Chapter 26

Opera in the German-Speaking Countries

THE INFLUENCE of the French musical style made its mark in Germany with Franz Schreker (1878–1934),¹ whose first opera, Der ferne Klang, was composed between 1903 and 1909, though not performed until 1912.² The first notable feature of Schreker’s music is the harmony, which basically is like that of Debussy: seventh and ninth chords as consonant units; free use, singly or in combination, of chromatic alteration, pedal points, and organum-like parallel progressions; and treatment of sensuous effect as an end in itself. But it is the Debussy of L’Après-midi d’un faune and La Mer, rather than of the subdued Pelléas et Mélisande, who is Schreker’s model. His texture is exceedingly full, often having complicated decorative rhythmic motifs within the beat or making use of several separated tone masses (as in the opening of Act II of Der ferne Klang). All this is supported by an orchestration of corresponding richness, in which harps, muted strings and horns, glissandi, tremolos, and similar effects are prominent. The feeling of tone impressions (Klang) in Schreker’s operas is so strong as to lead naturally to a symbolism in which sounds become the embodiment of ideal mystic forces. There are other signs of the late Romantic period as well: occasional Straussian Sturm und Drang in the harmony, reminiscences of Verdi in the melodic line, and traces of Puccini’s declamation and orchestral treatment.

The whole, nevertheless, is not mere patchwork but an original and very effective theatrical style, which made Schreker, during the years of World War I and the decade after, one of the most highly regarded opera composers in Germany.  His librettos (written by him) have been criticized for awkwardness of language and for their preoccupation with sex in exaggerated, pathological forms.   Die Gezeichneten (1918), a Renaissance subject, has this feature to an extreme degree.  Nevertheless, the opera, with its splendid orchestrations, is a musical masterpiece, a monument to the final bloom of Romanticism.  His chief work, Der Schatzgräber (1920), shows a tendency toward more triadic harmony, with much parallelism and a somewhat less complicated texture. The leitmotif system is less prominent here than in his earlier works, and in Irrelohe, it is abandoned altogether.  Meanwhile, Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin, considerably revised in 1920 from the original version of 1913, experimented with pandiatonicism and other new harmonic devices. These operas were extremely popular with the German public and were accorded hundreds of productions with multiple performances.

In marked contrast to the enthusiastic reception accorded Schreker’s early operas, the later ones—Irrelohe (1924), Der singende Teufel (1928), and Der Schmied von Gent (1932)—were staged by his friends and with great reluctance.  Riots organized by the Fascists greeted the premiere of Der Schmied von Gent in Berlin, and the following year the Nazis targeted Schreker because he was a Jew, forcing him to resign his position at the Prussian Academy of Arts. Performances of his music were also banned during the Third Reich.  These incriminating actions were too much for Schreker to bear, and soon thereafter he died of a stroke.  The Nazis had effectively dealt a crushing blow to the career of one who was as popular with the German public as Strauss and who had been publicly acclaimed as a composer “akin to Wagner.”³

While the Wagnerian movement found some echo in Italy, the influence of verismo in turn was felt in Germany.  Its methods are evident in Tiefland by Eugen d’Albert (1864–1932), first produced at Prague in 1903 and the most successful of this composer’s twenty operas.⁴ Tiefland is a brutally realistic drama in an effective musical setting that combines Italian-style recitative with Wagnerian harmonies and recurrent motifs in the manner of Puccini. Another popular veristic opera in Germany was Mona Lisa (1915) by Max von Schillings (1868–1933),⁵ a melodrama and murder against a Renaissance background, framed by a prologue and epilogue in a modern setting.  The music lies strongly under the influence of Puccini in melody and instrumentation and apparently also of early Debussy in the harmony, and there is some tendency toward separate musical numbers instead of the symphonic continuity of Schillings’s earlier operas, although recurring motifs are still present. Another German opera of the realist school was Oberst Chabert (1912) by Wolfgang von Walterschausen (1882–1954).  It is written in a non-melodic declamatory style, with the dramatic situations underlined by rapidly fluctuating harmonies in which the constant alternation of two triads at the interval of an augmented fourth has the effect of a persistently recurring motif.⁶

A CERTAIN ECLECTIC TENDENCY, not unlike that found in Italy, was manifest in German opera of the early twentieth century.  The influences of impressionism and verismo already noted in the work of some German composers were combined with other features inherited from the post-Wagnerian and late Romantic styles.  Representative of a more purely German tradition—though explicitly conservative and romantic—was Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949),⁷ in whose works a musical language deriving fundamentally from Wagner came to be modified by more diatonic melody, asceticism of feeling, long dwelling on mystical, subjective moods, and frequently dissonant, contrapuntal texture with long-breathed melodic lines.  Of Pfitzner’s five operas, Der arme Heinrich (1896) had a pronounced success, surpassed only by that of his masterpiece, the “musical legend” Palestrina (1917).⁸

Palestrina takes place at Rome in 1563, the last year when the Council of Trent was in session. The libretto is based on a version of Giuseppe Baini’s romantic but unfounded story of the way the sixteenth-century composer “rescued” polyphonic church music by composing his Missa Papae Marcelli for the Council of Trent.  It does not require any great penetration to perceive that Pfitzner (who in this one instance was his own librettist) has treated the legend with reference to the role of the artist in society and to his own particular position as defender of the ancient tradition of music against the modernists and Philistines.⁹ This implication, not unrelated to the dramatic idea of Wagner’s Meistersinger, was doubtless responsible in part for the favor Palestrina enjoyed for a time with the German public, a favor that died out after a couple of decades and that, until recently, seldom found any echo in other countries.

The opera requires a large cast of 14 male roles (4 basses, 2 bass-baritones, 3 baritones, 5 tenors), 2 travesty roles (soprano and mezzo-soprano) for the teenage boys, an alto role for Lucrezia (Palestrina’s deceased wife), 3 high sopranos for the voices of angels, and choruses, mainly of mixed voices. The orchestral forces are also large, but throughout the score there is a conscious effort to evoke the chamber-textured style of the sixteenth century, as in the opening prelude (example 26.1) scored for 4 flutes and 4 solo violins. Throughout the opera, Wagnerian principles of leitmotif prevail.

As the curtain rises on the first act, Palestrina is in a room with his pupil, Silla, who begins to play for him a song he has composed in “modern” (monodic) style, after which he expresses his desire to go to Florence in order to free himself from the restrictive conventions of the polyphonic tradition in Rome. Palestrina, however, is not attentive to Silla’s comments; he seems lost in his own thoughts. As Silla resumes his playing, Cardinal Borromeo enters to discuss with Palestrina the impending pronouncement from the Council of Trent that would ban all polyphonic music from the rituals of the church. With Emperor Ferdinand opposing such a view, Borromeo convinces the pope that the matter should be decided by having the council hear a polyphonic setting of the mass. He informs Palestrina that it is his duty to compose this setting; when Palestrina protests, Borromeo abruptly departs. The remainder of this exceptionally lengthy act focuses entirely on Palestrina, who finds himself devoid of inspiration ever since the death of his wife. He wonders why he should continue to create and asks “What for?” In answer to his question, apparitions of departed souls visit him, including that of his wife and some ancient “musical masters,” and they, together with a throng of angels amassed against the full height of the back wall of the stage, not only inspire him to compose the mass but also supply him with the opening Kyrie motif and other musical motifs from the original Missa Papae Marcelli. This and other solo scenes in the opera offer some of Pfitzner’s finest music.

Act II contains the physical action of the drama. Members of the council assemble, and while they are meeting, Palestrina languishes in prison where he has been sent for initially refusing Borromeo’s directive to compose a mass. The council’s discussion of polyphonic music erupts into a brawl among the members’ servants and as the curtain falls, some of the troublemakers are killed by soldiers.

Act III finds Palestrina once again in his study. While he was in prison, his hastily written music had been snatched from his home without his consent and performed to great acclaim before the council and the pope. To hail his achievement, a throng of visitors has come to his home, including the pope himself. They pay their respects and depart, leaving Palestrina alone, seated at the portative organ, contemplating the significance of his musical contribution. As the curtain falls, it brings to a close one of the more moving operas of the century.

EXAMPLE 26.1 Palestrina, Prelude

CONTEMPRORY WITH PFITZNERS was the Viennese Alexander von Zemlinsky (1872–1942). Of his six operas produced between 1897 and 1933, the most successful was Es war einmal (1900). Two of his one-act operas had their librettos based on the writings of Oscar Wilde: Eine florentinische Tragödie (1917) is after the author’s work of the same title, and Der Zwerg (1922) is a reworking of Wilde’s novel The Birthday of the Infanta. It has been suggested that the inspiration for Zemlinsky’s Tragödie may have come from the “Renaissance” operas by Schreker, Korngold, and Schillings, while that for Der Zwerg may have originated with Schreker’s ballet pantomime Der Geburtstag der Infantin, which was staged in 1908. Zemlinsky actually engaged Schreker to provide a libretto based on Der Gebutstag der Infantin, but when the work was completed, Schreker decided to set the libretto himself under the title Die Gezeichneten. Zemlinsky seemed obsessed with the idea of writing an opera based on Wilde’s novel, and therefore had another libretto written for him. The title, Der Zwerg, left no doubt as to the nature of the principal protagonist: he is indeed a dwarf. Zemlinsky was himself very small in stature, a fact noted by Alma Mahler, who is said to have described him as “a horrible dwarf.”

In addition to his own works for the stage, Zemlinsky’s influence has also been felt through the work of two of his distinguished pupils, Arnold Schoenberg (who will be discussed later) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897–1957). As a conductor, Zemlinsky was also directly involved with bringing new operas to the stage. For example, he conducted the premiere of Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf in 1927 and the Berlin premiere of Weill’s Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in 1931.

Korngold, like so many of his contemporaries of the 1930s, began his career in Europe and ended it in the United States. In the period before his emigration in 1934, he had gained international recognition for his productions of a pantomime, Der Schneemann (1910); two one-act operas that were performed as a double bill in 1916, Der Ring des Polykrates and Violanta; his highly successful three-act opera, Die tote Stadt (1920), for which he and his father, Julius Korngold, were co-librettists; and Der Wunder der Heliane (1927), written in a late Romantic style, with lyrical melodies, soaring vocal lines, and exceptionally well-wrought orchestration.¹⁰ Another Viennese composer of this generation was Franz Schmidt (1874–1939), a pupil of Bruckner and esteemed in Austria as a symphonist, who had some success with Notre Dame (composed 1902–4, staged 1914), the first of his two operas.

A solitary and enigmatic figure in music of the early twentieth century was Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924).¹¹ Of mixed German and Italian ancestry, one of the foremost concert pianists of his day, a scholar and philosopher, he reminds one of an artist of the Renaissance in the breadth of his outlook. His aesthetic views, which involved rejection of Wagner and adherence to operatic ideals of Mozart, made him an important early protagonist of the neoclassical movement.¹² Busoni’s Die Brautwahl (1912), the first opera that he completed with its requisite orchestration, revived the classical principle of closed vocal forms and instrumental numbers, though the libretto and music still retained many Romantic traits. This comedy was followed by Arlecchino and Turandot (subtitled Chineisches Fabel); both were first performed on the same 1917 program. Arlecchino is an ironical comedy in one act, making use of the old commedia dell’arte masks and including some spoken dialogue. Turandot is also a comedy; it is in two acts and was arranged from Busoni’s earlier incidental music to Gozzi’s play of the same title.¹³ In both of these operas, Busoni sought to revive the Italian opera buffa tradition of the eighteenth century, albeit with librettos that were in German.

Doktor Faust, completed by Busoni’s disciple Philipp Jarnach and produced posthumously at Dresden in 1925, is the composer’s principal opera and one of the most significant musical treatments given to this subject.¹⁴ Busoni (here, as always, his own librettist) was influenced not only by Goethe’s Faust but also by earlier versions of the story, beginning with the sixteenth-century legend of the astronomer and necromancer Dr. Johannes Faust, and continuing with versions by Marlowe and Lessing, as well as those of early puppet plays. He adapted them to his own mystical and symbolical intentions of sacrifice and rebirth. In Busoni’s retelling of the story, Faust is visited by three students who present him with a book of magic. Using the information in this book, he is able to enlist the aid of Mephistopheles, the Devil’s emissary, in exchange for his soul. Once that is accomplished, he appears at the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Parma on the pretense of entertaining the guests with feats of magic. In the course of the evening’s entertainment, Faust seduces the Duchess of Parma and then abandons her and her newborn child. In his subsequent encounter with the Duchess, now transformed into a beggar woman, he is handed a dead child, their child. In order to give life to his son, he must sacrifice his own life. The opera concludes with Faust’s spirit entering the child’s body and emerging from it, transformed into a young man.

