Although largely forgotten today, Ernst Krenek’s Leben des Orest (Life of Orestes, libretto by the composer) was one of the most anticipated Austro-German operas of 1930. With the extraordinary success of his Jonny spielt auf (Jonny strikes up the band, libretto also by the composer), performed over 500 times in forty-five cities from its premiere in 1927 to 1930,Footnote 1 Krenek had launched a craze for Zeitoper, or opera of the times, featuring jazz-infused scores, present-day settings, and plots drawn from everyday modern life.Footnote 2 But as details of Krenek’s next evening-length opera leaked out, many were left puzzled. Leben des Orest was based on ancient Greek mythology; it was set in the ancient past; and its subtitle ‘Grand Opera in Five Acts’ harkened back to a nineteenth-century operatic tradition that modernist composers emphatically rejected.
Leben des Orest was premiered in Leipzig on 19 January 1930, at the same opera house and with the same production team as the premiere of Jonny spielt auf. Critics’ responses were mixed, but generally positive. The most frequent critique was that the opera was simply too long – over four hours in its original version. Leben des Orest’s second production was at the Berlin State Opera house on the Platz der Republik, commonly referred to as the Kroll Opera. The reception of the Berlin production of Leben des Orest was significantly more negative than the Leipzig premiere. Many critics drew specific comparisons between the two productions, to the Berlin production’s detriment, and they assigned much of the blame to the Berlin production’s design. For this, the Kroll had commissioned Giorgio de Chirico, a Greek-Italian painter based in Paris whose ‘metaphysical’ paintings were considered forerunners to French surrealism.
In this article, I argue that the negative reception of the Berlin production of Leben des Orest stemmed in part from the aesthetic dissonance of its various creators’ approaches to neoclassicism. Krenek, de Chirico, and the Kroll team in Berlin each had a very different answer to what antiquity should mean in the modern day and how modern artists should make use of ‘classical’ sources, be they ancient Greece and Rome or the broader ‘classical’ heritage of music and visual art. Krenek drew on revisionist ideas about ancient Greece and Schubert to wrestle with his own ambivalence about modernity and where it seemed to be heading. De Chirico idealized Classical aesthetics and Renaissance classicism as stable values to which modern art needed to return, while recognizing that antiquity belonged irretrievably to the past. Audiences and critics also brought their own expectations about the Kroll’s abstract and modernist production aesthetic, which was based on productions of works such as Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau’s neoclassical Oedipus Rex in 1928. Attending to these differences not only explains the troubled reception of Leben des Orest at the Kroll, but also provides fertile ground to examine the complicated and sometime contradictory meanings ascribed to neoclassicism in the interwar period, especially as it moved between media and across national borders.Footnote 3
Krenek’s neoclassicism
Krenek was a prolific writer, and his essays, reviews, correspondence, and memoirs from the late 1920s offer a detailed record of his evolving aesthetic agenda and approach to the opera Leben des Orest. In the late 1920s, Krenek entered what he would later describe as his ‘neo-romantic’ period, of which Orest was his most substantial musical work. Then and now, ‘romantic’ is often used as an oppositional category to ‘classical,’ and while this distinction is certainly overdetermined, it can help us to understand how Krenek’s approach to the classical past – ancient Greece and Rome, as well as ‘classical’ Western art music of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – differed from the other contributors to the Kroll opera production of Orest.
Krenek’s initial plan for Leben des Orest continued his optimistic outlook on modernity from the mid-1920s exemplified in Jonny spielt auf. In that work, Krenek had juxtaposed traditional and modern values with a plot that revolved around how an African American jazz musician and his music shook up the lives of a modernist composer and his opera singer lover. The opera ends with its protagonists boarding a train to America and a new life that synthesizes traditional and modern values. As Krenek later explained, the opera does not actually show this synthesis, ‘because at the time that [he] wrote it, [he] did not know’ what such a synthesis would look like.Footnote 4 Rather, he optimistically believed that as time progressed, society would naturally achieve it.
