Queen Elizabeth Hall, London 

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Tim Ashley
Wednesday 28 November 2001 00.00 GMTLast modified on Friday 26
April 200200.00 BST

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http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2001/nov/28/artsfeatures6

First performed in Duisburg in 1929, Maschinist Hopkins was the work

of Austrian composer Max Brand. One of the most popular operas in
the later years of the Weimar Republic, it was banned by the Nazis in
1933. Brand - Jewish and a communist sympathiser - fled to the US,
and didn't return to Vienna until 1975. Like so many works branded
"degenerate" by the Nazis, the piece has languished in comparative
obscurity. The BBC broadcast it in 1986; this performance by the
Cambridge University Opera Society, was its UK stage premiere.

It's a forceful anti-capitalist parable set in an imaginary America on to

which many Weimar artists - Fritz Lang in Metropolis, Brecht and
Weill in Mahagonny - projected their own concerns. But rather than
envisioning the overthrow of a rotten system, Brand portrays
capitalism as a self-perpetuating nightmare. Bill, a foreman, and his
mistress Nell murder the latter's husband and take over his factory.
Hopkins, a machinist sacked as a result of Bill's strategies, rises from
the proletariat to destroy them, only to become morally compromised
by his own actions. By the end of the work he has become as inhuman
as the machines he operates.

The score lacks the cohesion of a number of operas from the period
that urgently await a UK staging - Schulhoff's Flammen, Braunfels's
The Birds - but its influence was colossal. Brand's mingling of
Schoenbergian serialism and jazz had a major effect on Berg's Lulu.
The machines are chillingly anthropomorphic, producing
sprechstimme and choral melismas that pre-empt Schoenberg's own
music for the voice of God in Moses and Aaron.

Katja Lehmann's production is a messy multimedia effort, hampered

by her decision to relocate the work to modern-day London, where
Brand's baleful machines have become computers sporting arty screen-
savers. But it was conducted with passion by Peter Treagar, and played
with panache, if not always accuracy, by the Cambridge University
Symphony Orchestra. Diction, though, was nobody's strong point. The
opera was sung in English, but the only words I caught during its two-
hour course were, "Bloody hell!"
Maschinist Hopkins: A Father for Lulu?
Clive Bennett
The Musical Times
Vol. 127, No. 1722 (Sep., 1986), pp. 481-484
Published by: Musical Times Publications Ltd.
Article DOI: 10.2307/964589
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/964589
Page Count: 4