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Cockney for Beginners - Deutsche Oper Berlin

Cockney for Beginners

Christopher White grew up in the East End of London and learned Cockney on the streets – a stroke of luck for Turnage’s GREEK, because the répétiteur was the perfect tutor for our American singers.

Greek / Open-Air auf dem Parkdeck
Oper in zwei Akten Mark-Anthony Turnage; Libretto von Mark-Anthony Turnage und Jonathan Moore nach Steven Berkoffs gleichnamiger Verstragöde aus dem Jahr 1980, basierend auf der Tragödie des Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
Musikalische Leitung: Yi-Chen Lin
Inszenierung: Pınar Karabulut
Mit Dean Murphy, Irene Roberts, Seth Carico, Heidi Stober
Premiere am 27. August 2021

London lore states that only those born within the sound of Bow bells (the bells of St Mary-le-Bow Church in the East End) are entitled to call themselves Cockney. People like my grandmother, for example. As for me, I’m not a hardcore speaker of Cockney, which is a dialect that sprang from local working-class slang in the mid-19th century. Middle-class people using the jargon as an affectation are labelled »Mockney«, an aptly awesome wordplay.

The thing I find most riveting about the jargon is Cockney rhyming slang, a kind of secret linguistic code that arose – perhaps not coincidentally – around the time that the London police force was established. A word gets replaced with a composite term that rhymes with the original word; then, once the term has caught on, the rhyming part of the composite is dropped, leaving a code word that is not understood by non-initiates like the police. Got it? In Turnage’s libretto for GREEK there is an example of it at the end of Act 1, when the protagonist says to a waitress »Let’s have a butcher’s«. What he actually means is »Let’s have a look« and »look« rhymes with »butcher’s hook«. Then »hook« is deleted and we’re left with »butchers« instead of »look«. My gran sometimes spoke in code, although for her it wasn’t a way of thwarting the police but just her having fun with language. And that’s continued to the present day.

At rehearsals we had to work on the singers getting the pronunciation right. There’s the glottal stop, which is when a letter is left out of a word, so »bottle« becomes »bo’e«. Cockney doesn’t have lengthened vowels, so »No« morphs into the diphthong »Nau«. We figured out that the way to sound authentic was to chew something while speaking and relax the jaw. Otherwise they’d end up with an Australian accent. As a native speaker, it comes naturally to me, but I still had to get my head around the actual phonetics. English dialects – and social class - are all about the pronunciation of vowels.

One might assume that Cockney, with its swallowed syllables, hardly lends itself to being sung. In fact the slang has its own musicality, with the words flowing into one another, like in the legato style. I can’t wait to hear the language of the East End of London being spoken on a Berlin stage.

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22
DEC

Advents-Verlosung: Das 22. Fensterchen

On 7 March 2025, the first part of Tobias Kratzer's Strauss trilogy, ARABELLA, celebrates its revival as part of our ‘Richard Strauss in March’ weeks, with Jennifer Davis as Arabella , Heidi Stober as Zdenka/Zdenko, Thomas Johannes Mayer as Mandryka, Daniel O'Hearn as Matteo and, as in the premiere series, Doris Soffel and Albert Pesendorfer as the Waldner couple. Today we are giving away our DVD, which will not be available in shops until 14 February 2025. We would like to express our heartfelt thanks to NAXOS for giving us the very special opportunity to put ARABELLA in our lottery pot for you almost eight weeks before the official sales launch.

In today's Advent Calendar window, we are giving away two DVDs of ARABELLA – a lyrical comedy in three acts by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. If you would like to win one of the two DVDs, please write an e-mail with the subject ‘The 22nd window’ to advent@deutscheoperberlin.de.

Vienna, circa 1860. The financially strapped Count Waldner is lodging with his family in a Viennese hotel. His only path to solvency is for him to secure an advantageous marriage for one of his two daughters – and the family can only afford to present Arabella, the eldest, in the upper circles of society. To conceal the family’s indigence, the parents have raised Zdenka as a boy, dressing her accordingly. Arabella is not short of suitors but has resolved to wait for ‘Mr Right’. When Mandryka, an aristocrat from a distant region, arrives, he and Arabella are instantly smitten. Arabella only asks to be able to bid farewell to her friends and suitors at the Fasching ball that evening. At the ball, Arabella says goodbye to her admirers. There is also the young officer Matteo, with whom Zdenka is secretly in love and with whom she has formed a friendship under the guise of her disguise as a boy. Matteo, however, desires Arabella and is distraught when he realises the hopelessness of his love. Zdenka devises a plan: she fakes a letter from Arabella in which she promises Matteo a night of love together. But instead she wants to wait for him herself in the darkness of the hotel room. Mandryka learns of Arabella's alleged infidelity and goes to the hotel with the ball guests to surprise Arabella in flagrante delicto. Arabella, innocent of this, is initially shocked and saddened by Mandryka’s suspicions but forgives him when the mix-up is revealed for what it is. The two agree to marry, as do Zdenka and Matteo.

Richard Strauss’s orchestral richness and opulence coupled with the period Viennese setting of the work led to ARABELLA being falsely pigeonholed as a light-hearted comedy of errors from its 1933 premiere onwards. In the estimation of Tobias Kratzer, however, who triumphed at the Deutsche Oper with his production of Alexander von Zemlinsky’s THE DWARF, this final collaboration between Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal marks a collision of two world views: the traditional roles of men and women on the one hand – as expressed in Arabella’s famous solo “Und du sollst mein Gebieter sein” – and a modern idea of social interaction on the other – as illustrated by Zdenka with her questioning of gender-based identities. Here, Kratzer turns the spotlight on this disunity between the various character portrayals in ARABELLA and explores these role-specific tensions on a continuum stretching from 19th-century Vienna to the present day. In the category of stage design, Manuel Braun, Jonas Dahl and Rainer Sellmaier were honoured with the renowned German Theatre Award DER FAUST 2023 for this production.

In this recording, under the baton of Sir Donald Runnicles, you will experience Albert Pesendorfer, Doris Soffel, Sara Jakubiak, Elena Tsallagova, Russell Braun, Robert Watson, Thomas Blondelle, Kyle Miller, Tyler Zimmerman, Hye-Young Moon, Lexi Hutton, Jörg Schörner and others, as well as the chorus and orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. The performances on 18 and 23 March 2023 were recorded by rbb Kultur and Naxos for this DVD.

We would like to thank the Naxos label for the great collaboration over the past few years, which documents recordings of DER ZWERG, DAS WUNDER DER HELIANE, FRANCESCA DA RIMINI, DER RING DES NIBELUNGEN, DER SCHATZGRÄBER, DIE MEISTERSINGER VON NÜRNBERG and ANTIKRIST. Richard Strauss' ARABELLA and INTERMEZZO will be released in the course of 2025.



Closing date: 22 December 2024. The winners will be informed by email on 23 December 2024. The DVDs will then be sent by post. There is no right of appeal.