Krenek was first inspired to adapt the Oresteia saga during a holiday to Spain in 1927.Footnote 5 In his initial conception, the opera anachronistically crossed ancient Greece with the present day. Orestes’s sister, Iphigenia, would not be transported to Tauris/Scythia, but to modern-day America, where she becomes a fashion model. Orestes’s travels would also bring him to America, where a bra advertisement featuring Iphigenia catalyses their reunion and they live happily ever after. This approach to Leben des Orest would thus have required Krenek to both portray the synthesis he avoided in Jonny and locate it in the United States, a land which exemplified modern life, technology, and mores in the popular imaginary.Footnote 6 Such juxtaposition of ancient Greek materials with modernity was common at the time, and its tongue-in-cheek, lightly self-deprecating mockery of modernity expressed a generally positive outlook on the present day.Footnote 7 For instance, in Stephan Wolpe’s Zeus und Elida of 1928, the titular god awakens in 1920s Berlin, becomes enamoured of a model in a perfume advertisement, and searches the city for her. High jinx ensue in a ‘fish-out-of-water’ scenario with plenty of jazzy music.Footnote 8
As the 1920s progressed, however, Krenek became concerned that modernity and modernization were sweeping away positive aspects of earlier, pre-First World War life and aesthetics. Soon after the premiere of Jonny, Krenek moved back to his native Vienna, and his writings from the late 1920s increasingly criticized modern life and culture. For instance, he disparaged modern popular music production as a ‘conveyor belt’ process that turns the listener into a ‘conveyor belt person’ and defended what he believed to be positive aspects of early nineteenth-century European life and culture worth preserving.Footnote 9 In the political sphere, Krenek joined voices praising the old Habsburg Empire as a multinational alternative to modern nationalist conflict.Footnote 10 In the cultural sphere, he similarly participated in defences of nineteenth-century figures such as Schubert, Offenbach, and the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy.Footnote 11 Krenek credited Schubert with revitalizing tonality in the early nineteenth century, and in his compositions of the late 1920s, Krenek sought to build on Schubert’s model to do the same. This turn to the early nineteenth century, and particularly the idealization of the bourgeois, Bildungsbürgertum culture within which Schubert moved, was central to Krenek’s later description of this as his ‘neo-romantic’ period.Footnote 12
As his thinking about the present day and the past evolved, Krenek also reconceptualized Leben des Orest. No longer a tongue-in-cheek celebration of modernity, the opera became a complex dialectical exploration of the positive and negative aspects of both modernity and tradition, or as Krenek referred to them in his writings, the Vital and the Spiritual (Geistige). Krenek returned the setting of the opera to ancient Greece, but importantly, not to classical Greece. As he explained in a response to a negative review of the opera, he sought to portray ancient Greek life and culture ‘as if it was alive, not a dead, finished past or an archaeological and philological ghost, but a naive, visible present’.Footnote 13 In an earlier essay introducing his opera, he cited nineteenth-century writer Jacob Burckhardt and the contemporary Egon Friedell that Greek statues and temples had not been white, but painted in many different colours.Footnote 14 It was this colourful, vibrant image of ancient Greek life he sought to capture in the opera. Thus, Krenek sets up another overdetermined dichotomy, but one that offers a useful way to think about the clashing approaches to neoclassicism at play in the Kroll production of Orest. On the one hand, there is a classical Greece, idealized in white marble statues and austere architecture and whose meaning was found in formalism, allegory, and symbolism, and on the other hand, an ancient Greece whose statues and buildings were painted bright and even gaudy colours and whose lifestyles were idealized as vibrant and spontaneous.Footnote 15
In this same essay, Krenek also mentioned but dismissed the work of nineteenth-century philologist Johann Jakob Bachofen as too symbolic and philological for his purposes.Footnote 16 However, in his later memoirs, Krenek reversed himself and cited Bachofen as an important inspiration, and indeed, Bachofen’s influence is evident in Krenek’s portrayal of ancient Greece.Footnote 17 Bachofen theorized human progress from primitive to civilized (with all the problems associated with nineteenth-century usage of these terms) as a transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. To illustrate this, Bachofen presented the Oresteia saga as a metaphor of ancient Greece’s transition from pre-classical primitive matriarchy to classical civilized patriarchy, symbolized in Orestes’s murder of his mother, Clytemnestra. Thus, while Krenek claimed to move away from abstract symbolism in his treatment of Greek myth, his portrayal of ancient Greece was actually a rich allegorical field.Footnote 18 The Vital and ‘primitive’ ancient Greece were represented with jazz. Here, Krenek drew on the interwar Austro-German imaginary of African Americans and jazz as ‘primitive’ that had played a central role in Jonny spielt auf, and he transferred that ‘primitiveness’ to Bronze Age Greece.Footnote 19 Meanwhile, the Spiritual and the emergent ‘civilized’, classical Greek culture were associated with the legacy of the nineteenth century, from Schubert to pre-First World War expressionism.Footnote 20
Krenek presents a dialectic of the positive and negative of the Vital and Spiritual before concluding with his proposed synthesis. He portrays the positive side of the Vital in scenes such as the Athenian annual fair in Act II, scene 3. Here, the Athenian people stroll around, interact with each other, engage with salespeople, enjoy circus-like entertainments, and generally project the image of a vibrant, thriving community. Musically, this is expressed with strong references to jazz, and Krenek also refers to modern life through film, as when the stage directions specify that a ‘short pantomimic action should be played in the style of such scenes as those in a Harold Lloyd film’.Footnote 21 Meanwhile, the negative side of the Vital comes to the fore in Act III, scene 6, when Orestes returns home after his first wandering years, arriving by chance during the funeral of his father, Agamemnon. In Krenek’s retelling, Agamemnon led the Greeks against their will into the Trojan War. After he left, his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus won the people over as fair and just rulers. When Orestes attempts to claim his father’s crown, the people fear a return to Agamemnon’s tyranny, and they riot. Krenek labels the scene a ‘blood orgy’ and sets it to a jazzy tarantella whose pace increases as the people’s fury and violence grow.Footnote 22
The positive side of the Spiritual can be seen in moments such as Act III, scene 5, when Orestes is in his first wandering years. He walks through the Arcadian countryside and sings an aria to the beauty of nature in the style of Krenek’s updated take on Schubert. Here, Orestes’s idealization of Greek hills and mountains mirrors Krenek’s own interest in the Alps as a source of a positive Austrian national identity.Footnote 23 Numerous critics identified this scene as the highpoint of the entire opera. The negative side of the Spiritual, on the other hand, comes to the fore in the so-called Land of the North and its King Thoas. Krenek invented this location to replace Tauris/Scythia in the original myth. Thoas is introduced in Act II, scene 2 with an aria that parodies pre-war expressionism. He sings of his obsession with astrology, which has led him to ignore his duties as both king and father. The scene clearly references Wagner’s Klingsor, but also the composer Max in Jonny spielt auf, whose modernist disconnection from real life was symbolized by his spending time alone seeking inspiration from Swiss glaciers. Krenek thus presents an excess of the Spiritual as leading to decadence and a detrimental disconnection from reality.
