She dies at the stake but inspires a composer
How Dare the Angel Sing
Grete’s Spirit seventy years later is pulled to contemporary San Francisco where Eugen’s elderly granddaughter Jan discovers his opera score in family storage. Grete follows the score back to Germany where the beauty of Eugen’s music amazes opera artists. Plus, Eugen’s and Grete’s parallel fates hit them hard emotionally since political bigotry is resurging in Europe and the USA.
Grete’s Spirit sees 150 artists premiere the opera at Theater Magdeburg in Germany in 2022. Audiences rise in ovations for this triumph of art over mass hatred and fear. Artists praise Eugen’s music and describe the tragedy of bigotry, past and present. Grete’s Spirit watches, mixing sorrow with joy, and weeps.
The opera wins Germany’s highest opera recording award in 2024.
In 1600s Protestant Germany, lives young Grete Minde an independent-minded woman born of a Spanish Catholic mother and Protestant burgher. After they die she faces discrimination. She runs away from home with a lover, joins a traveling theater troupe, returns home with her infant and, destitute, seeks her small inheritance. Her step-brother and town council deny her. She is an outcast. After a town fire, authorities falsely accuse Grete of arson, arrest her, force a confession and unjustly execute her at the stake. But as she dies she craves acceptance so deeply her Spirit lives on, determined to be understood.
Through the centuries, however, Grete’s Spirit sees men both condemn and romanticize her reputation.
Grete’s Spirit discovers Eugen Engel (means “Angel” in German) in 1920s Berlin composing an opera about her. His gorgeous music, expressing her life’s joys and sorrows, moves her. Eugen is Jewish, a self-taught musician, a fabric tradesman by day. Though his family flees the Nazis in 1933, he remains, a proud German, determined to find a theater to perform his opera and be recognized in Berlin’s musical community, in vain. Eugen sees Nazi persecutions but waits until 1939 to flee to Amsterdam. The Nazis capture and murder him in a death camp. His opera seems lost. Grete’s Spirit grieves.