Opera in German - German Opera Since 1945

German Opera Since 1945

Composers writing after World War II had to find a way of coming to terms with the destruction caused by the Third Reich. The modernism of Schoenberg and Berg proved attractive to young composers, since their works had been banned by the Nazis and were free of any taint of the former regime. Bernd Alois Zimmermann looked to the example of Berg's Wozzeck for his only opera Die Soldaten (1965), and Aribert Reimann continued the tradition of expressionism with his Shakespearean Lear (1978). Perhaps the most versatile and internationally famous post-war German opera composer is Hans Werner Henze, who has produced a series of works which mix Bergian influences with those of Italian composers such as Verdi. Examples of his operas are Boulevard Solitude, The Bassarids (to a libretto by W. H. Auden) and Das verratene Meer. Karlheinz Stockhausen set off in an even more avant-garde direction with his enormous operatic cycle based on the seven days of the week, Licht (1977–). Giselher Klebe created an extensive body of work in the operatic genre based on literary works. Other leading composers still producing operas today include Wolfgang Rihm and Olga Neuwirth.