Before the first scene of the opera unfolds, it is preceded by a symphonic prelude, a spoken narration, a prologue, and an intermezzo—all of which recall the manner in which Goethe begins his retelling of the Faust legend. Busoni’s score is cast in large musical forms, skillfully using both conventional set numbers and complex polyphony,¹⁵ the whole worked out with uncompromising idealism and making exceptional demands on an audience’s attention. It may be true, as Dent has said, that “one cannot apply to Doctor Faust the ordinary standards of operatic criticism. It moves on a plane of spiritual experience far beyond that of even the greatest of musical works for the stage.”¹⁶ Nevertheless, like many another high plane of “spiritual experience,” this one can sometimes be dull for outsiders. Despite moments of dramatic force and musical beauty, the general style of Doktor Faust is so compressed, so complex in both its dramatic and harmonic implications, and so rooted fundamentally in the late German Romantic sound-world that the opera is unlikely to become part of the standard repertoire.¹⁷

WE HAVE TRACED HITHERTO the different movements in Germany that may be understood as being, in one way or another, attempts to break away from the potent spell of Wagner: in the fairy-tale opera by the choice of a different kind of subject matter while retaining to varying degrees the Wagnerian idiom, the technique of leitmotifs, and the general idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk; in the Volksoper by radical simplicity of both subject matter and music; in the “realistic” operas of D’Albert and others by returning to dramas of uncomplicated human passion without metaphysical implications in a musical style influenced by the methods of Italian verismo; and in the operas of some other composers (notably Schreker) by infusing into the Wagnerian form some of the methods of French impressionism. After the first decade of the twentieth century, a rather general anti-Romantic tendency emerged, evidenced by changing ideals as to both the form and the content of opera: in form, a movement of return to the eighteenth-century principle of separate musical numbers, with the device of recurring motifs playing only a subordinate role (as in the later works of Schillings, Pfitzner, and Schreker); in content, by a return to purely human drama—historical or other—and a musical idiom emphasizing melody, clarity of texture, basically diatonic harmony, and formal structure governed by purely musical principles. This general neo-classical tendency was of course subject to all sorts of exceptions and modifications in individual cases, and after 1920 it found itself in competition with more radical movements, which will be described below; nevertheless, it persisted well into the twentieth century. Its chief representative is Richard Strauss, whose work is an epitome of the movement from post-Wagner to anti-Wagner in Germany.¹⁸

Strauss

Richard Strauss (1864–1949) had already produced two operas—Guntram (1894) and Feuersnot (1901)¹⁹—and most of his symphonic poems before he attracted the horrified attention of the entire operatic world with Salome in 1905, which had its premiere at Dresden. Oscar Wilde’s drama, originally written in French, translated into German by Hedwig Lachmann, and then considerably compressed and revised by Strauss himself, formed the libretto. Its peculiar atmosphere of oriental, sensuous, decadent luxuriance was perfectly captured in the music, which describes the necrophiliac ecstasy of Salome as vividly as Wagner had once described the agonies of the suffering Amfortas. The final scene of Salome was one of the first—perhaps the very first—in which the suggestive power of music had been successfully applied to such a subject, yet it is only one instance of Strauss’s amazing skill in musical characterization.

Formally, Salome is in the Wagnerian style: the orchestra is dominant; the music is continuous throughout the one act; there is a system of leitmotifs; the texture is uniformly thick and polyphonic; the rhythms are nonperiodic; and the voice parts are mostly of an arioso character. Strauss’s mastery of orchestral effect, the individuality and variety of his instrumental coloring, are as evident in the operas as in the symphonic poems. His harmony, which sounded so daring and dissonant at the turn of the century, is no longer novel, but just for this reason we can now better appreciate how appropriate it is for the dramatic purposes. Technically it may be regarded as a continuation of Wagner, with progressions generally conditioned by chromatic voice leading but less bound up with Romantic expressiveness, more remote and sudden in its modulations, and much more dissonant. It is a kind of harmony that assumes a familiarity with Wagner on the listener’s part and that, as it were, telescopes the characteristic Wagner progressions in a manner analogous to the treatment of a fugue subject in stretto. (We have already noticed a similar evolution from the Verdi melodic style in Puccini’s operas.) The melodies in Salome are of two sorts: either declamatory, with many unusual intervals rising out of the harmonic progressions, or else long-sustained, impassioned outpourings, marked by a very wide range and wide leaps. Strauss managed to combine the characteristics of the music-drama with the striking dramatic quality of Italian verismo and also to introduce some features of grand opera (for example, the “Dance of the Seven Veils”).

The characteristics of Salome are pushed even further in Elektra (1909), the opera with which Strauss began a lifelong association with the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal’s Elektra, a version of Sophocles’s Electra, was first performed at Berlin in 1903. Revivals included several performances at Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in 1905, one of which was attended by Strauss, who then decided to transform Hofmannsthal’s play into a libretto suitable for his next opera. By the time he and the playwright actually had an occasion to meet, Strauss had already started the process, cutting a considerable portion of the original play.²⁰ The two men corresponded throughout the gestation of the opera, but only when a few extra lines were needed for the “Recognition Scene” did Hofmannsthal become an active collaborator, his newly created eight lines constituting the first he contributed as a librettist for the composer.

In Elektra the central passion is the heroine’s insane thirst for vengeance on the murderers of her father. Once that fateful deed is accomplished by Orestes, Elektra breaks into a wildly ecstatic dance, dancing herself to death as the curtain falls. Here again Strauss has matched the somber horrors of the libretto with music of fearful dissonance, lurid melodramatic power, and a harmonic idiom in which for long stretches polytonality is the normal state. Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the score is the contrast between this dissonant idiom and the occasional stretches of lush, late Romantic sentimentality, with cloying sevenths, ninths, chromatic alterations, and suspensions. Whatever the composer’s intentions may have been, these portions give a final dreadful touch of spiritual abnormality to the whole action; they are like something familiar suddenly seen in a ghastly, strange light.

Der Rosenkavalier (1911), a “comedy for music,” was the first libretto that Hofmannsthal wrote specifically for Strauss, and with this opera poet and composer achieved an enduring success not equaled by any of their other joint creations.²¹ This romantic comedy of Viennese life around the time of Maria Theresa—the mid-eighteenth century—forms a perfect libretto, with humor, farce, sentiment, swiftly moving action, variety of scenes, and superb characterizations. The music is as varied as the drama. In some portions it is no less complex (though considerably less dissonant) than that of Salome and Elektra. The erotic quality of the love music in the first part of Act I is equal to Strauss’s best in this vein. For the most part, however, the style of Der Rosenkavalier is simpler and more tuneful than that of his earlier operas. The famous waltzes are anachronistic; the waltzes of Schubert, Lanner, and Johann Strauss, which these imitate, were not, of course, a feature of eighteenth-century Vienna. But this is of little importance, and it is still less important that Strauss has seen fit to decorate the waltz themes with some of his own harmonic twists.

The best musical characterizations are those of the Princess, a figure of mingled humor, wisdom, and pathos, and her country cousin, Baron Ochs, a type of comic boor drawn, at Strauss’s insistence, rather more coarsely than Hofmannsthal would have preferred. Sophie and Octavian, the young lovers, are by comparison colorless; their music is that of situations and sentiment rather than of personalities, and any possible realism in their relationship is prevented by making Octavian’s part a Hosenrolle, a “trouser role”—that is, a man’s part sung by a woman, like Mozart’s Cherubino. The scene of their first meeting and the presentation of the silver rose thus moves in an atmosphere of ideal, magical, passionless beauty, unsurpassed anywhere in the whole realm of opera. It is remarkable that here Strauss writes in an almost purely diatonic idiom, even emphasizing the triads by outlining them in the melodies; one of the composer’s happiest inspirations, the theme of the silver rose (high, dissonant appoggiatura triads with celesta, flutes, harps, and three solo violins), tinkles against this background.

The ensembles of Der Rosenkavalier are virtuoso creations, particularly the scene of the levee in Act I: a dissolution and at the same time an apotheosis of the eighteenth-century opera buffa ensemble, bringing together all the elements of this form in seeming confusion and yet with a curious illusion of realism; the introduction of a stylized Italian tenor aria, a veritable interpolated number in this scene, is accomplished in the spirit of sporting with the formal technique. The first two-thirds of Act III forms another long ensemble of broad farcical nature with elements of the old Viennese popular theater, laid on musically with a rather heavy hand, but of an irresistible comic dash that can be compared only to the ending of the second act of Die Meistersinger or the finale of Falstaff. After all this hurly-burly follows one of those transformations of mood, which are so characteristic of Der Rosenkavalier. The trio for three soprano voices (Sophie, the Princess, and Octavian) is another superlative number, a melting Baroque-styled texture of long-spun, interweaving lines above simple diatonic harmonies. The long decrescendo continues: the last song is a duet in G major, two strophes of a lyric melody in thirds and sixths, in the style of the old German Singspiel. The themes of the silver rose and the lovers’ first meeting sound once more. The opera closes with a pantomime of the Princess’s little pageboy, to the same music that was heard at his first appearance near the beginning of Act I. This masterly finale was largely shaped by Strauss’s demands. Hofmannsthal at one time feared it would be feeble in effect, but Strauss wrote: “It is at the conclusion that a musician, if he has any ideas at all, can achieve his best and supreme effects—so you may safely leave this for me to judge … from the Baron’s exit onwards, I’ll guarantee that, provided you undertake to guarantee the rest of the work.”²²

Der Rosenkavalier was hardly finished before Strauss and Hofmannsthal were at work on their next collaborative effort, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), designed as a pendant to a German version of Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This one-act piece is a profoundly poetic, sensitive treatment of the myth of Ariadne and Bacchus, in form and spirit suggesting the pastorales and ballets of Lully and Molière, which were likewise usually enclosed within a comedy;²³ and like those models, it introduces comic-satirical elements through personages borrowed from the Italian commedia dell’arte. Strauss’s music continues the trend toward diatonicism and simplicity evident in Der Rosenkavalier; harmonically, it starts from the point that the composer had reached in the silver-rose scene of the earlier opera and becomes progressively less and less chromatic. The trio in scene iii for three sopranos is similar to the trio in the last act of Der Rosenkavalier and is likewise followed by a simple folk-like song. A new element is the light, swift, parlando style of the comic scenes and of the prologue, which was added in 1916, when Ariadne was taken out of its original setting in the Molière play.²⁴ In this prologue, a comedy and an opera seria are being prepared for palace entertainment. As a timesaving device, the master of the palace orders both works to be performed simultaneously, thereby avoiding a delay in the fireworks display that is to conclude the festivities. Thus unfolds before the audience a combined comic-tragic spectacle. One especially difficult role, that of Zerbinetta, is written for a high coloratura soprano; there is a trouser-role, that of the Composer, for a soprano. The leitmotif technique is used to a slight extent, but the orchestra (only thirty-six players) is subordinated to the voices,²⁵ and there is a distinct tendency toward division into separate numbers. Ariadne auf Naxos was the definitive stage of Strauss’s conversion to a Mozartean style, an intimate opera in which the musical idiom is refined to a more nearly classic purity than in the earlier works.²⁶ From this point on, Strauss remained musically conservative. He had summed up in his own career the transition from Wagnerian music drama to the new anti-Wagnerian opera. But the flame of inspiration no longer burned quite so steadily; moreover, Strauss’s later operas, while no less perfect in construction and technical realization than his earlier ones, fell coldly on the ears of a changed postwar world, a world that could only hear his music as something out of a vanished and irrecoverable past. This historical misfortune has deprived the opera-going public, especially outside Germany, of acquaintance with some works that deserve to be better known.

One of these is Die Frau ohne Schatten, composed during the years of World War I on a libretto by Hofmannsthal based on one of his prose tales, and first performed at Vienna in 1919. Die Frau ohne Schatten is a symbolic drama with a complex score of grandiose proportions, rich in orchestral effects, embodying contrasting musical styles and recurring motifs.²⁷ The title role is portrayed by a beguiling fairy who has been transformed from a gazelle into an empress. To make complete her human identity, the empress must acquire a shadow. Failure to do so within the time limit of three days will bring a curse upon the emperor: he will be turned to stone. Tensions mount throughout the melodrama section (beginning of Act III), as the empress realizes that the only way to escape the curse is to inflict disaster upon a childless couple, the dyer Barak and his wife, whom she has come to love. She refuses this course of action, emphatically declaring: “Ich—will—nicht!” (example 26.2). To her surprise, her decision releases the emperor from his semi-petrified state and restores happiness to Barak and his wife (example 26.3). Strauss concludes the opera in a very subdued manner. In the epilogue, voices rise from different areas of the theater (six solo voices from the orchestra pit; the chorus of unborn children from offstage and from the balconies and aisles), their chorale-like expression hovering in a faint pianissimo above the harmonic support of the organ, harps, celestes, and arpeggiated strings.

EXAMPLE 26.2 Die Frau ohne Schatten, Act III

On a more intimate scale is Intermezzo (1924), a real virtuoso piece for the soprano, on a libretto by the composer in an autobiographical vein reminiscent of his Sinfonia domestica.²⁸ It is a “middle-class comedy with symphonic interludes,” a Zeitoper that mirrors an aspect of bourgeois culture in the early years of the Weimar Republic.²⁹ The story originates from an incident that occurred in the composer’s own marriage: his wife, Pauline, accused him of adultery, the charge growing out of a case of mistaken identity. What Strauss puts on the stage in a cinematic succession of thirteen scenes is a portrait of a family viewed through the mundane events of real life: the checking of a grocery list, the answering of a telephone, playing a game of Skat (the composer’s favorite pastime), having a quarrel with the cook, and dancing (a waltz) at a restaurant. Strauss, in the preface to the score, stresses the importance of the dialogue in this comedy, noting that it offers very few opportunities for the development of a cantilena style. He further calls attention to the fact that the symphonic element is merely hinted at so as not to be an obstacle to the vocal part, thereby allowing the text to be clearly heard if the orchestral dynamics are strictly observed. He further cautions conductors to take special care with all the transitions from the spoken passages to those in recitativo secco and accompagnato.

