WWhy is it often the case that royalty are particularly affable? They can be friendliness itself because all the inconveniences of everyday life are taken care of for them. Wherever they are ceremoniously entering, in a foreign country or in their own capital, the red carpet has always been rolled out. Only not in Mycenae! The Atrid royal court is cursed, as we learned in school. In Magdalena Fuchsberger’s production of Ernst Krenek’s opera “Life of Orest” at the Münster Theater, the head of the house enters the scene by personally unrolling the appropriate floor covering to prepare the big stage. And even before Agamemnon allows himself to be ensnared by the intrigues of the subjects, who, depending on their position, either want nothing to do with his war plan (race) or will exploit it for their own ends (counsellor), he gets caught up in the proverbial treachery of the object.
Actually, the carpet promises the masterability of the world in its perfect two-dimensionality. A map appears to have been woven into the specimen brought by Agamemnon. She will show that the sea route from Mycenae to Troy is long but direct. But as the king slides the carpet to earth according to plan, the mountain ranges flattened by the projection seem to return in rebel fashion, and the elevation of the vaults causes the great lord to stumble. The mishap does not remain singular. Like the new English king Charles III. immediately after acceding to the throne complained about his fountain pen, which soiled his lily-white hands “every damn time” when signing documents, the entrance ceremony became a chain of stumbling blocks for Agamemnon.
Slapstick represents tragedy
When he later returns to Mycenae as the victor in the fourth picture, a welcoming committee of carpet rollers hurries ahead of him. But these servants manage the work so easily and smoothly that in the eyes of the theater audience the humiliation of the king is complete. In the first picture we have seen a self-inflicted misfortune that anticipates everything else to which – and this is the joke, which is unmistakably unique to Krenek’s pastiche of the Atriden material – there is absolutely nothing tragic about it.
The representational term for this opposite and functional equivalent of the tragic as a means of dramatic chaining is slapstick. In his libretto, Krenek expressly prescribes movements in this style of American silent films, a comical dissection and assembly of gestural processes subject to tempo distortion and repetition. The characterization of Agamemnon commands the singer “short, imperious, almost pathological gestures”.
In Munster, the tenor Brad Cooper makes a triumph of overwhelming fidelity to the work by following this instruction. At the same time, Krenek characterized the melodies that he wrote specifically for Agamemnon with the prescription for the royal zigzag style of physical exertion. This principle of character formation may also be understood by studying the score, but to appreciate its achievement one must experience the piece on stage. That was impossible for six decades. The last German productions of the work, which premiered in Leipzig in 1930, took place in 1961, simultaneously in Wiesbaden and Darmstadt. There is no record either.
Originality is not the benchmark
In musicology, the disappearance of the piece from the repertoire is explained by Krenek’s programmatic eclecticism. Such judgments perhaps make things too easy for themselves when they tacitly presuppose an ideal of originality which, of all genres, is ultimately self-evident in opera. As in his jazz opera “Jonnyspiel auf”, Krenek collages tonal languages of the serious and the frivolous. The effect is, to use the terminology of the play’s political subject, leveling or democratizing. Not only the hit melodies of the choir, but also the echoes of contemporaries and predecessors in the operatic genre sound parodic in the overall effect.
