In its “Musica non grata” series, the formerly purely German-speaking Prague State Opera – there is still a Czech national opera – has now brought out another opera once ostracized by the Nazis after Kurt Weill’s “The Seven Deadly Sins” and Arnold Schönberg’s “Erwartung”: Franz Schrekers “Der ferne Klang” from 1909. This series, sponsored by the German Embassy, deals with works that not only shaped Prague’s musical life between the world wars and some of which premiered here, but also with composers such as Pavel Haas, Hans Krása and Gideon Klein and Viktor Ullmann, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Erwin Schulhoff, Rudolf Karel, Ernst Krenek, Jaromír Weinberger, Kurt Weill and Arnold Schönberg. Works by women composers from the Czech women’s movement will also be in the spotlight.
The ambitious project not only sounds promising, but also has a concrete effect on different levels. In addition to the fact that the Prague Opera is moving closer to the ranks of internationally renowned houses, attracting music lovers from abroad and reviving the German-speaking cultural tradition of the house founded at the end of the 19th century, it offers the great opportunity to get to know a modern age that goes beyond of common ideas. They are primarily characterized by the idea of a linear development, as effectively represented by the philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno: that with Arnold Schönberg’s departure from tonality and harmony, a new trend began that rightly declared everything else to be outdated. Other developments, such as those pursued by Paul Hindemith, counted for nothing.
Some rediscoveries of music in the first half of the 20th century timidly countered this conviction, and now in Prague, at that time a center of the musical avant-garde with Schönberg and Zemlinsky, one can see that there were movements that showed new ways beyond twelve-tone music and which should not simply be denigrated as late romantic. To this day, it is considered a sign of connoisseurship to classify these works as embarrassing works that came too late and were already anachronistic at the time. Especially when they were as successful as those of Franz Schreker, who was much played at the time.
Director Timofey Kulyabin smothers the play in musty naturalism
All the more regrettable is the impression that the pieces are being sold a little below their value when they are currently being rediscovered. The Prague Opera Orchestra is well prepared, but under the direction of its boss Karl-Heinz Steffens, it often seems too reserved. The cast of singers is very good, but not so spectacular that one would have to travel here, but above all the direction – by Timofey Kulyabin and his team – is particularly old-fashioned and, one has to put it this way: it suffocates the piece in musty naturalism.
For the sake of clarity, the relatively young Russian director Kulyabin, who is considered to be promising, has duly positioned himself politically with the words: “I do not support this decision of our government and I am against war in any form.” For other opera houses that would probably not be enough, as we saw in the case of Anna Netrebko, especially since he does not speak of war in relation to the Ukraine, but of a military operation, adopting the Russian terminology. There is currently a very precise distinction. Apparently Kulyabin is also trying to behave as correctly as possible in all directions. What else is he supposed to do? He’s at the beginning of his career and he’s ambitious.
Where Schreker’s opera was perhaps lacking in creative timeliness, in exciting image design, in surprising personal direction, he worked on the musical concept together with the dramaturge Ilya Kukharenko, deleting a choral melodrama here, putting an orchestral piece in a different place there, and finally a new one inserted by Anton Webern. And what at first seems just a little too big, namely, by his own admission, to give an image of the musical developments of the time, then appears as a vote of no confidence in Schreker’s music. As if that wasn’t enough. Or as if the composer lacked a sense of dramatic form.
Even if it is clearly Wagnerian, in this opera in particular Schreker is concerned with creating his own sound
This is not entirely understandable. Schreker has implemented a through-composed form based on the model of Richard Wagner, i.e. without formally independent arias, but the balance between sheer narrative and emotional reflection creates a tension throughout. His musical language is individually worked out, often on the edge of tonality and beyond, when the harmonies change so quickly that none can be grasped as a tonal vanishing point. And even if, especially towards the end, it is clearly wagnering again and again, Schreker is concerned with his own sound in this opera in particular, with which he achieved his breakthrough. About a “mysterious, otherworldly sound”, as Fritz, the composer in the opera, wants it to be. He can’t find him at home, so he has to go – alone, his fiancée Grete is only a nuisance, which is why he leaves her – to Venice, where the German baroque composers found inspiration and where Richard Wagner left his last breath.
Schreker began with the conception and composition as early as 1902 and completed the piece in 1909. Other biographical parallels in the opera plot can only be guessed at, but are of no importance for understanding. What is reflected very clearly, however, is the social, more specifically: the socio-psychological situation in Vienna around 1900. Above all, the rampant lust for pleasure, the lust for life of a declining elite, the erotically charged atmosphere. It is certainly no coincidence that a strongly sexually oriented psychology was developed in this place at this time. One can read Schreker’s opera beyond the individual drama: as a socially critical, latently feminist piece.
Career as a courtesan: Grete (with gold mask: Svetlana Aksenova) is a commodity from the start and becomes a prostitute after her Fritz leaves her.
(Photo: Zdenek Sokol/Prague State Opera)
The women actually only appear here as lived clichés, as dehumanized figures whose fate, at least in the case of the main character Grete Graumann, is also devalued in that it helps others, namely the great artist Fritz, to their downfall. There is the young woman as a sexual object, you see a cleaning lady sneaking around, and finally the old procuress appears who turns the young woman into a whore – initially as a high-class whore, but in the end she ends up working the streets. “A devil’s wife. She has race,” say the suitors admiringly. Gretel, the whore queen. But is this prostitute ambition more than an attempt to save one’s own dignity? If already a whore, but then the best? She appears in a red velvet robe with a gold mask, the costume department has done a great job. A kind of black mass is celebrated in the back room, incense is drawn into the auditorium.
Grete, who at the beginning of the opera serves as a stake for her father in the card game and, when he loses the game, is to be married off to the winner, is a commodity from the start. And it stays that way until the end, when Fritz admits to himself quite late that he shouldn’t have sent her away after all. The artist, who oscillates between noble desperation and hard self-pity, is comforted by a friend with the words: “I’ll bring them back to you.” In fact, and then there is a bit of a crunch in the story, he drags her along, the humiliated, maltreated, outcast. And then the composer and dramatist Schreker begins to end the dramaturgically and musically very close to Richard Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”, which of course has to go wrong. Schreker’s story is too small, the dialogues are too petty, the music is overblown in relation to it. Schreker doesn’t even come close to matching the intensity of Wagner’s “Tristan”. Unfortunately.