Deutsche Oper
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DER ZWERG von Alexander von Zemlinsky, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Premiere am 24. März 2019, copyright: Monika Ritterhaus
The Dwarf: Mick Morris Mehnert and David Butt Philip |
Donna Clara – Elena Tsallagova
Ghita – Emily Magee
The Dwarf – David Butt Philip,
Mick Morris Mehnert
Don Estoban – Philipp Jekal
Maids – Flurina Stucki, Amber
Fasquelle, Maiju Vaahtoluoto
Companions – Carolina Dawabe
Valle, Margarita Greiner
Alma Schindler – Adelle
Eslinger
Alexander von Zemlinsky –
Evgeny Nikiforov
Tobias Kratzer (director)
Rainer Sellmaier (designs)
Stefan Woinke (lighting)
Sebastian Hanusa (dramaturgy)
Ladies of the Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)
Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin
Donald Runnicles (conductor)
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| Donna Clara (Elena Tsallagova) and her guests |
‘I have always thought and still believe that he
was a great composer. Maybe his time will come earlier than we think.’ Arnold
Schoenberg was not always given to exaggerated enthusiasm for the music of his
contemporaries; he could hardly, though, have been more emphatic in the case of
his friend, brother-in-law, mentor, advocate, interpreter, and, of course,
fellow composer, Alexander Zemlinsky.
I had told myself that I ought
not to begin another piece on Zemlinsky with a reference to Schoenberg. In this
case, however, the Deutsche Oper more or less made my decision for me, by
prefacing this excellent new production of Zemlinsky’s one-act opera, Der Zwerg, with Schoenberg’s Accompaniment to a Film Scene, op.34.
Zemlinsky’s one-act opera dates from 1919-21, Schoenberg’s from the close of
the 20s. Much separates them: not least, though certainly not only,
Schoenberg’s adoption of the dodecaphonic method. Yet they have common roots as
well as kinship; the opening, additional scene to Tobias Kratzer’s staging
makes that clear, despatching us – and Zemlinsky – back two decades, to a
fashionable drawing room, in which the hapless, lovelorn Zemlinsky attempts to
teach Mahler at the piano. Alma Mahler, that is, or rather Alma Schindler,
whose rejection of Zemlinsky, depicted or rather imagined here, hit Zemlinsky
hard. Alex finds Alma irresistible – many did – yet she finds him repellent,
ridiculous; she pushes him away, mocks him. Kratzer makes clear that this is a
way in, as much for the composer and work as for us: in no sense an explanation
or reduction. I had worried that Schoenberg’s music might overshadow what came
afterwards – and perhaps it did, ever so slightly – but no harm was done, and
there was wit in the over-emphasis on the already prominent piano part as ‘learned’
and ‘performed’ by the figures at the piano. Anticipations of Schoenberg’s actual
Piano Concerto, both from the Brahmsian and Wagnerian wings – gross oversimplification,
I know – intrigued.
But back to Zemlinsky and Der Zwerg. We then move to the court of
the Spanish Infanta: a theatre of cruelty, wonder, superficiality, and, of
course, riches. It was difficult not to think a little of Salome here, not only on account of Oscar Wilde (whose short story
this is). The dwarf given as the Infanta’s eighteenth-birthday present is not
Zemlinsky – although Alma, with typical charity, would refer to him in her
memoirs as a ‘horrible dwarf’ – but the trauma of his rejection feeds character
and drama, as it had in works such as Eine
florentinische Tragödie and Die
Seejungfrau. Here, we see him in two different ways: as an actual ‘dwarf’, finely
acted by Mick Morris Mehnert, and as he sees – and hears – himself, a musician
(which he is, far from coincidentally), sung in parallel concert dress and
increasingly acted by David Butt Philip. Singing is the dwarf’s act: without
that, he would, as an ‘ugly’ person, be nothing. It enables him to be ‘merely’
ridiculous, in the eyes of the court. It is the crushing realisation that the child
– no more than Salome is she capable of empathy, of love – does not, could not
love him that has him confront his actual image, the singer at last seeing the
dwarf in the mirror. Such is the central tragedy of recognition, of despair, of
revulsion, of death.
Yet, as in Salome, we also sense the tragedy of the Infanta, Donna Clara. The
ladies of the court egg her on; is there any way, in this stifling, stylish, ‘aestheticised’
atmosphere, that she could have become more human? (What chance, after all, did
Alma have in her world of being taken seriously as a musician, as a woman, as a
human being?) Images or potential images abound. For the arrival of the gift
itself, sorry himself, mobile telephones are taken from the guests. How keen
they would have been to relay their amusement to a wider amusement; they
doubtless still will, long after the unfortunate object of their derision has
been forgotten. So too do ideas of music and musicians, of art and artists. An
orchestra is assembled, and quickly dissembled. Busts of artists – of men –
surround the stage and even – rightly, we feel – are smashed, like some of
those instruments. Is it perhaps too hopeful to install Zemlinsky’s bust
centre-stage at the close, as is accomplished here? Yes – and no. That is
surely the point. Zemlinsky’s time may or may not have come.
It certainly has done in terms
of musical performance. Butt Philip, in surely the finest, most commanding
performance I have yet heard from him, enticed and engaged. Elena Tsallagova
captured to a tee the difficult balancing act in a direction that was somehow
both the same and different, likewise as impressive in song as in demeanour. Emily
Magee and Philipp Jekal both impressed as Ghita, the lady-in-waiting who must
tell the Dwarf who he is – the Infanta lacks courage or even inclination – and Don
Estoban, supposedly master of ceremonies, yet quite out of his depth. They
helped us understand why, to appreciate failings that perhaps fell short of
tragedy, but which certainly helped prepare the way for it. Smaller roles were
all well taken, the chorus well prepared both vocally and on stage.
This was above all, though, an
achievement for Donald Runnicles and the Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper –
pointing us, perhaps, to the truth that it is in the orchestra that Zemlinsky
is most at home. It is easy to point to what he and his music are not –
Schoenberg, Mahler, Strauss… – and many would doubtless have done so again on
this occasion. Here, at least, the score never quite blooms as it might have
done with those composers; and, to be fair, as it does in Zemlinsky’s own Lyric Symphony. But one heard the
kinship with that score in particular, melodic and harmonic characteristics
never to be reduced to ‘influence’, but of a nature that we may well recognise
better when the composer’s time truly has come. Runnicles conducted as if this
were a repertoire work, its harmonic structure and meaning as clear, its
colours as specifically delineated and blended, as if he were conducting Wagner
or Strauss (or Schoenberg, etc.) There was more here, one felt, than could
possibly be discerned in a single hearing. The opera’s close in the ‘wrong’
key, Mahlerian ‘progressive’ tonality turned regressive, made its own tragic
point. Zemlinsky and his opera were given a voice – if, but only if, we
listen.
In 1959, another modernist critic, perhaps still
more exacting than Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, wrote of Zemlinsky in
surprisingly glowing terms. He had ‘made more of the compromises characteristic
of an eclectic than any other first-rate composer of his generation. Yet his
eclecticism demonstrated genius in its truly seismographic sensitivity to the
stimuli by which he allowed himself to be overwhelmed.’ We often look more warily than Adorno or
Schoenberg upon Romantic notions of genius, even as our concert halls, opera
houses, and much popular discourse cling to them. Once more: has Zemlinsky’s
time come? What of Alma’s too? Will those questions ever be beside the point?
Should they ever?
