Vienna.(Der Riese vom Steinfeld)

Friedrich Cerha's new opera, Der Riese vom Steinfeld (The Giant of Steinfeld), commissioned by the Staatsoper, opened there on June 15 (heard June 24). Peter Turrini's libretto is based on the short, unhappy life of an Austrian country boy who grew to a height of nearly nine feet, was rejected by his community, exhibited at fairs and royal courts, and returned to his home to die, aged twenty-seven, in 1887. A photo and other relics are now displayed in the local museum. The opera shows his rejection, his exhibition in the Prague Ghetto and at the courts of Kaiser Wilhelm II and Queen Victoria, and his sale to a circus. There, his love affair with a "Little Woman" is billed as an attraction and precipitates his rebellion from exploitation; he returns to his mother to die, unaware that his exhibition "partner" has never sent his share of the profits home. The work closes with his apotheosis as a tourist attraction. Unfortunately, the language used--when one can hear it--is banal in the extreme, and Cerha's music, despite echoes of Jewish folk music, a parody Prussian march and several folklike "songs" for the Giant, is turgid, heavy with sound clusters and little motion. The unsubtle attempts to portray the two monarchs as figures of fun (in itself a legitimate goal, since monarchs lay themselves open to deflationary treatment) devalue the work's protest of the rejection and exploitation of an outsider.