Marx's Night at the Opera
Jonathan Dove's Father of Communism opera has its UK premiere in Glasgow
Anti-capitalist aria: Roland Wood (Karl Marx) speechifies, Alasdair Elliott (Engels, seated, left) listens Picture by James Glossop
This was first published in Jan Geisbusch’s German translation on the website of Oper! Magazin. The original English version appears here by kind permission of Oper!’s editor, Dr Ulrich Ruhnke
A comic opera about Karl Marx? The German political thinker as a sixth Marx ‘Brother’? When Jonathan Dove’s twenty-somethingth opera, Marx in London! had its 2018 world premiere at Theater Bonn to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Trier’s most famous - or, according to taste, infamous - son, it wasn’t immediately clear why Dove had designated this work as a comedy. Yet, in a newspaper interview prior to the opening night, the composer told me that Verdi’s Falstaff was his ‘inspiration’ for his operatic Marx. The premiere staging had been designed as a co-production with Scottish Opera, but just over five years have passed during which one suspected that the Glasgow-based company had shelved the idea of a UK premiere. Then, in the middle of 2023, it announced a new production, by the Australian director Stephen Barlow who, since his 2015 Opera Holland Park staging of Dove’s most widely performed opera, Flight, has become the composer’s go-to director. Last summer Barlow scored another success with Dove’s latest opera, Itch at OHP.
Dove’s minimalist style - in contrast to leading US exponents of this kind of opera - leavens musical repetition with a deliciously tongue-in-cheek humour, which I have to confess I find more compelling than most of Philip Glass’s and John Adams’s bio-epics (the latter’s Nixon in China, the exception). For Dove, a big historical figure such as Karl Marx is a relatively unusual operatic subject. His earlier pieces focus on little people - the travellers and refugee in Flight, the heroic youngsters in Itch - but here a political-philosophical giant is disarmingly cut down to size. Dove and his librettist, Charles Hart (best-known for his lyrics for Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s Phantom of the Opera and Aspects of Love), wrote a comedy. Their Scottish interpreters finally deliver one, to delirious acclaim in Glasgow’s Theatre Royal on opening night (February 13).
The Marx family furnitures removed across London with William Morgan (Freddy, left) and Rebecca Bottone (Tussi Marx, right) Picture by James Glossop
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Operalogue to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.