Cast: Elli Maldaque (soprano) – Irene’s Voice (mezzo-soprano) – Mechanic/Father (baritone) – The Fishmouths (bass) – The Unknown Lover (actor or tenor) – The Official (actor)
Soloist ensemble or string orchestra: 1st violin, 2nd violin, viola, cello, double bass, harpsichord

World premiere: 20 November 1993, Klagenfurt
Performance duration: approx. 70 minutes
Publisher: Accent Musikverlag, Regensburg
CD: Arte Nova 38023

About the opera “On the Beautiful Blue Danube”

I am aware that the title of my opera “On the Beautiful Blue Danube” may be misleading, yet the bitterness inherent in the detachment from the life drama of the Regensburg teacher Elli Maldaque holds, for me, an aesthetic affinity with Ödön von Horváth’s Tales from the Vienna Woods. The lightness of the title stands here in stark contrast to the deeply tragic entanglements of the drama. It was also Horváth who dedicated the play *The Teacher of Regensburg* to our main character Elli, though he was unable to complete it.

The story of the teacher Elli Maldaque caused quite a stir in Germany in the 1930s and once again brought both psychiatry and the state, as an instrument of surveillance, into disrepute. What befell her and led to her early and inexplicable death might perhaps one day be replicated in a perfected form by the ‘Great Eavesdropping Operation’.
The broad outlines of the plot are quickly told, but they are not the focus of my interest in this material; rather, it is the conditions under which the total destruction of an exemplary, idealistic personality comes about.

The universally popular and respected teacher Elli Maldaque, who grew up in a menacingly bigoted family home in Regensburg in the early 1920s, meets Irene Neubauer, a friend of the French writer Henri Barbusse. With her arrival, a vision enters Catholic Regensburg that many intellectual giants and do-gooders of the time were drawn to: communism. Elli attends the meetings, which have already established a firm foothold in Regensburg’s political scene, and plays the piano there. Although she does not join the Communists, she cannot escape the fascination of this movement, which strikes her as profoundly Christian. Irene, and with her Communism, stand for a better world in which all people are there for one another on an equal footing.

Elli now devotes herself to her teaching with even greater dedication, yet the state’s surveillance has already cast its web over her. When, after several warnings, she does not renounce her sympathies and still insists she has no unchristian intentions, she is threatened with dismissal from the teaching profession, against which the entire body of parents protests. At this point, the spiral of her personality’s dismantling begins. One day she finds her flat ransacked, is threatened and followed, and the attrition tactics of the highly skilled surveillance apparatus—which oscillates between seemingly well-meaning advice and threats—take their toll. Elli becomes increasingly sensitive whenever anyone speaks to her about the problem. It becomes increasingly difficult for her to distinguish friend from foe, and she withdraws further and further into herself. Thus, this woman—who is frightened but otherwise completely healthy—is eventually admitted, not least due to the denunciatory machinations of her own father, as mentally disturbed to the Karthaus-Prüll psychiatric institution near Regensburg, where she dies shortly afterwards under unexplained circumstances.

Elisabeth Gutjahr’s libretto does not so much describe the specific case and deliberately avoids treating the documented stages of this fate as the main plot. It elaborates more strongly on what Ödön von Horváth had already hinted at for the stage and places the world experienced by Elli, as it were through a subjective camera, at the centre of the action. This allows for a dense, lyrical language and reveals Elli’s condition and its creeping changes from within, much like a Wozzeck syndrome. The entirely apolitical imagery does the rest, lifting the case out of the realm of news reporting and restoring to it the personal dimension it deserves.

The music does not illustrate the events. It is intended to give the piece the inner breadth that the external space denies it.

Franz Hummel

Message to Franz Hummel 1999

Franz Hummel was born in Altmannstein in 1939. He studied piano at the University of Music in Munich. He was discovered and mentored by Richard Strauss, Eugen Papst and Hans Knappertsbusch, among others. He initially made a name for himself as a piano virtuoso in the concert hall and with over 60 recordings. He also performed Beethoven and Rachmaninoff concertos with renowned conductors such as Sir Georg Solti. At around the age of 39, he decided to end his concert career in favour of pursuing his compositional skills, which he had aspired to develop since his earliest youth. In addition to symphonic and chamber music works, the focus of his compositional work lies in the field of opera (King Übü, Ritter Blaubart, Gorbachev Opera, Gesualdo Opera, Beuys, Handel Opera). He achieved greater renown with his King Ludwig II musical Sehnsucht nach dem Paradies (2000). He has also written several major instrumental concertos. Franz Hummel died on 20 August 2022 in Regensburg.