I don’t usually associate Arnold Schoenberg with comedy but he did write a one act comic opera Von Heute auf Morgen which premiered in 1929. It was an attempt to cash in on the vogue for satirical operas on modern themes characterised by Brecht and Weill and , if a bit slight and lacking Brechtian punch, it works well enough. A bourgeios husband and wife have returned from an evening out where they have met an iold friend of the wife who has become something of a femme fatale. There’s also a singer, inevitably a tenor, involved. The husband is rabbiting on rather gormlessly about the charms of the “other woman” so his wife decides to teach him a lesson. She apes the manners of a “modern woman”, neglects their child, plans assignations etc. There’s a long phone conversation inwhich the “friend” and the singer invite them back to the bar. By now the husband is beginning to realise what he stands to lose. The wife realises she has won. The other couple show up and there’s a “modern” vs. “traditional” quartet after which the “moderns” leave in disgust and the husband and wife revort to bourgeois domesticity.
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Fetter and Air was originally created by composer Dominick DiOrio and sound engineer Justin “JG” Geller as an eight channel public soundscape/display in Philadelphia. It’s now been remixed to stereo and released as a CD. It’s a kind of COVID memorial. Members of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia separately recorded their reactions to the pandemic and DiOrio set some of it to music. The result was 562 audio files which were then mixed down into a single twenty-seven minute track.
operaramblings 