The Osnabrück theater is currently countering the political kitsch, which has been administered to the audience on the opera stages for some time as a self-reassurance pill and globalization sin relief, with an eminently political opera that has considerable force and intelligence: "Fremde Erde", composed in 1930 by Karol Rathaus .
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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It is not a play to which the refugee drama of our time should be forcibly imposed, as Milo Rau did with Mozart's “Idomeneo”, regardless of aesthetic losses in Geneva.
“Foreign Earth” reports on its own about modern poverty migration in the 20th century.
The opera does not obscure the tough economic causes for this migration through cultural studies or gender theory.
Rather, it amazes in this field with an unusual constellation of gender and domination: with a woman as a capitalist who pitilessly lets men die in their saltpetre mines.
Who came up with something like that?
A woman: the librettist Kamilla Palffy-Waniek.
Apparently she still knew that domination is primarily linked to ownership of the means of production.
Off to South America
Impoverished Eastern Europeans are on their way to South America on a ship. Among them was the young Semjin with his fiancé Ankleka and their father Guranoff. You follow the promises of a labor agent and get hired at the Lean Branchista mine. The owner is also erotically fascinated by Semjin and gradually, suspected by the overseer Esteban, initiates a relationship of hierarchical sexuality with him.
This shatters his relationship with Anhui, but also class solidarity within the proletariat. Semjin's attempt to persuade his boss to change the conditions of production through pity ends with an escalation that proves that a capitalist may be a lovely woman, but as a capitalist cannot change without ceasing to be a capitalist. Semjin is outcast. He is stranded in New York - the director Jakob Peters-Messer leaves him at the feet of the Statue of Liberty, while behind it a semicircle of light shines in the colors of the rainbow. Freedom is always only the freedom of the higher-wage earners and class consciousness is an idea that is just as little covered by the egoistic everyday life as the historical mission of the proletariat.
Music plays a double role in this drama.
It is the singing that makes Semjin and Lean fall in love, each fascinated by the strange voice.
But music can connect people, but not change relationships, even if it makes them dance.
Rathaus - a Polish Jew from Eastern Galicia, friends of Joseph Roth, himself a pupil of Franz Schreker - confronts his finely-nerved, tense, choppy tonal language with American popular music.
He allows Ukrainian, Polish, Belarusian and Lithuanian folk tunes to sound alienated and without nostalgic promises;
only the orchestral timbres still tell of the familiar, dreamy scent of home, sensually strong under the inspired direction of Andreas Hotz.
Musical expectation horizon
It is the culture-industrial confection of culinary jazz and urban tango that is so attractive to migrants here, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger did in 2015 in his “Attempts on Discord” with a view to commercial advertising and the people of the Second and Third World described: It appears as a promise, as a “reliable description of a possible way of life. To a large extent, it determines the horizon of the expectations associated with migration ”. The Osnabrück program booklet quotes from this text, which is so much more sober and clearer than the pathos of freedom with which - as an alleged motif of worldwide migration - one feels at the Salzburg Festival this summer on the occasion of Jan Lauwers' production of Luigi's "Intolleranza 1960" Nono lied in her own pocket.
The direction of Jakob Peters-Messer brings the story from 1930 into our time, but refuses any short circuit with people in rubber dinghies on the Mediterranean Sea or the funding conditions for rare earths in Africa, which would be of the highest relevance for supporters of electromobility. Much more energy is invested in working out human conflicts against the background of economic fate. Jan Friedrich Eggers portrays Semjin as a disturbed man who is desperate because of his insight into the situation. Unlike for the touchingly tender, defenselessly exposed Olga Privalova as ankle, for him nostalgia is no longer a way out. With her rich, melodious and engaging soprano, Susann Vent-Wunderlich can unleash the very charisma to which Semjin falls. The choir,rehearsed by Sierd Quarré, overcomes enormous difficulties singing and also shows a desire for an individualized game.
Important rediscovery
Although the language of the libretto, measured against the subject, seems a bit sluggish, the course of the story is quickly predictable and some scenes seem dispensable, Andreas Hotz as a conductor, with his quick and sharp perception, manages to turn it into haunting art, that of the musical intensity lives on.
An important rediscovery by the dramaturge Juliane Piontek.
The fact that the theater is lavishly filled with people between the ages of eighteen and eighty at a performance after the premiere in the middle of the week shows that the previous artistic director Ralf Waldschmidt has left his now happily started successor Ulrich Mokrusch a functioning relationship between theater and urban society .