{"id":70501,"date":"2019-05-30T17:05:57","date_gmt":"2019-05-30T15:05:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=70501"},"modified":"2019-05-19T07:55:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T05:55:12","slug":"30-00-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=70501","title":{"rendered":"Suppressed By The Nazis To Make A One-Night Return"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>Kurt Weill Opera Suppressed By The Nazis To Make A One-Night Return<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

PJ Grisar<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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Getty Images\/Archive Phot\u2026<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A little-known \u2014 and very Jewish \u2014 opera by Kurt Weill is scheduled to debut in a fresh translation prompted by new insight into why the work remained obscure.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Weill, a composer known for his collaborations with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, wrote the comic opera \u201cThe Tsar Wants His Photograph Taken\u201d with librettist Georg Kaiser in 1927. But it stopped being performed just a few years after its premiere, when, starting in 1933, the new Nazi government of Weill\u2019s native Germany began a campaign to stifle Jewish artists.<\/span><\/p>\n

The opera \u2014 an example of Zeitoper, a genre of contemporary satirical musical theater \u2014 deals with a bungled assassination attempt on a fictional tsar. It was first performed in Leipzig in February 1928, with a later production in March of that same year in Altenberg. Other notable performances are few, including a 1993 production at Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico and the opera\u2019s 1986 U.K. premiere at Bloomsbury Theatre in London. According to new research from University College London, which is returning the show to Bloomsbury Theatre for a one-night-only performance May 4, the Nazis labeled the work \u201cdegenerate\u201d due to its inherently Jewish concerns.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe plot deliberately revolves around what a European audience would have assumed were a set of really stock Jewish characters, not only a pioneering woman photographer, who were nearly all Jewish then, but also a group of anarchist terrorists,\u201d Michael Berkowitz, a professor of Jewish history at UCL who has conducted new research into the opera, told\u00a0The Guardian<\/strong><\/span><\/a>. Citing such groundbreaking female photographers as Lotte Jacobs and Elli Marcus, Berkowitze added that \u201cPortrait photography was done by Jewish women because they were educated, yet lower class enough for a job seen as slightly distasteful, since you had to deal with sitters.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Nazis stopped it being performed not just because of what then would have been its obvious Jewishness, but because it was not a black-and-white story,\u201d Berkowitz said. \u201cThey liked straightforward morality.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the opera, which UCL is producing in a new translation by the show\u2019s director, Leo Doulton, an unnamed tsar arrives in Paris to sit for a photographer named Ang\u00e8le. (The last tsar, Nicholas II, was murdered with his family in 1918; the opera is set in 1914.) A quintet of anarchists swaps Ang\u00e8le out for one of their own and plants a gun inside her camera with the aim of killing the tsar. Comedy ensues when the fictional Russian autocrat falls for the fake Ang\u00e8le. It all ends with the tsar escaping unscathed \u2014 and with a handsome portrait of himself, to boot.<\/span><\/p>\n

Doulton told The Guardian that the opera\u2019s madcap plot reflects the cultural presence of anarchists at the time of its writing, but seeks to lessen anxiety around their actions by presenting them as inept. (Jewish anarchist leaders like Gustav Landauer and Erich M\u00fchsam, active in the 1918-1919 German Revolution that led to April-May 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, may have served as inspiration.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike later works by Weill, including \u201cThe Threepenny Opera\u201d \u2014 which launched the jazz standard \u201cMack the Knife\u201d \u2014 the music of the show is continuous, rather than separated into discreet musical numbers. It also has a tango portion that provides a foretaste of Weill\u2019s later, jazzier work.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt is a gorgeous opera,\u201d Berkowitz said, \u201cand it has made me wonder what other pieces were lost when they fell out of favor with the political regime.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Kurt Weill Opera Suppressed By The Nazis To Make A One-Night Return PJ Grisar Getty Images\/Archive Phot\u2026 A little-known \u2014 and very Jewish \u2014 opera by Kurt Weill is scheduled to debut in a fresh translation prompted by new insight into why the work remained obscure. Weill, a composer known for his collaborations with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70501"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70501"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70501\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70532,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70501\/revisions\/70532"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}