Speaker
Dr. John Gabriel
Senior Lecturer and Head of Musicology & Ethnomusicology, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne
Around 1930, interest in Christopher Columbus surged in Central Europe. Alongside new biographies and a revitalised campaign to make Columbus a saint, a series of operas about Columbus premiered across Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. In this talk, I explore how German and Austrian musicians responded to the tumultuous 1920s by reimagining Columbus’s voyages as both the highpoint and the beginning of the end of a late-medieval order that embodied unity and stability. Across cultural media, Columbus highlighted the paradoxical legacy of colonialism.
I examine four operas. Darius Milhaud and Paul Claudel’s Christophe Columb (1930) and Ernst Krenek’s Karl V. (composed 1932, premiered 1938) found modern relevance in the political legacy of Columbus’s voyages, reviving the idea of a globe-spanning Catholic political order as a balm for nationalist conflict. While Milhaud drew on his experiences with early twentieth century Latin American popular music to lend the opera local colour, Krenek used the twelve-tone technique as musical allegory of the divine mission of his opera’s title Emperor to unite the world under Catholicism. Ernst Dressel and Arthur Zweiniger’s Armer Columbus (Poor Columbus, 1927) used jazz and anti-Semitic caricature to highlight the financial motivations behind Columbus’s voyages and tie a neat loop around America, jazz, and capitalism. Finally, Werner Egk’s composed his radio opera Columbus (1933) shortly before the Nazi seizure of power, drawing heavily on an anti-colonial biography of Columbus by the Communist writer Jakob Wassermann. However, due to Egk’s “objective,” modernist musical and dramaturgical approach, the work proved compatible with Nazi cultural-political priorities when it was first broadcast months after the Nazi’s seized power.
Enquires
Ms. Lily Yau (Tel.: 3943 6510)
