If you were looking for an opera with a message for the times we live in, a good place to start would be Karl Amadeus Hartmann’s Simplicius Simplicissimus, which has had a belated UK premiere at Sadler’s Wells. Because Simplicius (yes, it’s a mouthful of a title) is a piece about what happens when great power falls into the unworthy hands of thugs and monsters.
First composed in 1934 in Germany, just after Hitler came to office, it’s ostensibly set in the Thirty Years War centuries earlier: a time of devastating turmoil across central Europe. But beneath this camouflage, it’s a portrayal of the Third Reich – which is why it had no chance of an immediate performance, and was never staged until the Second World War was over.
