Farce and tragedy coexist on stage in a masterpiece that celebrates great theater and great literature.
Experimentation in art was all the rage in the early twentieth century, and musical theatre was no exception. The new format of Literaturoper, a one-to-one adaptation of a literary text into opera with no recourse to libretto form, was one of such experiments. One example is Der Protagonist, originally a 1920 prose theatre piece by Georg Keiser turned opera by Kurt Weill. The story is set in the turbulent Weimar years, years when Weill and his fellow Bertold Brecht staunchly committed to social themes as part of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) paradigm. Der Protagonist is a single-act drama set in Shakespearean England. It is also a fine example of meta-theatre, in that it stages a company of travelling performers reading a pantomime commissioned by a local duke, who wanted to turn it into a piece of ‘serious’ theatre. The tragedy, though, will burst into the real world.