Synthesis arrives in the final act, when Orestes returns to Athens to stand trial for his mother’s murder. He accepts responsibility for his actions, and after his judges reach a stalemate, quasi-divine intervention leads to his acquittal. This is celebrated with a chorus Krenek described as modelled on those of Meyerbeer and Verdi, a distinctly nineteenth-century representation of synthesis.Footnote 24 For Krenek, the divine intervention was central to the opera’s message and part of his gradual rapprochement with the Catholic Church, but almost every critic found Krenek’s portrayal of this synthesis unsatisfying. After the opera’s Frankfurt premier, when it was clear that the opera needed to be cut in length, Krenek was furious at the suggestion from the Kroll’s production team that he remove Orestes’s final aria summing up the message and synthesis.Footnote 25 This moment in the opera and Krenek’s defence of it exemplify how much his own thought had changed since Jonny and the important role of the contrast between ancient and classical Greece in the opera.
Krenek’s intentions in Leben des Orest were strongly expressed in its premiere in Leipzig. Krenek was closely involved in this production, working with the same creative leads responsible for the premiere of Jonny spielt auf there three years earlier: director Walther Brügmann and conductor Gustav Brecher. Set and costume design was by the Viennese Oskar Strnad, who had worked on the Viennese production of Jonny spielt auf. As can be seen in the numerous photos and illustrations of the production reproduced in the press, the sets and costumes eschewed a pristine and austere classical Greek aesthetic and instead brought out Krenek’s Bachofenian approach to ancient Greece. In a particularly striking promotional photo, Elektra sits in prison after being framed for Agamemnon’s murder, staring out from the photo like a dishevelled wild animal in a torn and dirty shift dress, her gaol not much more than a cave with bars (Figure 1). On a platform over her prison, Orestes slays his mother and Aegisthus. It is clear that the production aimed for a certain level of realism, presenting Bronze Age Greece as it may have been for people living in it. Sets imitate stone construction, rough-hewn but intact and not ruined; images of Orestes on his travels show him looking dirty and wild. (The photos are all black and white, so we do not know if stage statues were painted.) Although certainly not the only factor, the relative success of this production stemmed in part from the consistency in vision between Krenek and the production team. This would not be the case at the Kroll.
Figure 1. Staged publicity photo of Orestes murdering Clytemnestra in the Leipzig production of Leben des Orest. Published in the Leipziger Neueste Nachrichten, Welt im Bild section, 26 January 1930, 8. Photo: Pieperhoff.
The Kroll Opera
When the Kroll Opera opened in 1927, it was Berlin’s third major opera house. It was the second house of the State Opera, whose main building was on Unter den Linden, and the City Opera (Städtische Oper, today’s Deutsche Oper) had a house in Charlottenburg. Despite this crowded scene, the Kroll quickly established a reputation for experimental and modernist productions.Footnote 26 Its main conductor, Otto Klemperer, was a champion of the period’s new, ‘objective’ style of music performance.Footnote 27 In its first season (1927–8), Klemperer oversaw the productions as well. His lead designer was Ewald Dülberg, a visual artist he brought with him to the Kroll in 1927. Dülberg was known for highly abstract, geometric sets, which both then and now dominate popular perceptions of the Kroll Opera. Much of this is due to the controversy stirred by Dülberg’s sets for canonical works such as Beethoven’s Fidelio and Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer, which also played an outsized role in the political storm around the decision to close the Kroll in 1931.Footnote 28
This reputation conditioned critics’ and audiences’ expectations of the Kroll’s production of Leben der Orest. Indeed, many would have seen the Kroll’s 1928 production of Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau’s Oedipus Rex, which as another modern retelling of an ancient Greek myth inevitably shaped the way critics viewed Krenek’s later work. Even more so because Stravinsky and Cocteau’s treatment of their source material aligned well with Klemperer and Dülberg’s approach to performance and staging, helping to set the overall expectations of a Kroll aesthetic in audiences’ minds. As Eric White has argued, Oedipus Rex ‘represents the summation and consummation of [Stravinsky’s] neo-classical discoveries of the last four years or so’, which emphasized an abstract and ‘objective’ treatment of musical elements of the past.Footnote 29 Here, ‘objective’ referred to both emotional detachment and a quasi-constructivist approach to past music as an object that could be broken down into component parts and re-assembled in a craftsman-like manner. Stravinsky and Cocteau’s understanding of antiquity and its meaning for the present day might then be described, in the words of Richard Taruskin, as a return to a ‘universal order’ in the form of a ‘“universal” culture that bore a “universal” message’.Footnote 30
Returning to the opposition between the classicism and romanticism mentioned earlier, Stravinsky’s neoclassicism was in large part a reaction against the legacy of Richard Wagner. Stravinsky’s ‘cool’ and objective neoclassicism opposed the ‘overheated’ romanticism of Wagner and his early twentieth-century epigones. Where Wagner’s endless melody and through-composed forms were heard as an outpouring of his individual subjectivity, Stravinsky returned to periodic melodies and clearly defined forms, drawing on styles of the past as if they were ‘objects’ to be manipulated. He modelled Oedipus on Baroque number opera and oratorio, with delineated arias and ensembles, broken up by spoken narration. Scholars and critics have identified musical influences from the Baroque, especially Handel, to Gluck and even Verdi, but all abstracted through Stravinsky’s musical irony, with added dissonances, distorted rhythms, and characteristic features taken to unidiomatic extremes.Footnote 31
The listener is further distanced from the action by the Latin libretto, the use of a narrator, and the stage directions. Stravinsky and Cocteau include detailed instructions for stage design, costuming, and movement that emphasizes their abstract, anti-subjective vision. For instance, they specify that ‘except for Tiresias, the Shepherd and the Messenger, the characters remain in their built-up costumes and in their masks. Only their arms and heads move. They should give the impression of living statues.’ And ‘the chorus … is concealed behind a kind of bas-relief in three ascending tiers. This bas-relief represents a sculptured drapery, and reveals only the faces of the choristers.’ As Stephen Walsh summarizes:
The entire conception … is like a visual realisation of those theories of pure expressive form and self-terracing dynamics which had accompanied his recent instrumental works. In neither what we see nor what we hear is anything to distract us from the drastic architectural and functional unity of the work taken as a whole in all its various elements.Footnote 32
For Stravinsky, the familiarity of the myth lent its retelling a ritual quality, which he underscored with these distancing effects.
