Aus vor dem Applaus

Lucia Albaretti, an ageing opera diva, is frantic: she is sitting in the dressing room, but the dagger she needs for her key scene is missing! Her dresser, Mrs Mussolini, must have forgotten to lay it out. Lucia’s young colleague Renata Svevo storms into the dressing room: she is suffering from acute love sickness as Giovanni, her beloved, is cheating on her with a hairdresser and, to make matters worse, wishes to meet her in her dressing room after the performance. Lucia advises her to change in her own – Lucia’s – dressing room and to leave a letter for Giovanni announcing the end of their relationship. Giovanni finds the letter, presents the flowers intended for Renata to Lucia, confesses his admiration for her, embraces her passionately and is then stabbed by Renata with the dagger which was thought to have been lost. Lucia sends Renata to her last entrance on stage and then stabs herself.
Karsten Schälicke and Hans Peter Müller-Kieling succeed in presenting this theatrical tale with its gruesome events related in carefree serenity and casual parlando in only 20 minutes. This musical sketch does not aim to display profundity; it achieves its effect through the juxtaposition of theatrically exaggerated high drama and the undisguised pleasure in bizarre entanglements.