Word: malpopita
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Radio, seven years ago scorned by most serious musicians, now like an important prima donna has music composed expressly for it. German Kurt Weill wrote the cantata Lindbergh's Flight for radio performance (TIME, April 13). Last week the first radio opera, Malpopita, was given in Berlin?the work of Composer Walter Goehr, a follower of Ultramodernists Franz Schrecker and Arnold Schonberg...
...Goehr's Malpopita is thoroughly morbid, as are nearly all current European art-efforts. Adam Schickedanz, after ten years in a factory, seeks adventure, falls in with sailors who persuade him to ship aboard a rumrunner. Fleeing from U. S. Government boats, the ship is wrecked on the island of Malpopita where the crew eventually discovers oil and Adam becomes once more a heckled, hard-working under...
This unimportant story has, for the most part, unimportant music. But as a radio experiment Malpopita proved singularly interesting. Speech and such external sounds as the sharp clicking of a Morse telegraph ticker described the action so vividly that no explanation of the story was needed. The performance was conducted, characteristically, by Erich Kleiber of the Berlin Staatsoper. This pleasant bald-headed gentleman (who, at the New York Philharmonic, is overshadowed by the severely classical Arturo Toscanini) has championed more modern opera than any other man in Germany. He directed the premieres of Austrian Alban Berg's Wozzeck (five years...
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