Stravinsky’s neoclassicism was thus quite different from Krenek’s. If Krenek imagined ancient Greek statues and temples restored to their bright and gaudy colours, Stravinsky and Cocteau embraced the image of cold, white marble that emphasized stark black and white contrasts and focused the eye on form and geometric proportion. The critic Heinrich Strobel, who knew Oedipus Rex from the Kroll’s production, captured this neatly in his review of the premiere of Leben des Orest in Leipzig several months before Orest came to the Kroll:
[Krenek] is afraid of ‘bloodless classicism’ and of stylistic experimentation. He fears the problems raised by Stravinsky’s ‘Oedipus’. He wants a lively, colourful opera scene. Stravinsky monumentalises, stylises, depersonalises antiquity into the utmost clarity of style. Krenek de-heroizes, naturalises, individualises antiquity into a haphazard mix of styles.Footnote 33
And while Oedipus aligned well with the artistic agenda of Klemperer and Dülberg, Orest did not. The Kroll team seems to have been at least in part aware of this, as can be seen in the decision-making process to stage both operas.
From Oedipus to Orest at the Kroll
Klemperer and Dülberg were in Paris for the dual premieres of Oedipus, the first a concert performance on piano (played by Stravinsky) in the salon of the Princess de Polignac on 29 May 1927 and the second a concert performance with orchestra conducted by Stravinsky on the next evening. They were immediately taken by the work and moved quickly to bring it to the Kroll.Footnote 34 Their production debuted a little less than a year later, on 25 February 1928, and only a few days after the work’s first fully staged performance in Vienna.Footnote 35
The speed at which they moved suggests that Klemperer and Dülberg perceived the work to align with their own artistic goals. The supposedly ‘objective’ elements of Stravinsky’s music certainly resonated with Klemperer’s own reputation as a conductor, and the work’s clearly delineated, ‘architectonic’ structure and its stage directions lent itself to Dülberg’s abstract, geometric design. Indeed, Stephen Walsh describes the Kroll sets as ‘relentlessly abstract’ and the production as ‘essentially as in the stage directions’.Footnote 36 Preserved set designs (Figure 2) and photographs show the stage filled with a series of interconnected, stepped platforms on which singers and chorus could stand immobile, while allowing the narrator to move across the set.
Figure 2. Ewald Dülberg’s stage design for Igor Stravinsky and Jean Cocteau’s Oedipus Rexi at the Kroll Opera Berlin, 1928. Wikimedia commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ewald_D%C3%BClberg_Igor_Strawinsky_Oedipus_Rex_B%C3%BChnenarchitektur.jpg.
Critical reaction to Oedipus Rex at the Kroll Opera was mixed.Footnote 37 As the work was still quite new and largely unknown, much of the discussion focused on the opera itself. Critics were largely in agreement about what was notable in Oedipus Rex, focusing on what we today recognize as its neoclassical characteristics such as its number opera or oratorio-like form, Stravinsky’s ironic references to earlier music, the performance instructions with masks and references to statues, and the overall detached, objective sensibility. However, there was much disagreement whether this represented a positive or negative development in Stravinsky’s output and in modern music generally. Critics were similarly unified in their opinion that the work was ideally suited to the aesthetics of Klemperer and Dülberg, even as they wildly disagreed whether they liked those aesthetics or not. Adolf Weißmann of the Berliner Zeitung was negative about the opera, yet observed that:
Klemperer, who until now has used opera to experiment against opera, could apply his fanatical acidity to this unusual, aloof work. From this perspective, it was quite naturally an unsurpassable performance. … Ewald Dülberg, who interpreted the rectilinear designs on a blue background with gusto, masterfully realized this style.Footnote 38
The more positive Alfred Einstein opined in the Berliner Tageblatt:
The performance under Otto Klemperer was of the first rank. The conductor here is, in fact, only seemingly just the executor, the mechanical realiser of the ‘objective’ music – but what a task, to achieve this ‘objectivity’ … This is Klemperer’s domain, this is where his approach is legitimate; it does not work with Fidelio, but with Stravinsky it doesn’t just work, indeed ‘objectivity’ triumphs! Ewald Dülberg as set designer is also in his element: this archaised antiquity was impressive and even fantastic in its rigidity.Footnote 39
The production thus represented the ne plus ultra of what critics and audiences came to expect of the Kroll’s aesthetic.
