Learning a new piece is always a fascinating journey and usually takes me a very long time, depending on the work’s length and complexity of course. Kurt Weill’s Street Scene has indeed taken me a long time and we open on June 19th here in Dresden at the Semperoper. I learned the piece in English but found out rather late in the day that we were doing it in a German translation by Stefan Troßbach. Benjamin Britten was very keen on his operas being performed in the vernacular and I think that Street Scene, which contains so much dialogue and ‘melodramas’, will be much more appealing to a German audience in translation. The purists may not be so enthusiastic!
The first piece I ever conducted as an undergraduate at university was Weill’s ‘Threepenny Opera’ and I’ve always loved his maverick-like musical personality. When he fled from Germany in 1933 Weill first went to France, then England before travelling to America. Once there he tried as hard as he could to become as American as possible. After 1941 even the letters he wrote to his wife Lotte Lenya were in English even though their mutual native tongue was Geman. With Street Scene he set out to write an ‘American Opera’ (he also referred to it as a ‘Broadway Opera’). It is a vast melting pot for every possible musical idiom imaginable. Jazz, blues, grand opera, melodrama, Broadway dance numbers .You name it and it’s there. It’s a musically virtuosic tour de force and he considered it to be his masterpiece.
One of the challenges of the piece is for the singers who have to be able to sing, act, dance and speak like actors. In the original production the four principal roles were taken by opera singers and the rest of the cast were Broadway artists. In our production all the singers are members of the Semperoper ensemble who are doing a great job in combining all the necessary artistic disciplines. Put that together with Bettina Bruinier’s lively production and the wonderful Staatskapelle orchestra and it should be an evening to remember!
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