New Works: Kafka on Trial

The Visitation, an opera based loosely on Franz Kafka’s The Trial, is U.S. Composer Gunther Schuller’s way of dealing “with the Kafkaesque in the Negro problem.” Judging by the response of the Hamburg audience that saw the first performance last week, Schuller has made a good deal.

The central character is Carter Jones, splendidly sung by Negro Baritone McHenry Boatwright. Schuller sees Jones as “the type of Negro whose personal and racial characteristics have become undefined because of attempts over the years to adapt himself to the dominating social order. He simply wants to lead a decent life in an indecent society. ” Onstage, that society is represented by a gang of white toughs, in an unnamed U.S. city, who accuse Jones of an undisclosed misdeed, subject him to a “trial” in a cotton warehouse and beat him mercilessly. He seeks help from the Legal Aid Society, friends, a minister, but to no avail. In desperation, he turns and pleads his case to the audience in a moving aria, ending with the anguished cry, “I am your conscience.” In the final scene, while the orchestra plays a wailing New Orleans funeral dirge, the white toughs drag the beaten Negro on stage, kill him with a shovel, and bury him in an earthen grave.

Schuller’s score is starkly modern, laced with traditional and atonal improvisations by a septet of jazz musicians who share the pit with the full orchestra. In one impressive orchestral interlude, the foreboding of violence is achieved by the integration of threatening crowd noises broadcast through loudspeakers in the rear of the auditorium, sustained, jaggedly dissonant chords from the orchestra, and frantic improvisations from the jazz combo. At the curtain, the Hamburg audience exploded in a great ovation, called Boatwright back again and again for bows.

Flushed with success, Hamburg State Opera Director Rolf Liebermann described The Visitation as “the best opera since Wozzeck.” U.S. audiences may have a chance to see and hear for themselves next summer, when Liebermann expects to bring The Visitation to Manhattan as part of the Hamburg Opera’s first American visit.