Exposé  -  Background  -  Genre Film Opera

Information zu Kroll
A film opera by Börries Müller-Büsching, Mark Polscher und Andreas Rochholl

Scene of action: Berlin           Time:  Present

The film has two narrative threads: the story of a musician named Klemperer and that of a female singer.  These parallel narrated stories are closely interwoven through the recollections of Gold Else (a bronze sculpture on the Victory Column in the Great Star) of the Weimar Republic period, when she stood in the square between the Reichstag and the Kroll Opera.

Background:  The composer Klemperer, 37 years old; earns his living as a free-lance conductor.  A politician has enticed him to Berlin promising him a leading position for an innovative concert series, in which all the city orchestras would participate.

Klemperer feels his head becoming cramped.  The music he senses in him wants to happen,wants out, yet choir and orchestra of the State Opera refuse to co-operate with him, as his music would introduce methods not officially provided for.  The high-ranking personality who brought him to Berlin is no longer available.  Klemperer calculates the value of the energy required to force open the walls of a cultural temple.  In attempting this on his own, he injures his shoulder.  He can no longer conduct.  Short of money, he quietly moves to an abandoned  property storeroom, where he sets up a world of his own.  Despite this he wants to assert his rights and tries by submitting an application to the petition committee.  There the politician, Dr. Victoria Prutenia is enthusiastic about his plans and recognises in him a suitable partner for her own world of ideas dream world?) moulded by the ideal of Mitterand’s Grand Project:  It is her will that a new modern national opera be built on the Schlossplatz (Castle Square) according to  Friedrich Schinkel’s modified plans for the Castle Area, which, she maintains, were found only recently amongst the art objects looted by the Russians in Petersburg.  But quite soon these plans turn out to be fakes. Plunged into uncontrolled disappointment, somewhere between legislative and executive, Klemperer meets a man, who is reading a book about Otto Klemperer and quietly sketching something…

One morning a woman wakes up in a tree in a city park feeling dazed. A visionary dream has caused total amnesia; she is under the ecstatic influence of everything  she has experienced in that dream:  a numinous creature kidnaps her from home, reaches into her eyes and reshapes them. Then it trickles a few drops of a milky fluid into her throat.  Its male voice orders her to recapture its property in the city in which she awakes.  She is to set up a temple where people can gather and bond with him singing and dancing.  The woman sets off into the city, at first she doesn’t see too well; she feels strange/she doesn’t recognise herself.  She asks strangers on the streets where she can find people and places to sing and dance.  Drifts into the nightlife of Berlin: Yet the groups she finds and observes remain completely detached and unsatisfactory.  When she gets into really unpleasant difficulties, she instinctively resists so violently and ruthlessly that she becomes frightened.  The woman returns to the Zoo near where she woke up that morning.   She sees a goat and a goat herdgirl.  Together they wander through the city, gathering people to form a new group and looking for a meeting place, have astonishing experiences from the awareness of their own fertility.  After one failure, it seems that the great dream will become reality: an investor offers an absolutely unbelievable location…

Finally the two stories meet together on the meadow, where the Kroll Opera once stood…

Background

Omnipotence is a subject that confronts each person.  The concept of what is divine, powerful, omnipotent comprises the longing for expanding the normal human possibilities of existence.  Singing is one of the most impressive human capabilities to publicly communicate ideas and feeling. A big voice reaches many listeners and has a powerful effect.  An orchestra fills bigger rooms.    The effect of combining these two affects the natural wish of the human being to be a part of it, which, he feels, reaches beyond his own ego.

Again and again the opera is and was used and misused as platform for social and political matters.  Through its unmistakable origin as an art form at court, the opera rouses consciously and unconsciously neo-aristocratic projections and satisfies thus an apparently not so seldom felt bourgeois desire to belong to the elite.  The old-fashioned theatre with its many balconies represents hierarchic society, with all eyes fixed on the Royal Box is also a favourite meeting point of today’s society.  Thus we have reverted to Wagner’s revolutionary idea and initiative of Bayreuth: the eyes of the audience, free from its social origin, are fixed not on the illustrious public, but solely on the stage.  In “Kroll” light is thrown on the psychological limitations and those relating to the history of the mind of the interface between politics and opera.

How does democracy deal with artistic utopia, whose financing is in the hands of politically controlled authorities?  What role is played by those who legitimise public funds? Does the Berlin Republic cultivate a more mature approach to cultural questions than the Weimar Republic? According to its origin, today’s music theatre has its roots in the Greek cult of Dionysos in whose honour tragedies and comedies, singing and dancing with masks, choir and scenery were performed under the Greek sky.  Has this god of the fertility of nature, who according to his mythical origin crossed borders between Asia and Europe, even more to impart to us than the antiquated images in museums  and an iconography closely interwoven with the whole European history of art?

“Kroll”, a res publica, a public affair, the utopia of a contemporary music theatre.

Genre Film Opera

Film operas are in the main films of opera classics, in which a pictorial aesthetic similar to a feature film is added to a conventional audio recording, whereby the three-dimensional theatre stage is replaced by the screen

The film opera “Kroll” takes up the joint development potential of film and opera with modern audio-visual technology, a beginning of which had started in the Twenties and Thirties (i.a. Alban Berg, Paul Dessau) but then was totally blocked by the political terror of the Nazis.  In “Kroll” two media are not mixed with each other in a multimedial process; they are made together.  Music and film cannot therefore be performed in a meaningful way separately from each other, different to the videoclip, where the picture to the music can be changed or omited as desired without influencing the musical context.

back