Almost a century after it was written, Marc Blitzstein’s Parabola and Circula has finally reached the stage – or rather, the concert platform. Composed in 1929-30, when the American composer was just 25, this one-act opera with a libretto by George Whitsett, was long considered lost, its intended premiere at the Dessau Theater thwarted by the rise of Nazism. Now, thanks to the efforts of musicologist Kai Hinrich Müller, conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens and publisher Boosey & Hawkes, the score has been painstakingly reconstructed and mounted for its long-delayed world premiere, which took place at the Philharmonie Berlin and Norrköping.
Blitzstein, one of America’s fiercest political dramatists and a friend of Leonard Bernstein, was not a Bauhaus member – where no music department existed, in any case. Yet his opera shares the spirit of radical reduction and abstraction that defined the Bauhaus milieu and its artistic satellites. One immediately recalls Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922) when confronted with Blitzstein’s cast of geometric beings: Parabola, Circula, their children Rectangula and Intersecta, and a supporting gallery of friends Prism, Linea and Geodesa.
The plot is both allegory and parable. Parabola adores the perfect Circula, yet cannot endure her perfection. Swayed by his so-called friends – Prism, the roguish instigato;, Linea, the envious traitor; and Geodesa, the lumbering aggressor – he succumbs to doubt because he does not trust his own instincts but gives in to social trends and pressures, ultimately leading to division and death. In Whitsett’s libretto, this doubt grows into a monstrous black projectile that ultimately destroys Circula. The allegory, though clad in geometry, speaks of recognisably human states: jealousy, insecurity and the self-destructive tendency of love.
Blitzstein’s score is as eclectic as it is experimental. Echoes of Hindemith, Weill and Stravinsky are juxtaposed with jazz-inflected rhythms and angular constructivist gestures. In concert form, one inevitably misses the multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk that the work implicitly demands – costumes, movement, stagecraft – but even without Schlemmer-esque visuals, the music alone reveals a young composer intent on breaking the mould of conventional operatic dramaturgy. Here, love is not hard-won but already excessive, its destruction less a societal tragedy than a wilful unravelling from within.
Aleksander Nohr brought a rich and smooth baritone to the role of Parabola, providing a suitable foil for soprano Mari Eriksmoen’s clear elucidation of Circula. Among the other five roles, Matthew Newlin’s melodious tenor stood out as Rectangula, and Hongni Wu impressed with her svelte mezzo as Linea. This belated premiere of Parabola and Circula was deemed important enough for the President of Germany to attend and was crowned with standing ovations, not least for the excellently playing of the Norrköping Symphony Orchestra led by its Chief Conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens.
The evening’s second half placed Blitzstein in dialogue with Bernstein’s Symphony no. 2, “The Age of Anxiety”. Written in 1949 with Bernstein taking inspiration from WH Auden’s long poem and translating it into a musical narrative, it is as much an expression of the uncertainty and anxiety of the time after World War 2 as a curiosity of developing a modern society. It is a fusion of post-romantic severity with dissonant harmonies, lush lyricism and jazz idioms, with a dominant part for piano, here given a taut, brilliant interpretation by Tzimon Barto, who underscored the stylistic daring and emotional urgency of the work. Half an hour of musical exuberance provided a radiant foil to Blitzstein’s darker fable.
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