Brian Ferneyhough has written an opera entitled Shadowtime, about the death of Walter Benjamin. It had its premiere in Munich in late May. The libretto is by the avant-garde poet Charles Bernstein, and, needless to say, it is something other than a realistic narrative of the tragic last days of the author of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Instead, we get an intellectual fantasia showing Benjamin in conversation with Friedrich Hölderlin, Pope Pius XII, the two-headed figure of Karl and Groucho Marx, and Adolf Hitler, among others. One passage consists simply of a series of anagrams of Benjamin’s name:
I'm a lent barn Jew
A mint bran jewel
A barn Jew melt in
A rent Jew in balm
A Jew lamb intern
Brain mantle Jew
Brain mental Jew
I studied the reviews, which are linked on Charles Bernstein’s site, and could find no mention of a singing part for Adorno. A disappointment. The opera comes to the Lincoln Center Festival next summer.
