The Black Mask

Silvanus Schuller, mayor of the village of Bolkenhain, has invited an unusual set of guests to the carnival; seemingly untouched by the death and pestilence that ravage outside - this misery, 14 years after the end of the Thirty Years war, appears incapable of penetrating the walls of the house - 13 people meet for a feast, their destinies, as it turns out, inseparably entangled in another, and about to be overturned by the forthcoming nightmarish events. All are included in this death-dance, all are about to die - all except Löwel Perl, who alone will leave unscathed the scene of horror.
The village of Bolkenhain is in the immediate vicinity of Ober-Salzbrunn, the birthplace of Gerhart Hauptmann. Bolkenhain, more exactly the dining-room of a market-place corner-house, the residence of the wealthy mayor Silvanus Schuller, on an afternoon in February 1662, is the setting for the play The Black Mask, which in 1928 was published together with the one act play The Witchride as Ghost; was premiered a year later in the Burgtheater in Vienna; and served Harry Kupfer and Krzysztof Penderecki as the inspiration for the libretto to Penderecki’s third opera.
„Like a mirror of the times the Mayor’s house brings together events that lie outside the current continuum and polarises them via the collected characters. These are the representatives of world-views, of privately developed wisdoms.  They deputize types; in the piece however, it is not their differences that are expanded upon or the fraction building which is emphasised, it is at most only in the beginning that such an appearance is awakened, that it could go in this conventional dramatic direction. Instead it is the fate of fear and destruction to which they must all yield. In the end all are equal in a destroyed world.“