EXAMPLE 26.3 Die Frau ohne Schatten, Act III

After Die ägyptische Helena (1928; revised, 1933), Strauss and Hofmannsthal turned their attention to Arabella (1933), the last of their collaborations. This “lyrical comedy” is similar in atmosphere and general sound to Der Rosenkavalier, with a plot verging on operetta but handled with delicacy and spontaneous lyric warmth, a happy blending of the composer’s full orchestral sonorities and fine details of chamber music style. The libretto represents a fusion of two previously written works by Hofmannsthal—an unfinished play The Cabby as Count and a short story Lucidor, Characters from an Unwritten Comedy—and in so doing brings into the story elements of local color related to the Vienna of the late eighteenth century, such as the Cabbie’s Ball, which was an annual event during that period of Vienna’s history. The opera is about a young woman waiting for the right man to come into her life; it begins with a scene showing a widow living in a Vienna hotel with her two daughters, one of whom (Lucile) she dresses as a young man (Lucidor), believing that this will increase the other daughter’s (Arabella) chances of marriage. Arabella does indeed meet a man, Mandryka, with whom she falls in love, and in the subplot to this opera one of Arabella’s other suitors is joined in marriage with her sister. Strauss’s conception of this opera required his librettist to provide him with a sufficient number of situations that would translate into set pieces, especially arias, for he firmly believed that “the aria is the soul of opera.” Memorable examples are the arias sung by Arabella and Mandryka in Act I; they also include the love duet in Act II and the final “staircase” duet in Act III.

Die schweigsame Frau (1935), on a libretto by Stefan Zweig after Ben Jonson, is a comedy that has spoken dialogue, recitatives, lyric passages, and many ensembles. It also contains a few musical quotations from older composers (Verdi, Monteverdi, Mozart, Wagner, and Weber) and from Strauss himself. A wealthy old retired admiral, who detests loud noises (because his hearing was damaged), is tricked into a mock wedding with the “silent woman.” Act II contains the “noise” scene, with bells ringing, doors banging, and ammunition exploding. Extremely difficult are the ensembles in this opera, requiring the utmost virtuosity from the cast.

Friedenstag (1938) is an exceptional one-act work in subject, style, and spirit. The libretto, sketched by Zweig and completed by Josef Gregor, decries the horrors of war and promotes a message of peace. This opera, set in the seventeenth century during the Thirty Years War, tells of a fortress under siege, whose commander would rather die than surrender. Before this fateful decision is made, peace is declared and the warring factions embrace, vowing to work toward a more peaceful world. Strauss wanted this opera performed in Germany as a witness to his belief in pacifism and as a statement of resistance to Nazi domination of the arts. He achieved uncensored performances in Nazi Germany by deliberately creating a Wagnerian-style score that gave the impression of being highly nationalistic and politically acceptable. He even included quotations from Martin Luther’s chorale tune “Ein feste Burg,” with one such statement occurring in the stirring finale where love, hope, and peace triumph over the destruction and hatred of armed conflict.³⁰ Josef Gregor also delivered the librettos of Strauss’s next two operas, both on mythological themes: Daphne (1938), a “bucolic tragedy,”³¹ and Die Liebe der Danae, a “merry mythological tale” composed in 1938–40 but not performed until 1952.

Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio (1942), is a one-act “conversation piece for music” on a libretto by Clemens Krauss—“no work for the public, only a fine dish for connoisseurs,” the composer said. With only a pretext of a plot, Capriccio revolves about a discussion (which never reaches a positive conclusion) of certain “theoretical questions of art,” especially the relation of words, music, and staging in opera; yet, for all the lack of dramatic movement, the personages are no mere shadows but fully drawn human characters. The scene is laid in Paris at the time of the Gluck-Piccinni quarrel (see chapter fourteen), which gives Strauss occasion to quote now and then a musical phrase from operas by these two composers. He also quotes a beautiful melody from one of his own compositions, the Krämerspiegel (1918), at the very point in the opera when the countess says that “the theater unveils for us the secrets of reality. In its magic mirror we discover ourselves.”And that same melody (played by strings, harps, and horns) is used again as the countess makes her final “moonlight” entrance.

Capriccio completes a cycle that Ariadne began. Appropriately to its period, the score is of a stylized rococo quality and is held throughout in the mood of chamber music. A full orchestra is required but is used for the most part only in small combinations; the sonority of the string sextet, first heard in the introduction, runs like a thread through the opera. The words are made to come clearly through the polyphonic orchestral texture,³² being conveyed in lifelike dialogue and broadly designed ensembles; the principal aria, a number of central importance in the score, is a lyrical setting of a sonnet translated from Ronsard’s sixteenth-century Continuation des amours (example 26.4). Altogether, Capriccio must be regarded as among the very best of Strauss’s operas, the musical testament of an artist in the matured wisdom of age; in this, as in other respects, Capriccio is a worthy companion to Verdi’s Falstaff.³³

Schoenberg and Berg

In the early part of the twentieth century, the expressionist movement was reflected in opera most clearly in the works of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951)³⁴ and his pupil Alban Berg (1885–1935).³⁵ The first two of Schoenberg’s four operas, Erwartung and Die glückliche Hand, were composed in 1909 and 1913, respectively, though not performed until 1924. Both belong to a period when the composer was intensely involved with Wassily Kandinsky and the Blaue Reiter group of painters. Kandinsky believed in allowing art to express an artist’s inner being, a point made clear in his theoretical treatise of 1911 Über das Geistige in der Kunst: “That is beautiful which is produced by inner need, that which springs from the soul.”³⁶ Both operas call for a large orchestra, usually subdivided so that only a few instruments are playing at any one time, and both are in the dissonant, thick Schoenbergian harmonic style of the pre–World War I period. The voice lines are wide in range, with large, ultra-expressive intervals, occasionally (as in Die glückliche Hand) going over into Sprechgesang (Sprechstimme)—that is, a kind of vocal utterance halfway between speaking and singing, with exactly notated rhythm but only approximately notated pitch. Both dramas are essentially subjective, the scenery and action being symbolical; both are, in scale, cantatas rather than operas.³⁷

EXAMPLE 26.4 Capriccio, scene vi (“The Sonnet”)

Erwartung is a monodrama, with a libretto by Marie Pappenheim, based upon one of her personal experiences: an unnamed woman seeking her lover, wanders through a forest during a moonlit night. Her expectations are realized in a way she did not anticipate; she finds only his murdered body, over which she sings a long monologue, a modernistic Liebestod. The opera unfolds in a single act of four scenes that are connected by orchestral interludes and, given its “stream of consciousness” approach, there is little that can be defined in terms of set pieces.

Die glückliche Hand, an autobiographical dramatic work, has three soloists (Man, Woman, and Gentleman) and a chorus of twelve voices. It uses colors symbolically in scenery, costumes, and lighting to characterize emotional states. Especially effective are the on-stage pantomimic gestures that are paired with descriptive orchestral music and coordinated with motivic ideas.

Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen (1930), a one-act comic Zeitoper, is another autobiographical work centered around suspected (but unfounded) spousal infidelity. It is written with distinct recitatives and arias, thus following the general trend of the postwar period toward the number opera, and embraces the twelve-tone technique.³⁸ Of the three works, Erwartung is the most successful. In both dramatic technique and musical style it may be regarded as a foretaste of Berg’s Wozzeck.

Schoenberg’s one large work for the theater is Moses und Aron, for which he wrote the entire libretto in 1928 and had composed the music of the first two acts by 1932 (only a few sketches exist for the music of Act III).³⁹ A radio performance was given in 1954 and the first stage performance in 1957. Moses und Aron is an opera-oratorio,⁴⁰ structured in separate numbers, in which Schoenberg has used the biblical material for a dramatic presentation of the tragic abyss (tragic, because unbridgeable by good will) that lies between wisdom and action: Moses, the philosopher-lawgiver, cannot communicate his vision;Aron, the man of action, can only misunderstand and falsify it.⁴¹

The composer contrasts the two main characters by giving Moses a Sprechstimme role and Aron (tenor) a bel canto type of role, which, as it turns out, is the only leading singing role in the opera. Moses relies upon his words to convince the Israelites to trust in God. Aron relies upon miraculous events to work their persuasive magic. While Moses is away, Aron creates the Golden Calf, around which an orgiastic dance takes place that culminates in the killing of the Youth and the sacrifice of the four Naked Virgins. Only when Moses returns and destroys the Golden Calf does the orgy cease. Act III was never completed; thus the opera ends with Moses uttering a cry of despair: “O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!” (O word, word that I lack!).

Schoenberg’s profound drama, a reflection of his life and religious ideas,⁴² is united to a musical score of fearful difficulty (he himself doubted whether a performance would actually be possible), towering in conception, masterly in realization, and of overwhelming dramatic effect. Within the unity imposed by consistent use of a single twelve-tone row is endless variety of expression and sound, from the (symbolical) Sprechgesang of Moses’s role to the gorgeous oriental colors and wild dance rhythms in the scene of the worship of the Golden Calf. Moses und Aron, though unfinished—and its very incompleteness may also be symbolic—is one of the great works of twentieth-century opera, and one that will remain significant for many generations.

In contrast to the oratorio-like character of so many contemporary operas, the character of Berg’s operas is purely theatrical. Wozzeck, composed between 1914 and 1922 and first performed at Berlin in 1925, is based on a “dramatic fragment” by Georg Büchner (1813–37) that was discovered after the author’s death.⁴³ The original twenty-five scenes were reduced by Berg to fifteen and grouped into three acts of five scenes each. Wozzeck, the hero, is a representative of what he himself calls “Wir arme Leut’” (We poor folk), tormented by circumstances, suffering but unconscious of guilt, finally murdering his mistress and drowning himself, driven always by forces he never thinks of questioning or resisting. Despite the date of Büchner’s drama, Wozzeck is thoroughly typical of the postwar period in Germany;⁴⁴ its atmosphere seems as though infected by the morbid, bitter, neurotic mood of that time. Yet it is not merely topical: Wozzeck is a universal figure, symbol of the oppressed and, in a larger sense, of man in his naked helplessness before blind powers that care nothing about his fate.

Büchner’s Woyzeck had its first Viennese production in the Kammerspiele on May 5, 1914. Among those in the audience was Paul Elbogen, whose recollection of this event appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1981. Elbogen had a seat in the gallery of this small theater and several rows behind him sat Alban Berg. The play lasted for some three hours, performed without interruption, and at its conclusion, the audience broke into enthusiastic applause. As Elbogen was leaving the theater, he and Berg exchanged a few comments about the production, with Berg stating that he found the drama to be “incredible.” Then he added, “Someone must set it to music.”⁴⁵ As Jarman points out in his study of Wozzeck, it is rare to find a description of the precise moment when a composer decides to create a work, but there is no denying that this theater event was the genesis of a major opera of the twentieth century, one that continues to hold a unique position in the repertoire of theaters around the world.⁴⁶

Since the expressionist technique makes every external object a projection of Wozzeck’s own soul, the scenes, characters, and events of the opera have an unearthly quality, like a nightmarish puppet show; and Berg’s music belongs to this nightmare world as surely as Debussy’s belongs to the dream world of Pelléas et Mélisande. The harmonic style of Wozzeck is in most places atonal, full of strange, wonderful color effects (as in the scene of Wozzeck’s suicide) and distorted reminiscences of the normal “waking” world (for example, the “folksong” in Act I, the caricature of the Rosenkavalier waltzes in Act II). The vocal lines, mostly in sharply pointed declamation with abrupt, wide intervals, alternate between ordinary speech, Sprechgesang, and song. There are a few recurring motifs, notably Wozzeck’s “Wir arme Leut’” (example 26.5), but the chief means of unity is the organization of each act and scene in set musical forms derived from classical patterns. These patterns reveal themselves, however, only on analysis; it is no part of the composer’s intention that the auditor should perceive them, unless subliminally. Sometimes they have a direct dramatic function: there is a grim fitness, for example, in the choice of the learned passacaglia form for the scene in which Wozzeck submits himself to a doctor as a subject for scientific experiments (Act I, scene iv). The scenes within each act are connected by orchestral interludes; the longest of these, in Act III, recapitulates the themes of the entire drama in climax before leading into the brief coda-like final scene.

Apart from the epilogue, Wozzeck appears in every scene except scene v of Act I. This is the scene in which the Drum Major returns to the street where Marie lives, he having first set eyes on her (in scene iii) when he led a parade past her house. At first Marie refuses the Drum Major’s advances, for she is a righteous and moral person, but her current situation—a life of poverty with a man who shows signs of insanity—works against her better judgment and she allows herself to be seduced by him. At the beginning of Act II, Wozzeck suspects Marie of infidelity; by the final scene of that act, his suspicions are confirmed—the Drum Major bursts into the army barracks and in front of Wozzeck boasts that he has conquered Marie.

