George Antheil (1900-1959)
Venus in Africa, opera in one act (1954)
Johanna Stojkovic (soprano) – Yvonne
Miljenko Turk (baritone) – Charles
Thomas Laske (bass-baritone) – Innkeeper
Claudia Barainsky (soprano) – Venus
Stephan Boving (tenor) – The Peddler
Bochum Symphony Orchestra/Steven Sloane
rec. 2009, Ruhrkongress, Bochum
Libretto in English and German included
cpo 777 450-2 [56]
Antheil’s Bad Boy days were well behind him when he wrote his one-act satirical opera Venus in Africa. He composed it in 1954 to a libretto by film and TV writer Michael Dyne and it was premièred in Denver in 1957, two years before Antheil’s death. It’s set in a hotel café in Tunisia where an American writer bickers with the girlfriend who has left her home, ex-boyfriend and dog, to be with him. Her departure coincides with the arrival of a ‘Girl’ whom the audience takes to be the incarnation of Venus, to whose statue the forlorn writer had turned when in his cups. Counterfeit currency complicates the plot but not as much as the Girl, whose spectral presence finally encourages the writer toward reconciliation with his girlfriend.
Though it has some parallels with Antheil’s own life – in essence this seems to have happened to him, though it wasn’t Vernus Incarnate he saw but a flame-haired Albanian woman – the essential geniality of the plot allows Antheil full play with his witty and deliberately exaggerated compositional brush. The bickering couple are supported by music that could come straight from a technicolor musical, the Tunisian episodes have sinuous pastiche ‘Eastern’ elements that are as authentic as Ketèlbey, and when brief passion erupts it’s Puccini tinged with Strauss. It’s music that, as Antheil once wrote, is easily understood by an American theatre audience, popular music (mainly) assimilated into a lush, rhythmically vivid hour’s entertainment that includes rumba and two-step but not much of his earlier mechanistic-futuristic music.
From time to time there are tango rhythms that remind one of Milhaud and the writer Charles’ increasingly bibulous monologue in the second scene is accompanied by a lightly mocking jazzy rhythms. There are waltz themes, too, that often to accompany burgeoning love scenes. There is even a kind of Dance of the Seven Veils that presages a scene which is vaguely reminiscent, in effect, if not musical implications, of Martinů’s Julietta – a dreamscape of temporary, illusory enchantment. When Charles and Venus (the Girl) fall in love he is ‘complete’ he says, to the accompaniment of high-quality musical kitsch. And when post-coitally, as it were, lyricism emerges it’s soon destabilised by dissonances and turbulence.
Most of the singers sing solo or parlando but after the love melee a vocal quintet emerges that reflects the jealousy, duplicity and deceit that accompanies the action. As Antheil directs in a stage note; ‘It is not necessary to hear every word; the action is visible enough’. The final scene’s rapprochement between the Writer, Charles and the returned Yvonne is a romantic duo, suitably rapturous, summoning up Rosenkavalier – itself a work of Viennese kitsch – in a double-bind of escapism.
In a work as smart and snazzy as this, and as littered with jazz and dance tropes, there is an argument that it should be cast with Americans, who can deal with the tart exchanges and brittle argumentative nature of the first scene, in particular, with immediacy and verbal transparency. CPO has cast all-German speakers in the roles and though Miljenko Turk is Croatian he studied in Germany. This question really only applies to the two leads, Charles – sung by Turk whose English is fine – and Yvonne, sung by Johanna Stojkovic who sometimes takes her character’s terseness to the limit and can be hard to decipher. The roles of the Innkeeper and Peddler are character parts, admirably taken here, and amenable to local colour. Venus (The Girl) is sung by Claudia Barainsky who embodies the allure of dreamlike sensuality.
In my copy of the booklet pages 27 and 28, which contain part of the libretto, have been printed twice. There must be a misprint on page 42 where the lines speak of ‘over the charm between two souls’ where, presumably ‘chasm’ is meant.
The Bochum Symphony is conducted by Steven Sloane who has real insight into Antheil and has major experience conducting music theatre and everything from Marx to Zimmermann. This was recorded back in March 2009, roughly half-way into his tenure in Bochum, which ended in 2021. The opera offers a valuable look at Antheil’s last compositional years and the musical directions he may have taken – theatrical, televisual, filmic – had he lived into his 60s.
Jonathan Woolf
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