by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, August 22, 2005.
A friend once borrowed a history of opera from the
library, only to find that every other page had been marked up by one
of those hyper-punctuating annotators who stalk the pages of library
books around the world. Whether the topic was Monteverdi, Wagner, or
Gilbert and Sullivan, the voice in the margins kept returning to one
agonized, enigmatic question: “WHAT ABOUT SCHREKER???”
My friend, who understandably knew little of the Austrian opera
composer Franz Schreker (1878-1934), began to use that graphite cri de
coeur as shorthand for the cult of obscure art, which sees repertories
and canons as conspiracies against neglected genius. Any gathering of
aesthetes will sooner or later have a “What about Schreker?” moment.
It's a good question, though. Schreker was better on his best days than most
great composers are on their off days, which is why canons of genius
are suspect. A child of fin-de-siècle Vienna, he delighted in the
traumas of hypersensitive artist types, capturing them inside a
glistening spiderweb of orchestral sound. At the height of his career,
around 1920, he was anything but obscure: his operas were staged in all
the major German and Austrian houses, and he became the director of the
prestigious Hochschule für Musik, in Berlin. There were various reasons
for his subsequent decline: he grew less sure of himself as he passed
the age of forty; the ever-changing stylistic trends of the Jazz Age
left him bewildered; he was of partly Jewish descent, which meant that
after the Nazi takeover of 1933 he could no longer earn a living. He
tried to learn English, in preparation for possibly emigrating to
America. “Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin,” he wrote in his
notebook. But he did not get the chance, dying, literally and
figuratively, of a broken heart.
An attempt at
resuscitation is under way. Schreker's operas are sidling back into the
repertories of Central European opera houses. This summer, the Salzburg
Festival mounted a beautifully disturbing production of “Die
Gezeichneten,” or “The Branded,” which, between 1918 and 1930, played
in twenty-two cities, and then went unheard for decades. Nazism
consigned Schreker to obscurity; now German-speaking opera lovers seem
determined to make amends. Heinz Fischer, the President of Austria, who
is trying to quell yet more antiSemitic noises from the country's far
right, made a point of attending “Die Gezeichneten” and visiting an
exhibition of Schrekeriana which the Jewish Museum of Vienna had put
together. But it's tricky to frame Schreker as a virtuous victim of
history. Nikolaus Lehnhoff, who directed “Die Gezeichneten,” rightly
perceives that there is something dangerous and strange at the heart of
Schreker's music, an unstable, implosive energy, which guarantees that
it will have an uneasy future.
Schreker
had sharp features, a high forehead, and incisive eyes. He looked a
little like Mahler, which may explain why Alma Mahler had an affair
with him after her husband's death. His father was a portrait
photographer for the European aristocracy; his mother came from an old
Austrian Catholic family. He was one of the few young composers of his
generation who refused to be overwhelmed by Richard Wagner, paying heed
instead to international contemporaries, notably Debussy, Puccini, and
Paul Dukas, whose opera “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” is another hidden gem
of the fin de siècle. (New York City Opera will revive it this fall.)
Schreker's first major opera, “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”),
first heard in 1912, stood out from myth-based, swords-and-sorcery
operas of the period, because it was set in the present day, in the
salons and cafés of the bourgeoisie. An ambitious young composer goes
in search of a “distant sound,” turning away from the woman who loves
him. She descends into the dregs of society, not unlike Wedekind's
Lulu, and only when it is too late does the artist realize his error.
From
the start Schreker had an urge to make art about art, to show the
exhilarating possibilities and creeping dangers of the creative path.
In “The Music Box and the Princess,” a wandering youth summons magic
sounds with his flute. In “The Singing Devil,” an organ builder creates
a wondrous instrument that is supposed to bring peace, but falls into
the hands of an evil fanatic. In “Der Schatzgräber,” a musician uses an
enchanted lute to locate buried treasure. In “Irrelohe,” an itinerant
fiddler sets fire to the countryside wherever he goes. And in
“Christophorus,” the strongest opera of his later years, a wise old
composer oversees a quarrelsome posse of students, one of whom is a
Schoenberg-like fanatic who “writes linearly.”
Schreker
wrote his own librettos, mobilizing naturalistic devices that hadn't
been used in German opera before. Freudian dream journals mix with
slangy chitchat; one scene melts into another with cinematic ease.
There are fascinating effects of distancing: often, a character will
sing in elegant phrases about something horrible—in “Ge-zeichneten,”
the soprano lingers lovingly on the word Hässlichkeit,
or “ugliness”—while attempts at wholesome passion are undercut by
dissonance. The music vacillates between melodies of Mediterranean
grace and textures of otherworldly complexity. Schreker never abandoned
tonality, but he made the triad a nucleus around which extra notes move
in flickering orbits. Periodically, his late-Romantic orchestra
dematerializes: heavy instruments recede, and chiming tones of harp,
xylophone, and celesta (the sound of Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum Fairy)
take over. One minute, you are standing on solid ground; the next, you
are dancing on mist.