At the opening of the third act, Marie is reading the Bible, trying to find solace from the story of the woman taken in adultery, but her fate is sealed, for soon thereafter, Wozzeck fatally stabs Marie as they walk near a pond in a forest. Scene iii finds Wozzeck in a tavern with several young women, but when someone notices blood on his hands, he quickly leaves. He returns to the forest, searching for the murder weapon. Once it is found, he throws it into the pond, and then wades into the water to wash the blood from his hands. The water, however, catches the reflection of the blood-red color of the moon, causing Wozzeck’s entire body to appear to be bathed in a pool of blood. In his attempt to cleanse himself of the crime, he moves deeper and deeper into the water until he drowns.

Initial productions of Wozzeck, in German and in translations, provoked mixed and often hostile reactions. With the passage of time, the sound of Berg’s music has become more familiar and Wozzeck is now recognized not only as a powerful drama in music but also as one of the few really successful masterpieces of the twentieth century.

EXAMPLE 26.5 Wozzeck, Act I scene i

Wozzeck—Berg. © 1931 by Universal Edition A. G., Vienna. English translation © 1952 by Alfred A. Kalmus, London W. 1. © renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U. S. and Canadian agent for Universal Edition A. G., Vienna.

From a set of sketches for Wozzeck by Alban Berg.

Berg’s second opera, Lulu, was completed in substance before the composer’s death in 1935, but the orchestration had been finished only through the first two acts and a small part of the third.⁴⁷ The first two acts, and two fragments of the third, were performed in 1937 in Zurich, and frequent revivals of this truncated version appeared for several decades. Berg’s widow possessed a reconstruction of the third act, but it was withheld from the public until her death in 1976. The first complete production of Lulu took place in 1979 at the Paris Opéra, and in this form it has now come into the repertoire of the world’s major opera companies. Although the addition of the reconstructed third act lengthens the performance to four hours, it nevertheless restores a requisite balance to the opera and clarifies the inner motivations of the drama itself. Berg created his libretto, with some cuts, from two plays by Frank Wedekind. The central personage, Lulu, is conceived as the incarnation of the “primal woman-spirit,” and the drama is concerned with the fatal effects of her attraction for various lovers, finally ending with her own doom. Although externally occupied with the most realistic details, the work is not essentially realistic but rather expressionistic, sometimes grotesquely and extravagantly so. The drama is in two parts, the division occurring between the rigidly symmetrical first and second scenes of Act II. Separating parts 1 and 2 is a musical interlude (built on the principle of a crab canon) paired with a three-minute silent film that portrays the intervening action—the arrest, conviction, and imprisonment of Lulu and her subsequent escape from a hospital where she had been confined because of illness. The close relationship between the two parts is underlined by the dual roles assigned to three of the singers: Lulu’s murder victims in Act I become her clients in Act III.

From a set of sketches for Wozzeck by Alban Berg.

Both musically and dramatically, the opera is notoriously complex. Notwithstanding this complexity, Lulu is marvelously effective in the theater. The changing flow of the drama and the intensity of its emotional expression are always controlled by the composer’s intellectual power in wielding musical forms.⁴⁸ Certain motifs, harmonies, tone series, and combinations are associated with particular characters and scenes. The opera is not, as has often been stated, based throughout on a single tone row, but its felt musical unity is the result of interconnections among the different formal elements. Such subtle relationships may be no more consciously grasped by the audience than are the comparable relationships in Wozzeck, but the formal unity and the dramatic import of both works can be sensed in the theater without a knowledge of their technical construction.

FOUR COMPOSERS WHO CONTRIBUTED SIGNIFICANTLY to the revitalization of German opera during the Weimar Republic (1919–33) are Ernst Krenek (1900–91), Kurt Weill (1900–50), Paul Hindemith (1895–1963), and Max Brand (1896–1980). They wanted to make art more relevant to the general public and expressed this interest in their writings, compositions, and promotional activities. Weill’s contribution to this cause initially focused on promoting concerts of “modern” chamber music by American, French, Eastern European, and German composers, including his own works and those by Hindemith and Krenek. By 1925 Weill and Krenek had started publishing essays in which they suggest how opera might be brought to a wider audience. Weill urges composers to draw inspiration from Mozart rather than from Wagner, and he views Busoni’s Doktor Faust as “the starting point for the formation of a golden age of opera,” contrasting it with Berg’s Wozzeck, which he considered to be a culmination of the Wagnerian ideal of music drama.⁴⁹ Krenek blames the “head-in-hands” type of cerebral music created by Schoenberg and his followers for the rift between “serious” and “light” music that was unique to Central Europe. He champions French culture as a model for composers, having experienced firsthand during his stay in France (1924–26) how art was able to forge a compatible relationship with its community. Weill and Krenek also wrote about the influence popular dance music and jazz could exert on modern music. Hindemith made his views known primarily through his musical scores and through his organization of music festivals designed to educate and entertain a new public. In a 1929 essay Hindemith shows his concern for the future of music when he writes: “The old public is dying off. How and what must we write in order to get a larger, different, and new public; where is that public?”⁵⁰ Seven years earlier he made an initial attempt to answer that question with his incorporation of popular American music idioms, such as the foxtrot, in Kammermusik No. 1 (1922). All three composers ultimately found opera to be an excellent medium in which to put their ideas to the test.

Krenek

Krenek began his remarkable career at Vienna in the composition classes of Franz Schreker, and when, in 1920, Schreker assumed the directorship of the Academy of Music at Berlin, Krenek followed him there to complete his education. While still a student, Krenek brought forth the first of his twenty operas, Zwingburg (1922). Its political implications are immediately apparent: a tyrant rules from within a castle (which looks suspiciously like a factory) unseen by his subjects, who, with jerky gesticulations, execute monotonous routines to the musical accompaniment of an organ-grinder, who is cursed to play unceasingly. For one day only, the tyrant offers release from this mode of mechanical existence. To bring about this liberation, the organgrinder is tied to a pole to prevent him from playing. As the people move about in a trance-like state enjoying themselves, they take pity on the organgrinder and untie him so that he, too, can enjoy freedom. Unfortunately, his freedom means a return to the status quo: the music resumes and the people are once again under the tyrant’s spell.

The problem of personal freedom with its attendant autobiographical overtones became, by Krenek’s own admission, a dominant theme in his works for the stage.⁵¹ Beginning with Der Sprung über den Schatten (1924), he sought to bridge the divide between elite and popular musical entertainment. After the successful production of this satiric farce, with its variegated musical styles—including jazz elements—integrated into an atonal structure, Krenek brought forth a conspicuous “hit,” one that contrasts the lifestyle of an intellectually restrained Central European composer with that of a carefree American jazz musician, and in the process makes a statement about the current problems of the artist and society. Jonny spielt auf (1927) represents a combination of fantasy and gross realism set to exuberant rhythms and catchy tunes in jazz style with just enough dissonance to give the impression of daring “modernism.”⁵² Considerable variety of mood was achieved within this general idiom, from the gaudily vulgar strains of a restaurant orchestra to romantic expressiveness and the final apotheosis of Johnny, the black band leader, symbol of the vigorous optimistic new world “conquering Europe with the dance.” Krenek intended Jonny to be taken seriously, but audiences for the most part regarded it as a comedy or satire, and—whether or not owing to this misunderstanding—it had a brilliant though short-lived success.

Jonny spielt auf is among the finest examples of a Zeitoper, a genre that achieved considerable stature during the Weimar era. Zeitoper has been loosely defined as a work in a comic vein based upon social satire and parody, situated in a contemporary setting, with plot and characters reflecting various aspects of everyday life.⁵³ The action is meant to take place in ordinary places—a kitchen, an automobile, an office, a cabaret, an elevator—and the musical score usually embraces popular American dance music and jazz.⁵⁴ Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf exemplifies this definition well: the setting is Europe in the 1920s; the scenes take place in a hotel lobby, a home, a police car, and a train station; and the score embraces instruments (banjos and saxophones) and jazz-related styles (blues, shimmy) of the popular music realm.

Not long after Krenek returned to his native Vienna (c. 1928), Austria’s independence began to be undermined by Nazi aggression in the guise of a new nationalism. His response to the impending crisis was made in Karl V, a grand opera commissioned by the Vienna State Opera House. It proved to be one of his most important works for the theater, remarkable for a nobility of style well suited to the grandeur of the subject. The libretto focuses on the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth century, Charles V, in the period following his abdication of power; the dialogue between Charles and his confessor-monk provides Krenek with an appropriate forum in which to raise questions of current interest, in particular the issue of an individual’s freedom to choose allegiance to God and the church universal instead of fealty to a nation. Using the twelve-tone technique, Krenek created an opera that was “explicitly anti-Nazi, pro-Austrian, and Catholic.”⁵⁵ For obvious reasons, it was banned from Vienna during the preliminary rehearsals in 1934. The message intended for his fellow Viennese was heard first in Prague at the 1938 premiere; shortly thereafter, Krenek immigrated to the United States.

Except for a few chamber operas, Krenek did not return to writing a full-scale work until Pallas Athene weint (1955), which presents scenes of the war between Athens and Sparta, with application to the modern issue of how to defend freedom without succumbing to tyranny; the music is based on an adaptation of the twelve-tone technique. A somewhat similar technique is used in Bell Tower (1957), an expertly wrought, dramatically and musically satisfying setting of a libretto by the composer based on a story by Herman Melville. He followed this one-act opera with Der goldene Bock (1963), which shows his preoccupation with serialism and the theater of the absurd; two operas written specifically for television; and Sardakai (1970), a farce of mistaken identities and disguises that pokes fun at some of the sacred conventions of his generation.

Weill

In 1920 Kurt Weill began a three-year period of compositional studies with Ferruccio Busoni. Shortly thereafter, his interest in writing for the theater came to fruition when he and Georg Kaiser, one of the most popular German dramatists of the day, collaborated on several projects. Their first successful venture was the 1925 production at Berlin of Der Protagonist, a one-act opera that takes place at the time of Shakespeare: a traveling troupe has been rehearsing a rather bawdy entertainment, but when it is learned that a bishop will be attending the performance, the duke orders the troupe to substitute a tragedy for the comedy. Sections of pantomime are used for the “rehearsals” of both the comic and the tragic versions of this “play” within the opera. At the very moment in the tragic version of the “play” when the protagonist should be killing his rival, he becomes enraged at the sight of his sister with her lover and steps out of character, fatally stabbing her. This gripping piece of theater engendered an enthusiastic response from audiences wherever it was staged and paved the way for Weill to find support for a Berlin premiere of his second one-act opera, Royal Palace (1927). Incorporated into the score of Royal Palace are jazz idioms, as defined by dance forms (the foxtrot and the tango) and instrumentation (the solo piano and saxophone). The opera also includes film sequences—after Dejanira is given an airline ticket, she is shown, on film, going to the airport and boarding the plane—the first time cinematic interludes are known to have occurred in an operatic production.⁵⁶ Royal Palace was staged as part of a triple bill, along with Weill’s Der neue Orpheus and Manuel de Falla’s puppet-opera El retablo de Maese Pedro. Unfortunately, Royal Palace received unfavorable reviews, primarily because its appearance in so short a time after the premiere of Jonny spielt auf invited immediate comparison with what unquestionably had been a theatrical triumph.

Weill’s contribution to the Zeitopern repertoire came in 1928 with Der Zar lässt sich photographieren, which he subtitled an opera buffa. The opera takes place in a female photographer’s studio in Paris, where a czar has come to have his photograph taken. The czar, however, is unaware that the studio has been taken over by anti-czarists who plan to assassinate him with a gun concealed inside a camera. What the would-be assassins had not anticipated was having the czar fall in love with the female photographer, who was impersonating the owner of the studio. When the czar decides to take her picture with the rigged camera, she and her fellow conspirators hasten to escape before they are apprehended by the police.

One of the interesting features of Der Zar is Weill’s positioning of a male chorus in the orchestra pit, where it serves as an intermediary between the characters on stage and the audience. According to Weill, the chorus was expected to “emphasize the opera buffa character of the work” by voicing their opinions to the audience in a “somewhat improper way” (etwas unpassender Weise) on what has been taking place on the stage.⁵⁷ The comic role assigned to the chorus was further heightened by the manner in which they were costumed: long white beards, mustaches, dark dress coats, and top hats.⁵⁸ This same sort of attire was frequently used for groups of men in expressionist plays of the period.⁵⁹ The chorus performs in various formats ranging from unison to four-part harmony, singing a text or humming, and performing unaccompanied or accompanied by the full orchestra. Jazz is also a distinguishing feature of this opera, but the instrumentation for the jazz sections of Der Zar is limited to piano, percussion, brass, and woodwinds, except for the “Tango-Angèle,” which is accompanied by a gramophone recording that introduces the traditional “big band” sound.⁶⁰

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, operas were used in schools for teaching moral and religious doctrines; in like manner, some twentieth-century operas provided a means for communicating left-wing political doctrines. In both cases, the method was to clothe the teachings in easily understood, popularly accessible music. The principal early twentieth-century examples stem from the “epic theater” movement in Germany, headed by Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956).⁶¹ Foremost among them were two settings by Weill of Brecht’s librettos: Die Dreigroschenoper and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, with premieres at Berlin in 1928 and at Leipzig in 1930, respectively. Both operas remain popular in spite of political changes that have made many parts of their original librettos outdated.

