Goodbye to Berlin; Hello, at last, Melbourne
April 2013
It is rare for a classical music concert to come with a parental guidance warning, but it is also rare for a leading Australian ensemble to present a program that focuses entirely on music from the Weimar Republic, that period of extraordinary creative activity that occupies the years between Germany’s defeat in World War One and the rise of the Third Reich.
The Australian Chamber Orchestra, however, continues to be not only one of our most technically accomplished ensembles, but also one of the most innovative. As the title suggests, Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret focuses on music that also has particular significance for Humphries himself. No, the warning does not anticipate an unscheduled appearance by Sir Les; rather it is in response to Erwin Schulhoff’s Sonata Erotica, a Dada-inspired ‘graphic’ score from 1919 that, shall we say, pre-empts that scene from When Harry met Sally by about 70 years. To deliver it, Humphries and the ACO are employing the talents of the theatrical force of nature that is Melissa Madden Gray (aka Meow Meow).
No doubt the Sonata Erotica will, as it of course was designed to do, cause a stir in performance. Schulhoff, however, was more than just a master showman of post-World War One theatre of the grotesque; he was also undoubtedly one of the greatest compositional talents of the first half of the twentieth century. Fortunately, the ACO is also performing two movements from his outwardly more conventional, but still remarkable, Suite for Chamber Orchestra of 1921, but the fact that his name is hardly know today, even in musical circles, points to just how catastrophic the impact of the cultural and racial policies of the Nazi Party proved to be. Having moved to Prague at the time of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, Schulhoff was deported to the Wülzburg Concentration Camp where he died on August 18, 1942.
Humphries’ own interest in this repertoire dates back to his childhood in Melbourne where he witnessed first-hand the cultural impact on the city of Jewish immigrants from Europe. Some effects were immediate and soon became part of the fabric of the city (Hitler’s lasting gift to Melbourne, as Humphries has said elsewhere, was coffee and chamber music). Much of the culture they brought with them, however, found no new home, and this, combined with economic necessity, meant that much sheet music and many 78s ended up being off-loaded to second-hand book and record stores. Precociously aware of both the narrow cultural horizons of suburban Australian culture, and the relative vibrancy of what these immigrants had left behind, Humphries’ life-long interest in Weimar culture was secured by seeking out what he could of the traces of Weimar jazz, cabaret, and opera that had been abandoned on our shores.
One such find was a recording of excerpts from the 1927 Berlin production of Ernst Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf (‘Jonny leads the band’), the first so-called Zeitoper (Opera of the Times), and the first mainstream European opera to incorporate jazz music and other aspects of contemporary life into its dramatic core. For a brief period Jonny had dominated the opera houses of Europe, and had even received stagings in Leningrad and New York. It is quite possible, however, that the ACO’s performance of a brief excerpt from the work in this concert will be the first music from this opera ever performed in Australia.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the music from Max Brand’s Maschinist Hopkins – another precociously successful work entirely forgotten today – will be a premiere. Brand’s rise to fame and subsequent obscurity and exile is one of the more lamentable tales of ‘what might have been’. I have little doubt, however, that interest in Hopkins will be considerably revived by the snippet the audiences will hear at the hands of the ACO.
If this concert starts to sound just a little suspiciously worthy, let there be no mistake, the principle characteristic of all the music on this programme is a joyful love of life, all the more powerfully expressed, perhaps, because of the troubled times in which it was born. But this was also the great achievement of Weimar era music, to be both thought-provoking and entertaining, to be both avant-garde and popular, to disregard the ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ silos that we have subsequently inherited. Their loss was, in the end, also ours.
Other music on the programme includes excerpts from Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, chamber music by Wilhelm Grosz (later to become famous for the songs Red Sails in the Sunset and Isle of Capri and some superb cabaret songs of Friederich Holländer and Mischa Spoliansky.
This concert contains adult themes. The ACO recommends parental guidance for those under the age of 15. The production also includes the use of theatrical haze (fog) machines.
Australian Chamber Orchestra presents Barry Humphries with the ACO and Meow Meow at Arts Centre Melbourne, Hamer Hall, on May 5 (2:30pm) and May 6 (8:00pm).
artscentremelbourne.com.au
aco.com.au
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