The Clever One by Orff, The Tzar has his photograph taken by Weill, Dj. 11 Maig 2023, De (2023/2023), Dirigit per Keith Warner,, Director musical Yi-Chen Lin, Opernhaus, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

Kurt Weill and Carl Orff share the joy of playing with theatrical forms, narrative traditions and conventions of music theatre. While one ventured into the realm of comic opera in 1928 with The Tsar Lets Be Photographed, the other created a cheerfully serious play of meaning with Die Kluge in the early 1940s, in which fairy tales, folk theater and Bavarian »Kumedi« were combined. At the center of the plot of Weill's turbulent one-act play is a tsar who is about to be assassinated in a Paris photo studio. A life-threatening flirt develops between the aristocrat and a co-conspirator who poses as the photographer Angèle ... As a real contemporary opera, Weill's work lets popular light music sound and integrates technical innovations such as the gramophone, on which the Tango Angèle , which has become a hit, is played . Carl Orff develops his Twelve Scenes with a comparable verve and yet with a completely different style. To do this, he draws on Grimm's fairy tale The Clever Farmer's Daughter, the story of the king and the clever woman, which can be found in countless variations worldwide. Proceeding from the language, radically and ingeniously primitive, Orff's Die Kluge aims for a three-dimensional effect on the stage. The palette of expression ranges from spoken to rhythmic words to cantilena. The use of knittelling verses creates an artful folksyness that repeatedly turns into satire. In Weill's »Tsar-Opera« the events are commented on by a gentlemen's choir in tails and top hats. With Orff, Shakespearean thugs comment on the events in banquet-singing ensembles - and so the audience at the Frankfurt premiere in 1943 heard the words from her mouth: "Tyrannis carries the scepter far" ...