Die Dreigroschenoper was molded from The Beggar’s Opera, an eighteenth-century social and political satire by John Gay and John Pepusch. Even before Elizabeth Hauptmann started to translate Gay’s text into German, European interest in the 1728 work had been sparked by a very successful 1920 revival of The Beggar’s Opera in England. As early as 1925, for example, a German publisher had suggested to Hindemith that he create a modern version of the ballad-play, a suggestion he declined.⁶²

The libretto for Die Dreigroschenoper represents the collaborative work of Hauptmann, Brecht, and Weill.⁶³ It retains the basic outline of Gay’s text; the setting is located in the Soho district of London during the late Victorian period. Mackie, the gangster-hero, secretly marries Polly, whose father, Peachum, is the Mafia-styled boss of London’s professional beggars. When Peachum discovers what has taken place, he is furious and decides to reveal Mackie’s whereabouts to the police, for Mackie has long been on their “most wanted” list. Polly warns Mackie of the impending crisis and he tries to escape, only to be betrayed by some prostitutes in a brothel he has visited. Mackie is condemned to hang, but before the fatal act occurs at the gallows, Peachum comes downstage to tell the audience that a happy ending is obligatory in opera and that the Queen of England has provided it by pardoning Mackie, elevating him to the peerage, and giving him a sizable annual allowance. Peachum then turns to the characters on stage and cautions them to be mindful of the fact that “happy endings” are seldom the lot of the poor.

For the first number of Act I, the “Morgenchoral des Peachum,” Weill used the very same music that Pepusch had written to open The Beggar’s Opera, making only a few adjustments to accommodate the German text.⁶⁴ From that point forward, Weill composed new music, with some numbers similar in style to the opening folk tune, and others exploring the blues, tango, and foxtrot rhythms of the jazz medium.⁶⁵ Thematic material from no fewer than six of the opera’s songs is incorporated into the final chorale. Satire underlies the musical conception of the opera, with Weill creating sentimental tunes for portions of the text that are anything but sentimental, and injecting into the seemingly stable triadic harmony unexpected jolts of chromaticism. The instrumental accompaniment for the premiere was entrusted to the seven-member Lewis Ruth Band, which was adept at playing the many different instruments required for the production. For example, the banjo player also played the parts for cello, bandoneon, and guitar, and the alto saxophonist played those for flute, clarinet, and baritone saxophone.⁶⁶ The juxtaposition of the derivative styles from Baroque opera and the 1920s cabaret produced a unique form of entertainment—spoken dialogue and songs—that Brecht and Weill were never again to equal in their collaborations.⁶⁷

Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny grew out of an earlier work by Brecht and Weill entitled Mahagonny Songspiel, performed in July 1927, a few months after these two artists had met and found common ground on which they could build a working, albeit brief, relationship.⁶⁸ The Songspiel consisted of Weill’s setting of Brecht’s five “Mahagonny” poems, which were linked by musical interludes and bounded by an instrumental prelude and postlude to create a dramatic whole. The stage design for this Songspiel—a boxing ring in which six singers stand as if giving a concert version of the work—elicited protests from some in the audience and cheers and wild applause from others. Similar pros and cons were expressed by the professional critics. This mixed response did not deter Brecht and Weill from pursuing their intention to write a full-length three-act opera based on the same “Mahagonny” theme of a “Paradise City,” where inhabitants are free to enjoy themselves to the fullest so long as they can pay for their life of pleasure. Failure to pay one’s debts, however, brings one face to face with death. When Jim Mahoney falls into this predicament, he is sentenced to die in the electric chair. No one comes to his rescue and his execution provokes a riot. As the city burns, the crowd chants: “Can’t help ourselves or you or anybody.” This opera, an anticapitalist satire set in America in a newly established city, is scored for a very small ensemble consisting of piano, banjo, bass guitar, zither, accordion, and saxophone. It is a very complex work and was considered by contemporary critics, such as Theodor Adorno, to be exemplary of that era’s concept of the avant-garde, even though its musical language reflects the traditional tonal and melodic style of the late nineteenth century.⁶⁹ At the premiere and at subsequent performances in Germany, groups of “brown-shirted” Nazis protested both outside and inside the theaters, for Weill was not only a Jew but also a left-wing sympathizer. Somehow the performers usually found a way to continue to the final curtain, despite these attempts at disruption.

Similar in political aim were Weill’s school opera Der Jasager (1930) and Die Bürgschaft (1932), his last opera to be presented in Germany before Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime came to power in March 1933.⁷⁰ Bürgschaft represents Weill’s most ambitious work for the stage and once again the libretto, by Caspar Neher, sounded a warning about the tragic consequences that come from a civilized society invaded by a tyrant intent upon ruling by the laws of money and power. Musically, Weill enters a new phase of his career with this score, a fact that he himself acknowledged in a statement made after the successful Berlin production of the revised Mahagonny in December 1931 at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm. Gone is the pseudo-jazz flavoring of his earlier works; a neo-classical style prevails, reflecting the influence of Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex. Here a full orchestra is used, while at the same time the piano is given a very important role. Arias, recitatives, and ensembles (some of them in a contrapuntal style) are designed as well-defined numbers. Central to the work are the two choruses—one represents an oppressed people; the other communicates the opera’s message to the audience.

Following this production and the staging of Der Silbersee (1932), a three-act play with music, Weill decided he could no longer live in Germany, for by the beginning of 1933 the Nazis had banned all performances of his stage works.⁷¹ He initially settled in Paris, where Die Sieben Todsünden, a ballet-Songspiel in nine scenes (written for one dancer and one singer), had its premiere in June 1933. Two years later, he was invited to come to the United States, where he embarked upon a second career as a composer of works for Broadway, off Broadway, and the cinema.⁷²

Hindemith

The satirical tendencies fashionable in Germany during the late 1920s are well illustrated in the comic operas of Paul Hindemith (1895–1963).⁷³ Hin und Zurück (1927) is a one-act tour de force in which the second half reverses the action of the first, so that at the end the situation is exactly the same as at the beginning; the music correspondingly reverses the order of its themes and movements, though without going into the intricacies of strict retrograde canon. The work is scored for an orchestra of seven wind instruments and two pianos; the music, in various styles by turns but unified in effect nevertheless, is decidedly clever and successful in performance. This chamber opera (of ten minutes duration), Hindemith’s first attempt at writing a Zeitoper, parodies the marital problems that arise in domestic life, but does so in the context of a comic presentation.

Neues vom Tage (1929; revised, 1953), the last opera of Hindemith to be produced in Germany before the war, is also a Zeitoper and, like Hin und Zurück, is a comedy constructed in the manner of an eighteenth-century number opera. It is a longer work, a witty revue about a married couple who, through their efforts to obtain evidence for a divorce, become “the news of the day,” with characters so firmly established in the minds of their public that they no longer have any right of private action and cannot even drop their divorce proceedings, although they wish to. On this plot are strung several amusing episodes, including a bathroom scene and a chorus of stenographers performing to the rhythmic accompaniment of clacking typewriters. This opera also follows the circular structure of Hin und Zurück, with one of the couples, who contemplated divorce, deciding to stay married, and the other couple, who did obtain a divorce, deciding to remarry. In other words, these two couples at the end of the opera are in the same marital state as when the opera began. The music, like most of Hindemith’s in this period, is linear in texture and strongly rhythmic, well suited to the lively action. There is also a jazz scene, and the final chorus is a fugue.

Several other important works by Hindemith date from the 1920s, among them the full-length opera Cardillac (1926; revised, 1952), on an excellent tragic libretto by Ferdinand Lyon.⁷⁴ No opera of this period more clearly exemplifies the classical principle of separate musical numbers and the “new objectivity” (neue Sachlichkeit) that was then in vogue.⁷⁵ Moreover, each number is constructed according to purely musical laws, the themes being straightforwardly developed in the manner of a concerto, undeflected by any attempt to illustrate mere details of the text: music and drama run parallel but without interpenetration. The “absolute,” instrumental character of the music is reinforced by the prevailing texture, highly rhythmic and contrapuntal; the voice is treated in the late Baroque manner as one melodic line among concertizing instruments. In addition to this characteristic linear style, two other idioms are occasionally used: a kind of accompanied recitative in which the vocal declamation is set against a single rhapsodic line in the orchestra; and a quieter, chordal, neo-romantic style that foreshadows some aspects of Hindemith’s later development (for example, the recitative and aria “Die Zeit vergeht,” in Act I, scene ii). Hindemith gives the saxophone a central role in the accompaniment of Cardillac’s arioso “Mag Sonne leuchten!” (Act II) and introduces elements of jazz in the tavern music of Act III. The chorus writing is vigorous, idiomatic, and effective, especially in the closing scene.

Lyon’s libretto is an expressionist drama, in which an artist’s role in society is explored: it tells of a goldsmith (Cardillac) who feels compelled to kill the buyers of his creations in order for him to repossess that which he has crafted. Hindemith’s score, however, is in a style that is unrelated to expressionism. Resolving this dichotomy proved to be a remarkable achievement on the part of the composer, who skillfully “reconciled the Baroque aesthetic with the demands of an expressionistic dramatic subject.”⁷⁶

Hindemith began as an iconoclast but later modified his style, softening harmonic asperities and clarifying tonal relationships. Such changes were incorporated into the revised versions of Cardillac and Neues von Tage. They also influenced Wir bauen eine Stadt (Oxford, 1931), a children’s opera written in a straightforward, simple melodic style, and Mathis der Maler (1938),⁷⁷ an operaoratorio. Mathis der Maler is a long and complex work embracing a great variety of musical styles, among which suggestions of medieval modality are prominent. (The most familiar portions of Mathis are those arranged by Hindemith as an orchestral suite.) Hindemith’s libretto is based on the life of Matthias Grünewald, the sixteenth-century German painter who became famous for his Isenheim altarpiece. Matthias, torn between allegiance to his art and support for the peasants’ revolt and subsequent war of 1525, has reason to question the efficacy of artistic creation as a meaningful response to the call for social and political action. Convinced by Paul the Apostle of the immortality of art, Matthias allows his canvas to become a powerful weapon of protest.

The libretto for Mathis represents Hindemith’s first literary effort and is one that has been viewed as an autobiographical response to the environment in which he found himself in the mid-1930s. Just as Mathis is taunted in the opera with the pointlessness of art in a time of war and political turmoil, so too was Hindemith haunted by this same question.

The neo-Baroque trend in Hindemith’s music culminates in Die Harmonie der Welt, a work similar to Mathis but on an even grander scale that was first staged at Munich in 1957.⁷⁸ There are eleven solo roles, in addition to choruses; a full orchestra is supplemented by a second orchestra on the stage; and many of the sets require a divided stage. Each of the fourteen scenes in the five acts represents an episode in the life and philosophy of the astronomer Johannes Kepler, the title of whose treatise Harmonices mundi (1619) Hindemith adopted for his libretto. Whereas the drama of Mathis der Maler dealt with the position of the artist in society, Die Harmonie der Welt was conceived as an exemplification of Hindemith’s views—going back to medieval teachings—of the order in a work of music as being symbolical of an all-embracing order in the physical and spiritual universe. Consequently, the events and characters have a symbolic function as well as a dramatic one, and this entails both a certain static quality in the development of the drama and an occasional impression that some of the persons are more like allegorical figures than real human beings. The monumental, oratorio-like character of Die Harmonie der Welt, in addition to the enormous resources required for its presentation, will doubtless prevent it from ever becoming fixed in the operatic repertoire—which is a misfortune. A richly polyphonic orchestral texture is the basis of the musical structure. As in many twentieth-century operas, classical instrumental forms play a large role in the musical development. Examples are the “scherzo” in 7/8 time in Act II; the “variations on an old war song” in Act V; and especially the closing scene, reminiscent of the grandiose finales in Baroque opera, which introduces the earth, sun, and planets (each represented by the personage who was its mystical incarnation in the drama) in a magnificent apotheosis, to a sonorous, orchestral-choral passacaglia on a theme made up of the tones shown in example 26.6.

EXAMPLE 26.6 Tones of the passacaglia theme from Die Harmonie der Welt

Brand

Perhaps it was sheer coincidence that in the year Henry Ford’s essay “Machinery—The New Messiah” was published Max Brand brought to the stage Maschinist Hopkins (1928), a Zeitoper that explores the impact of technology on factory workers—an issue of capitalism versus labor that is as relevant today as it was in the 1920s and 1930s.⁷⁹ The opera takes place in America, with scenes located variously on the factory floor where huge machines are displayed, in a bar where workers meet with their foreman to discuss problems, and in a night club where the tensions of a love triangle (Bill, Nell, Hopkins) unfold. The machines represent progress and the promise of new jobs, but they also symbolize destruction and depersonalization—two of the principal characters meet their deaths on the factory floor, having been pushed into the revolving wheels of the machines.

For the bar and night club scenes, Brand incorporates American elements of jazz, dance, and popular song (the last named to be performed on stage by “six black singers”), but for the factory scenes, he uses film to suggest the machines becoming animated objects, with an offstage chorus simulating their voices. His projection of film on stage marked an early example of a composer using this medium in an operatic production.⁸⁰ Especially effective is Brand’s handling of the chorus, as a choir of machines or as a choir of workers. In the final scene of the opera, as the dawn of a new workday unfolds and the machines on the factory floor are activated, the choir of workers rhythmically chants in a Sprechstimme manner the words “Arbeit, Arbeit, Arbeit” (work, work, work), the incessant repetition suggesting that the workers themselves have become mere machines.

