Cheerful musical theater

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The cheerful music theater was a branch or genre of music theater in the GDR . The term was coined in 1957 by the state-owned music publisher Lied der Zeit .

Emergence

From 1949 to 1989, GDR cultural functionaries and artists tried to distinguish the genre from the development in the Federal Republic, increasingly determined by the American musical , and from the socialist appropriations of the other Warsaw Pact states . The aim was to combine claims, entertainment and the socialist institutionalization of what was previously a predominantly commercial genre. In contrast to the theorists, the theater-makers see themselves primarily as practitioners responsible for a stage effectiveness with a claim.

In the course of GDR history, operettas and musicals went through metamorphoses parallel to other genres in the GDR. In total, over 200 GDR works were premiered (without adaptations and transitional works to revue and cabaret ). The socialist operetta of the post-war period, the GDR musical emancipating itself from the Broadway model, small forms such as the musical comedy, newer forms such as the rock musical (after 1970) and youth musicals developed by the drama branches were summarized under the term "cheerful musical theater".

Works

With the criticism of “cultural heritage”, pieces with a contemporary reference have emerged since the 1950s (e.g. Treffpunkt Herz by Herbert Kawan and Peter Bejach, 1951), the analysis of which was intended to increase the future potential of the genre for the GDR. After 1955, the formative generation of composers appeared: Eberhard Schmidt ( Bolero , The Pig Wedding ), Gerd Natschinski ( Messeschlager Gisela , Mein Freund Bunbury and many others), Guido Masanetz ( the devil is loose in Frisco ), Conny Odd ( Alarm in Pont L ' Evêque , Karambolage ), Gerhard Kneifel ( boards that mean the world ), Harry Sander ( Froufrou ), Siegfried Schäfer ( don't fall in love with a saint ), Thomas Bürkholz and others. a. created works that were considered suitable as the basis of a GDR repertoire. The two genre-defining lyricists were Helmut Bez and Jürgen Degenhardt . Theorists and text authors were also Klaus Eidam and Otto Schneidereit .

In 1951 the operetta Treffpunkt Herz by the composer Ernst Herbert Kawan was premiered under the new director of the Metropol-Theater Berlin, Hans Pitra . When he took office in Berlin, Pitra said: “It is not important for me to continue the tradition, but to create new traditions!” The heart of the meeting was a first approach to a socialist contemporary piece: it is about a young socialist man fighting a philistine collective at a provincial train station. It was about "unconventional characters" and "lively people of our time", with a plot that "unmistakably sprang from our newly created circumstances", so Otto Schneidereit.

Another important starting shot in 1952 was Eberhard Schmidt's Spanish operetta Bolero , text book by Otto Schneidereit. Schmidt was a Spain fighter against fascism. Librettist Schneidereit lets the choir sing: "Our work, our songs, that alone is our world". The GDR specialist magazine Musik und Gesellschaft wrote: “With Bolero , all the junk of the old operetta is finally thrown overboard.” The way would be shown “for future German operettas”.

Successful titles such as Guido Masanetz ' In Frisco is the Devil Losing (first performance of the revised new version in 1962 at the Metropol-Theater Berlin), in which American capitalism and racism are portrayed using the example of dock workers in San Francisco, were created; the play ends with the formation of a dockers union. According to Otto Schneidereit, the piece has become "one of the most successful of the operettas created in the GDR".

Gerhard Kneifel's Aphrodite and the Sexual War (premiered in the Musical Comedy Leipzig 1986), a reworking of the Lysistrata comedy, is a clear anti-war piece that picks up on the ideals of the GDR peace movement. In the second song of the Lysistrate it says: “Don't say yes, don't say yes, if you want to say no, don't be quiet, don't be quiet if your heart wants to scream, don't join in, don't join in, contradicts your feelings ". And further in bossa nova rhythm: “Men take all power, women can be used at night. Men impregnate someone in the twinkling of an eye, women can look after the soup. Men get sick if they don't scream, women dress up for winners. Men get medals, give orders, women are allowed to worry that men will lack for nothing. For a thousand years the god-willed lyre: women are the slaves, men the liberators, the prospect that things can change, only then can you start immediately! ”(Lyrics by Wolfgang Tilgner ).

Many new operettas in the GDR took up the theater theme to show that life itself is a single theater play, such as Gerhard Kneifel's boards that mean the world (based on Paul von Schönthan's Raub der Sabrinerinnen , first performance in the Metropol-Theater Berlin, 1970 ). The next Frisco probably most successful East German operetta My friend Bunbury by Gerd Natschinski (premiered at the Metropol Theater Berlin 1964) after the social comedy The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is about double life and breaking out of a public existence, the so-called "Bunburying" . Through the subject of London at the beginning of the 20th century and the use of a British theater classic, My Friend Bunbury is also an appropriation of the US musical My Fair Lady , based on the model of George Bernhard Shaw's Pygmalion , also set in London at the turn of the century. For US musicals there were high royalties from the West, which the GDR tried to get around with their own replacement or alternative works.

