2023-12-15 08:23:20
Vienna – The Vienna Volksoper has decided on an unusual form of coming to terms with history. With the premiere of the operetta “Let’s forget the world – Volksoper 1938”, the stage commemorated those artists of the house who were expelled or murdered during the Nazi persecution because of their Jewish origins.
The Dutch director Theu Boermans built a play within a play around the last operetta production, which had been re-produced at the Volksoper in 1938, shortly before Austria’s “annexation” to Nazi Germany. This work was entitled “Greetings and Kisses from the Wachau” and was written by the composer Jara Benes.
Boermans lets the audience take part in the rehearsals of this light marriage and love story, and in the various reactions that National Socialism triggered among the artists of the Volksoper – from enthusiasm and followership to solidarity with the Jewish colleagues who had to flee or were deported.
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The Israeli Keren Kagarlitsky set musical contrasts as a composer and conductor by combining the partly jazzy melodies of Jara Benes with her own music and works by Schönberg and Mahler for the new production “Let’s forget the world”.
The audience was moved by Kagarlitsky’s performance and Boermans’ story. There was a lot of applause for today’s ensemble, which the artistic Volksoper team from 1938 brought to life once again. Among them at the time was Fritz Löhner-Beda, who is not only known as the librettist of the Lehar operetta “Land of Smiles”, but also as the lyricist of the “Buchenwald Song”, which he wrote in the concentration camp of the same name. He was murdered in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942.
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