The unlikely and melodramatic operatic telling of Angela Merkel's story, from East German pastor's daughter to the highest-ranking female politician in German history, is spicing up a dull election campaign, writes Derek Scally
Opera heroines have it hard. Aida is buried alive, Norma is burned alive and Elektra drops dead. Now the tragic heroine roll-call has a new entry: Angela Merkel, a German conservative politician who is as likely an opera heroine as Mary Harney.
If life really imitated art, Merkel, leader of Germany's Christian Democrats, would now be on trial for murder. After all, she shot her political nemesis at point blank range in front of hundreds of onlookers last week.
But it was just the dramatic finale of Angela - A National Opera, a new production by Berlin's Neuköllner Opera company. Edmund Stoiber, the conservative prime minister of Bavaria, survived the fictional shooting and in reality stands a good chance of being Germany's next chancellor by the end of the month.
And the melodramatic telling of Merkel's story, from East German pastor's daughter to the highest-ranking female politician in German history, has added spice to a dull election campaign.
Director Robert Lehmeier says Merkel's life follows the classic path of all opera heroines: success, tragedy and failure. "Angela Merkel throws up many riddles. She has a pronounced power instinct, which is yet somehow brittle," he says.
His inspiration for the opera was The Coronation of Poppea, written by Claudio Monteverdi in 1642, about a beautiful woman who schemes her way to become empress of ancient Rome. The score of Angela, by Frank Schwemmer, is a nervous, jarring work that lurches from cabaret numbers to jazz via modern atonal. Librettist Michael Frowin uses short, episodic scenes to document Merkel's decade-long struggle in German politics, almost exclusively the realm of middle-aged, West German men who studied law.
Soprano Kathrin Unger gives a strong performance as Angela Merkel, playing a high-strung, nervous woman aware that she is still an East German scientist at heart, more at home with scientific theories of Brownian Motion than Machiavelli's political strategies. "She is young, she is a woman, and she is an East German," sings a Greek chorus early on in the opera. "She was always an outsider."
She was born Angela Dorothea Kasner in Hamburg in July, 1954, but grew up in East Germany after her father, a pastor, decided to move back to the family parish.
She studied physics at university and earned a doctorate in 1986 but she swapped physics for politics in 1989 and was elected in East Germany's first and last free elections in 1990.
She joined the Christian Democrats (CDU) and emerged from political obscurity in 1991 when she was hand-picked by Helmut Kohl, who called her "my little girl", to serve in his cabinet. But when Kohl was implicated in an illegal fundraising scandal that overwhelmed the Christian Democrats, Merkel was the first to turn on her mentor.
She condemned him and his anonymous donors and took a gamble by marketing herself as a representative of a new generation, untouched by the scandal. The gamble paid off and she became party leader two years ago, one of the most unlikely turn of events in recent German politics.
Her tale, as recounted in the episodic opera, ends with a crucial meeting last March with Edmund Stoiber, leader of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), the smaller sister party of the CDU.
Both Merkel and Stoiber were anxious to run against Gerhard Schröder as the conservative candidate in the general election, but at the last minute Merkel stepped aside. But opera heroines never bow out quietly, so librettist Michael Frowin uses artistic licence to let his Merkel shoot her colourless rival.
But Stoiber survives and the message is clear: passionate and idealistic Angela has no chance against the political technocrat from Bavaria.
The opera is enjoying a sell-out run and critics have praised the libretto that takes irreverent swipes at the political scene in a way Berlin hasn't seen since the cabarets of the 1920s.
The libretto is also littered with jokes that make for welcome comic relief from what has so far been a humourless election campaign. The heroine's haircut - an overly severe bob - becomes the butt of one joke when a character asks: "What profession has Angela Merkel's hairdresser?"
Merkel, a self-professed fan of Richard Wagner, has been too busy on the campaign trail to attend a performance. But the rumour is that she will attend as a publicity stunt days before polling day to drum up support.
THE opera has its last performance on election day, September 22nd. Its future after that is unclear but it is unlikely to have a long life as it is overtaken by real life events. As it stands, the material is overshadowed by the setting: the opera is being staged in a half-finished subway station 20 metres below the Reichstag and the new chancellery in Berlin's government quarter.
The echoing concrete tunnels under the corridors of power are a perfect place to dramatise the backroom intrigues and power struggles that have gripped Germany's conservatives since losing power four years ago.
Angela provides few deep insights into the character of Germany's leading female politician, but it is a pleasant surprise to see that even the earnest world of German politics can be made interesting if it doesn't take itself so seriously.
One audience member, a self-professed fan of Schröder, left the opera disappointed last week. "If this is supposed to be a real opera, I think Angela should turn the gun on herself."