THE ETERNAL ROAD: AN ENCOUNTER WITH THE PAST
Ergo Media. Directed by Ron Frank, with music composed by Kurt Weill and arranged and performed by Paul Lehrman. Executive Producer Paul L. Newman; Producers David M. Barsky and Rhyllis Lazar. 2000. Running time 57 minutes.
''The Eternal Road: An Encounter With the Past'' tells of an epic musical drama about the history and plight of the Jews, which was written in Europe in 1934 and performed in New York in 1937, but not heard again until 1999. With Hitler in power and German Jews in flight, the Austrian producer Max Reinhardt, himself expelled from Germany, put together a musical pageant about the Jewish experience from the days of Abraham. The Austrian writer Franz Werfel was recruited for the libretto. Kurt Weill, who had escaped across the French border one step ahead of the Gestapo, agreed to do the music. The authors had to flee to America before they could see their work produced.
''The Eternal Road,'' which begins with a 1930's Jewish congregation trapped inside its synagogue, recounts biblical stories of persecution and follows the group into exile. The opera was a huge hit on Broadway, but its elaborate staging and hundreds of extras cost so much that after 152 sold-out performances, the producers went bankrupt.
The city of Chemnitz, in the former East Germany, was preparing to stage the European premiere of ''The Eternal Road'' at the same time that director Ron Frank arrived with his father, Erwin, himself a Chemnitz refugee, who was invited back to his hometown for the first time in over 60 years. Combining the history of Chemnitz and the Frank family with scenes from the revival of the opera, the documentary deftly alternates from the present to the past. -- The New York Times