Maschinist Hopkins hit a responsive chord in audiences attending the more than two hundred performances this opera enjoyed, for its staging occurred during a period when very high unemployment and runaway inflation in Germany were adversely affecting people’s lives. The prospect that advances in technology could somehow bring a brighter future for the average worker provided a ray of hope in an otherwise bleak environment. The Third Reich, however, viewed Brand’s opera quite differently, deriding it for its references to America and condemning it as “degenerate art.”⁸¹

GERMEN-LANGUAGE OPERAS based on Greek mythology continued to be written in the twentieth century. Those by Strauss have already been discussed, but a number of others deserve to be mentioned. Within the general orbit of the Schoenbergian musical style was Alkestis (1924) by Egon Wellesz (1885–1974),⁸² a one-act setting of a text by Hofmannsthal (after Euripides) that unfolds in a series of broad tableaux in a rather austere, monolithic idiom. The important position of the chorus in this work was emphasized even more in the composer’s later opera Die Bakchantinnen (1931). Krenek’s Leben des Orest (1930) is also related to Greek mythology. This “grand opera” takes place in pre-Christian Greece and requires a large cast. The score is infused with jazz dance idioms.

Carl Orff (1895–1982) added to this repertoire with his Antigonae (1949) and Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), both settings of Hölderlin’s translations from Sophocles.⁸³ In these, there are five gradations of vocal delivery for both soloist and chorus: (1) ordinary speech, (2) rhythmic semi-speech, similar to Berg’s Sprechgesang, (3) a form of stylized speech consisting of rhythmic chanting centered on one tone but punctuated by melodic deflections to nearby tones and occasional wide leaps, (4) the same, but expanding into a longer quasi-melodic chant, and (5) a combination of (3) and (4) with sweeping stepwise, fast, and impassioned melismatic outbursts, characteristically placed at the beginning of a phrase (example 26.7). The voices may be either unaccompanied or accompanied by ostinato rhythmic patterns in many different combinations of percussion, either without fixed pitch or in static harmonies. The chorus constantly participates in the action and each scene is in a clearly outlined musical form.

No description can do more than suggest the unique effects produced by the composer’s peculiar choice of means. Music, reduced nearly to the primal elements of rhythm and single tones, enters into a union with language that conjures up for the imagination a far-off mythical stage in the history of human speech. The variety of sounds and the varying degrees of dramatic tension that Orff manages to achieve within his self-imposed musical limitations are remarkable; nevertheless, the very intensity of the idiom tends to limit the length of time for which it can be effective, and for this reason perhaps Oedipus, being shorter than Antigonae, is the more successful of the two works. Orff continued with this style of writing for the theater in Prometheus (1968) and De temporum fine comoedía (1973), the latter with a text in Greek and Latin.⁸⁴

EXAMPLE 26.7 Oedipus der Tyrann

Oedipus der Tyrann—Orff. Piano-vocal score, © 1965 Schott Musik International. © renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Musik International.

Early in his career, Orff’s move toward radical simplification in the face of the general tendency toward sophistication or massiveness in opera music of the 1930s aroused comment, favorable and otherwise, concerning the resulting works, none of which happened to be operas in the traditional sense of the word. One such work is the semi-dramatic cantata Carmina burana (1937) that has maintained its popularity to the present day. Another is Der Mond (1939), which is closer to being an opera in the ordinary sense of that word, though it would perhaps be more accurate to designate it as a “folk play with music.” In these and his later works, his musical style anticipated the “accessible” postmoderism and minimalism of the late twentieth century, for it reflected Orff’s contention that music was an art form that could and should communicate with adults as well as with children.

A Bavarian contemporary of Orff was Werner Egk (1901–83). His Columbus, originally written for radio broadcast in 1933 and frequently performed since then on German stages in a revised version dating from 1942, is a rather static combination of opera and epic. A later and possibly better mixture of these elements is found in Irische Legende (1935; revised, 1970). Die Zaubergeige (1955), also designed for radio broadcast, immediately preceded the most memorable of Egk’s operas, Peer Gynt (1938), a straightforward human drama adapted from Ibsen, with a musical score of considerable variety, color, and melodic interest.

One of the notable Swiss composers of the early twentieth century was Hans Huber (1852–1921). In addition to his Festspiele and similar works composed for the theater, Huber brought forth several operas, all of which were steeped in the Romantic tradition. They include Kudrun (1896), Die Simplicius (1912), and Die schöne Belinde (1916), his most well known of the three. Unlike Huber, whose career was primarily centered in Basle, many other Swiss composers lived abroad or, at the very least, sought venues for the premiere productions of their operas in cities such as Dresden, Berlin, and Munich. One of these composers was Othmar Schoeck (1886–1957), distinguished especially as a songwriter. He composed several operas, with Penthesilea (Dresden, 1927) his most successful. Another was Frank Martin (1890–1974), who spent the early part of his career in Switzerland but then in 1946 took up residence in the Netherlands.⁸⁵ Not until he was sixty years of age did he turn his attention to the writing of opera. The first of his three works in this genre was Der Sturm (1956), a three-act German-language adaptation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest that premiered in Vienna. The other two operas were set to French-language librettos. Le Mystère de la Nativité, first performed at Salzburg in 1960, is adapted from a medieval mystery play and depicts heaven, earth, and hell on three separate levels of the stage. The music associated with each of these levels is similarly distinguished, ranging from very simple music for heaven to twelve-tone technique and a full orchestral timbre for hell. Monsieur de Pourceaugnac (1963), which did have a premiere in Geneva, is a close adaptation of Molière’s play of the same title.

From a younger generation of Swiss composers come Heinrich Sutermeister (1910–95), Klaus Huber (b. 1924), and Rudolf Kelterborn (b. 1931).⁸⁶ Sutermeister became committed to the idea that composers should write music that appeals to the widest audiences possible but without compromising one’s principles. His music shows the influence of three composers: Verdi, Debussy, and his teacher, Orff. In the tragic opera Romeo und Julia (Dresden, 1940), he combines a pleasing melodic style with a good sense for the dramatic. In his Raskolnikoff (1948), adapted from Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, he calls for two separated orchestras to represent inner and outer realms of the world. Of particular interest are Sutermeister’s works designed for television productions, of which Seraphine (1959) and Das Gespenst von Canterville (1964) are representative of his work in this medium.⁸⁷ His last opera was Le Roi Bérenger (1985).

Whereas Klaus Huber has to date contributed only one opera to the Swiss repertoire, namely, Jot, oder Wann kommt der Herr zurück (Berlin, 1973) in which avant-garde techniques are prevalent, Kelterborn has produced several, all with German texts. Serialism plays an important role in his conception of the musical scores, from his earliest opera, Die Errettung Thebens (1963), to his most recent, Julia (1991). The last-mentioned work is a chamber opera, based in part on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and in part on Gottfried Keller’s novella, which concerns the fate of a young Israeli woman (Julia) who is living in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine and is in love with a young Palestinian (Romeo).

THE COMPOSER WHO PROBABLY BEST REPRESENTS the continuing central tradition in opera in the German-speaking countries at the beginning of the post–World War II era is an Austrian, Gottfried von Einem (1918–96). In his music, piercing harmonic dissonances and sharp variegated rhythms are contained within an essentially tonal and Romantic-styled framework of expression that has singable melodic lines, the whole enlivened by original thematic ideas and handled with a natural flair for stage effect. Von Einem’s early works for the theater include, in addition to ballets, two operas: Dantons Tod (1947), on a libretto adapted from Georg Büchner’s drama of the same title, a work notable for its tumultuous crowd scenes; and Der Prozess (1953), based on Franz Kafka’s novel, a score in which each scene constitutes a musical unit with its own characteristic and formal pattern. Among his later works are Der Zerissene (1964); Der Besuch der alten Dame (1971), a neo-classical Singspiel; Kabale und Liebe (1976); the very controversial Jesu Hochzeit (1980); and Tulifant (1990). Der Besuch der alten Dame, based on Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s play with that title, concerns a very wealthy lady who returns to her hometown in Switzerland and offers the townsfolk huge sums of money if they will murder her former lover; her offer is accepted and the repulsive deed is accomplished. The horror of the crowd’s willingness to comply is skillfully communicated by Von Einem’s score.⁸⁸

Von Einem’s composition teacher and librettist was Boris Blacher (1903–75), a prolific and popular composer in his own right.⁸⁹ Blacher’s music is as varied as the many styles with which he experimented, including folk, jazz, and electronic. Three of his best-known operas are Preussiches Märchen (1952), a comedy; Abstrakte Oper No. 1 (1953), on a text of meaningless syllables in a lightly satirical vein; and Romeo und Julia (1947), a work that foreshadows the type of chamber opera written by Britten.

A more broadly conceived use of the twelve-tone technique can be found in the operas of many German composers of the second half of the twentieth century. The leading composer and teacher of this generation was Wolfgang Fortner (1907–87), distinguished for symphonic and choral works as well as operas. His best-known opera is Die Bluthochzeit (1957), a melodious, clean-textured setting of Federico Garcia Lorca’s tragedy Bodas de sangre. His other works for the stage include In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplín Belisa (1962), also based on a play by Lorca, and Elisabeth Tudor (1972).⁹⁰

Other composers in Germany who have attracted particular notice for their operas include the Swiss-born Rolf Liebermann (1910–99), Paul Dessau (1894–1979), Hanns Eisler (1898–1962), Bernd Alois Zimmermann (1918–70), and Hans Werner Henze (b. 1926). Liebermann, in Lenore 40/45 (1952) and Penelope (1954), juxtaposed contrasting musical styles for a novel treatment, half realistic and half fantastic-satirical, of contemporary subject matter. His School for Wives (1955), with music in a tonal style, is a witty modern version of Molière’s comedy.⁹¹ Eisler, an East German composer who lived in the United States from 1933 to 1948, is best remembered for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, including the opera Die Massnahme (1930). Two other plays by Brecht, Die Verurteilung des Lukullus and Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti, were given musical settings by Dessau: Das Verhör des Lukullus (March 1951; revised as Die Verurteilung des Lukullus for an October 1951 production) and the comedy Puntila (1966). Questions of moral responsibility pervade the material Dessau brought to the stage, a reflection of his intense involvement with political and social issues. For example, his internationally successful opera Lukullus focuses on the career of a Roman general whose acts of brutality, committed under the cloak of military expediency, are judged to be crimes against humanity, punishable by banishment into eternal “nothingness.” Omitted from the orchestration are instruments such as violins, clarinets, oboes, and horns that would lend an expressive quality to the score. Einstein (1974), Dessau’s last opera, addresses the question of a scientist’s responsibility to society for his inventions; a biographical sketch of the title character is supported by a mixture of musical styles ranging from electronic tape to quotations from J. S. Bach’s works, and from jazz to twelve-note technique.⁹²

A powerfully expressive score composed during the post–World War II era is Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1965), a Janus-faced work that looks back to Berg’s Wozzeck and points forward to Henze’s We Come to the River.⁹³ The story of Die Soldaten comes from an eighteenth-century play by Jakob Lenz, whose depiction of the military “establishment” in Prussian society can be read as an indictment of the military in the twentieth century as well. Zimmermann mirrored this conception by positioning the audience in a circle on swivel chairs surrounded by multiple stages. The revised designs, reflecting his submission to practicality, call for a multilayered set consisting of five levels, on which simultaneous staging of scenes can take place. The dramatic possibilities of this set are exemplified in the layered staging of three scenes, involving different times and places, in which (1) Stolzius receives Marie’s letter of rejection, (2) Marie’s grandmother sits weeping, anticipating her granddaughter’s downfall, and (3) Baron Desportes seduces Marie. This collage of time, space, and action is reinforced by Zimmermann’s score, with its variety of instrumental groupings, such as the reduction of instruments to a solo guitar at the end of Act III, scene iii, and the combination of organ and percussion for the interlude that opens Act IV, scene ii; its pluralism of musical material, such as the introduction of jazz in Act II, scene i; the use of the Dies irae and Bach chorales; and the incorporation of film footage, prerecorded tape, and offstage voices in the final scene of Act IV; and its structural design, wherein each scene in this four-act opera adheres to a specific musical format—the four scenes of Act I, for example, are subtitled, respectively, “Ciacona,” “Ricercari,” “Toccata,” “Nocturno.” From the loud crashing tone clusters in the overture (example 26.8a) to the introspective recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the concluding scene (example 26.8b), Die Soldaten makes its moral statement in a unique manner that has been imitated but seldom duplicated.

In sharp contrast to Zimmermann, who composed only one opera, Hans Werner Henze can be counted among the more prolific opera composers of the second half of the twentieth century.⁹⁴ From his one-act comedy Das Wundertheater (1948), which reveals his serialist training with Wolfgang Fortner and his association with a like-minded group of composers in Darmstadt, to Venus und Adonis (1997), he has been engaged with a wide variety of literary and musical materials. In Boulevard Solitude (1952), he presented a realistic adaptation of the Manon Lescaut story, in which each of the separate scenes is accompanied by a stylized modern dance. He next produced Das Ende einer Welt (1953), composed for radio broadcast, and Ein Landarzt (1951), a radio opera based on Kafka’s story, with music that reflects the musical style of Berg’s Lulu.

