Romeo und Julia

While a roaring ball stirs up spirits inside, a boy and a girl meet on the sidelines – and fall in love at first sight. But because they belong to warring families, Romeo and Juliet's love may be immortal, but it is above all forbidden.

The chamber opera by the German-Baltic composer Boris Blacher, written in 1943, condenses Shakespeare’s famous tragedy to its essence: the fate of Romeo and Juliet. Scenic miniatures conjure a foggy world hostile to love. Characters occasionally materialise like ghostly apparitions, while a Brechtian chansonnier comments with humour and with harshness on the failure of the greatest love story of all.

Blacher takes the sparseness of means to the extreme three years later during the war. The bombing of the German opera houses and a life-threatening lung infection are the formative events that give his version of Romeo and Juliet its dramaturgical and musical character. The omnipresence of death, even in the seemingly happy moments of life, gains a threatening presence through the Allied bombing raids. The extent to which this theme must have captivated Blacher is also evident in his adaptation of the Romeo material.

From the classic German translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck, the composer distilled scenic miniatures that radically reduce the Shakespearean drama to the powerless lovers in the face of their doom. Any episodes or characters that did not directly advance the tragedy of the two protagonists were eliminated from the plot. In keeping with the uncompromising conciseness of the scenes, Blacher created a score that ‘in its austerity is reminiscent of a small miracle’ (H.H. Stuckenschmidt). Like a haiku, the composer sketches with sparse instruments - a string quintet, flute, bassoon and trumpet make up the entire orchestral apparatus - sometimes developed from a single musical motif, building on it and circling around it, in its scenic miniatures, the love- and life-hostile world of fog through which Romeo and Juliet move. Other characters occasionally materialise like ghostly apparitions, only to disappear again just as suddenly as they came after fulfilling their dramaturgical function.

The chorus is the master of this universal realm of fate, which Blacher introduces as the third protagonist in the arrangement of the play. With text parts of characters who drive the action, such as the potion-administering Father Lorenzo, the Nurse or Romeo's friend Benvolio, the eight-member chamber ensemble oscillates flexibly between the role of a sympathetic observer, catalyst of action or indifferent commentator of the tragic events - without, of course, ever showing any willingness to show Romeo and Juliet the predefined path out of their downfall.

Depending on the musical treatment of the chorus in particular, the entire sound character of Romeo and Juliet can change in astonishing ways. Some of the few recordings available of this operatic rarity recall in their accuracy and transparent transparency the Apollonian tonal language of a Frank Martin, whose secular oratorio Le vin herbé was premiered only a year before Romeo and Juliet and must have been known to the Blacher. Other recordings of the work, especially from the English-speaking world, focus less on immaculate sound purity and more on a rougher, more characteristic interpretation in the style of Kurt Weill, in which the individual voice does not have to subordinate itself to the collective.

The most peculiar feature of this opera, rich in peculiarities, is also in the Weillian tradition: in three piano-accompanied chansons, a chansonnier splinters the delicate pathos of the rest of the score with laconic summaries of the dramatic events in Brechtian style. The subtle irony of the cabaret numbers reveals Boris Blacher's alienation at Shakespeare's moral verdict that it was too much love that brought about Romeo and Juliet's doom.

This score, which ‘conceals more than it says’ (H.H. Stuckenschmidt), defies any clear scenic definition in its compressed nature, but gives the opera-goer the opportunity to form his or her own fantasy of the tragic events.

Adapted from Anna Grundmeier