Zemlinsky, Die Seejungfrau

Zemlinsky and Schoenberg, Prague, 1917
Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

‘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 far from given to exaggerated claims for ‘greatness’, yet he could hardly have been more emphatic in the case of his friend, brother-in-law, mentor, advocate, interpreter, and, of course, fellow composer, Alexander Zemlinsky. Ten years later, in 1959, another, still more exacting modernist critic, Theodor Adorno, wrote in surprisingly glowing terms. Zemlinsky 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 perhaps 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. Has Zemlinsky’s time come? Or is the question now beside the point?


In that Romantic vein, the Lyric Symphony remains Zemlinsky’s ‘masterpiece’: frequently performed, recorded, and esteemed. His operas are now staged more often, at least in Germany. In that same 1949 sketch, Schoenberg praised Zemlinsky the opera composer extravagantly, saying he knew not one ‘composer after Wagner who could satisfy the demands of the theatre with better musical substance than he. His ideas, his forms, his sonorities, and every turn of the music sprang directly from the action, from the scenery, and from the singers’ voices with a naturalness and distinction of supreme quality.’ What, then, of the invisible theatre of the symphonic poem, historically related to Wagnerian drama from Liszt onwards – as indeed in the œuvre of Richard Strauss? There are no voices, nor is there scenery. But what of ideas, forms, sonorities, and action? Die Seejungfrau (‘The Mermaid’) is Zemlinsky’s sole essay in the genre and now his most widely esteemed non-vocal work. 

Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

It was not always so. After only three performances, in Vienna, Berlin, and Prague, Zemlinsky withdrew the score. The first performance on 25 January 1905 was also noteworthy for the premiere of Schoenberg’s tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande, and for being the final concert of the Vereinigung schaffender Tonkünstler (‘Society of Creative Musicians’), founded by Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, and fellow conductor-composer Oskar Posa only the previous year. It had already performed Strauss’s Sinfonia domestica and the Vienna premiere of Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder. Here each of the founding members conducted his own premiere, five songs for baritone and orchestra by Posa given between Zemlinsky and Schoenberg’s symphonic poems.


The audience did not react kindly to Pelleas, which had most likely been poorly performed (and conducted). Schoenberg would subsequently recall that ‘reviews were unusually violent and one of the critics suggested to put me in an asylum and keep music paper out of my reach’. That is what musical history has tended to remember. However, Zemlinsky’s piece, although misunderstood as merely ‘charming’, even in one review ‘heart-warming’, was received with greater enthusiasm. Such misunderstanding is nevertheless understandable, given that Zemlinsky’s aesthetic would always remain attached to an old-fashioned notion of ‘beauty’. In a 1902 letter to Schoenberg, he declared: ’A great artist who has everything required to express himself meaningfully, must observe the boundaries of the beautiful, even if he should stretch them further.’ To do so, he continued, would have a trained ear, ‘our era … yours and mine,’ hear mere ugliness. For him, Strauss crossed that line in Ein Heldenleben. Such would not be the path taken in the ‘symphonic poem, Das Meerfräulein, by [Hans Christian] Andersen,’ soon renamed Die Seejungfrau. 

Marie Pappenheim, oil painting by Schoenberg, 1909
 Image: Arnold Schönberg Center, Vienna

It is uncertain why, following those three performances, Zemlinsky suppressed the work. He did not even mention it in a 1910 worklist he sent to Universal Edition. It appears he may have come to regret the persistence of elements of less-than-symphonic repetition, which he saw as more at home in the Viennese operettas he conducted to earn a living. The unpublished score was divided, the first movement given to Marie Pappenheim, a friend of Zemlinsky, now best known, alongside achievements as dermatologist and sexual liberationist, as Schoenberg’s librettist for Erwartung. Zemlinsky retained the second and third movements, taking them with him when he fled Europe for the United States in 1938. Only in the early 1980s did scholars come to realise that the three movements belonged together. Die Seejungfrau was finally published, receiving its first ‘modern’ performance, conducted by one of those scholars, Peter Gülke, in 1984.


In the letter to Schoenberg quoted above, Zemlinsky outlined his plan:

Part I a: At the foot of the sea (entire exposition) b: Mermaid in the human world, storm, the prince’s rescue.

Part II a: The mermaid’s longing; with the witch. b: The prince’s wedding and mermaid’s demise. Thus two parts, but four sections.