In the mid-1950s Henze left Germany and settled on an island in the Bay of Naples; he also left behind a style of composition championed by the Darmstadt composers, with whom he had previously been associated. This physical detachment from his native soil allowed Henze to acquire a new perspective on the ingredients that help create successful compositions for the stage. Two major operas are associated with this Italian sojourn. The first is Der König Hirsch, a fairy-tale opera with a long, elaborate, and variegated score that confirms Henze had indeed broken free from serialism. The significance of this stylistic change, however, could not be fully appreciated until 1985, when the original version of this five-hour opera was performed in its entirety at Stuttgart.⁹⁵ The second is Der Prinz von Homburg (1960), a full-scale grand opera with choruses; it is adapted from Heinrich von Kleist’s drama on the subject of a military officer whose insubordinate actions on the battlefield cause him at first to be sentenced to death, a sentence later commuted.

EXAMPLE 26.8a Die Soldaten, Overture

Die Soldaten—Zimmermann. B. Schott’s Söhne, ed. 5076, 1. © 1975 Schott Musik International.© renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Musik International.

EXAMPLE 26.8b Die Soldaten, Act IV, scene iii

Die Soldaten—Zimmermann. B. Schott’s Söhne, ed. 5076, 1. © 1975 Schott Musik International.© renewed. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission of European American Music Distributors LLC, sole U.S. and Canadian agent for Schott Musik International.

From grand opera, Henze turned to composing a twelve-tone score for Elegy for Young Lovers (1961). This chamber opera, with a libretto in English by W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman, centers on an egotistical poet whose artistic inspiration comes from anxieties experienced by others. In order to create a situation that would produce this kind of inspiration, the poet kills his stepson and the stepson’s girlfriend (the “young lovers” in the title of the opera). A full-scale comedy, Der Junge Lord (1965), appeared next, followed by a one-act opera seria, The Bassarids (1966), an adaptation by Auden and Kallman of Euripides’ The Bacchae. The score of The Bassarids is structured as a four-movement symphony, with a specific form for each movement: sonata, scherzo, adagio and fugue, and passacaglia.⁹⁶

In the ten years between The Bassarids and We Come to the River (1976), Henze became increasingly involved as a left-wing political activist, but his writings and music of this period show that his advocacy of world revolution was tempered by a strong defense of artistic individualism.⁹⁷ We Come to the River, on an original libretto by Edward Bond, explores the conflict between authoritarian power and personal freedoms. This antiwar opera makes its attack on the militaristic values of a capitalistic society with the harshness of an atonal score and the weight of more than one hundred roles accompanied by three orchestras positioned on three separate stage levels.⁹⁸

Two markedly different operas are Henze’s The English Cat (1983), a two-act comedy of manners written in the style of a number opera, and Venus und Adonis (1997). The latter, a “dance drama,” is an opera about an opera; it calls for three dancers—Venus, Adonis, and Mars—whose vocal parts are taken by three singers positioned near them on the stage. In addition there are six or more singers who, for most of the opera’s duration, remain invisible to the audience. Their contribution consists principally of singing a cappella madrigals. The dancers become embroiled in a fateful love triangle, and eventually the three singers representing them fall into a similar fateful relationship. In the epilogue, one of the madrigalists portraying a shepherd asks the dead Adonis if he is “lonely among the stars.” Adonis’s reply is that he had been lonely while he was alive but now he is “a star among stars.”

FOR THE PAST QUARTER OF A CENTURY, Karlheinz Stockhausen (b. 1928) has been preoccupied with the creation of LICHT: Die sieben Tage der Woche, an opera cycle consisting of seven music dramas related to the seven days of the week.⁹⁹ In Robin Maconie’s exceptionally perceptive discussion of LICHT, he explores the implications of the title: “As the light of Newtonian rationalism can be split into seven spectral colours, so the seven days of LICHT are interpreted as partial refractions of a total spectrum.”¹⁰⁰ There are, of course, many other levels of interpretation of the title, not the least of them the religious symbolism of equating goodness with light, evil with darkness. This, in turn, suggests that LICHT continues in the tradition of religious drama, while at the same time pushing the limits of opera as a genre to the point of disintegration.

The first opera Stockhausen completed for the cycle was Donnerstag aus LICHT (1981). It is in three acts, bounded by a “greeting” and a “farewell,” and has as its principal characters Michael, Eva, and Luzifer, the very same characters, together with their generative melodies, who are to appear in the remaining six operas. Michael represents the hero figure; Eva is his consort and also his mother; and Luzifer plays the role of the antagonist. Uniquely, Stockhausen has designed the casting for these three roles in such a way that each can be represented by either a singer (tenor, soprano, bass, respectively), an instrumentalist (trumpet, basset horn, trombone), or a dancer. Precedent for the use of the mime-instrumentalist can be found in several of Stockhausen’s works, such as Harlequin (1976), which is to be performed by a dancing clarinetist. Donnerstag consists of scenes and acts from previously commissioned works, precluding any attempt on the part of the composer to weave them into a unified whole. What guides the structural design is not narrative but ceremony. Upon entering the theater, audiences are “greeted” by an instrumental prelude played in the foyer; upon leaving the theater, they are bid “farewell” by five trumpets that signal to one another from the roof of the theater or from some other elevated position outside the building.

The overall plan of the seven music dramas is as follows: Donnerstag is concerned primarily with the life of Michael, the musician who brings a cosmic message to earth. Samstag (1984) and Montag (1988) are focused on the characters of Luzifer and Eva, respectively. Dienstag (1992) embodies Der Jahreslauf (The Course of Time), a commissioned work written for the Japanese Imperial Gagaku Ensemble in 1977, in which the role of temptation is explored in connection with the character of Luzifer as he and Michael come into conflict. Mittwoch dwells on the cooperative actions of the three characters; Freitag (1996) reveals how Eva is tempted by Luzifer; and the seventh opera, Sonntag, is to make manifest the mystical union of Michael and Eva.¹⁰¹

Three composers who have had a number of works come to the stage since the early 1980s are Argentinian-born Maurice Kagel (b. 1931), Siegfried Matthus (b. 1934), and Udo Zimmermann (b. 1943). Kagel has lived most of his adult life in Germany, where he has worked as a filmmaker, a dramatist, and a composer. Early in his European career he succeeded Stockhausen as director of the Cologne Course for New Music. Kagel’s works for the theater include the multimedia Staatstheater (1971), consisting of nine vocal, instrumental, and scenic sections that can be performed in any order desired. The work, at first glance, appears to embrace the standard components of any opera production, but it is in the handling—or rather the intentional mishandling—of these components that Kagel succeeds in negating the essence of the very medium in which he is involved. Among his later works are Die Erschöpfung der Welt (1980), Aus Deutschland (1981), and Tantz-Schul, which was performed at the Vienna State Opera in 1988. Tantz-Schul takes its title from a 1716 treatise on dance written by a Venetian choreographer who served the court in Dresden for more than thirty years.¹⁰² The treatise is unusual in that the author not only wrote about various types of dances but also included illustrations, for which he supplied a brief melody for each entry. Kagel took these melodic fragments and wove them into an operatic score.

Matthus has been exceptionally successful with his operatic productions, not the least of them being his ninth opera, Farinelli, or the Power of Singing, first staged in Dresden in 1998. The opera centers on the life of Farinelli, a famous castrato who studied with Nicola Porpora and whose career took him first to Naples, then to London where he competed with Handel’s singers, and finally to Spain where he served King Philip V. This king was prone to having nightmares and periods of deep depression. To alleviate these maladies, Farinelli was hired to gladden the king’s spirits through music. The plot is a retrospective of Farinelli’s life but it also includes a romantic subplot that concerns Farinelli’s love for the court’s prima donna, Maria. To lend an air of authenticity to some of the scenes, Matthus moves through a wide variety of styles: he parodies the Baroque bel canto, quotes musical material from Mozart, and mimics the operatic palette of Hindemith and Berg.

Udo Zimmermann’s career as a composer owes much to Henze and to several Polish composers. Long before the Berlin Wall was dismantled, he had earned the respect of both East and West German audiences. One of his most successful operas is Die weisse Rose (1967; revised, 1986), a chamber opera for two singers and an orchestra of fourteen instrumentalists. The title refers to the anti-Hitler White Rose student revolt that occurred in 1943, led by a brother and sister. For their crime against the Hitler regime, the Nazis condemn them to death. Wolfgang Willaschek imagines the thoughts of these two young people as they await their fate and captures these emotional moments in a series of texts that are then set to music by Zimmermann, who weaves them into a cycle of sixteen songs. Among his other operas are Levins Mühle (1973), a grand opera after the novel of the same title by Johannes Bobrowski, Die wundersame Schusterfrau (1982), and Gantenbeim (1997).

From the youngest generation of composers comes Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971). His Thomas Chatterton, based on the life of the seventeenth-century poet of the same name, premiered at Dresden in 1998 to mixed reviews. The musical language that he embraced in this, his first opera, is atonal expressionism, no doubt a suitable choice to convey the gloominess of the subject at hand. A second opera entitled Heliogabal was commissioned for performance at Salzburg in 2001.

1. See Heinsheimer, “Schreker Centennial”; studies by Bekker and Neuwirth; numerous articles in Musikblätter des Anbruch (see especially vols.  2, 6, and 10).

2. Alban Berg created a piano reduction of the vocal score.

3. This assessment of Schreker’s talent was made by Paul Bekker (1882–1937), a highly regarded music critic in Frankfurt, where the premieres of Der ferne Klang and Der Schatzgräber took place.  See Musikblätter des Anbruch (1920), 2:3.

4. Tiefland was D’Albert’s seventh and most successful opera, with additional productions given in Berlin (1907), Vienna (1908), and New York at the Metropolitan Opera (1908).  See Schmitz, “Eugen d’Albert als Opernkomponist" and biography by Raupp.

5. In addition to his career as a composer, Schillings distinguished himself as a teacher, conductor of operatic works, and theater administrator.  For more on Schillings’s other operas, see chapter twenty-three and Detig, Deutsche Kunst, deutsche Nation: Der Komponist Max von Schillings.

6. Sailer, “Waltershausen und die Oper.”

7. See Riezler, Hans Pfitzner und die deutsche Bühne; Bahle, Hans Pfitzner und der geniale Mensch; Williamson, The Music of Hans Pfitzner; and Pfitzner’s own writings.  See also studies of separate operas by Hirtler and Berrsche (Der arme Heinrich); Osthoff, “Palestrina e la legenda musicale di Pfitzner” and Toller, Pfitzner’s Palestrina: The Musical Legend and Its Background; Newsom, “Hans Pfitzner, Thomas Mann, and The Magic Mountain”; Steinberg, “Opera and Cultural Analysis: The Case of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina.’ The Munich-based novelist Thomas Mann was an ardent admirer of Palestrina and included a thorough discussion of this opera in chap.  6 of his Betrachtungen eines Un-politischen (1918).

8. His last opera, Das Herz (1931), shows a more advanced harmonic style and partial return to the form of separate numbers.

9. Prefacing both the score and libretto of Palestrina is a quotation from Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung that undergirds these views.

10. Zemlinsky’s Eine florentinische Tragödie (1917) and Korngold’s Violanta (1916) continue to delight audiences. For example, both operas were revived as a double-bill production by the Santa Fe Opera in 1984. For more on Zemlinsky, see Clayton, “The Operas of Alexander Zemlinsky”; idem, “Zemlinsky’s One-Act Operas.” On Korngold, see Blickensdorfer, “Erich Wolfgang Korngold: Opern und Filmmusik”; Carroll, Erich Wolfgang Korngold: His Life and Works.

11. Biographical studies by Dent, Guerrini, and Beaumont. See also Busoni’s own writings on music.

12. Busoni attacked Wagner in his Entwurf einer neuen Aesthetik der Tonkunst (1907) and criticized his use of the leitmotif in several essays. Clearly expressed in Busoni’s writings is his desire to create a type of opera that would be set apart from the Wagnerian music drama.

13. Gozzi’s Turandot with incidental music by Busoni was first staged in 1905; a new staging of the play took place at Berlin in 1911.

14. In 1985, Anthony Beaumont revisited the detailed instructions left by Busoni at the time of his death concerning the manner in which this opera should conclude and then devised a way to complete the opera that differs from the version furnished by Jarnach. Both the Beaumont and Jarnach endings can be heard in a 1999 recording of the opera. For an explanation of how the Beaumont ending was created, see Beaumont, “Busoni’s Doctor Faust: A Reconstruction of Its Problems”

15. For example, there is a dance suite (polonaise, pastoral, gallop, waltz, minuet) in the wedding scene, a set of variations in the scene in which Faust encounters six spirits, and contrapuntal writing in the tavern scene. The opera includes an arrangement for two flutes and two harps of the well known “Greensleeves” tune and incorporates melodies related to non-Western cultures—melodies that Busoni quotes verbatim from Geschichte der Musik by A. W Ambros.

