The opera had not yet been produced at the time of my San Diego lectures. As a postmortem I may add that I had never anticipated the amount of indignation and anguish that the performance, which eventually took place in Hamburg, caused. One could expect the conservatives to be outraged. but they were just as vociferously joined by the radicals on the Left, although in my opera the ‘people’ were victorious after all, and the Establishment inflicted on my engaged poet the ultimate humiliation: that the last refuge where he could indulge in writing a poem was the men’s room in a police jail, which I thought was a sharp enough accusation. But they were furious because they felt that I was making frivolous fun of the liberation efforts of the Third World and accused me of being sponsored by the CIA.
Krenek, Ernst. Horizons Circled: Reflections on My Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974. Print.