As work progressed – Zemlinsky wrote far more slowly than Schoenberg – the four sections remained, yet spread across a ‘fantasy in three movements for large orchestra’. The shift to three movements speaks of developing symphonic ambition; ‘symphonic poem’ is how Zemlinsky persistently referred to it in correspondence with Schoenberg. Even the narrative and pictorial ambition of the first movement, its storm included, are bound together by a Brahmsian mode of thematic working. ‘I had been a “Brahmsian” when I met Zemlinsky,’ Schoenberg recalled; ‘his love embraced both Brahms and Wagner and soon thereafter I became an equally confirmed addict.’


The scherzo has less in the way of narrative; it is more of a symphonic movement ‘after’ Andersen. Not for nothing do the waves of La Mer, Debussy’s three ‘symphonic sketches’, come to mind at its opening. The third movement too proceeds in notably symphonic fashion, earlier music revisited and transformed. It may ultimately offer a hymn to ‘man’s immortal soul’, yet far from dependent upon a programmatic idea, let alone a detailed narrative. We should not push such claims too far. Zemlinsky’s themes are motifs, associated with objects, ideas, emotions, as that ‘New German School’ of Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and even their successor Strauss would have understood. ‘Home’, ‘joy’, ‘despair,’ seabed, mermaid, ‘human world’, and many others speak of a conceptual dramaturgy extending beyond ‘absolute’ music, even if it eventually returns us to that realm. An age old problem of ‘programme music’ – do we need the ‘programme’ or not? – is resuscitated in a tale of neither fish nor fowl that, both in subject matter and in aesthetic controversy, redramatises and rephrases that very same problem.

Routledge translation, 1883

It is generally wise to beware reading autobiography explicitly into music. In this case, however, the romantic ardour Zemlinsky had felt prior to rejection by his pupil, Alma Schindler (subsequently Mahler) seems unavoidably related, at least in generalised fashion, to the work’s subject matter. Such would be the case more specifically in two operas, Der Traumgörge (‘Görge the Dreamer’) and Der Zwerg (‘The Dwarf’). The history and hysteria of the merwitch music, ‘bei der Meerhexe’, cut by Zemlinsky and only latterly restored in Antony Beaumont’s critical edition of the original version, tells its own bitter story. Dark brass writing at the opening proves unsurprisingly Wagnerian, although Strauss may be just as relevant. Disentangling the two hardly seems relevant. Haunting string chords, woodwind solos too, suggest Mahler’s early cantata, Das klagende Lied, which had finally received its first performance in Vienna, in 1901, albeit in heavily revised, truncated form. We might continue, isolating affinities with Till Eulenspiegel, Tod und Verklärung, and so on, yet what would be the point, without broader critical observation? Affinity is not necessarily influence; even when it turns out to be, there remains the question: ‘so what?’


Perhaps we come closer to appreciation of the work’s particular qualities when we recall that Zemlinsky, like Mahler and Strauss, yet unlike Schoenberg, was also a conductor of the first rank. The detail of his orchestral scores is noteworthy in itself and for its practicality, born of experience. That is not to say that he does not make strenuous demands; however, they are never absurd. (One might draw a comparison with, say, Liszt in his piano writing.) Beaumont identifies in this work the birth of an especially ‘singular aspect of Zemlinsky’s art,’ namely his ‘exploitation of the glissando,’ as opposed to Mahlerian portamento, ‘as an expressive device in its own right’. It could hardly have been signalled more emphatically, nor indeed originally, than in the scherzo: four unison trombones at fortissimo. Beaumont rightly acknowledges one contemporaneous usage: Schoenberg’s Pelleas, which requests muted trombones at ppp. Mere coincidence is unlikely. Who influenced whom? We shall probably never know – although Schoenberg’s greater speed at writing may just give him the edge of probability.


At any rate, as Adorno realised, Zemlinsky’s voice, impulse, and general priorities were more typical for ‘Vienna 1900’ than Schoenberg’s. Erik Levi has astutely described Zemlinsky as ‘very much a child of his time, a composer who enthusiastically absorbed a wide array of contemporary cultural influences, but whose distinctive voice only emerges after sustained exposure to his music.’ We stand in a better position to receive and learn from such exposure than previously; indeed, we have now for a little while. Zemlinsky’s time may have come upon us earlier than we knew.

(This essay was first published to accompany the Pentatone recording of Die Seejungfrau by the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and Marc Albrecht. See below.)

