Rolf Liebermann, Leonore 40/45 (1952)

Well...it's my first opera with a slash in the title, I'll tell you that much.  This is a rare one, which possibly hadn't been performed since the fifties; the page is a bit cagey about that.  But now we can see it because of Theater Bonn and Operavision. Hurray!

So as you might guess, this takes place during World War II.  It's sung in a mixture of German and French.  Albert is a music student; he and his father are listening to Fidelio on the radio (hence the title), when word comes down that everyone's being enlisted, so he reluctantly joins up.  In occupied France, he meets Yvette, a French woman working with the Resistance.  They fall in love, obviously, but then Albert is forced to leave with his regiment and they loose contact.  Oh, did I mention the angel?  There's this guardian angel, Emile, who introduces the opera and at several points intervenes to make things turn out better.  In the second part, the War's just ended, and Albert and Yvette are looking for each other.  She learns from Emile that he's working at a music store, and so she goes to apply for a job there (it's extremely unclear what the whole job thing has to do with anything; it feels like she's engaging in this really pointless subterfuge).  At any rate, the two of them are reunited; a tribunal doesn't want them to get married because France and Germany are still considered enemies, I guess, which I don't totally understand: if the War's over it's over, innit?  You can't maintain enmity indefinitely.  Regardless, Emile tells everyone to knock it off, and the marriage can proceed.

It's not entirely clear what the message is here.  It feels like there's supposed to be some sort of darker subtext, but it doesn't come across.  The final chorus involves everyone singing about "the best of all worlds," making you expect some kind of Panglossian irony, but...who can say.  At the end of this production, a Nazi flag appears out of nowhere, which is obviously a message (and an extremely relevant one these days), but that must've just been a production decision, so who knows.

Regardless, I liked this quite a lot.  The operavision page says that it's "rooted in the 12-tone tradition of Schoenberg and Berg" (there's a part in the opera where characters are arguing about twelve-tone music), but it sounds nothing like Moses und Aron or Wozzeck.  That style may have some influence on it, but I honestly wouldn't have gone there had it not been spelled out.  It's mostly pretty melodic, I tell you.  Not my all-time favorite thing, but perfectly pleasant with some memorable moments.  

Also, the production is absolutely fantastic.  It's this sort of expressionistic thing with really cool George-Grosz-looking art and animation mixed in.  A lot of the stuff on Operavision is, sad to say, Regietheater, which is especially frustrating when you're talking about a little-seen work, but this knocks it out of the park and makes up for any deficiencies in the source material.  Theater Bonn?  More like Theater Bomb-Ass!