Walter Braunfels: DIE VÖGEL (THE BIRDS)

The work: From ancient comedy to opera tragedy

This postromantic work now returns to the Bayerische Staatsoper almost exactly 100 years after the world premiere of The Birds in the Nationaltheater on 30 November 1920. Together with Franz Schreker and Richard Strauss, Walter Braunfels was one of the most acclaimed German composers of the day, and his opera The Birds enjoyed enormous success in the 1920s. In 1923 Hitler asked Braunfels to compose a party anthem. Braunfels, whose father had already converted from the Jewish faith to Protestantism and he himself had then converted to Catholicism, declined. With the rise of National Socialism, being half Jewish he lost his position as Director of Cologne’s Musikhochschule, and performance of his works ceased. He retreated to Lake Constance, where he survived the Second World War.

The Birds, based on Aristophanes’s ancient comedy, also remained Braunfels’s best known work in the post-war period. Spurred on by the humans Good Hope and Loyal Friend, the birds dare to rise against the gods and establish their own state, their “cloud-cuckoo-land”. A foolhardy undertaking, as it turns out.

Aristophanes wrote the play in the 5th century BC as a sardonic commentary on Athens’s over-ambitious policy of expansion. But with Braunfels the plot takes on another dimension: The comedy becomes a grim tragedy, revealing the disillusioning experiences of World War One. Zeus brutally destroys the newly founded state, and the birds are mercilessly silenced. Musically, Braunfels’s fairy-tale opera is rooted in romanticism – it is rich in melodies and onomatopoeia and invokes bird calls as well. Bruno Walter, the world premiere’s conductor, said the opera was, “one of the most interesting novelties of my Munich work period”.