Götterdämmerung, De Nederlandse Opera, 30 November 2013

Het Muziektheater, Amsterdam

Siegfried – Stephen Gould

Gunther – Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester
Alberich – Werner van Mechelen
Hagen – Kurt Rydl
Brünnhilde – Catherine Foster
Gutrune, Third Norn – Astrid Weber
Waltraute – Michaela Schuster
First Norn – Nicole Piccolimini
Second Norn, Wellgunde – Barbara Senator
Woglinde – Machteld Baumans
Flosshilde – Bettina Ranch

Pierre Audi (director)

George Tsypin (set designs)
Eiko Ishioka, Robby Duiveman (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
Cor van den Brink (choreography)
Maarten van der Put (video)
Klaus Bertisch (dramaturgy)

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra

Netherlands Opera Chorus (chorus master: Eberhard Friedrich)
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

 

I shall try to make this relatively short, partly on account of time pressures, but also because I still have to watch the DVD set of this Amsterdam Ring from Hartmut Haenchen and Pierre Audi, and shall therefore be able to say more once I have seen the whole ‘cycle’. (I know the word is misleading in many ways, but it is now so ingrained that its use is sometimes well-nigh inevitable.) That said, a live experience can be very different from a filmed one; indeed, for me at least, the former is nearly always preferable. There is in any case a different cast for this run. Moreover, fellow speakers at the Internationaal Wagner Congres, which took me to Amsterdam in the first place, advised that Audi’s production, in particular George Tsypin’s brilliant set designs, did not really transfer very well to video. I shall see…

 

In many respects, it is Tsypin’s ring-like space – presumably developed in concert with Audi – that dominates proceedings: not in any sense limiting, but as a good production will do, enabling. (Stephen Langridge’s Parsifal, to which I shall come shortly, did quite the opposite: a rude, yet alas not-at-all surprising awakening, upon my return to London.) The ring is, cleverly, not circular but never meets, permitting a lengthy walkway up to the theatrical heights. Not only does that facilitate comings and goings, observations and retreats; it reminds us that Wagner’s Hegelian view of history – Schopenhauer notwithstanding – does not deal in the purely ‘cyclical’. In Götterdämmerung perhaps of all works, that is crucial. The audience is drawn in; indeed people watch – like the Immolation Scene ‘watchers’ themselves – from the extremities of the set. Equally innovative and provocative is the placing of the orchestra within the ‘ring’. It is, of course, quite a different conception from that of Wagner’s invisible orchestra at Bayreuth, which, bizarrely, no one seeks to follow.  Yet, in a sense, it has equally distinguished roots in Wagnerian æsthetics. Wagner’s conception of the orchestra as his Greek chorus does not rely upon an invisibility that was never the case in Athens; indeed, the complexity of the chorus’s engagement with drama is part of the point. We are reminded, moreover, of Patrice Chéreau’s stated Bayreuth wish, explicitly echoing Wagner, that ‘that the orchestra pit be, like Delphi’s smoking pit, a crevice uttering oracles — the Funeral March and the concluding redemption motif. The redemption motif is a message delivered to the entire world, but like all pythonesses, the orchestra is unclear, and there are several ways in which one might interpret its message. … Should one not hear it with mistrust and anxiety?’

 

Audi does not propose an overarching Konzept, at least not insofar as I could discern from this viewing of a single drama. Yet in no sense does his production seem vacuous. This is not Lepage (surely the very nadir: no criticism could be too harsh), Schenk, Braunschweig, or Cassiers. There is, may Wotan be thanked, no aping of a bad nineteenth-century naturalism, as Thomas Mann would have put it and whose utterly failure Wagner himself appreciated. Yet there is a sense both of myth – at some times vaguely eastern, the veils for Gutrune and Brünnhilde reminding one of Wagner’s (proto-)Schopenhauerian flirtations – and of its interaction with history: the very stuff of the Ring. Boundaries are fluid yet the presentation is far from formless. Thus the Gibichungs can sport stylised nineteenth-century fashion at one point, for instance Gutrune’s wedding dress, and Gunther’s hunting green with top hat, both admirably fitted to the attractive figures of Astrid Weber and Alejandro Marco-Buhrmester. At the same time there is a sense of the mists of myth and pre-history descending, the imaginative presentation of Brünnhilde’s final sinking into red oblivion a case in point: superficially similar, in its use of choreography and sheets, to that in the Berlin production of Guy Cassiers, yet so much more theatrical – and meaningful. Elegance is never exchanged for Loge’s anarchistic fire. And there is real fire too – somewhat mystifyingly at the end of the second act, but more meaningfully at the end of the third.  The Tarnhelm is used intelligently at the close of the first act, so that we see both mysterious visitors and their role in Brünnhilde’s fate. Too often - for instance, in Keith Warner's London staging - directors mess this up completely; not here.

