When he was 26 years old, Kurt Weill, who at that point was a composer mostly of chamber music and songs, wrote the opera Der Protagonist. With this work he not only found his métier but became famous overnight. Eventually Weill would create a new style of opera called Zeitoper: a “topical opera” with urban settings dealing with up-to-the-minute political issues–The Threepenny Opera would be his greatest success. But in Der Protagonist we get to hear Weill coming into his own.
Der Protagonist is not a Zeitoper, but it is clear what attracted the future Threepenny Opera composer to Georg Kaiser’s libretto: it is something of an “opera of ideals”, each character representing a certain notion rather than being a fully fleshed-out realistic person. The Protagonist (so named in the libretto) represents artistic idealism, and the Sister stands for love in all its earthly guises. There are two pantomime sequences, a murder out of jealous rage, and a merry band of players enacting scenes at a shoddy inn–stuff of opera indeed. The plot (such as it is) can get a little confusing and the booklet sadly lacks a synopsis, so you are more or less on your own.
The score sparkles with invention, a shape of Weill to come, exemplified in its incorporation of jazz, accessible harmonies, and vital rhythmic ideas. Weill’s orchestration sometimes waxes heavy handed, more where less would have sufficed, but it brims with so much musical enthusiasm that you can hardly fault it. For a mid-20s composer’s first major experiment with opera, Der Protagonist is astonishingly successful.
Conductor John Mauceri has an absolute gift for interpreting Weill. He is not afraid to rough the score up a bit, bringing out not only its dense, lyrical beauty (in portions) but also its intentional vulgarity–and he draws a huge, gutsy sound from the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. The two pantomime sequences, strictly orchestral moments, alone would make this a worthwhile disc, mostly due to Mauceri’s enthusiasm and devil-may-care interpretive manner. As the titular protagonist, tenor Robert Wörle is outstanding, though his counterpart, soprano Amanda Halgrimson, is less so. There is a wonderful contribution by bass Matteo de Monti as the money-hungry innkeeper, and as the band of dell’arte-style players, Johannes von Duisburg, Jan Buchwald, and Matthias Koch blend excellently and play off each other with exuberance. This recording, part of Capriccio’s ongoing series of Weill operas, might jar the connoisseur’s ear a bit, the voices being too closely recorded for optimum balance with the orchestra, but it is an easily overlooked flaw.
