Man, this one was just sitting there for so long waiting for me to get to it. And now I have! The other Krenek opera I've seen is Karl V, famous(?) as the first complete, full-length twelve-tone opera. And one of the only? Obviously, lots of composers have dabbled in serialism to one degree or another, but pure twelve-tone operas are very rare. Anyway, I'd probably never have heard of this, only it came in a set with Karl V (as you can see). It was supposed to debut in 1930, but the authorities didn't like it (for fairly obvious reasons), so it wasn't performed until 1990, a year before Krenek's death. Nice that he got to see it.
This has a somewhat complicated plot, but there's not much information about it on the internet (at least in English), so I feel I should go over it in relative detail. Vienna, 1918, just after Armistice Day: Ottmar Brandstetter, an army officer, is hanging himself, having been worn out by the war and convinced that his sweetheart Elisabeth doesn't love him anymore. But he's rescued by Sebastian Kundrather, owner of a not-super-successful vineyard and wine bar. Kundrather agrees to let him work in the vineyard. Meanwhile, Elisabeth was still plenty in love with him, but it's been erroneously reported that his suicide attempt was successful, so she takes up with his friend, Alfred Koppreiter, a successful industrialist. She regrets this when she sees that her former beau is still alive--and she still has feelings for him--the more so, presumably, because Koppreiter soon leaves her in favor of Kundrather's coquettish daughter Maria (who later leaves him in favor of a German investor named Kabulke--this will be relevant later). Bradstetter is leading a sort of aimless existence meanwhile, bumping from one menial job to another.
AT THE SAME TIME, there's a yellow journalist named Erich Atma Rosenbusch, who is posing as a labor organizer at Koppreiter's business. He comes up with a scheme to ruin Koppreiter by making everyone think that he, Koppreiter, had bribed him, Rosenbusch, to go easy on him (or something; I must admit, I sort of missed some of the particulars here). This ruins Koppreiter's business, and a bunch of laid-off employees beat Rosenbusch to death, not that I suppose that's much comfort. Now Koppreiter is going to be prosecuted, so he wants to flee the country and needs somewhere to hide in the meantime. Brandstetter is currently working as a carnival barker, and suggests that Koppreiter can disguise himself as one of the carnival freaks--no one would suspect it. This seems to be going okay, but then Kabulke shows up with Maria, who, due to his intervention, has been named Miss Vienna. Seeing them together is the last straw for Koppreiter. He pulls out a gun to kill himself; Brandstetter tries to stop him and in the scuffle is himself shot and injured, and Koppreiter kills himself anyway. Bummer. Now everyone is calling Brandstetter a hero for trying to save his friend and they all try to channel his newfound celebrity (if such it be) for their own ends. He demurs, saying that he's going to go back to the vineyard with Elisabeth (and to be clear she doesn't just love him again because of his alleged heroism, the opera's not that cynical; they had gotten back together before that). Everything ends happily, albeit with a bit of sort of ominous foreshadowing, as well one might expect from a German opera written in 1930.
I have to say: what an absolutely fucking fascinating opera. I've really never seen the like, plotwise. The thing it most reminds me of is Berlin Alexanderplatz; even though the location is different, it feels like a very, very similar milieu, and capturing the same feeling of interwar chaos, unease, and restlessness. Actually, I'd be willing to wager that Krenek (who wrote his own libretto) was (unconsciously, at least) influenced by Döblin's novel. It had been a huge publishing phenomenon just the year before, so he HAD to have read it, and particularly Brandstetter haplessly bouncing from job to job is SO reminiscent of Franz Biberkopf's travails. At one point he's illicitly selling "French postcards;" Biberkopf likewise for a while was hawking pornography. But regardless, I've never seen anything in an opera like the social panorama that we get here. I didn't know that operas could do that, really.
If you think the music is going to sound anything like Karl V, that is a dumb thing to think and you should stop doing it. There are certain occasional serialist motifs, but broadly speaking, this is in the romantic tradition. Krenek also mixes in elements of the popular music of the time, which really helps with the feeling of time and place.
I mean, I don't want to oversell this or anything, but it really does seem to me to be a groundbreaking opera, and Krenek probably deserves to be much more widely-known and performed.
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