In addition to the newly created pieces, attempts were made to avoid the “late bourgeois operetta” from the pre-socialist era as much as possible, as well as pieces that came from the Nazi era. Instead, Jacques Offenbach's oeuvre was cultivated as a supposed class pioneer and works such as The Beautiful Lurette (1880), in which simple Parisian laundresses dared to revolt against the nobility, were performed. This late work by Offenbach, largely neglected internationally, experienced a real boom in the GDR, which among other things led to a DEFA film in 1960 . With over three million viewers, Die Schöne Lurette is one of the most successful DEFA productions ever. As part of the GDR Offenbach care, the legendary Knight Bluebeard production by Walter Felsenstein at the Komische Oper Berlin, which was filmed in 1973, must also be mentioned .

Nonetheless, a regression and recession of the genre followed in the late 1970s and 1980s. A major reason was the lack of dramatic events in the so-called developed socialist society. The increasing number of American musicals (e.g. Hello, Dolly! ) And the "late bourgeois" operetta (e.g. Die Blume von Hawaii ), which had been outlawed up to that point, slowly let the project "Heiteres Musiktheater der DDR" ebb away.

Performance venues

Unlike in the western states, where operettas and musicals often took place at guest theaters (e.g. touring productions in the Theater des Westens Berlin and Deutsches Theater Munich), developments in the GDR took place in the city, district and state theaters in the music genre. Operettas and musicals were subordinate to the theater association, not the one for entertainment.

The importance of the genre for the GDR can be seen from the existence of three large repertoire theaters exclusively for operettas and musicals ( Metropoltheater Berlin , Staatsoperette Dresden , Musikalische Komödie Leipzig) with the official mandate to cultivate new creativity, while comparable houses in the West ( e.g. Volksoper Vienna , Gärtnerplatztheater Munich) have become second urban opera houses since around 1965.

The Erfurt Theater , the Theater des Friedens Halle , the Elbe-Elster-Theater Wittenberg and the Volkstheater Rostock devoted themselves to premieres of the cheerful GDR music theater.

Historical meaning

The special path of the "cheerful music theater of the GDR" between the folkloric tendencies of the Slavic states and the work of the FRG influenced by the USA included the subversive efforts of the makers to find special solutions and information beyond the political guidelines of socialist realism . The failure of this claim in the friction of state influence, domestication through stable forms of operation, creative departure and controlled effect is a unique case in the international history of operettas and musicals.

reception

The new operettas created in the GDR were completely ignored in the western part of the republic. After 1989, they largely disappeared from the now pan-German repertoire. In publications such as Volker Klotz's Operetta: Portrait and Handbook of an Unheard-of Art , they are not even mentioned in the revised and updated new edition from 2016, as if there had never been four decades of music theater history in eastern Germany. Even in more recent works such as The Cambridge Companion to Operetta , edited by Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott, the development in the GDR after 1949 remains completely unmentioned in the chapter on operettas in Germany.

Individual attempts to rediscover the GDR operetta repertoire were the 1997 production of Messeschlager Gisela at the Neukölln Opera (staging: Peter Lund ). The Chemnitz Opera followed shortly afterwards with an elaborate production of the work on intrigues in the planned haute couture (premiered in the Metropol-Theater Berlin in 1960). Roland Dippel writes about the productions in the 1990s: “This heralded a renaissance of operettas and musicals in the GDR within the vigorously commercialized wave of Ostalgie in the millennium. The spirit of the times and the popularity of the audience seemed favorable to the genres of music theater that theorists and practitioners in the GDR had tried hard to achieve. Older visitors reveled in the melodies of the most famous GDR musical composer and memories, while younger visitors enjoyed the cheeky excursion into the past before the great change. At the same time, the Annaberg Theater dared a new production of Natschinski's Servus Peter . So the view seemed free to other works than My Friend Bunbury . ”But the renaissance did not take place for the time being.

In 2012, the World of Operetta exhibition in the Vienna Theater Museum had a sub-section on “Cheerful Music Theater” and a catalog article on the subject of Roland Dippel. When the exhibition was transferred to the Munich Theater Museum, the director of the museum had the GDR part replaced with a Johannes Heesters focus.

Roland Dippel is one of the few who has worked up the GDR operetta history so far, including in a series of newspaper articles for the Leipziger Volkszeitung . His series Operetta and Musical in the GDR appeared in several parts in 2016, but received little national attention.

