Man and Boy: Dada is a 2003 opera by Michael Nyman on a libretto by Michael Hastings. It tells the story of a friendship between aging dada artist Kurt Schwitters and a twelve-year-old boy. These two characters and the boy's mother make up the cast of the opera.
It was first performed at the Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe, Germany, March 13, 2004, directed by Robert Tannenbaum. It was then produced by the Almeida Opera, July 15, 17, and 18, 2...
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Man and Boy: Dada is a 2003 opera by Michael Nyman on a libretto by Michael Hastings. It tells the story of a friendship between aging dada artist Kurt Schwitters and a twelve-year-old boy. These two characters and the boy's mother make up the cast of the opera.
It was first performed at the Badisches Staatstheater, Karlsruhe, Germany, March 13, 2004, directed by Robert Tannenbaum. It was then produced by the Almeida Opera, July 15, 17, and 18, 2004, in a production designed by Jeremy Herbert and directed by Lindsay Posner at Almeida Theatre.
The opera features an extensive use of oboe (rare in Nyman's work), mostly in the second act, to capture the feel of post-War popular music, somewhat reminiscent of Dmitri Shostakovich's Suite for Variety Orchestra.
Michael is a young boy on a bus who competes with an old man for bus tickets, which they both collect (as did Nyman as a child). The man turns out to be Kurt Schwitters, a dada artist who escaped Germany, although his wife has been...
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