Only To Slowly Fade

The Threepenny Opera was an ‘occasional’ work claiming an anti-establishment leftist agenda that, to tell the truth, never convinced anybody at the time – on the other hand it has been correctly observed that the implications of its form have not been fully digested, even today. The cynical tone of the songs and the cavalier disregard for highbrow/lowbrow distinctions permeating the work as a whole opened up a new approach to the theatre that proved problematic for subsequent generations. Few are prepared to admit that, in 1928 at the Theatre am Schiffbauerdamm, ‘serious’ art music and opera died an inglorious death. Artistic forms and modalities have a mortal inner life, they evolve through time – they follow a hyperbolic evolutionary curve, reaching a peak of development, only to slowly fade as they are superseded by other diversions. The political spasms of the twentieth century, together with the rise of the mass media, still obscure the passing of nineteenth century aesthetic categories, including the avant-garde and the seriously experimental – the radicalism of the Second Vienna School notwithstanding.
The Munich Opera House was destroyed in October 1943, prompting Richard Strauss to draft several bars of music ‘in mourning’. Listening to the final work, Metamorphosen, one senses not just the horror of those ‘dark days’ but also, in its tenuous echoes of Tristan and ‘Eroica’, an act of mourning for the end of an entire phase of European musical sensibility.

Published in The Supplement Issue 26 Jan 2006

Illustration: Montage II Only To Slowly Fade, 2006