The Strasbourg Opera presents The Treasure Seekeran opera unpublished in France, more than a century after its creation by the post-romantic composer Franz Schreker, banned by the Nazis and forgotten after the war.
Son of a converted Jew, considered an avant-garde artist of sulphurous and decadent opera themes, the German composer died in 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, having lost everything.
“An injustice of history”according to Alain Perroux, director general of the Opéra national du Rhin (ONR), who describes for AFP the work of “post-Wagnerian”by the complexity of its musical alloys and the conductive motifs associated with characters or objects.
By giving a French premiere of a Schreker, the ONR is doing it again after The Distant Sound played in 2012 in Strasbourg.
The plot of treasure hunter is that of a sensual fairy tale with drawers that goes wrong. In an authoritarian kingdom, Elis, a minstrel who owns an enchanted lute, is in search of the queen’s misplaced jewels. Just like Els, the daughter of an innkeeper, ready for all the vicissitudes to seize it. Unless love is the real treasure that connects these two beings…
Reflecting the modernity that flourished under the Weimar Republic, The Treasure Seeker premiered in 1920 at the Frankfurt Opera. It had been a triumph, the press had been enthusiastic and it had been played more than 350 times in fifty cities until 1932. Then it fell into oblivion after it was banned by the Third Reich.
In Christof Loy’s current staging, men in military uniform and aristocrats in tuxedos looking like carnivores evolve in a setting of black marble and red curtains.
The orchestra is conducted by the Slovenian Marko Letonja, musical director of the Orchester philharmonique de Strasbourg from 2012 to 2021, who had already officiated on The Distant Sound. The Finnish soprano Helena Kuntunen embodies a manipulative and victim Els at the same time, prey to the oppressive desire of men and a venal lover.
The show, co-produced with the Deutsche Oper Berlin, was presented to German audiences last May. It is played in Strasbourg until November 8, then in Mulhouse from November 27 to 29.