- Zeitoper
"Zeitoper" (German: "opera of the times") was a short-lived genre of
opera associated with Weimar Germany. It is not known when or by whom the term was coined, but by 1928Kurt Weill ("Zeitoper" in "Melos") was able to complain that it was more a slogan than a description. Like "opera buffa " it used contemporary settings and characters, comic or at least satiric plots (Max Brand 's "Maschinist Hopkins " is a sole tragic example) and aimed at musical accessibility. Two distinguishing characteristics are a tendency to incorporate modern technology (trains, airplanes, telephones and even elevators) and frequent allusions to popular music, especiallyjazz . This last, more than any social satire, earned the suspicion of the political right and ensured that it would not survive into theNazi era.Ernst Krenek 's "Jonny spielt auf " (1927) is held up as the epitome of the genre. Other composers arePaul Hindemith ("Neues vom Tage ", "Hin und zurück "),Eugen d'Albert ("Die schwarze Orchidee ") andWilhelm Grosz ("Achtung! Aufname! " to a libretto byBela Balazs ). At the possible instigation of Krenek, the AmericanGeorge Antheil also wrote a "Zeitoper" for Frankfurt, "Transatlantic" (1930, originally titled "Glare"). In "Von Heute auf Morgen " (1930)Arnold Schönberg attempted to have the last word on the fashion: at the end a child enters and asks the reconciled parents "What are modern people?" "That changes from one day to the next."Reference
Susan C. Cook "Opera for a New Republic: the Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill and Hindemith" (University of Michigan, 1988)
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