The reception of art in the early years of the German Democratic Republic was governed by two significant factors. The first was the premise that the conditions of state socialism would inevitably yield to a communist utopia. The second was that art would facilitate this evolution by illuminating the seeds for utopian development that already existed both in the GDR and in the Germanic cultural heritage more generally. These axioms came together in Georg Lukács's theory of reflection, which underpinned the Soviet socialist realism that was introduced to East Germany in the wake of World War II. Art, Lukács proclaimed, should provide a depiction "of the subtlety of life, of a richness beyond ordinary experience," through which it can "introduce a new order of things which displaces or modifies the old abstracts." 1 Opera was held to be an ideal art form in this context. Despite concerns in other Marxist quarters about its elitist connotations and escapist tendencies, 2 adherents of socialist realism were convinced of its value for East German society. Characteristic was Walther