ABSTRACT
The production of Europeras 1 & 2 is a somewhat curious story. The premiere was scheduled for November 15, 1987, but on November 12 there was a fire which completely gutted the Frankfurt Opera House. The fire was supposedly started by an unemployed East German emigre with a history of arsonist activities, who had apparently broken into the Opera House looking for food. The man later turned himself in to the police, and there was speculation that he was working for a radical political group, although nothing was proved. Cage took his setback in his usual optimistic stride:
I think it shows very clearly that this society is in transition, we hope, to another society in which there won't be that great separation between those who have what they need and those who don't. I haven't seen the man or talked with him, but it seems he must not only have been hungry but somewhat out of his mind. It's not his fault, but the fault of the whole society. The opera in society is an ornament of the lives of the people who have. I don't feel that so much with my work, but with more conventional operas, it's clearly an ornament that has no necessary relation to the 20th century. (Durner 1988, 13)
The production was quickly reassembled, and first performed on December 12, 1987.
