The black orchid (opera)
| Work data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The black orchid |
| Shape: | Opera grottesca |
| Original language: | German |
| Music: | Eugen d'Albert |
| Libretto : | Karl Michael von Levetzow |
| Premiere: | December 1, 1928 |
| Place of premiere: | New Leipzig City Theater |
| Playing time: | 120 min. |
| Place and time of the action: | New York, 1920s |
| people | |
The black orchid is an opera grottesca in three acts by the composer Eugen d'Albert based on a libretto by Karl Michael von Levetzow . The premiere took place on December 1, 1928 at the New City Theater in Leipzig under Gustav Brecher in a production by Walther Brügmann .
action
D'Albert's opera grotesque flirts with the America of the Prohibition era , plays in the gangster and nightclub milieu of Manhattan and presents Percy Garnett, head of a gang of burglars (half Mackie Messer, half Cardillac), who leaves behind a self-grown black orchid with every coup as her hero. He falls in love with Lady Grace, the “most beautiful woman in New York”, and thus becomes a competitor of the secret service chief Bobby Pinkleton. Also in the party: lots of weird guys, including the sensation reporter Schmuckele and the niggers (so called according to the textbook) on duty, along with the glacier girls from the Mount Everest Bar, a nightclub on the top of a skyscraper.
criticism
The librettist Karl Michael von Levetzow has mixed these ingredients together to create an adventurous cocktail of opera, operetta, revue and crime novel, which makes it difficult to unravel the individual stages of the plot, even if you understand more of the text.
The Kolportagestück may not be called a jazz opera, but the borrowings from the popular music of those years, from spiritual, foxtrot and shimmy, and the instrumentation with saxophones, tuba, banjo and vibraphone (instead of the originally planned singing saw) unmistakably suggest the timbre of swinging Twenties.
literature
- Eugen d'Albert: The Black Orchid , Universal Edition, Vienna 1928
- Musik für Alle, No. 276: Eugen d'Albert The Black Orchidee - text part by Wilhelm Raupp, Ullstein-Verlag, Berlin 1928