200000 Taler

Boris Blacher was one of the most important and most widely performed composers in post-war Germany. In his 1969 opera “200 000 Taler” (200 000 Thalers) he adapted a comedy by famed and popular Jewish author Scholom Aleichem and created a sophisticated milieu study around tailor Schimele Soroker and his family who come to great fortune by winning the lottery.

This 1970 recording of the world premiere production stars a stunning Martha Mödl as Soroker’s wife and Günter Reich in the role of the shrewd tailor. Director Gustav Rudolf Sellner leads his fine cast meticulously through the comic and self-ironic material and supports the cliché-less score that Blacher conceived for Aleichem’s characters. Heinrich Hollreiser conducts the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin with insight and musical mastery. As the Neue Zürcher Zeitung wrote after the premiere, “Blacher discovers forces and notions that move our century within the naive, unpretentious literary material at hand. … Without ever using Jewish melodies this score creates a kind of folklore of a setting that is fully Blacher’s own. Here lives a new style.

Preußisches Märchen

On the surface it is a comic version of the “Hauptmann von Köpenick” story in which it is not the petty thief Wilhelm Voigt who carries off the prank but a respected member of society, the clerk Wilhelm Fadenkreutz. He is not a factory owner like Diederich Heßling, but definitely has many of the characteristics of the hero of “Der Untertan”. Boris Blacher and Heinz von Cramer Cramer quickly realised that such a devastating critique of Germany’s past would not be easy to stage, and they toned down the satirical text before presenting it to the intendant of the Städtische Oper, Heinz Tietjen. Blacher also shortened the caricature of the German national anthem played on the tuba at the start of the piece to make it less recognisable. The authors cast about for a long time for a title for their work that would not conflict with Carl Zuckmayer’s “Der Hauptmann von Köpenick”. After considering “Herrliche Zeiten” (Glorious Times), they finally hit on the idea of combining the local and the fantastical by calling the work “Preußisches Märchen” (A Prussian Fairytale). The premiere on 23 September 1952 in the Theater des Westens, where the Deutsche Oper Berlin ensemble appeared under the title of “Städtische Oper” between 1945 and 1961, was acclaimed by audiences and critics alike.