Die Verlobung in San Domingo

Heinrich von Kleist’s novella is set in the year 1803 during the slaves’ rebellion in the French colony of San Domingo. The French officer Christoph von Ried takes refuge in the midst of the fighting in the house of a rebel. The rebel’s daughter Jeanne falls in love with him and decides to save him, which she eventually manages to do. But a chain of unfortunate events forces the officer to assume that Jeanne has betrayed him. He kills her and recognizes too late that he owes his life to her. In his opera created on 1961/62, Werner Egk sticks closely to Kleist’s text while emphasizing the basic conflict by introducing a modern pair of commentators – Mr Schwarz [Black] and Mr Weiß [White]. They act both as narrators, but also as irreconcilable representatives of the racial conflict.