 

Hartmut Haenchen’s direction had its moments. It was certainly preferable to the truly abysmal efforts of Antonio Pappano last year at Covent Garden. (I am beginning to think that legislation might be necessary to wrest Wagner from Pappano’s near-monopoly. A good musical director would recognise his strengths and more importantly his weaknesses, and distribute repertoire accordingly.) There was little of that stopping and starting, that driving hard and that grinding to a halt; yet, by the same token, there was some scrappy orchestral playing – the brass nearly inaudible at the end of the first act, when their steel should viscerally reflect the brutality of Brünnhilde’s rape – and Wagner’s melos was sometimes obscured.

 

Stephen Gould’s Siegfried was serviceable: more than one can often say, but it was neither an especially meaningful nor mellifluous performance. Catherine Foster displayed considerable dramatic commitment and, when her tone was properly focused, a fine command of Wagnerian line; intonation, however, was sometimes a problem.  Kurt Rydl, a wonderful Hagen in his time, showed that, whilst he can still act the part with the best of them, he should alas probably have retired a while ago, his voice often threadbare and lacking focus.  Weber, though her voice could sometimes prove attractive, had a tendency towards blowsiness. Marco-Buhrmester, though, was deeply impressive, his vocal delivery of text and music alike as elegant as his stage presence. Michaela Schuster’s Waltraute was the other star performance; as with Marco-Buhrmester, every word was made to tell, yet without exaggeration. Hers was a performance that drew one in as the production suggested. I only noticed afterwards that Eberhard Friedrich had trained the chorus; that made perfect sense, since its excellence put me in mind of Bayreuth at its best. More anon when I have watched the DVDs…

DVD Review: Der fliegende Holländer, Netherlands Opera

Daland - Robert Lloyd
Senta - Catherine Nagelstad
Erik - Marco Jentzsch
Mary - Marina Prudenskaja
Steersman - Oliver Ringelhahn
The Dutchman - Juha Uusitalo

Martin Kušej (director)
Martin Zehetgruber (set designs)
Heide Kastler (costumes)
Reinhard Traub (lighting)
Sebastian Huber (dramaturgy)
Joost Honselaar (television director)

Chorus of the Netherlands Opera (chorus master: Martin Wright)
Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra
Hartmut Haenchen (conductor)

Opus Arte OA 1049 D (166 minutes, recorded live at the Amsterdam Music Theatre, 16 and 25 February 2010).


The performance opens with a monochrome televisual storm, through which we see as well as hear strings, horns, kettledrums, other instruments, and eventually the conductor. Wagner’s opening bars prove furiously driven. Calmer seas greet the very slow, very soft English horn-led response, spots on the camera making clear the ‘framing’ of the filmic experience. The Overture, then, finds its roots in a backward-looking pot pourri conception, as opposed to forward-looking integrated symphonism, though it is perhaps not entirely without attempts to forge such a unity. Brass tend to Solti-like stridency, though the Netherlands Philharmonic woodwind evince winning perkiness and welcome lack of homogeneity. Urgency and stark contrast, then, are the watchwords, suggesting neither performance nor production will prove beholden to ‘tradition’, whatever that might be. When, towards the close of the Overture, we first view the stage, it is unclear whether the curtain has been up all along. A stark – again monochrome – set of steel and glass is immediately revealed, onto which runs a motley multi-coloured crew, one member sporting an unbecoming tropical shirt, equipped with lifejackets and lifebelts, as one registers the (relative) surprise of hearing in such a context Wagner’s 1860 ‘redemptive’ version of the coda. Were one wishing to distinguish oneself from Cosima’s Bayreuth ‘music-drama’ approach, the ‘original’ or at least an earlier version of the score might have provided greater consistency. However, one soon begins to realise that, by default or design, and I cannot believe that there is no design here, the conflict between ‘backward-’ and ‘forward-looking’ Wagner is being dramatised.