After his first season at Kroll, Klemperer felt overwhelmed in the dual role of musical and general director and stepped back from his role overseeing the production team, while health issues severely limited Dülberg’s ability to work on staging and designs. Klemperer maintained decision-making power over repertoire, but dramaturge Hans Curjel took a more prominent role in production, including commissioning directors and designers. Under Curjel, production design largely maintained its associations with abstract, geometric construction, although rarely taken to the extremes seen under Dülberg. In his post-Second World War writings, Curjel described collaborations with leading modern artists as central to his agenda at the Kroll, and this most regularly meant Bauhaus figures such as Oskar Schlemmer and László Moholy-Nagy. Photographs of their designs for operas such as Tales of Hoffmann or Madama Butterfly show an integration of realistic set objects (including Bauhaus-style furniture) with the abstract, geometric constructivism for which the Bauhaus was famous and generally aligned with popular perceptions of the Kroll aesthetic.Footnote 40
It was thus Klemperer who made the decision for the Kroll to stage Krenek’s Leben des Orest in its 1929–30 season, but Curjel who was primarily responsible for assembling a production team and managing decisions about staging and design. On closer examination, their decision to mount Leben des Orest appears half-hearted, and the choice of de Chirico to have been based on an interpretation of Leben des Orest at odds with Krenek’s intentions. Krenek’s publisher, Universal Edition (UE), had begun actively promoting the work to opera houses around Germany as Krenek entered the final stages of composition, and a letter from the UE to Krenek on 7 September 1929 suggests that they had received a commitment that one of the Berlin opera houses would stage the work, but which one was still to be decided.Footnote 41 In his biography of conductor Otto Klemperer, Peter Heyworth provides one perspective on what was happening behind the scenes:
Having rejected both Von heute auf morgen [From One Day to the Next, a twelve-tone satirical opera, music by Arnold Schoenberg, text by Max Blonda (pseud. Gertrud Schoenberg)] and Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny [Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, music by Kurt Weill, text by Bertolt Brecht and Elizabeth Hauptmann], Klemperer found himself without a new opera for the 1929/30 season. As a result he had no alternative but to opt for Krenek’s latest work, Das Leben des Orest [sic]. The prospect did not fill him with enthusiasm.Footnote 42
Indeed, in another interview with Heyworth, Klemperer remembered Leben des Orest as ‘not so good, but also not so bad’.Footnote 43
In his post-war recollections, Curjel took credit for commissioning de Chirico. His accounts suggest that this decision was motivated foremost by a general desire to associate productions at the Kroll with famous visual artists, and de Chirico was useful as an example of an artistic collaborator from outside the German cultural sphere.Footnote 44 Curjel’s description in an essay published in 1973 is typical: ‘Two fundamentally new measures contributed decisively to [the Kroll’s achievements]: the use of important spoken-theatre directors to stage the operas, and, no less important, the decision to trust representatives of radical modern painting with the stage design.’Footnote 45 As examples of the latter, he lists ‘the Bauhaus masters László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer, as well as the Italian leader of the “pittura metafisica” Giorgio de Chirico’.Footnote 46 Curjel’s association of de Chirico with metaphysical painting also figures prominently in Curjel’s most direct statement on the decision to invite de Chirico to work on Leben des Orest:
Giorgio de Chirico, founder of ‘metaphysical painting’ also had his say at the Kroll Opera. When I was searching for a stage designer for Ernst Krenek’s classicist-surrealist opera Das Leben des Orest [sic], a mix of through-composed opera, neo-romanticism, and jazz, the paintings of de Chirico came to mind.Footnote 47
Given Curjel’s description of Leben des Orest as ‘classicist-surrealist’, it is not surprising that he would have thought of de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings, which prominently incorporate representations of ancient Greek and Roman architecture and sculpture alongside modern referents into proto-surrealistic images. But while on a superficial level this may have seemed a ready match for Krenek’s juxtaposition of jazz and antiquity, in fact it missed the fundamental divergence between how Krenek and de Chirico approached the legacy of ancient Greece and its relevance in the modern world.
Giorgio de Chirico’s classicisms
Throughout his career, de Chirico engaged with the classical legacy, as represented by ancient Greece and Rome as well as Italian Renaissance classicism. Then and now, de Chirico’s reputation rests on the ‘metaphysical’ style that he cultivated between roughly 1909 and 1919. But after establishing himself as one of the most cutting-edge modernists of the pre-war years, de Chirico responded to the horrors of the First World War and the upheavals that followed by turning to the past as a source of stability and humane values.Footnote 48 He sought to rediscover the techniques of Renaissance and Baroque masters by meticulously copying their work and studying historical treatises on painting. He even experimented in making his own paints using recipes described in those treatises.Footnote 49 In the early 1920s, de Chirico also painted a number of original works in a pastiche of older styles and penned several essays advocating a return to early Renaissance subjects, genres, and styles.Footnote 50
De Chirico sporadically continued to produce pastiches of older styles in the years that followed; however, by the mid-1920s, his output was once again dominated by work clearly building on his metaphysical style.Footnote 51 In these new works, his ongoing interest in the techniques of the past remained evident, especially in the softening of tonal colour and contrast, a reduction in the abstraction of figures and objects, and the introduction of living characters. Many critics and painters at the time, as well as modern scholars, have lamented these developments as a regression in his work, a judgement reliant on a teleological approach to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history as an inevitable progression towards abstraction and Surrealism.Footnote 52 In recent decades, some scholars have sought to revalorize de Chirico’s inter-war work and draw attention to both its continuities and developments on his earlier metaphysical style, dubbing his later output his ‘continuous metaphysical’ period.Footnote 53
As such, de Chirico’s approach to technique in the late 1920s bears a fascinating similarity to Krenek. Krenek turned to Schubert as a way to revitalize tonality and create music that was both fit for modern times and maintained a connection to tradition, and his turn was also met with confusion or derision by contemporary critics and later music historiography. But while there are strong parallels between Krenek and de Chirico on a technical level, they differed strongly on how they understood modernity’s relationship to the classical past (whether Greece, the Renaissance, or Schubert), which in turn led to significant differences in how they represented ancient Greece as an icon that stood for all these classical pasts.
