Neues vom Tage

CONTENT
After a furious argument, the married couple Laura and Eduard decide to get divorced. Mr and Mrs M. also become involved in the argument with the result that they also make the decision to get divorced. The two couples encounter another again at the Registry Office: Mr and Mrs M. are already happily divorced because they had hired the attractive Mr Hermann from the Büro für Familienangelegenheiten GmbH [Office for Family Affairs plc] to provide suitable grounds for divorce. Laura and Eduard also employ his services and arrange a compromising meeting between Laura and Mr Hermann in a museum where they are to be ambushed by Eduard.
When the latter espies the faked love scene, he is suddenly overcome by genuine feelings of jealousy, breaks a statue and is thrown into prison as a vandal. Laura takes up residence in a hotel and has a bath. Hermann who has actually fallen in love with Laura importunes her in the bathroom. When Mrs M., to which Hermann has also made a declaration of love, comes onto the scene, she feels herself betrayed by the other two and summons the hotel staff to provoke a scandal. All present with the exception of Mrs M. deplore the embarrassment of this situation. Eduard hears of the scandal while in prison: at the same time, Laura is forced to read the lurid headlines on this case. On his release, Eduard realises that he will be unable to pay for the damage he caused in the museum. Managers employ the couple for performances in theatres and music halls to present their ‘case’ as the scandalous attraction of the season. This enables them to earn sufficient money to be able to settle all their debts and they subsequently make plans to retreat into private life, but the opinions expressed in the press have irrevocably brought them into the public eye, forcing them to continue their act as the ‘news of the day’ indefinitely.

COMMENTARY
Hindemith and his librettist Marcellus Schiffer, the wittiest and most successful revue author of the time, take the medium of contemporary revue theatre in Berlin of the late 1920s, a blend between cabaret and grand ‘shows’, and utilise this concept for the new form of topical opera. They then proceed however to develop this form of opera into a satire on the modern social modes of behaviour, providing a critique of the times but without any trace of arrogant or self-opinionated cynicism through the plot which is transferred to the present time. The protagonists disport  themselves ‘factually ‘, play their roles and express themselves indirectly in a conventional manner, and whenever they break out of their set roles, and reveal ‘emotions’ such as rage, jealousy or love – this appears simultaneously ridiculous and embarrassing and leads to catastrophe. Alfred Einstein wrote after the first performance: ‘The orchestral introduction alone is a prelude to a devilish puppet theatre with a peculiarly beautiful woodwind episode just before its conclusion; all interludes possess a rhythmic buoyancy which is intrinsic to Hindemith. An entire duet scene is unfolded from the initial frenzied fugato on the piano for two and then four hands; everything is formed and leads in part to excessive surplus weight—as for example in the finale in the hotel bathroom within its cantata-like quality.
This formalism has however a dramatic purpose. The scene at the registry office has a dreamlike atmosphere and this dreaminess becomes intensified into a symbol of the times in the septet in which six managers offer their propositions to the distraught hero and heroine: this march in C major is the internal highlight of the drama where buffonesque action is transformed into magnificence— this moment will remain as the artistic depiction of our situation and our Americanisation, simultaneously as image and critique. This is the point where a topical work of art touches on a “work for eternity”.’ (G. Sch.)