It is a Zeitoper, a genre of music theatre which used contemporary settings and characters, satiric plots which often include technology and machinery.

Historically the Zeitoper came to an abrupt end with the Nazi period,[1] and after the war the cultural institutions were perhaps hesitant to return to the lighter, often decadent and comic operas written before the holocaust changed the artistic perspective.

[2] In early March 1927, the German Chamber Music Festival in Baden-Baden contacted Weill about having a piece ready for that July; he presented this idea to Kaiser.

It quickly became clear that this piece would be too large for that festival (both in length and in the size of the orchestra it would require); Weill would eventually bring the Mahagonny-Songspiel there instead.

Plans for its performance in the Soviet Union fell through for ideological reasons – above all, said an adviser for Moscow State Opera, because the hero "adopts no firm political stance".

A new translation by Leo Doulton, with research by Michael Berkowitz, professor of Jewish history at UCL, is reported to cast new light on the reasons for the work's suppression by Nazi Germany and to set the opera in its proper context.

Angèle (the proprietress) and her male assistants, one of them a boy, have little work to do, but a telephone-call brings news that the Tsar wishes to have his photograph taken.

She manages to avoid being accidentally shot by the Tsar, and is finally about to press the bulb to shoot him when the equerry re-appears to report that the police have followed some assassins to the studio.

The gun is removed from the camera, and the Tsar, though dismayed that the real Angèle is not as attractive as the false one, finally, as the chorus again says, "has his photograph taken".

Mario Carlin, Marcello Cortis, Ugo Trama, Antonio Pietrini, Adelio Zagonara, Robert Amis El Hage.