© 1996 MUNICH FOUND

Slaughterhouse Five, Live
by Anne Midgette

You've read the book, now see the... opera. Sure. After all, in the days before film, opera was the way to bring a popular book onto the stage. Sir Walter Scott, father of the international blockbuster bestseller, saw more than 50 operas based on his novels. So what's so surprising at the idea of making an opera from an enduring modern classic like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five?

Well, maybe it's a little surprising— especially in Munich. The world premiere of the opera Schlachthof 5, libretto and music by composer Hans-Jürgen von Bose, opened this year's Munich Opera Festival in July (1996), and to hear the advance press, Munich's opera public was preparing to mutiny at the idea of kicking off our lovely traditional festival with a piece of modern music! The work's full title, by the way, is:

Schlachthof 5, nach dem Roman von Kurt Vonnegut, ein wenig in der telegrafisch-schizophrenen Art über den Brandbombenangriff auf Dresden, über mehr oder weniger angenehme Geschichten aus den Staaten und über den Planeten Tralfamadore, von wo die fliegende Untertassen kommen. Friede.

and if you have trouble with this, imagine the anticipatory disquiet of premiere patrons paying DM 250 a ticket for opening-night seats.

What do you know: people liked it. Maybe they didn't love it. Schlachthof 5 is not a font of tunes you're going to go out and whistle in the street. Maybe some people hated it. But the overall reaction was one of cautious acceptance. The work is basically entertaining (apart from a few problems with dramatic pacing—, for example, a two-hour-long first act); the music is interesting; the singers are respectable, and everything is kept moving in the capable hands of conductor Paul Daniel.

Von Bose said that his goal in Schlachthof 5 was to create a show ''in the Monty Python sense - —colorful, glittering, glamorous, insane.'' The finished product certainly has traces of all these elements. What it doesn't offer is light humor. Caught halfway between German and Anglophone traditions of music theater, von Bose tried at once to be entertaining and to write a monumental Gesamtkunstwerk for the 1990s, and he didn't quite pull it off: the result is more like Monty Python meeting Richard Wagner. Schlachthof 5 lumbers along with a veritable elephantine gait. This isn't a bad thing: elephants can be funny, too. But anyone coming to Schlachthof 5 looking for belly laughs is likely to be disappointed.

In general, however, the opera holds interest, conveys some of the book's zaniness if not its antic shimmer, and has some genuine musical values. One strength is evident in von Bose's handling of a range of styles, from cabaret to classical. Musical eclecticism is a hallmark of many composers these days, but von Bose's brand of it is more successful than most. This is because, first, he didn't simply lift quotes from past works, but wrote his own music in a variety of styles, and, second, in an opera about a man who becomes dislocated in time, it makes perfect dramatic sense for the music to hop around from epoch to epoch.

So when two space aliens (the metallic-clad Helena Jungwirth and countertenor Charles Maxwell) twitter Baroquely, alternating with synthesized cosmic flying-saucer music; or when Billy Pilgrim's daughter (the scintillating Frances Lucey) belts out cabaret into a handy mike, it all fits right in with a story about a man who is living simultaneously during World War II and the 1960s, and who's kidnapped by extraterrestrial Trafalmadorians somewhere in the middle.

Not only did Schlachthof 5 win acceptance in Munich, but the piece actually seemed to achieve its goal of drawing a new, younger public into the opera house. There were new faces and funkier outfits both onstage (in Act II, the extraterrestials appeared as punks, a gratuitous gesture in the generally good production of Eike Gramss and set/costume designer Gottfried Pilz) and off. A generation which tends to reject opera as antiquated and overblown may be drawn in by the prospect of something new.

That's certainly a belief of Intendant Peter Jonas, who has done his best to shake up the Munich opera since taking over in 1993. Jonas gives importance not only to new productions, but to new works: one of his first steps was to commission new works from German composers (an attempt to counter frequent allegations that he is Anglocentric). Schlachthof 5 is the first of these commissions; the next, in January, is Venus and Adonis by Hans Werner Henze. Not only is Henze an eminent composer, but the festival he founded, the Munich Biennale, has been one of the city's only venues for young composers: for von Bose in 1990 and, this year, for composer Tan Dun, whose hit Marco Polo was a coproduction with the Bavarian State Opera.

The opera should be commended for getting a piece of Munich's modern action. And foes of the modern who criticize Jonas for breaking with tradition by producing works like Schlachthhof 5 should remember that, as Jonas points out, modern opera has a long tradition in Munich, —dating back at least to 1865, when the house saw the world premiere of an opera called Tristan und Isolde. Schlachthof 5 is no Tristan. But it's good enough to be seen and heard, at least once.

© 1996 MUNICH FOUND