BREMEN DIARY:CAN YOU set the Holocaust to music? The new opera Raoul, which has just premiered in Bremen, is a brave attempt to do just that.
It tells the story of Raoul Wallenberg, the young Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in wartime Budapest by issuing them with Swedish passports. Wallenberg vanished after the war and it is suspected he was killed by the Soviets but his tale lives on as testimony to the difference that one person can make, even in the most appalling of circumstances.
The English-language production opens as Wallenberg is questioning his purpose in life. He receives an answer in wartime Austria.
"Black uniforms! SS! Oh no!" he sings. "They shot the child!" It's the first of many histrionic outbursts set to music that will set the tone of the evening to come.
Wallenberg arrives in Budapest, telling the desperate Jews he meets at the Swedish embassy: "I have been sent to help you. The world knows what goes on."
The action moves into the wartime Budapest nightlife where, as the chorus tells us, "the girls are easy . . . the food is greasy". The evening's bizarre action gathers pace. Actors simulate pulling each others' teeth. Adolf Eichmann, played by a portly baritone with a ponytail, tells us: "I'm not guilty of anything except being obedient. I organise atrocities." This Eichmann certainly doesn't mess about.
His henchmen are another matter, leaping around the stage in white balaclavas. Then a troupe of blonde, goose-stepping children appear from nowhere. It's a death march. Of course.
"Die you scum!" shouts one child playing a guard, pretending to shoot another child playing a prisoner.
Despite the increasingly desperate situation of the Hungarian Jews, act one closes with the stirring anthem: "They can't take our spirit, our freedom survives."
The stunned audience staggers out of the auditorium for a well-earned glass of wine. Unnoticed by most, standing in the corner, is the composer of Raoul, Gershon Kingsley.
"This is unbelievable: people paid good money for this lousy orchestra and lousy singers?" rages the 86-year-old New Yorker. He's not fishing for compliments: he's furious.
It is only the second performance of Raoul, but complex German theatre union rules mean that the original, opening-night cast from two nights earlier cannot perform. Instead audiences are seeing a partly new cast, a second-rung chorus and an unrehearsed orchestra. That would explain some, if not all, of the piece's rough edges.
Calming down somewhat, Kingsley describes the piece as "my autobiography, my musical face". "Friends said I was going to have a tough time with this and they were right," he says.
"People don't want to see a musical about the Holocaust, but maybe an opera, I thought. But we had trouble finding a commission and Bremen was the only theatre that would stage it."
Kingsley was born in Germany in 1922 and was evacuated to a kibbutz in Palestine in 1938. He moved to the US aged 24, completed his musical training in Los Angeles and moved to New York. He soon became a pioneer of electronic music, embracing the Moog synthesiser in the late 1960s.
A self-described "musical whore", his body of work covers advertising jingles, religious music, operas and soundtracks, including the horror flick Silent Night, Bloody Nightand the soft porn movie Sugar Cookies. He released a string of well-regarded electronic albums including, In Sound From Way Outand an all-synthesiser Gershwin: Alive and Well and Underground. He has played Carnegie Hall and worked with Leonard Bernstein, Josephine Baker and Lotte Lenya.
Kingsley's greatest popular success, though, is the instantly recognisable and infuriatingly infectious melody Popcorn, which has been recorded hundreds of times over the decades.
Raoul, he says, began life as the orchestral work Voices from the Shadows, then became an opera after an approach by German lyricist Michael Kunze.
Sadly, it is Kunze's contribution that ruins the evening: his witless dialogue and inept lyrics make Wallenberg and friends sound like they are singing comicbook dialogue. Did Jews really walk around war-torn Budapest exclaiming: "I don't want to be a victim!"
Adding to the production's problems are the generally hysterical tone and heavy-handed symbolism. The opera's apparent message - that even one man like Raoul Wallenberg can make a difference - was clear from the outset.
Still, Kingsley's score rises above it all, stirring and gorgeous, at times recalling the operas of Kurt Weill.
By the end of the evening, the faces of the Bremen audience are frozen in place. If anyone didn't like Raoul, they don't dare say.
"Many thanks for the ticket," remarks a man in an even voice to an acquaintance. "It certainly was . . . an experience."
