Word: ronnefeld
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...occasion was a performance of Composer Peter Ronnefeld's four-act opera, The Ant. Spectators at the Düsseldorf Opera seemed to find no middle ground; they were either enraged or entranced by the generally cacophonous score and by the frankly libidinous libretto that provided space for an orgiastic ballet, a striptease and a recitative recounting of the early sexual exploits of a couple of convicts. Composer Ronnefeld, 26, who conducted the orchestra, was greeted by a caterwauling of penny whistles from the top balcony. ("Idiots up there!" shouted pro-Ronnefeld forces in other parts of the house...
Preposterous as the story is, it gives Ronnefeld a fine chance to exercise his talent for musical satire; the score glitters with echoes of half a dozen com posers, from Berg to Bartok. Carl Orff's cantata Carmina Burana is brilliantly parodied by an offstage male chorus singing a salty Latin text on the mating habits of ants; acidulous Stravinskyan brasses turn up in Act III. The real wonder is that despite the borrowing Composer Ronnefeld's score has a character of its own brash, melodramatic, full of rhythmic fire...
Dresden-born and the son of a viola player, Ronnefeld toured Germany in his teens as a concert pianist. Now chief conductor at the Bonn Stadttheater, he has written a handful of other compositions, but The Ant is both his first full-scale opera and his first work to attract wide attention. The boos it also attracts seem to Composer Ronnefeld merely "stupid." To people who read it correctly, he insists, his ant opera "introduces a higher reality...
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