In de Chirico’s work, both before and after 1919, references to the classical past appear primarily as broken or ruined stone objects: statues, pillars, and other architectural structures, particularly temples. In de Chirico’s pre-1919 metaphysical paintings, these appeared in proto-surrealistic juxtaposition with modern objects, such as the pairing of a head from a broken statue with a red rubber glove in The Song of Love (1914).Footnote 54 After 1919, the classical past became an even more frequent and prominent subject in his paintings. He produced several series of paintings in which consistent types of figures appear in different configurations, in what Lorenzo Canova has described as ‘scenes of contemporary life with ancient visions’.Footnote 55 In the series ‘Horses’ and ‘Gladiators’, the respective horses or gladiators appear in outdoor scenes with ruins of temples, pillars, or statues around them. In the series ‘Landscapes in the Room’, broken statues, pillars, and other stone objects are piled in the middle of modern living rooms, and in the series ‘Furniture in the Valley’ modern furniture appears in outdoor landscapes, often including Greek ruins in the background. Finally, in the series ‘Archaeologists’ (Figure 3), large mannequins with blank heads have bodies made of piles of broken statues, pillars, temples, and other detritus of the ancient past.
Figure 3. Giorgio de Chirico, Gli archeologi (The Archaeologists), 1927, oil on canvas, 116 × 89 cm. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Italy. Photo Credit: Alessandro Vasari, Mondadori Portfolio/Art Resource, NY, USA. © Giorgio De Chirico. SIAE/Copyright Agency, 2025.
These paintings create the overall impression of a disorienting modern world in which the modern individual lives among the legacy of the classical past. Importantly, however, this legacy is represented by ruins, reinforcing that this past is irretrievably gone. For the modern individual, these two worlds – modern and classical – are jumbled together, but remain distinct and unreconcilable, contributing to the overall experience of disorientation that characterizes modernity.Footnote 56 Even when the modern individual imagines the ancient past or ancient myths (as in the horses and gladiators), these seemingly living imaginary objects are situated among ruins that remind the viewer that while we might imagine antiquity as vibrant and living, in reality it is lost forever. De Chirico’s mannequins, a stand-in for the individual anonymized and depersonalized by modern society, are tellingly named Archaeologists – again, the modern individual seeking a connection to the past, but a past that always remains fragmentary.
Describing the similar effect in de Chirico’s designs for the Ballet Russe production of Le Bal in 1929 (which align closely to his series Landscapes in the Room), Juliet Bellow writes that ‘de Chirico actively put the [past and present] in tension, extending to the stage the interrogation of classicism increasingly evident in his paintings of the 1920s’.Footnote 57 As in his designs for Orest, this is achieved by ‘juxtapose[ing] diverse styles, temporal allusions and materials without reconciling them’.Footnote 58 Reading de Chirico’s designs for Le Bal alongside a series of contemporaneous paintings on the biblical theme of the Prodigal Son, she writes that de Chirico’s work ‘problematize[s] a return to the past’, and describes his style as a ‘sceptical neoclassicism’.Footnote 59 Meanwhile, Gottfried Boehm has written of how, in this period, de Chirico ‘deliberately employed “dépaysement”, an alienating juxtaposition of elements which gave the painting an enigmatic, inscrutable quality’.Footnote 60 This neoclassicism was ‘anything but nostalgic’, as it ‘became tinged by dark, melancholy, bitter and despairing overtones’.Footnote 61 Although Boehm does not explicitly make the connection, such dark overtones align well with a reading of de Chirico’s work as an expression of the alienated condition of the modern individual.
De Chirico’s emphasis on the unbridgeable distance between the past and the present as a reflection of the experience of modernity stands in stark contrast to Krenek’s approach and Stravinsky/Cocteau’s approaches. Krenek attempted to bridge the distance between past and present and to make ancient Greek life and culture relevant and accessible. For Krenek, the pillars, temples, and statues of ancient Greece were solid, whole, and painted vivid colours. Meanwhile, Stravinsky and Cocteau embrace the unbridgeable distance to the past as an invitation to abstraction and symbolism. They monumentalize the austerity of the pure white marble of ancient Greek statues and architecture for an abstract and objective modernism that emphasizes geometry and form. Opposed to both, de Chirico embraces the perspective of the modern individual. Ancient Greece is a ruin among which the modern individual lives, and even when they try to imagine the past as vibrant and alive, the ruins around the edges remind the viewer that this is just an imagining. It was this perspective that de Chirico brought to his designs for the Kroll’s production of Leben des Orest.
