Norrköping Symphony Orchestra

The US-American composer Marc Blitzstein is considered one of the major representatives of political music theatre in the USA. He maintained close connections with Berlin and had strong links to the legendary November Group whose members also included musicians associated with the Bauhaus such as Stefan Wolpe and Wladimir Vogel. According to a letter, the premiere of “Parabola and Circula” was intended to take place at the Dessau Theatre: the theatre manager appeared to be “seriously excited” about the opera and planned a performance in “collaboration with the Bauhaus people there”. These plans were however abandoned and the opera initially fell into oblivion, only being rediscovered during a research project on Bauhaus Music at the Bauhaus Archive / Museum für Gestaltung Berlin.

Inspired by Blitzstein’s interest in Constructivist art, “Parabola and Circula” is set in a land of abstract forms. All protagonists originate from the world of geometry and the opera tells a story which is both tragic and beautiful: a romance between a Parabola and a Circle, the parents of Rectangula and Intersecta, who are in love and yet lose each other. The seeds are sown by doubt which significantly affects their lives: Parabola asks his friends Prism, Line and Geodesy what they think of Circula. The friends are united in their judgement: love takes away one’s independence and oppresses the spirit of modernity. The doubt felt by Parabola grows into a black projectile which ultimately kills Circula. Their children are left behind and weep bitterly. Blitzstein presents a destroyed paradise with intensely autobiographical and contemporary historical connections: humans always destroy what they love the most.

The concert programme is complemented by Leonard Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2 “The Age of Anxiety” which addresses the issues surrounding doubt and the feeling of anxiety which go hand in hand with the search for identity and finding one’s place in a rapidly changing world. What is it that can still cement people together? Both composers searched for their own answer to this question which has lost nothing of its relevance in our time.