Anything but a Romantic reactionary,
Schreker was nevertheless seen as a throwback in the foxtrotting
nineteen-twenties. The fashion was for hard, dry sound; he could not
let go of his gossamer textures. A brilliant teacher, he watched sadly
as his own students disavowed him. He got a secret revenge in
“Christophorus,” which was too far-out and meta-operatic to be
performed in the composer's lifetime. (The Kiel Opera has made a good
recording for the CPO label.) Master Johann's star students are
Christoph, a strutting prodigy beloved of the critics, and Anselm, an
ambivalent, watchful youth. Christoph ends up a murderer, a drug
addict, a disciple of brute strength. Anselm finds virtue in truth,
simplicity, “female weakness”—everything that Germany was preparing to
reject.
If
“Der Ferne Klang” is Schreker's most inspired work—the Venetian party
scene in Act II, with its layering of choruses, Gypsy bands, and
singing gondoliers, is worthy of “Don Giovanni”—“Die Gezeichneten” is
the one that takes you by the throat. The plot, which Schreker
initially concocted for his RomanticImpressionist colleague Alexander
Zemlinsky, sets up a love triangle among three habitués of Renaissance
Genoa: Alviano, a hunchbacked aesthete, who builds an island utopia
called Elysium; Count Tamare, handsome and heartless, who, with
fellow-squires, converts Elysium into a hotbed of sexual depravity,
taking the daughters of Genoa's merchant class as victims; and
Carlotta, a diffident painter, who falls in love with Alviano, or at
least the idea of him, only to give in to Tamare's advances. The
Schreker scholar Gösta Neuwirth has found that the scenario contains
various cunning portraits of fin-de-siècle personalities. Alviano
resembles the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, who built a gay
pleasure den in a grotto on Capri. Tamare seems to have been based on
Tamara von Hervay, an accused bigamist and witch. And Carlotta, who
rightly fears that sex would kill her, is probably a stand-in for the
perpetually keening Zemlinsky, as well as for the less sentimental
Schoenberg, who painted in his spare time. The libretto supplies a
description of Carlotta's painting of a glowing hand: it precisely
resembles one of Schoenberg's pictures. The transposition of gender
roles is typical of Schreker's devious psychology.
The
music, too, is full of deceptive surfaces and tricky allusions. It is
itself a kind of magic grotto, designed to lure the unsuspecting ear. A
splashy, hummable melody linked with Tamare functions like “La donna è
mobile,” the ditty that the Duke sings in Verdi's “Rigoletto”; it is
the charming face of a vicious man. A complementary melody, wavering
between major and minor, represents Carlotta's moody yearning. It
collapses in on itself as the opera goes on, until it becomes nothing
more than a D-major triad superimposed on D-minor: a clotted, shivering
mass. These unearthly sounds appear in conjunction with a finale of
shameless melodrama. Some twists are predictable—Alviano kills Tamare
in a rage—and some are not. When Carlotta, nearly dead in the wake of a
rough night with Tamare, looks up to see Alviano, there is no tearful
reconciliation. Instead, she screams, “Away, away! A troll!” Alviano
goes mad. Curtain.
Lehnhoff, in his production, takes
Schreker's sadistic manipulations a step further. In the first two
acts, an austere, ominous landscape unfolds: characters crawl over the
surface of a gigantic broken statue, which makes for a dramatic sight
amid Salzburg's rock-hewn Felsenreitschule stage. In Act III, we enter
Elysium, which here becomes a mechanical sexual ritual, not unlike the
boring orgies in Pasolini's “Salò” and Kubrick's “Eyes Wide Shut.” In
Lehnhoff's vision, the girls who have been abducted into Elysium are
not teen-agers but mere children, and they are not only raped but
murdered. It is a grisly tableau out of Egon Schiele or Otto Dix.
European opera stages are full of such unspeakable acts nowadays, and
they usually have no dramatic point. Lehnhoff, who in other productions
has proved anything but a sensationalist, knows what he is doing: he is
following to the logical extreme Schreker's cultivated understanding of
the worst in human nature.
The musicologist Christopher
Hailey, who has long campaigned for a Schreker revival, observes that
the operas work best if they are done in the highest possible style.
The Salzburg performance, despite a series of awkward cuts, came close
to the ideal. Kent Nagano conducted the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester
of Berlin, applying the same priestly devotion to Schreker that he
brings to Mahler and Messiaen. Robert Brubaker sang the taxing role of
Alviano with unflagging intensity, perhaps missing some lyric nuance
along the way. Michael Volle was a charismatic and brutal Tamare. Above
all, Anne Schwanewilms was transfixing as Carlotta. With her hotly
expressive stage presence and coolly beautiful soprano voice, she
caught the ambiguities of Carlotta's character and, by extension, all
the fire and ice of Schreker's world.
