Music: Preposterous Ant

Holding his champagne glass high, the baritone sang a warm and impassioned aria to the health of his mistress-ant. He had scarcely finished when the restaurant proprietor brushed the mistress-ant from tablecloth to floor and stepped on it. The baritone dropped dead, the brasses blazed, and the audience swung into one of the liveliest musical brawls to erupt in Germany in years.

The occasion was a performance of Composer Peter Ronnefeld’s four-act opera, The Ant. Spectators at the Düsseldorf Opera seemed to find no middle ground; they were either enraged or entranced by the generally cacophonous score and by the frankly libidinous libretto that provided space for an orgiastic ballet, a striptease and a recitative recounting of the early sexual exploits of a couple of convicts. Composer Ronnefeld, 26, who conducted the orchestra, was greeted by a caterwauling of penny whistles from the top balcony. (“Idiots up there!” shouted pro-Ronnefeld forces in other parts of the house.) Even a critic who admired Ronnefeld conceded that there was perhaps “a little too much theater” in The Ant.

The theatrical opera tells the story of Salvatore, a shabby, greying voice teacher who falls in love with Formica, a curvy voice student. Later, in a fit of jealousy. Salvatore strangles Formica at the peak of a coloratura run. In prison, the murderer’s only companion is a queen ant that has flown in the window, and Salvatore comes to believe that the ant is his dead beloved.

After Salvatore’s release, the action shifts to the cabaret where he sings his climactic aria (Vivat Formica] before the ant dies beneath the proprietor’s heel.

Preposterous as the story is, it gives Ronnefeld a fine chance to exercise his talent for musical satire; the score glitters with echoes of half a dozen com posers, from Berg to Bartok. Carl Orff’s cantata Carmina Burana is brilliantly parodied by an offstage male chorus singing a salty Latin text on the mating habits of ants; acidulous Stravinskyan brasses turn up in Act III. The real wonder is that despite the borrowing Composer Ronnefeld’s score has a character of its own brash, melodramatic, full of rhythmic fire.

Dresden-born and the son of a viola player, Ronnefeld toured Germany in his teens as a concert pianist. Now chief conductor at the Bonn Stadttheater, he has written a handful of other compositions, but The Ant is both his first full-scale opera and his first work to attract wide attention. The boos it also attracts seem to Composer Ronnefeld merely “stupid.” To people who read it correctly, he insists, his ant opera “introduces a higher reality.”