Staging Leben des Orest at the Kroll
Among contemporary sources, Curjel’s programme note written for the production provides further insight into his decision to commission de Chirico. In it, he praises Krenek for moving away from the ‘academic-philological’ approach to ancient Greece.Footnote 62 However, instead of recognizing Krenek’s desire to inhabit everyday ancient Greek life on the ground, Curjel compares Krenek’s approach to Jean Cocteau’s in works such as Antigone or Oedipus Rex. Cocteau’s description of his process in reworking Sophocles for Honegger as ‘taking photographs of Greece from an airplane’ captured the German imagination and was frequently cited in discussions of modern adaptations of ancient Greek and Roman sources.Footnote 63 Curjel describes Krenek’s approach as similar to that of Cocteau, focusing not on ‘the landscape with its ruins’, but on ‘mythology itself … seen with modern eyes and experienced from a present-day perspective’.Footnote 64 This modernity, for Curjel, was evident in Krenek’s use of modern-day language (including expressions such as ‘2 pm’ for the time) and jazz. If Curjel saw similarities between Krenek and Cocteau, it was likely another of Cocteau’s works that directed him to Giorgio de Chirico, an essay from 1927 titled Le mystère laïc (Giorgio de Chirico): Essai d’étude indirecte.Footnote 65 In it, Cocteau emphasizes the surrealist qualities of de Chirico’s work, including his fascination with mythology and his juxtaposition of ancient and modern references and objects. Cocteau was interested in de Chirico and his metaphysical work because of their influence on French surrealist painting, particularly de Chirico’s work from before his stylistic shift in 1919.
Curjel also mediated de Chirico’s visual interpretation of Krenek’s work. As Curjel wrote in a post-war account: ‘A telegram summoned him [de Chirico] to Berlin. It was in the year 1930. We played Chirico the opera, translated the German text for him, and discussed it with him for a few days. After a couple of weeks, he sent small, exciting gouaches [a kind of opaque watercolour], which the young Teo Otto realised on stage.’Footnote 66 In these discussions, the Kroll team and de Chirico agreed on ‘the Greeks, who live in their own ruins’ as ‘the motto for the overlapping of past and present that this opera and its production were about’.Footnote 67 Who else was included in Curjel’s ‘we’ is unclear; it likely included the Kroll team involved in the opera: Klemperer, who conducted, and Ernst Legal, who directed, and possibly Otto, but it did not include Krenek.Footnote 68 While Krenek had been closely involved in preparing the Leipzig production, he only travelled to Berlin to observe and comment on final rehearsals. The Kroll’s focus on a juxtaposition of ancient and modern, including the use of ruins, goes strongly against Krenek’s publicly stated intentions to bring the two together in a specific, yet timeless whole, without parody or stylization.
Teo Otto’s involvement further underscores the influence of Curjel and Kroll team on the stage design, as de Chirico’s designs were minimal and required not just realization, but also elaboration. As Otto later recalled:
I had the extremely difficult task of putting myself into the style of this accomplished artist, to newly form the very small images, which were hardly transferable, to translate them to the necessary scale, in such a way that they remained the work of Chirico. I had to sometimes do something, invent something, in the style of Chirico.Footnote 69
De Chirico’s designs were indeed minimal, and comparison of them to press photos and sketches of the sets reveals not just the size of Otto’s task in realizing them, but also how Otto drew on de Chirico’s other work to fill out the stage.
Figure 4 shows de Chirico’s design for the Athenian market fair, and Figure 5 shows a staged publicity photo of this scene from the Kroll’s production. Even allowing for de Chirico’s designs not including the cast, there are many striking differences, all of which draw the stage design more strongly into the realm of the metaphysical. De Chirico’s design prominently features a stylized, but relatively realistic and intact statue in the centre of a large open space, surrounded by booths for the fair. These booths are required, as Orestes approaches several during the scene. In the background, we see Athens off to the right at the base of the mountains. While de Chirico’s designs for other scenes do include ruined architecture, there is none in this image. In Otto’s realization, the statue has become a mannequin, a well-known trademark of de Chirico’s metaphysical style. The city now extends across the mountains in the background (adding the Parthenon to underscore the Athenian setting), but many of the structures around the fair itself are fragmentary or cut off. In the back right we see a ruined column and part of a building with a ruined roof.
Figure 4. Giorgio de Chirico, Bozzetto per Das Leben des Orest (Athenian Fair), 1930. In Giorgio de Chirico. Catalogo Generale. Opere dal 1913–1974. vol. 4, ed. Giorgia Chierici (Dogana: Maretti Editore, 2018), 151. © Giorgio De Chirico. SIAE/Copyright Agency, 2025.
Figure 5. Staged publicity photo of Act II, scene 2 (Athenian Fair) in the Kroll Opera production of Leben des Orest. From Curjel, Experiment Krolloper, Plate 74. Photo uncredited.
Similar differences can be seen in the sets for Mycenae, the home city of Orestes and his family. In de Chirico’s design (Figure 6), a small temple stands on the left of the stage. Although not ruined, its partially exposed foundations signal the beginnings of decay. Standing centre stage, separate from and in front of the temple is a small platform. On the right, a road leads past the temple to the city, which again is in the background, slightly to the right with mountains behind it. However, in the staged press photos of the production (Figure 7), the platform is connected to the temple and becomes a large landing leading into it. A ruined column stands on the platform. The cast is arranged for Act I, and Orestes is tied to the column, awaiting sacrifice. (In a newspaper sketch of the production from Act III, Orestes is shown stabbing his mother at the base of these steps, with Aegisthus standing on the platform in front of the column and Elektra imprisoned in a cage at the front of the stage; Figure 8.) The stage is again full of buildings, some in ruined condition, and the background is transformed into a large harbour with at least one ship visible, referencing the impending departure of the Greek army for Troy.Footnote 70
Figure 6. Giorgio de Chirico, Bozzetto per Das Leben des Orest (Mycenae), 1930. In Giorgio de Chirico. Catalogo Generale. Opere dal 1913–1974. vol. 4, ed. Giorgia Chierici (Dogana: Maretti Editore, 2018), 150. © Giorgio De Chirico. SIAE/Copyright Agency, 2025.
