Julia Kerr’s forgotten opera Der Chronoplan returns to the stage in Mainz
Julia Kerr (1898–1965) was not only the wife of Berlin's leading critic Alfred Kerr – she was also a successful composer. Her daughter Judith recounted the family's exile in her book When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit. Among their belongings was the unfinished manuscript of the Zeitoper Der Chronoplan, in which the Kerrs send the great Albert Einstein on a journey through time.
Julia Kerr, born Julia Weismann in Wiesbaden in 1898, was one of the few female composers in the late 1920s who managed to gain a foothold in the male-dominated world of contemporary music in Germany. But her breakthrough came too late. Her first opera, Die schöne Lau, was the first opera ever to be broadcast in its entirety on German radio from Berlin in February 1928. The successful stage premiere took place in Schwerin in 1929. The Hamburg State Opera then commissioned her to write the opera Der Chronoplan based on a libretto by her husband, the famous German writer and literary critic Alfred Kerr. The premiere never took place after the Nazis seized power.
The Kerr family fled via France and Switzerland to England and Julia's career as a composer ended with her emigration. After the war, she worked as a secretary and interpreter, including at the Nuremberg Nazi trials. The Kerrs' daughter, Judith Kerr, became world-famous for her children's books, especially When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, The Tiger Who Came to Tea and the Mog series.
Der Chronoplan – a humorous Zeitoper with a culturally dark undertow – is about an invention by Albert Einstein, a time machine, which he presents to a select Berlin society at his home in Caputh near Berlin. Among the invited guests are Max Liebermann, Richard Strauss, George Bernard Shaw, Gerhart Hauptmann and a journalist. Shaw and the journalist accept Einstein's invitation to embark on a journey through time. On their way to ancient Rome, however, they suffer ‘shipwreck’ and end up in early 19th-century England, where they meet the young Lord Byron, who is suffering from mal du siècle. After Einstein repairs the time machine, Byron is persuaded to travel back to the 1920s. There he falls in love with a young, emancipated Berlin woman...
Norbert Biermann, who has previously been recruited to reconstruct the lost score of Jaromír Weinberger's Spring Storms, has supplemented the parts for Kerr’s opera which were lost during a radio production of excerpts by Bavarian Radio in 1952. The posthumous premiere of Der Chronoplan takes place on 24 January at the Staatstheater Mainz – in the presence of the descendants of Julia and Alfred Kerr – staged by Lorenzo Fioroni and conducted by Mainz GMD Gabriel Venzago.
> Further information on Work: Der Chronoplan
Image: Staatstheater Mainz with Tim-Lukas Reuter (© Andreas Etter)