Brot und Spiele

The coal mine in which Adam Eving has toiled for thirty years has been shut down. Like many of his colleagues, he has become a victim of the structural transformation in the Ruhr area. The entrepreneur August Stein steps in just at the right time with his idea: he has purchased the coal mine to use as a film set in which the workers should go about their duties as in the old days. They are however only acting as extras for the film he plans to make about them as well as opening the mine to tourists as a sort of amusement park in which they can gaze in astonishment at the workers on-site going about their jobs. This is bad news for the recruitment officer who has up until now been able to entice the previously unemployed miners to take up new jobs in the South German armament industry. This officer however also consents to being made a member of the cast and continues to act out his previous role but now in front of the camera. When Adam Eving is seriously injured in a work accident during an open day at the mine, the workers rebel against this new form of exploitation, under the leadership of Adam’s son Kurt who has fallen in love with Stein’s daughter Gudrun. Stein orders the police to evacuate the mine/film set.
Max von der Grün and Günther Wiesemann selected a highly topical subject from the 1980s for their ‘Ruhr area opera’: the dramatic social and economic effects of structural change in the heavy industrial centres situated on the Ruhr. The original idea for this work is not new: back in 1952, Hermann Kasack depicted the scene of a film city presenting life in a German post-war town in his novel ‘Das große Netz’. Von der Grün’s libretto is a balancing act between the nostalgic glorification of the “honest worker” and the clichéd presentation of the ‘evil entrepreneur’ who exploits workers casually as interchangeable material for the entertainment industry. Despite the substantial dimensions of the orchestral forces, the music retains predominantly chamber music proportions, frequently incorporating elements from twelve-tone music and strongly motoric percussion figures utilised to accentuate the monotony of work processes.