16. Dent, Ferruccio Busoni, 304.

17. Doktor Faust has had only two New York productions: one at the New York City Opera in 1992 and the other at the Metropolitan Opera in 2001.

18. See Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss; Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on His Life and Works; Krüger, Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Richard Strauss; W. Mann, Richard Strauss: A Critical Study of the Operas; Schuh, Über Opern von Richard Strauss; idem, Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Richard Strauss; R. Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen; and studies by Hartmann; Kennedy; and Krause.

19. For more on Feuersnot, see chapter twenty-three. A concert performance of Guntram at New York in 1982 marked its premiere in the United States.

20. For a detailed analysis of Strauss’s adaptation of the Hofmannsthal play for his opera, see Gilliam, Richard Strauss’s Elektra, chap. 2.

21. Pörnbacher, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss; Schuh, Der Rosenkavalier: Vier Studien.

22. Letter of September 12[?], 1910, in Strauss and Hofmannsthal, A Working Friendship, 67–68. Quoted by permission.

23. The analogy will be seen most clearly by comparison with the following works of Molière: La Princesse d’Elide (1664), Psyche (a tragédie-ballet, 1671), the pastorale in La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas (1671), and the pastoral intermèdes in Georges Dandin (1668) and Le Malade imaginaire (1673), music by M. A. Charpentier.

24. For a detailed study of the two versions of the work, see Forsyth, Ariadne auf Naxos by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss.

25. Although the reduced size of the orchestra suggests a chamber-style orchestration, the effects that Strauss is able to achieve are related more to his symphonic poems. See, for example, the orchestral accompaniment to Bacchus’s final solo.

26. There is in the 1916 Ariadne score considerable variety of musical style. Compare the overture and incidental music with the expansive design of scene iii.

27. Although the merits of this opera have been hotly contested since its creation, the Metropolitan Opera production in 1981 left no doubt that it can win acclaim from critics and public alike. Cf. Pantle, Die Frau ohne Schatten by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss; Lehmann, Five Operas and Richard Strauss; Hofmannsthal, Erzählung.

28. See Gilliam, “Strauss’s Intermezzo: Innovation and Tradition”

29. Other examples of Zeitopern by Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith are discussed below.

30. See Potter, “Strauss’s Friedenstag.”

31. The United States premiere occurred at the Santa Fe Opera in 1981.

32. This was always an important consideration with Strauss; see his prefaces to this opera and Intermezzo, and also his correspondence with Hofmannsthal.

33. Strauss’s last work for the musical stage was an opera designed for young people, Das Esels Schatten. This school opera, in Singspiel form, is based upon Wieland’s fable of a Greek dentist who hires a donkey to carry him to the next town.

34. See Reich, Schoenberg: A Critical Biography; Neighbor, “Schoenberg”; Wörner, “Arnold Schoenberg and the Theater”; Lessem, Music and Text in the Works of Arnold Schoenberg; [Schoenberg], Arnold Schoenberg Letters.

35. See Perle, “Alban Berg”; Redlich, Alban Berg: The Man and His Music; Leibowitz, “Alban Berg et l’essence de l’opéra”; Jarman, The Music of Alban Berg; Fuss, Musikalisch-dramatische Prozesse in den Opern Alban Bergs.

36. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 55.

37. For a discussion of the motivic design in both of these operas, see Lessem, Music and Text.

38. H. Keller, “Schoenberg’s Comic Opera.”

39. Schoenberg intentionally spelled Aaron as Aron. This spelling, however, is not consistently observed by authors in their studies of the work.

40. Schoenberg’s initial draft (c. 1927–28) of Moses und Aron was as an oratorio, but by 1930 he had changed his conception of the work, and hence the libretto was reworked for the stage. Nevertheless, the score retains many oratorio-type features, especially in Act I with its long choral numbers. The first United States performance was at Boston in 1966, directed by Sarah Caldwell.

41. See Wörner, Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron (Gotteswort und Magie: Die Oper Moses und Aron); H. Keller, “Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron ’; P. White, Schoenberg and the God-Idea.

42. Schoenberg, who was very much interested in mysticism and the works of Schopenhauer, discloses this autobiographical reading of Moses und Aron in a statement to Alban Berg, quoted (in an English translation) in P. White, Schoenberg and the God-Idea, 234

43. The scenes Büchner sketched for a play are based on a historical event that took place in Leipzig in the 1820s. Johann Christian Woyzeck (b. 1780), a barber and a former soldier, murdered his mistress and for his horrible crime was himself executed in the town square on August 27, 1824. Note that the title of Büchner’s play is Woyzeck, while that of the opera is Wozzeck.

44. Berg served three and a half years in the Austrian army during World War I, an experience that permitted him close identification with the title character.

45. “Firsthand Reminiscence of a Historic Night,” San Francisco Chronicle (October 27, 1981), quoted in Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck, 1:40.

46. See Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg: Wozzeck;Jarman, Alban Berg: Wozzeck; Reich, “A Guide to Wozzeck ’; Kerman, “Terror and Self-Pity”;Jouve and Fano, Wozzeck ou le nouvel opéra; Schmalfeldt, Berg’s Wozzeck: Harmonic Language and Dramatic Design.

47. See Perle, The Operas of Alban Berg: Lulu;Jarman, Alban Berg: Lulu; P. Hall, A View of Berg’s Lulu through the Autograph Sources; Ertelt, Alban Bergs Lulu: Quellenstudien und Beiträge zur Analyse.

48. Although the score is conceived as a number opera, Berg superimposes a specific musical form upon each act: sonata (I), rondo (II), theme and variations (III). See Perle, “Alban Berg.”

49. See Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe, 464–67, for a translation of the entire essay from which this quotation (p. 466) is taken. Weills essay, “Die neue Oper,” was originally published in Der neue Weg (January 16, 1926), 24–25.

50. Hindemith, “Über Musikkritik,” 106.

51. Krenek, Horizons Circled, 37. See also the composer’s other writings, especially Music Here and Now and Exploring Music (Zur Sprache gebracht), and Rogge, Ernst Kreneks Opern.

52. Initially, there was some resistance to this opera, but it soon became an international success, with performances at major opera houses, including the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

53. Strauss’s Intermezzo, discussed above, also fits this description of a Zeitoper. For an in-depth study of Zeitopern from the Weimar Republic era, see Cook, Opera for a New Republic: The Zeitopern of Krenek, Weill, and Hindemith, which includes an extensive and topically organized bibliography

54. Cook, Opera for a New Republic, 4.

55. Krenek, Horizons Circled, 114.

56. The idea for the use of film sequences in Royal Palace came from the director of the Staatsoper, Franz Ludwig Hörth, who had seen film used in a similar fashion in a Volksbühne production in 1927. See Taylor, Kurt Weill, A Composer in a Divided World, 94.

57. Weill made these remarks about the chorus in an interview with E. T. Krojanker, published in the February 18, 1928 issue of the Leipzig Neueste Nachrichten.

58. See Cook, Opera for a New Republic, 133, for a photo showing the chorus, dressed in the manner described above, for the premiere of Der Zar at Leipzig.

59. Examples cited by Cook, Opera for a New Republic, 132, include plays by Georg Kaiser and Ernst Toller.

60. The actual recording was made by the Dobbri Saxophone Orchestra under the supervision of Weill and is available, on rental, for productions of the opera.

61. See, in addition to Brecht’s own writings, Schumacher, Die dramatischen Versuche Bertolt Brechts; Hartung, “Zur epischen Oper Brechts und Weills”; Drew, “Topicality and the Universal”; articles in The Score (July 1958), no. 23; Kowalke, Kurt Weill in Europe; Taylor, Kurt Weill: Composer in a Divided World.

62. Taylor, Kurt Weill, 131.

63. Brecht also drew his text from Kipling and Villon wherever he needed material to supplement that provided by Gay. For a thorough discussion of the genesis of Die Dreigroschenoper, see Hinton, ed., Kurt Weill: The Threepenny Opera, chap. 2.

64. Weill’s incorporation of Peachum’s song (“Through all the employments of Life”) remained in the score through the dress rehearsal for the initial production, but was cut from the opening night performance.

65. Since the music was meant to be sung by actors, not professional singers, Weill often had to alter the vocal parts to suit the abilities of the performers. No one version of the opera (neither the full score nor the published piano-vocal score) replicates exactly what was heard on opening night in Berlin (1928), for the score was subjected to numerous changes thereafter. In fact, a “final”version of the opera was never sanctioned by either the librettist or the composer.

66. The    band parts used for the original production, recordings, and even for the film have been preserved. For a list of instruments assigned to the seven players, as well as the obbligato use of these instruments in the opera, see Abbott, “The ‘ Dreigroschen’ Sound.”

67. The success of Die Dreigroschenoper was nothing short of astounding for the German theater of the 1920s. The opera also proved to be of immediate appeal to audiences around the world and was translated into many different languages to accommodate those productions. For a discussion of The Threepenny Opera in America, including Marc Blitzstein’s adaptation, see chapter twenty-nine. Two of the most famous songs from this score are “Moritat” and “Pirate Jenny.” For Benjamin Britten’s adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera, see chapter twenty-eight.

68. Brecht and Weill collaborated from 1927 until 1930 and again in 1933 for Die Sieben Todsünden, a ballet.

69. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 19, 193.

70. When Weill departed from Germany, he left behind a number of scores, including that for Die Bürgschaft. Since he was never able to recover these materials, he assumed they were destroyed by the Nazis and went to his grave with this assumption. The original version of the score, however, not only survived but upon its recovery in the 1990s was once again performed, with a production in Europe in 1998 and another in the United States at the Spoleto Festival in 1999.

71. For a study of eight composers who lived and worked under the Third Reich or who were driven into exile by the Nazi regime, see Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits.

72. This second phase of Weill’s career is discussed in chapter twenty-nine.

73. Hindemith, A Composer’s World. See also biographies by Strobel, Kemp, Briner, and Skelton.

74. Willms, Führer zur Oper Cardillac.

75. Neue Sachlichkeit is a term that was applied first to art and photography and later to music and literature. With respect to music, the term was used to describe an approach to form and content that embodied a renunciation of expressionism.

76. Quotation from Ian Kempe’s article, s. v. “Hindemith, Paul,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980).

77. The premiere, planned for Berlin, was canceled by the Nazis and hence the work was first staged in Switzerland where Hindemith fled in 1938 before coming to the United States in 1940.

78. Briner, “Eine Bekenntnisoper Paul Hindemith.”

79. Ford’s essay appears in The Forum (March 1928), 363–64.

80. For another example, see Weill’s Royal Palace discussed above.

81. For an excellent discussion of this opera, see Mehring, “‘Welcome to the Machine!’ The Representation of Technology in Zeitopern.”

82. Beer, “Egon Wellesz und die Oper”; Redlich, “Egon Wellesz”; Schollum, Egon Wellesz.

83. See Klement, Das Musiktheater Carl Orffs; W Keller, Karl Orffs Antigonae.

84. See Thomas, Carl Orff: De temporum fine comoedia; Liess, Zwei Essays zu Carl Orff, De temporum fine comoedia.

85.    See Billeter, “Frank Martins Bühnenwerke.”

86. See Briner, ed., Swiss Composers in the 20th Century, for biographical profiles of these and other prominent Swiss composers.

87. Birkner, Heinrich Sutermeister: Der Weg des Bühnenkomponisten.

88. See Stuckenschmidt, Die grossen Komponisten; idem, “Von Einem’s Der Besuch.”

89. Blacher, “Neuland Rhythmus”; Stuckenschmidt, Boris Blacher.

90. Fortner’s association with the summer symposiums on contemporary music at Darmstadt brought him to the attention of many of Germany’s younger composers. See, in particular, Fortner’s writings on his own music.

91. Klein, “Rolf Liebermann als dramatischer Komponist”; Glanville-Hicks, “Some Reflections on Opera.”

92. Hennenberg, Paul Dessau; idem, Dessau-Brecht musikalische Artbeiten; Schaefer, “Paul Dessaus Einstein Oper”.

93. Zimmermann composed the score for Die Soldaten, including the revisions, between 1958 and 1964. See Seipt, “Die Soldaten.

94. See Flammer, Politisch engagierte Musik als kompositorische Problem, dargestellt am Beispiel von Luigi Nono und Hans Werner Henze; Rexroth, ed., Der Komponist Hans Werner Henze; Henze, Bohemian Fifths: An Autobiography.

95. A shortened version of König Hirsch was produced at Berlin in 1956 and a revised version, entitled Il re cervo, or The Errantries of Truth, was performed at Kassel in 1963.

96. Griffiths, “The Bassarids”; D. de la Motte, Hans Werner Henze: Der Prinz von Homburg; Geitel, Hans Werner Henze.

97. Henze, Essays; idem, Music and Politics: Collected Writings, 1953–1981.

98. The American premiere of this opera took place at Santa Fe in 1984.

99. Stockhausen had plans to complete the cycle in 2002.

100. Maconie, The Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen, 263.

101. Ibid. For the most recent bibliographic material on LICHT, s. v. “Stockhausen,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001), 24:413–14.

102. Gregorio Lambranzi’s treatise, Nuova e curiosa scuola de’ balli teatrali / Neue und curieuse theatricalische Tantz-Schul, was reprinted in 1975 and therefore would have been readily available to Kagel.