In 2019 the topic of GDR operetta was discussed at the conference Gaiety, Glitz and Glamor - or Dispirited Historical Dregs? A Re-Evaluation of Operetta presented at Leeds University . After that, there will be research projects at the musicological institutes of the Universities of Leipzig and Halle that will deal with the history of GDR operettas, for example the research of Katrin Stöck.

In 2020, the Semperoper dedicated a concert to the cheerful music theater in the GDR music scene . With operetta researcher Kevin Clarke, it also moderated Maria Mallé , a former member of the Metropol Theater in East Berlin. Clarke recalled that the works of the cheerful music theater were a mirror of their time and thus also evidence of 40 years of post-war German history. You don't have to like the works, but you shouldn't ignore them either, but rather deal critically with them and include them in general discussions about social upheavals after the Second World War. This also includes open research into the relationship between GDR operetta makers and the political elite, for example by composing hymns and cantatas for party congresses of the SED or accepting state awards such as the culture prize. Mallé commented that the works of the GDR operetta have been ignored by West German music theater research and international operetta historians: "Ignorance is a particularly unpleasant kind of arrogance."

Personalities

Composers (selection)

Lyricist (selection)

Theorist (selection)

Directors (selection)

  • Erwin Leister, Wolfgang Weit

literature

  • Helmut Bez , Jürgen Degenhardt , HP Hofmann: Musical. History and Works , Lied der Zeit, Berlin 1981.
  • Roland Dippel: Cheerful music theater - operetta in the German Democratic Republic (1949–1989) . In: Marie-Theres Arnbom, Kevin Clarke, Thomas Trabitsch (ed.): The world of operetta. Frivolous, erotic and modern, Brandstätter, Vienna 2011, pp. 213–239. ISBN 978-3-85033-581-2
  • Margit Gáspár: Stepchild of the Muses. Operetta from antiquity to Offenbach , VEB Lied der Zeit, Berlin 1969 (German edition by Hans Skirecki. Klaus Eidam was in charge of the German edition )
  • Hermann Kaubisch: Operetta. A foray through their empire , Berlin 1955, Henschelverlag (preface by Otto Scheidereit)
  • Roland H. Dippel: Series of operettas and musicals of the GDR . In: Leipziger Volkszeitung .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christoph Links: The fate of the GDR publishers. Privatization and its consequences, Links, Berlin 2013, p. 153. ISBN 9783862842568
  2. ↑ a b Otto Schneidereit: Berlin how it cries and laughs. Walks through Berlin's operetta history . VEB Lied der Zeit Musikverlag, Berlin 1973, p. 332 .
  3. ↑ a b Otto Schneidereit: Berlin how it cries and laughs . S. 336 .
  4. ↑ Otto Schneidereit: Operetta from Abraham to Ziehrer . Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1965, p. 228 .
  5. ↑ Volker Klotz: Operetta: Portrait and manual of an unheard of art . 4th revised and expanded edition. Studiopunkt Verlag, Sinzig 2016, ISBN 978-3-89564-180-0 .
  6. ↑ Anastasia Belina and Derek B. Scott: The Cambridge Companion to Operetta . In: Cambridge Companions to Music series . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2019, ISBN 978-1-316-63334-2 .
  7. ^ Roland Dippel: Heiteres Musiktheater: Operetta in the German Democratic Republic (1949–1989) . In: Marie-Theres Arnbom, Kevin Clarke, Thomas Trabitsch (eds.): World of Operetta: Glamor, Stars and Show Business . Brandstätter Verlag / Austrian Theater Museum, Vienna 2011, ISBN 978-3-85033-581-2 , p. 229 .
  8. ↑ Sebastian Holder: The birth of the operetta from the spirit of pornography. In: operetta-research-center.org. February 2, 2012, accessed April 15, 2020 .
  9. ↑ Kevin Clarke: Deliberately forgotten? The GDR operetta. In: operetta-research-center.org. March 16, 2013, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Roland Dippel: Operettas and musicals in the GDR: Part 4 - The cheerful musical theater in step with the West. In: lvz.de. March 8, 2016, accessed April 16, 2020 .
  11. ↑ Gaiety, Glitz and Glamor — or Dispirited Historical Dregs? A re-evaluation of Operetta. Draft programs. In: golny.leeds.ac.uk. Leeds University School of Music, accessed April 20, 2020 .
  12. ↑ Recording of the concert evening : Bettina Volksdorf: MDR KULTUR: Opernmagazin – Spezial: Heiteres Musiktheater. In: mdr.de. April 11, 2020, accessed April 16, 2020 .