Social opera – “dresses make people”: departure and fear

Imagine: late autumn, you are work and homeless, have no cent in your pocket. But because her clothes are still handsome, they are considered a highly positioned personality. Food and rooms in an inn are literally pushed up, you are tearing around your acquaintance. Hand on heart: do you clarify the error?

The Schneider Wenzel Strapinski comes in Gottfried Keller’s story “Dresses make people” from 1874 in this situation. After all, he tries to swim a few times. But this always fails due to some small circumstance – and later on the larger one that he falls in love with the district daughter Nettchen and that in him. However, this has another admirer, the attentive Melchior Böhni, who notices early on that the alleged Polish count has such strangely stabbed fingers. Böhni moves in and stages a spectacular exposing of Strapinski.

nd.kompact – our daily newsletter

Our daily newsletter nd. compact Bring order to the news madness. You get an overview of the most exciting stories from the Editorial team. Get the free subscription here.

Alexander Zemlinsky made it an opera that was premiered in 1910. His librettist Leo Feld has made the economic processes less sharply than basement. Likewise, the revenge that Strapinski and Nettchen take in the after history of the main story are missing. The fact that the opera ends with Nettchen’s confirmation of love, now not to the count, but to the tailor, may be rejected as a turn to sentimental. But a libretto for music has to be good.

In fact, Zemlinsky composed an opera that does not have to shy away from comparison with the most famous generic contributions. Here he picks up a wide variety of idioms from the folk song to the waltz and the operetta -like to the grotesque march and Wagner’s emphasis. This serves to characterize people, situations and social conditions. This does not result in a mishmash, but Zemlinsky succeeds in melt in his own music language. The melody is concise, recognizable leitmotifs comment on the action and give it an additional dimension. A developed variant technology prevents uniformity, the instrumentation ensures clarity.

Of course, there are no spectacular effects with which Richard Strauss or Giacomo Puccini did not at the same time. These two rely on occasional visitors as well as in the concentrated audience, Zemlinsky only on the latter. But if you listen exactly, you will discover a variety of references. Above all, “clothes make people” a deeply humane opera. In general, you will find almost no one in Zemlinsky’s music -theater work, apart from supporting characters, to whom the composer does not apply. This is by no means blurred in sentimental, but is composed in a scenic way in terms of situation.

For these reasons, it is due to the Cottbus State Theater to bring the work that is too rarely listed on the stage. You can see and hear a version that Zemlinsky had created for the Mannheim Theater in 1913 and which was never performed because of the theater closures at the beginning of the First World War. Antony Beaumont, who has already created a performance version of Zemlinsky’s unfinished opera “The King Kandaules”, has edited the material, so that a “premiere” is reported in Cottbus.

Stephan Märki and co-director Chris Comtesse do not rely on image strikers or update, but on the gestures precisely implementation of what is given by action and music. This approach takes people seriously who can be seen here and gives them freedom to move and illustrate them.

The stage space that Silvia Merlo and Ulf Stengl is responsible for. The two do not show a provincial goldach, in which self -deception and fraud occur, but characterize the surroundings with a few signal elements. The video projections of the two so economically and precisely unleash the imagination where it makes sense: in a utopia of departure and liberation as well as in the fear visions that Strapinski goes through in the face of its exposure. All of this offers the framework for illustrating social conditions without falling into naturalism. The movements on the stage are also well synchronized with the processes in the orchestra led by Alexander Merzyn, which Zemlinsky’s colorful score knows.

As a tailor -made count, Paul Schweinester designs the bandwidth of hesitation and trumps, resignation and emhase – everything that role calls for this role without being derived into sentimental. Anne Martha Schuitemaker is faced with a barely solvable task: How do you sing an overwhelmed girl who crashes into a false count from a lack of reality, but that’s why it is precisely a human attention that makes her superior to the other Goldachers? The defective should not be sung in deficiency. Schuitemaker gives Nettchen the big feeling right from the start, thus preserving the figure from ridiculousness and also the humane of Zemlinsky’s work.

In accordance with the composition, Todd Boyce does not show the Melchior Böhni as raven -black. Böhni also loves Nettchen, he also got stuck in Goldach because of this love, and he too is an outsider: awake intellectual among good -faith provincial citizens. Boyce makes it credible that this Böhni is a poor guy who unfortunately force the events to fight against the new intruder.

The staging is well occupied to small supporting roles, which shows the strength of the Cottbus ensemble. It brings a neglected important work and is a lot superior to what can be seen in better -equipped Berlin stages. So sit down in the regional train from Berlin – this is always more comfortable than Strapinski’s hike.

Next performances: 28.2., March 27, 19.4.