Figure 7. Staged publicity photo of Act I (sacrifice of Orestes) in the Kroll Opera production of Leben des Orest. From Curjel, Experiment Krolloper, Plate 73. Photo uncredited.
Figure 8. Illustration of Orestes murdering Clytemnestra in the Kroll Opera production. Published in Tempo (Berlin) 54 (1930). No further source information preserved in the clippings collection of the Ernst Krenek Teilnachlass, Wienbibliothek. Illustration uncredited.
Reviews of Orest at the Kroll were noticeably more critical than they had been in Leipzig. The Kroll staging played a key role throughout this reception, from critics who focused specific ire on the staging and stage designs, to those who expressed confusion about the meaning of the opera, given the disconnect they perceived between the work and the production. Depending on the political, aesthetic, or other agenda of the critics, there could be some variation in their criticism, but it is notable how even across political divides similar issues rose to the fore.
Multiple critics explicitly noted a disconnect between what they believed Krenek was trying to do in the opera (based on the work itself, but also in many cases referring to Krenek’s many publications and interviews about the work) and what they saw in the production. Writing in the Deutsche Tageszeitung, for instance, Hermann Springer was quite positive about Krenek’s music and the singers’ performances, but not the set design: ‘The demands of the work were not entirely met in the set design. … The dull stylisation destroys all the festivity: the Southern sun shines, but does not warm.’Footnote 71 Many critics laid blame on de Chirico’s designs.Footnote 72 In the Vossische Zeitung, Max Marschalk complained: ‘The Leipzig production was so much better than the Berlin one. The Viennese painter Oskar Strnad [who designed the Leipzig production] just has a different, a better head than this Giorgio de Chirico, who was hired for Berlin.’Footnote 73 Erich Urban of the Berliner Zeitung was more blunt: ‘To whom do we owe this awful designer Giorgio di Chirico, who Teo Otto had to take under his arm with an “adaptation” and costume designs? … this Giorgio di Chirico, who is at best a miserable beginner (Leipzig availed itself of the experienced and indeed more artistic Strnad)’.Footnote 74
Krenek also seems to have had mixed opinions of the production. After sitting in on final rehearsals, he wrote to his publishers that he liked de Chirico’s designs (but that his wife did not).Footnote 75 His opinion changed, however, after the first performance. He wrote again to his publishers that while the music was well performed, the production was ‘very rough and scenically run-down’ and ‘the visual element was done ineffectively’. Overall, he shared the critic’s judgement that the Berlin production was inferior to the one in Leipzig.Footnote 76 His post-Second World War memoirs only mention de Chirico’s designs in passing, ambiguously describing them as ‘noteworthy’ (bemerkenswert).Footnote 77
Conclusion
While Leben des Orest would not rival the success of Jonny spielt auf, it was nevertheless one of the most performed new operas of the late Weimar Republic, produced by thirteen opera houses before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 put an end to any performances of Krenek’s music in Germany. Several of these later productions also featured stagings that did not align with Krenek’s intentions for the work, including highly politicized productions in Darmstadt in 1930 and Mannheim in 1932 that incorporated greater abstraction in set design and picked up on Krenek’s portrayal of the Trojan War to reinterpret the work as pacifist and anti-fascist. The Darmstadt production was led by Arthur Rabenalt and Wilhelm Reinking and featured a single, abstract construction of steps, ramps, and platforms that served as the set for the entire production, supplemented by projected slides of sites from ancient and modern Greece, as well as other references, such as a modern battleship when Agamemnon, costumed as Mussolini, sails off to the Trojan War. Aegisthus, who orchestrates the murder of Agamemnon, was costumed to resemble Lenin.Footnote 78 While such productions may have aligned in the broader sense with Krenek’s desire to update Greek myth and make it alive and relevant to modern audiences, such specific party-political interpretations were far removed from his intentions.
The work of Curjel at the Kroll Opera and Arthur Rabenalt and Wilhelm Reinking in Darmstadt are seen today as key precursors to the modern practice of Regieoper, in which directors present highly original interpretative stagings, sometimes radically at odds with the original intent of the work.Footnote 79 Such productions are often quite controversial. Some critics and audience members disapprove of the freedoms taken with the original work, while others appreciate the effort to shake up and find new meanings in the operatic repertoire. Nevertheless, Regieoper as an approach has become well established. When audiences today go to a Regieoper production by a director such as Calixto Bieito or Barry Kosky, they do not expect to see a traditional production. Rather, they bring with them a set of expectations about Regieoper itself and the director’s style and approach.
Audiences at the Kroll were beginning to become used to such proto-Regieoper productions and clearly brought such expectations with them to the Kroll production Leben des Orest. But the production bombarded them with multiple conflicting inputs: Krenek’s take on classical Greece and nineteenth-century classical music diverged from their expectations of him as the composer of Jonny spielt auf, which then conflicted with the blend of restoration and surrealism in the neoclassicism of Giorgio de Chirico’s designs. Both of these then clashed with critics’ and audiences’ expectations of the Kroll, conditioned in part by its productions of works such as Stravinsky and Cocteau’s Oedipus Rex, whose neoclassicism aligned so well with the Klemperer and Dülberg’s ‘objective’ musical performances and abstract and geometric productions. Thus, the conflicted reception of Leben des Orest at the Kroll Opera provides not only a unique lens through which to examine the wide range of conflicting neoclassicisms circulating in interwar Europe, but also into the history of operatic production in general.
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