This DVD has an average score of two and a half stars on amazon. The most extensive review gives it five stars and opens by proclaiming that "I guarantee you won't enjoy this opera." Well...forewarned is forearmed, I guess. Anyway, I really truly cannot resist a challenge like that.
Right, so Simplicius Simplicissimus is a picaresque seventeenth-century novel treating of the horrors of the Thirty Years' War, which had recently devastated Germany. The opera version repeatedly claims that in 1618, twelve million people lived in Germany; in 1648, it was down to four million. As far as I can tell that seems like a bit of an exaggeration, but it's horrifying either way. It's not a numbers game. Hartmann, a committed anti-fascist composing as the nazis were rising to power, clearly had other things on this mind. He couldn't have known quite how bad things were going to get, but I suspect he had inklings, and if he doesn't make specific comments on current events, the implications are clear. Clear enough that--unsurprisingly--the opera wasn't actually performed until 1948.
It's a five-hundred-page novel, and this is an eighty-minute opera, so without having read the former, it's pretty clear that it's a rather skeletal version thereof. As it opens, Simplicius is working for a farmer, singing to keep the wolves away, until some knights come around and slaughter all the peasants, as recounted by the chorus in gruesome detail. Next, Simplicius comes across a hermit who agrees to let him stay with him and teaches him about right behavior. When the hermit dies a few years later, he's taken to the local governor, who is amused by his constant, naive truth-telling and takes him on as jester. Simplicius recounts a vision of a tree of life with the nobles at the top and the commoners down below supporting them. I don't know if this is in the original novel; it sounds suspiciously like that old (and accurate) socialist poster:
At any rate, peasants storm the palace and kill everyone except Simplicius, whom they hold in too much contempt to even murder. And that is that. This production presents this all in a theater-of-alienation sort of way, with everything very abstract and modernist, characters in shabby modern-day dress, &c. That seems perfect to me--the way this material demands to be presented.
So what did I think of it? Well...I enjoyed it. Quite a lot, actually. It's a work of art of great merit. Suck it, amazon reviewer! Though actually, I suppose this is just a matter of semantics. People--myself included, I'm sure--often do the thing where we feel like if a text is upsetting or unpleasant enough, it's wrong to say that we "enjoy" it. The parameters of "enjoy" are very unclear. Are we supposed to not enjoy anything sad/grim/depressing? Only things based on real events? Things that hit a little too close to home? Well, these days, my feeling is that if you find something in some way edifying or artistically fulfilling or whatever...you enjoyed it. I would hasten to add that in this taxonomy, enjoyment is not synonymous with "fun." You can enjoy extremely unfun works.
And I liked this! I wouldn't use the word "fun," exactly but...I mean, I've seen grimmer. Wozzeck, Lulu, Die Soldaten, certainly, just thinking of musically similar works. It's a dark piece, for sure, but not exactly hopeless. The middle section here with the hermit is actually unironically sweet. The music is some variety of serialism; maybe I'm just getting better at appreciating this sort of thing, but I thought it ruled. Frequently very exciting and occasionally even beautiful. And Claudia Mahnke there is quite brilliant in the title role (yes, a trouser role), ably embodying the character's naivete and feeling of lostness.
Really, I don't think this is that hard to like. I don't know what you amazon people are on about. Well, maybe I'm just a maniac. But things like this elevate us, and I am grateful to be able to experience them.
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