First performed in Duisburg in 1929, Maschinist Hopkins was the work of Austrian composer Max Brand. One of the most popular operas in the later years of the Weimar Republic, it was banned by the Nazis in 1933. Brand - Jewish and a communist sympathiser - fled to the US, and didn't return to Vienna until 1975. Like so many works branded "degenerate" by the Nazis, the piece has languished in comparative obscurity. The BBC broadcast it in 1986; this performance by the Cambridge University Opera Society, was its UK stage premiere.
It's a forceful anti-capitalist parable set in an imaginary America on to which many Weimar artists - Fritz Lang in Metropolis, Brecht and Weill in Mahagonny - projected their own concerns. But rather than envisioning the overthrow of a rotten system, Brand portrays capitalism as a self-perpetuating nightmare. Bill, a foreman, and his mistress Nell murder the latter's husband and take over his factory. Hopkins, a machinist sacked as a result of Bill's strategies, rises from the proletariat to destroy them, only to become morally compromised by his own actions. By the end of the work he has become as inhuman as the machines he operates.
The score lacks the cohesion of a number of operas from the period that urgently await a UK staging - Schulhoff's Flammen, Braunfels's The Birds - but its influence was colossal. Brand's mingling of Schoenbergian serialism and jazz had a major effect on Berg's Lulu. The machines are chillingly anthropomorphic, producing sprechstimme and choral melismas that pre-empt Schoenberg's own music for the voice of God in Moses and Aaron.
Katja Lehmann's production is a messy multimedia effort, hampered by her decision to relocate the work to modern-day London, where Brand's baleful machines have become computers sporting arty screen-savers. But it was conducted with passion by Peter Treagar, and played with panache, if not always accuracy, by the Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra. Diction, though, was nobody's strong point. The opera was sung in English, but the only words I caught during its two-hour course were, "Bloody hell!"
