Review – “The Emperor’s New Waltz” in Salzburg
Hurt!
05.03.2023 by Peter Jungblut
The only 18-year-old British composer Alma Deutscher makes fun of contemporary music, power-hungry music professors and cheap fashion brands in her opera “Des Kaisers Neue Walzer”, taking her cues from Mozart and Hans Christian Andersen. This is usually entertaining, but leaves a stale followingtaste.
Image source: LTS/ Tobias Witzgall
What do conservative music lovers, who have to endure some contemporary piece between Mozart and Beethoven, like to say regarding the people sitting next to you? Of course: Hurz! The television sketch of the same name by Hape Kerkeling from the then satirical show “Total Normal” is 32 years old once more. “Hurz” stands for the supposed nonsense of modern composers, makes the tonal language of the avant-garde ridiculous. And the particularly funny thing regarding it: You can see loud, aghast listeners who force themselves to like the musical nonsense – so that they don’t appear as philistines.
The opera: three and a half hours with dramaturgical weaknesses
An entire evening of music theater can be made out of this, as the very young British composer Alma Deutscher has now demonstrated at the Salzburg State Theater. At almost three and a half hours, the work is clearly too long, because the plot can really be summed up with “Hurz”: An evil, autocratic composer who can’t think of any melodies, only dissonant tinkling, terrorizes students and audiences and ends up for it exposed to ridicule. The blond gardener triumphs, whispering romances to the guitar and of course the Viennese waltz, which is celebrated here as the highlight of music history.
And because the composer Alma Deutscher is considered a “child prodigy” – she began playing the piano at the tender age of two – she keeps flirting with Mozart and quoting his hits, including the “Don Giovanni” finale. Before the break, all this made for a lot of laughter, following the break the sequence of scenes dragged on a lot. It took a while for all conflicts to be resolved. The problem with this premiere, however, was not dramaturgical flaws, which hardly matter in the work of a not even twenty-year-old, but the really ambiguous message that new music is fundamentally presumptuous, a practical joke for a blasé cultural scene that only wants to make itself important.
Alma Deutscher falls into the ideology trap with her criticism of avant-garde music
Hans Christian Andersen’s socially critical fairy tale, in which the self-important emperor ends up standing naked, is transferred to the music here, according to the motto, listen to this, these avant-garde composers are incompetent and vain, but nobody dares to put it in their face accept. This is sometimes reminiscent, one has to put it so harshly, of the agitation once morest so-called “degenerate music”, mainly because what right-wing extremists describe as “healthy popular sentiment” is constantly and obtrusively presented here. Pretty young people sing pretty old songs and make the world happy. Hape Kerkeling didn’t let any such associations arise with “Hurz”, that’s the big difference, because of course satire can also make fun of contemporary composers.
So it wasn’t the fault of the director Christina Piegger and the set designers Laura Malmberg and Paul Sturminger if this premiere left an extremely stale followingtaste. Someone should have pointed out the danger zone to the young British composer. In the programme, Alma Deutscher says that she doesn’t want to parody any specific colleague, but rather the prevailing “ideology” in contemporary new music. But that is itself ideology, and unfortunately a fatal one.
Alma Deutscher in an interview
BR-KLASSIK spoke to the young composer before her Salzburg premiere. In the interview, the young composer lashes out at contemporary classical music. New music is quite an ideological event, says Deutscher. In the end, however, noise is just noise. She prefers to look for beautiful melodies. Click here for the article.
The Ensemble: Convincing across the board
On the other hand, it is absolutely fine that Alma Deutscher speaks regarding sexual assaults at music colleges – she herself expressly claims not to have been affected, but the cases of abuse of power were reported in large numbers by the press. The incidentally expressed criticism of cheap fashion and its bizarre marketing methods was absolutely appropriate. Despite all the objections, the conductor Katharina Wincor, the choir and the soloists all did an excellent job. It was entertaining for long stretches and played very authentically. No one overdid it with the satirical furor, everyone remained believable in their roles, even the severely hysterical and wonderfully comedic Anne-Fleur Werner as the diabolical marriage swindler. Then a very decided Hurz!
Broadcast: “Allegro” on March 6 from 06:05 on BR-CLASSIC
