Word: einem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...proposition: nobody is sure of anything. The plots of this school usually have the random malevolence of nightmares; the singing line often gets lost among the soliloquies. Such an opera made its U.S. debut last week in Manhattan's City Center: The Trial, by Viennese Composer Gottfried von Einem, based on Franz Kafka's famed nightmare of the same name...
...Einem's score, for all its effective orchestration, had more barking sound effects than flowing music; much of Joseph K.'s music was recitation on a single note. While The Trial went on, the audience sat intent and silent. But at the end the applause was thin. Most of it went to Tenor John Druary for his two hours of almost continuous singing in the difficult lead, and to Phyllis Curtin for her beautiful soprano and her coquetry in the parts of the opera's three erotic women...
...finally led away by two black-clad agents and stabbed to death. This macabre theme of man tortured by forces he does not understand was successfully used by Alban Berg in Wozzeck and by Gian-Carlo Menotti in his more popular Consul. Salzburg first-nighters, remembering Von Einem's earlier, impressive opera, Danton's Death (TIME, Aug. 18, 1947), came with high hopes. But by the final curtain, they found themselves less than spellbound, responded with lukewarm applause...
...lauded the first-rate production, including the staging, the orchestra (under the Vienna State Opera's Karl Boehm) and the highly imaginative sets (by German Designer Caspar Neher), which evoked a kind of Orwellian gloom amid Salzburg's sunny, baroque opulence. But critics reluctantly admitted that Von Einem's score itself was something of a disappointment...
Although its overall effect was suitably uncanny, at times it sounded like a good movie sound track rather than full-blooded, dramatic music. Episodic treatment (like the book, the opera is divided into nine separate scenes) broke the mood with each intermission. Moreover, critics noted, the Von Einem score was derivative - now a dash of Puccini, now Tchaikovsky, now Stravinsky. The opera's best feature : three scenes in which Joseph K. (superbly characterized by German Tenor Max Lorenz) is involved with different women, all beautifully sung by Switzerland's Soprano Lisa Delia Casa (who will appear at Manhattan...