Update, 10/6/23: WCPE announced via its website that, “After careful deliberation, due consideration, and hearing from our supporters, listeners and the public, The Classical Station has decided to broadcast the entire 2023-2024 season of New York Metropolitan Opera.”
Last month, Berlin’s newly-nomadic Komische Oper opened its first season in exile with Hans Werner Henze’s “Das Floß der Medusa.” With the company’s theater scheduled for a multi-year renovation, director Tobias Kratzer turned Hangar 1 of the decommissioned Tempelhof Airport into a massive swimming pool, bookended by 1,600 seats. Based on the 1816 wreck of the Napoleonic warship “Méduse,” which spared the onboard nobility and officers but left nearly 150 enlisted men (and one woman) on a raft for dead, Henze’s secular 1968 oratorio was dedicated to Che Guevara and cited by musicologist Ernst Helmuth Flammer as the catalyst for a renewed debate on the relationship between music and politics. Reviewing the work’s 1969 recording for the New York Times, Theodore Strongin saw things differently: “It’s true that the record jacket bears the dedication, ‘For Che Guevara.’ But there’s very little else in the text or music to arouse political emotions, one way or another.”