200,000 thalers

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Work data
Title: 200,000 thalers
Shape: Opera
Original language: German
Music: Boris Blacher
Libretto : Siegmund Bendkower , Boris Blacher
Premiere: September 25, 1969
Place of premiere: German Opera Berlin
people
  • Schimele Soroker, a tailor ( baritone )
  • Ettie-Mennie, his wife ( mezzo-soprano )
  • Bailke, his daughter ( soprano )
  • Motel, assistant ( tenor )
  • Kopel, assistant (baritone)
  • Perl, neighbor (soprano)
  • Solomon, landlord ( bass )
  • Koltun, businessman (baritone)
  • Solowejtschik, matchmaker (tenor)
  • Himmelfarb, bank clerk (tenor)
  • Mendel, domestic worker (bass)
  • Reb Ascher Fein, a rich man ( pantomime )
  • Golda, his wife (pantomime)

200,000 thalers (also in the spellings 200,000 thalers , 200,000 thalers , 200,000 thalers or two hundred thousand thalers ) is an opera in three scenes (pictures) and an epilogue by the composer Boris Blacher . The libretto was based on a story by Sholem Alejchem . The German translation was done by Siegmund Bendkower and Boris Blacher. The opera's premiere took place on September 25, 1969 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin .

action

place and time

A Jewish village in Galicia , late 19th / early 20th century.

Summary of the three pictures and the epilogue

Poor tailor Schimele Soroker lives with his wife and daughter in an Eastern Jewish shtetl . He has serious money problems because he still owes his landlord Solomon the rent that he will have to pay tomorrow. His two tailors' assistants Motel and Kopel are both in love with Soroker's pretty daughter Bailke. Her wedding to a rich man should also be Soroker's financial security in old age.

Solomon and his agent, the businessman Koltun, are just as interested in Bielke as the two apprentices. Bailke is supposed to be married to one of the rich applicants out of the financial emergency. Then the news arrives that Soroker has won the main prize of 200,000 thalers in a lottery. Solomon and Koltun now find Bailke even more attractive and want her to be a wife.

Two weeks later, Soroker is already living with his family in a new, splendid and sophisticated house bought on credit. Solomon and Koltun continue to harass Bailke. Everything should be discussed at dinner; The matchmaker Soloveychik also arrives to initiate a marriage. The two assistants Motel and Kopel, who continue to love Bailke, offer Bailke their help in escaping. Suddenly the bank teller Himmelfarb appears and announces that the lottery win was a mistake. Soroker is now as poor as before. The supposed friends withdraw. Soroker and his wife have to move back into their old, crumbling tailoring workshop.

Bailke had fled there in the meantime before the impending marriage. Of the two apprentices, she chooses the motel she prefers. When her parents find her in their old home, they accept Motel as their son-in-law, provided that he does not expect a dowry. Bailke and Motel are now starting their new life.

plant

The opera, referred to by Blacher as a “comedy like a song ,” goes back to the story Dos Groijse Gewins by Scholem Alejchem. Alejchem describes in a humorous tone the difficult, hard life of Jewish emigrants. In language and action he revives lost and lost Eastern Jewish ways of life by satirising belief in earthly goods (e.g. wealth), sometimes alienated in a vague manner, while at the same time depicting it as an essential characteristic of his characters.

The premiere took place on September 25, 1969 at the Deutsche Oper Berlin as part of the Berliner Festwochen . Heinrich Hollreiser was the musical director . Gustav Rudolf Sellner was responsible for the “realistic, appropriate” staging ; the set, which also used a revolving stage, came from Ita Maximowna .

The premiere cast , in which numerous "character actors" participated, consisted of: Günther Reich (Schimele Soroker), Ernst Haefliger (Motel), Gerd Feldhoff (Kopel), Martha Mödl (Ettie-Mennie), Dorothea Weiss (Bailke), Tomislav Neralić ( Landlord Solomon), Ernst Krukowski (Kolton), Gitta Mikes (Neighbor Perl), Karl-Ernst Mercker (Solowejtschik), Cornelius van Dijck (Himmelfarb), Robert Koffmane (Mendel).

In his opera 200.00 thalers , Blacher combines social criticism , as shown in his chamber opera Die Flut (premiered in 1946, based on Guy de Maupassant ), with fantastic elements. Blacher cultivates a "concise, unromantic, but admirably characterizing and expressive style of composition". Blacher's music is written in a conversational tone with a characteristic rhythm and pointed Parlando style, which largely adapts to that of the literary model; it contains no arias or other ensemble movements, which makes the orchestral accompaniment more interesting than the vocal line. She uses modernist techniques that incorporate the rhythm of the text in it. Blacher also used echoes of Jewish folk music and Jewish folklore in his composition, but did not take these elements true to the notes. The composition is based on Blacher's principle of arithmetic lengthening and shortening of rhythmic and thematic phrases with his method of "variable meters".

The opera was well received by the audience as a respectable success. The contemporary music criticism, which had probably expected a more modern, more avant-garde tonal language from Blacher, was mostly disappointed and negative. The music critic Heinz Josef Herbort , who discussed the premiere for the weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT in detail, noted a “less revolutionary” musical language compared to the plot, which he described as follows: “The motor skills from Stravinsky's 'Sacre', combined with Puccini's small-cell theme and church-toned five-tone melodies, this mixture turned into a quasi-serial modernism by Wolf and pepped up with occasional timbre patterns ”.

Blacher himself commented on his opera as follows: “In my opinion, the attraction of the subject lies in the fact that here in the smallest cell of human communities, that is, in a Jewish family in the eastern, Polish-Russian regions, forces become evident that are our century significantly moved: such as the change in the social structure, racial hatred, the antinomy of happiness and materialism, but also the generation problem and much more. "

The vocal score with libretto was published by Boosey & Hawkes in 1969 .

Audio documents

In 1970 Blacher's opera was staged in a studio in the form of a television play with the premiere cast, which was released on DVD by Arthaus Musik in 2015 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b c Heinz Josef Herbort: Berliner Festwochen: 200,000 thalers misunderstanding . Performance review. In: DIE ZEIT of October 3, 1969. Retrieved on February 12, 2017
  2. a b c d e f Arlo McKinnon: BLACHER: 200,000 thalers . DVD review. In: Opera News Magazine . Issue January 2015, Volume 79. No. 7. Retrieved on February 12, 2017
  3. a b c d Miquel Cabruja: Blacher, Boris - 200,000 thalers: wit and the art of characterization . DVD review. Klassik.com. Retrieved February 12, 2017
  4. a b c Dieter Zöchling: The chronicle of the opera . Chronicle Publishing House. Harenberg. Dortmund 1990. Page 529/530. ISBN 3-611-00128-7 .
  5. a b Blacher, Boris: 200,000 Taler (1969) . Work information from Boosey & Hawkes . Retrieved February 12, 2017
  6. Karl-Josef Kutsch , Leo Riemens : Large singer lexicon . Fourth, enlarged and updated edition. Munich 2003. Volume 5: Seideman – Zysset. Attachment. Operas and operettas and their world premieres. Page 5340. ISBN 3-598-11419-2 .
  7. a b c BLACHER: 200,000 thalers . DVD review. Classical CD Review.com. Retrieved February 12, 2017
  8. ^ Rolf Fath: Reclam's Opernlexikon . Philipp Reclam, jun. Stuttgart 1989. Page 73. ISBN 3-15-010356-8 .