Sunday, May 09, 1999
Weill piece premieres here
BY JANELLE GELFAND
The Cincinnati Enquirer
The 126th May Festival season opens Thursday with the U.S. premiere of Kurt Weill's “Prophets” (“Propheten”), Act IV of The Eternal Road.
The performance will take place in the historic Isaac M. Wise Temple on Plum Street, where stages will be built around the temple's podium as well as over pews on the sides to make room for the soloists, chorus and orchestra.
The Cincinnati version of “Prophets” is an adaptation made by Weill scholar David Drew. Mr. Drew has added some extra music by Mr. Weill, including an optional opening: “Hatikvah,” the Israeli National Anthem.
“To be honest, I would have loved producing the whole thing (The Eternal Road). It's a formidable task: four hours, five acts, casts of thousands. It's like The Ten Commandments,” Mr. Conlon says.
“This is a pageant, more than an opera,” he says. “You see the entire Old Testament, the entire parade of Hebrew prophets and kings.”
The story takes place in a synagogue on the night of a pogrom, where middle-European Jews are awaiting the decision of a dictator and what he'll do with the Jewish people.
“When you think, this was written in the early '30s, long before anyone knew what would happen — Weill somehow smelled this,” Mr. Conlon says. “The piece was never produced in Germany. It was produced on Broadway, then it disappeared.”
The Issac M. Wise Temple, on the National Register of Historic Places, was built in 1866 under the supervision of Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, the founder of Reform Judaism in America.
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