2023-11-19 08:19:38
“Father, mother and Margot still can’t get used to the sound of the Westerturm bell, which tells you what time it is every quarter of an hour,” recites Olivia Warburton Anne Frank from her famous diary, accompanied by Volker Krafft on the piano. And then, with a brightened face and voice, she says: “I do, I liked it straight away, and especially at night it’s so familiar. You’ll probably be interested to know how I like being in hiding.”
Anne Frank wrote these lines on July 11, 1942, shortly after she moved with her parents and sister into the hiding place in the back of the warehouse at Prinsengracht 263. The Jewish family hid there from the National Socialist occupiers for a good two years until they were betrayed in 1944 and deported to concentration camps. Only Anne’s father Otto survived the Holocaust.
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As Anne Frank, Warburton wears knee-high socks and a dress that were common in the 1940s. On the rehearsal stage of the State Opera, the soprano kneels on an oversized book page – and thus in a pop-up picture book that currently shows a photo of the Amsterdam warehouse. The rest of the background is still white; later diary pages in Anne Frank’s handwriting will be turned here. There are a few more props in the room that will be used at the premiere of the opera “The Diary of Anne Frank” by Grigori Frid on November 25th and then at various performance dates until April at the opera. A school desk with a pencil case, chair and a satchel next to it.
Director David Bösch sits in front of the stage and listens intently to Warburton, going over with her how she slips into the next picture in the book – in the great set design by Patrick Bannwart and Falko Herold. This is shown by Anne Frank’s bed in the secret annex, which almost completely fills the small space on the book page and thus makes tangible the prison character that the few square meters in the annex inevitably meant, while life outside continued as normal. Perhaps the parents and sister hated the sound of the bell because it reminded them of exactly that. And maybe that’s exactly why 13-year-old Anne liked him.
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With impressive details, offered in a variety of different image levels from the graphic novel to film recordings to the pop-up element in the all-encompassing diary, Bösch wants to make it easier for young viewers to access the material. Because, according to the director, “many young people still have a lot of inhibitions about going to the opera.”
The musical monodrama by the Russian composer Grigori Frid (1915–2012) appeals to young audiences in two ways. On the one hand, he limits himself to 21 scenes in order to describe Anne’s character, her courage and her idealistic worldview despite everything and relies on the fact that the opera, which is played here by an eleven-piece chamber orchestra, succeeds in one hour, for which films and plays do or even books take significantly longer. On the other hand, he extracts the feelings of the young heroine through the recitatives, through the soprano’s singing. In his production, Bösch supplemented the passages from the diary set to music with quotes he had read without musical accompaniment in order to expand the image of Anne Frank.
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„Anne Frank“-Register
Staging the play against the backdrop of the war in Israel and the Gaza Strip, against the backdrop of global anti-Semitic demonstrations and attacks, was “hardly bearable,” says Bösch, because no one could have predicted the developments when the production was planned.
For him, Anne Frank was not just “the Jewish girls, but also the girl, the young person who believes that people are actually good after all.” This is what manifests itself in the diary. So Anne said “in desperation: actually it would be better if we hadn’t hidden ourselves, then we wouldn’t be alive anymore, that would be better than in this terrible situation.” At the same time, she also writes jokes in the book, is funny and cheerful, and reminisces.
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The opera shows “how much potential there is in just one little girl”. According to Bösch, the diary is “an incredible literary gift to posterity, although of course it would have been better if none of this had happened and she had survived and experienced what she dreamed of: becoming a writer, falling in love, getting married, etc Role of women to live differently than their mother.”
All the terms that would otherwise be used to describe plays just didn’t work for Anne Frank: “You can’t say that it goes far beyond that, that would be putting things into perspective again. At the same time, this is one of six million Jewish lives extinguished that had so much potential and right to life. This is the humanistic message beyond historical truth and accuracy.”
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