Moralities – Moralitäten

I The frogs wish to have a king. They misunderstand Jupiter’s warning against such a stupid request, upon which he sends them a crane to gobble them up. 
II Previously the crows were able to sing beautifully. But, as they tried to imitate the fashionable whinnying of horses, they lose this facility. 
III A shipping company runs into a storm at sea and prays to the gods for help. After surviving a sea-crossing unharmed, in their rediscovered joie-de-vivre they mock all authority and have a wild party. (quoted from: introductory text to the Music Primer for the 8th Youth Festival of Music, Deutschlandsberg 1991) 

The title of this composition places the work in a tradition reaching back to the middle ages. In the 15th and 16th centuries, “Morality Plays” were allegorical plays with a didactic and moral content demonstrating to the citizenry the cardinal virtues and obligations. Henze and his librettist Auden made use of Aesop’s fables, to which they give an emphasis relevant to contemporary social situations. 

"These are three teaching pieces or school operas, composed in early 1967 for the Music Festival in Cincinnati, where they received their first performance in May 1968. I can imagine that they will be capable of performance in music schools, opera studios and colleges, staged or in concert. As far as stage production is concerned, it is left entirely to the performers to find their own style. Here, too, fun should play a principal role. The first piece deals with the difficulty of re- cognising the advantages of an anarchic way of life, the second with modernism and the third, with the short memory of a society that thinks it can get away with it again. Each of the three little operas is divided into numbers – short forms, little arias, recitatives, choral ensembles."