Back from Ireland, meeting with old friends and a visit to the Wexford Festival Opera, where Kurt Weill’s Der Silbersee (The Silverlake, first performed in Leipzig, Erfurt, and Magdeburg, on the same day, February 18th 1933) kept us in conversation afterwards for days…
The opera critics loathed it (especially the one from the FT, and see The Stage !), but we loved it; especially the ending as the two defeated and soon to be forgotten outcasts walk away over the miraculously frozen Silverlake – the sense of failure together with the sense of hope. Deeply unsettling.
– ‘Brothers on the verge of companionship and warfare’, and I noted precisely the history of their progression through Europe since 1933. Not one alone on walk-about, and not more than two, it was precisely two; two outcasts (in other words, the sort of person critics consider failures and quickly forget), two tramps, two city vagabonds… walking away.
mmj