This month staff and students are involved in the revival of an opera which was almost lost after being suppressed by the Third Reich in the 1930s.

This month staff and students are involved in the revival of an opera which was almost lost after being suppressed by the Third Reich in the 1930s.

Cambridge University Opera Society, in collaboration with Baker's Opera and Churchill College Music Society, is to mount the UK premiere stage performance of Max Brand's opera Maschinist Hopkins (Hopkins the Engineer) at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, at 2pm on Sunday 25 November 2001. A preview performance will be given in the Dining Hall of Churchill College this week on Sunday 18 November, 2001.

The London performance is just one part of Thwarted Voices: Music Suppressed by the Third Reich, a day of musical events at the South Bank Centre. The day is sponsored by the Austrian Cultural Forum as part of a major three-month festival,Vienna Berlin London: Trails of Creativity 1918-1938, which celebrates the cultural links between these cities in the inter-war period.

Largely forgotten today, Max Brand was one of the leading composers of the inter-war period in Austria and Germany. First performed in April 1929, Maschinist Hopkins was Brand's first opera. It was an overnight sensation, with some 142 performances of the work in its first season alone, a statistic unparalleled in operatic history. Its lasting success, however, was curtailed by rise of the Third Reich. Maschinist Hopkins was to become, alongside works by Arnold Schoenberg and Ernst Krenek among others, one of the archetypal works of art labelled degenerate by the Nazis. Brand was forced out of Austria in 1938 and eventually settled in the USA, where he became a pioneer in the development of electronic music.

Throughout his life, Brand was fascinated by society's changing relationship with technology and Maschinist Hopkins explores this relationship in both its score and plot. Such subject matter was a common preoccupation of the time, as witnessed by Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1926) and the aesthetic experiments at the Bauhaus.

Composed in a period which saw an unprecedented number of new operas staged in Germany, the contemporary theme, metropolitan setting, and 'American' characters in Brand's opera also demonstrates his desire for the opera house to engage more closely with modern politics and popular culture.

In Maschinist Hopkins, factory machinery plays a crucial role, representing the potential of technology to serve as both saviour and oppressor. Although the machines that we encounter today are more likely to be of the smaller, electronic kind, the issues Brand's opera raises about technologically-mediated human relationships remain as relevant as ever.

Posing his social and humanitarian questions in a melange of thriller and romance, Brand's drama unfolds in a cinematic fashion, a kind of operatic film noir. The orchestral score fully exploits the stylistic palette of the day, demonstrating not only Brand's mastery of contemporary operatic styles but also his ability to comment critically upon that tradition and its increasing alienation from mass culture. Brand draws heavily upon American jazz and other popular dance styles alongside passages of cutting-edge musical expressionism.

The performance of Maschinist Hopkins is being supported by the following institutions:

The entertainer Barry Humphries, who has a particular interest in this repertoire, has kindly agreed to act as Patron of the performance.


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