Opera Thoughts #2

There were several reasons why I wanted to pair The Seven Deadly Sins (1933) with The New Orpheus (1925). Orpheus was written before Weill had met Bertolt Brecht, a relationship that – with set designer Caspar Neher – would lead to some of their greatest achievements. The Sins was their final collaboration, and was a commission accepted out of financial need, when the world had changed beyond all recognition and when the artists whose work together had already ended in disagreement had fled their homeland.

I detected a strong autobiographical connection between these works, which are about what it means to be an artist, and in particular the struggle to succeed. Both are divided into seven chapters, with a prologue and epilogue. In Orpheus, Weill looks to his recent past playing piano in a Berlin Beer Hall and organ in a synagogue, and forward to a future travelling the world. In The Sins, he is himself two itinerant people, the Weill of German Jewish artistic life, well-known and well-respected, the composer of Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera, colleague and friend of the greatest names of German culture, and also the penniless refugee with only a suitcase of music to his name, whose music would provoke confusion and scepticism when it was first presented in Paris, and not the acclamation of genius that Orpheus receives after his Eiffel Tower concert. Shortly after the premiere of The Sins, Weill would emigrate to the USA where he would re-invent himself as a popular composer of Broadway musicals.

At the conclusion of The Sins, Anna returns to Louisiana where she mournfully describes her reunion with the moon on the Mississippi, and the house for which she has sold herself these past seven years. The final words – shared between the two Annas – are ‘Right, Anna? / Right, Anna.’ There is no resolution here, and certainly no redemption. Redemption is not on offer, either to Eurydice, or to Orpheus who – in the original myth – was torn limb from limb by Dionysiac Maenads, and whose disembodied head continued to sing, post mortem.

To my ear, the music sounded like the product of two different brains, with the 2nd Symphony sitting somewhere in the middle. Critics have frequently spoken of ‘two Weills’. As David Drew writes in his article on Weill for the Grove Encyclopaedia of Music:

While some notable artists have simply stopped creating at a certain stage in their careers and a few have put an end to their lives, Weill is perhaps the only one to have done away with his old creative self in order to make way for a new one. The pre-1934 composer had been acutely conscious of his roots and responsibilities as a German artist in post-war society; had felt himself to be a part of the modern movement and one of its leaders in the younger generation; and was accustomed to measure his talents and achievements against those of the most eminent of his German contemporaries, Paul Hindemith. The post-1940 composer was one who asserted that he had never thought of himself as a German composer, that his only roots were those he had now established in the USA, and that his responsibilities were to the American musical stage in its popular form. The composer whom he now saw as his chief rival was Richard Rodgers.

Brecht, in contrast, remained doggedly devoted to his political and theatrical beliefs, and returned to Berlin in 1949. During his exile, he lived for a year in the house of the sculptor Ninnan Santesson – Lövstigen 1., on Lidingö, Stockholm.

Both works are settings of poetic, non-naturalistic texts, (and in the case of The Sins, translated poetically by the decidedly un-Brechtian W.H. Auden), and both are written for two soloists. In The Sins there are two Annas – a singer, and a dancer, and in Orpheus there are two Orpheuses – a singer, and a violinist. The singer is one of the great dramatic sopranos of our times – Nina Stemme – and she appears in both works. Her partners in the evening are Charlotta Öfverholm, whose impressive body of work as a dancer, actor and choreographer has, in recent years, focussed on the question of ‘age on stage’, and Katarina Andreasson, leader of the SKO, as the sole violinist in Orpheus. The story we tell in this evening is about what it means to be a mature artist today. To bring an orchestral musician onstage to create a theatrical performance is a huge challenge, and it requires a very specific type of artist, who can not only master the incredibly technically demanding material created by Weill, but also perform it from memory, and interact and communicate with another performer on the stage. In fact, I would go so far as to say, that outside Orebro, this challenge would be an unimaginable impossibility. Under the direction of Nali Gruber, one of the world’s leading experts on the music of Kurt Weill, we present these two fantastic stage works alongside the 2nd Symphony, which has now become an established part of the SKO repertoire. Co-creating this evening with my colleagues Bengt Gomer and Helle Carlsson, our second project together with the SKO after Fidelio (2020), this has been a profound privilege for me. I hope you enjoy it.

*with thanks to Kim Kowalke and his article in A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill (1986).

This performance took place at the Hjalmar Bergmann Theatre, Örebro on Saturday 3 December. Future performances are planned in 2024 and beyond.