Opera After the Zero Hour

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Introduction
Chapter One: Placement and Displacement
Rank and File: Opera's Everyday Biographies
The Situation of New Opera in the Post-War Repertoire
Chapter Two: The Significance of Nonsense: Boris Blacher's Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1
Why Abstract an Opera?
Linguistic Abstraction in the Libretto
Making Music from Nonsense
Hearing Controversy and Politics in Abstraction
Chapter Three: Italy, Atonally: Hans Werner Henze's Konig Hirsch
The Bondage of bel canto
The Magic of Konig Hirsch
From Sketches to Songs
Melody, the Renegade's Hara-kiri
Chapter Four: The Opera Underneath: Carl Orff's Oedipus der Tyrann
Origin Stories I: Ancient Greece in Germany
Origin Stories II: Ancient Greece against the Opera
An Opera without Music?
Traces of the Opera Underneath
Chapter Five: Explosive Pluralisms: Bernd Alois Zimmermann's Die Soldaten
Wagner and Berg: Zimmermann's Operatic Pasts
A Spaceship of the Mind: Zimmermann's Operatic Futures
From Lenz to Literaturoper
The Structure of Pluralism
Serialism and Expression(ism)
In the End
Chapter Six: Rebuilding and Retrenchment: The Munich Nationaltheater and Werner Egk's Die Verlobung in San Domingo
Ideas of Reconstruction
The Reconstruction of the Munich Nationaltheater
November 1963: The Gala Reopening
Who Was Werner Egk?
Operaticism and Racial Stereotypes in Die Verlobung in San Domingo
Epilogue
Bibliography

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Opera After the Zero Hour: The Problem of Tradition and the Possibility of Renewal in Postwar West Germany presents opera as a site for the renegotiation of tradition in a politically fraught era of rebuilding. Though the "Zero Hour" put a rhetorical caesura between National Socialism and postwar West Germany, the postwar era was characterized by significant cultural continuity with the past. With nearly all of the major opera houses destroyed and a complex relationship to the competing ethics of modernism and restoration, opera was a richly contested art form, and the genre's reputed conservatism was remarkably multi-faceted. Author Emily Richmond Pollock explores how composers developed different strategies to make new opera "new" while still deferring to historical conventions, all of which carried cultural resonances of their own. Diverse approaches to operatic tradition are exemplified through five case studies in works by Boris Blacher, Hans Werner Henze, Carl Orff, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, and Werner Egk. Each opera alludes to a distinct cultural or musical past, from Greek tragedy to Dada, bel canto to Berg. Pollock's discussions of these pieces draw on source studies, close readings, unpublished correspondence, institutional history, and critical commentary to illuminate the politicized artistic environment that influenced these operas' creation and reception. The result is new insight into how the particular opposition between a conservative genre and the idea of the "Zero Hour" motivated the development of opera's social, aesthetic, and political value after World War II.

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