Wind ‘noise’ heightens, for better or worse, the orchestral storm throughout this opening scene. Fine choral singing throughout offers both weight and clarity, a credit to the Netherlands Opera Chorus. The Steersman, spotlit, dons a gold-lamé coat to deliver his song, taken very slowly, distended even, vocal strain telling not least through intonational insecurity; contrast is attained by speeding up considerably for the ‘Hoyohe!’ quasi-refrain. Tempo fluctuations mark the Dutchman’s ensuing monologue too, well delivered by the dark Finnish voice of Juha Uusitalo. This Dutchman is clearly tormented, but powerful too, looking forward, as does the orchestra, to the Wotan of the Walküre monologue. For all the modern dress and setting, though, the shadowy arrival of him and his crew has been accomplished in ghostly fashion, his other-worldliness intensified during the exchange with Daland. And it is clear that ‘exchange’ is on the latter’s mind, suave if shallow venality the guiding principle of Daland’s conduct, in an intelligent reading from Robert Lloyd.

Hartmut Haenchen has become increasingly prominent as a Wagner conductor. I first encountered him on disc at the helm of some rather hard-driven CPE Bach performances, then in the theatre leading Salome in Paris, which he also conducted relatively recently at Covent Garden, both solid if hardly unforgettable performances. As conductor for the Netherlands Opera Ring, directed by Pierre Audi (here credited as ‘artistic director’), and for Parsifal both in Paris and at La Monnaie, he has made claims for himself as a quasi-‘authentic’ Wagnerian, dubiously boasting of having led a swifter Parsifal even than Boulez, as if speed equated to tempo – though I believe Clemens Krauss, if not Hermann Levi, came in a few minutes faster still. Whatever the ideological stance, however, Haenchen’s performance is for the most part impressive, poised, like Martin Kušej’s production, between Wagner’s reimagined past and future. ‘Numbers’ have their own character, yet never distractingly so, as tends to happen when conductors become insistent upon Wagner’s debts to predecessors; the seeds of Bayreuth are to be identified too in a greater continuity. Likewise, the ghostly figure of the Dutchman, whose realm appears to be of an almost Schopenhauerian metaphysical realm, contrasts with the fistfuls of fifty euro notes gathered keenly by Daland and the Steersman.

The second act proved at first somewhat puzzling to me. There is just the one girl spinning: Senta. The rest are pampering themselves at a spa, towelling robes and all, with a swimming pool outside the window. A contrast is certainly drawn between Senta’s seriousness and the magazine-reading habits of the others, Mary included, but it seems an odd way to go about presenting it. However, one comes to realise that Kušej is also drawing a contrast between Senta’s present self – Catherine Nagelstad is hardly a girl, but nor does she now need to be – and a past simplicity, imagined or otherwise, hence the determined nature of her spinning amidst a backdrop of tawdry modern entertainment. The Dutchman’s hooded, marauding crew may be seen outside, leaving a dead body by the swimming pool, which turns red with bloody pollution. After a brief visit outside – into the real world? – Senta re-emerges to Erik with blood on her hands. Would-be purity cannot be maintained in such a world, though Nagelstad’s excellent marriage of Lieder-like detail with fine command of vocal line underlines the effort. There is, moreover, more than a hint of Nilsson-like sarcasm – again, this is no mere girl – to her delivery of the words ‘Ich bin ein Kind, und weiß nicht, was ich singe!’ When the Dutchman arrives, the meeting between the two of them is invented by Haenchen with a musical weight, if not always style, such as one might expect of the later Wagner. The stage is relatively empty, thinned out, too, Kušej emphasising the existentialist challenge the lovers offer to Daland’s empty materialism.

Once one has out of the way the embarrassing disco-dancing, neither attentive nor revealingly contradictory to the score, the third act continues to heighten the contrast between the late bourgeois-phenomenal world and a noumenal alternative; we also continue to follow a stronger portrayal of Erik than is generally encountered. He emerges as more dignified, more of a credible character, despite his backward-looking music. Though Erik may be no revolutionary, here and in the preceding act – especially upon the words ‘Satan hat dich umgarnt!’ – he presents us not only with a plausible alternative morality to either of the production’s two principal worlds, but also with true, deeply-felt anger, through Marco Jentzsch’s finely judged, not-quite-heroic portrayal. He may be romantic rather than Romantic, but he is no cipher. However, it is the darkly Romantic image of Senta’s portrait that is revealed as the final backdrop for Martin Zehetgruber’s set designs. Victory for erotic metaphysics over Erik’s more plausible humanity? Perhaps, but not quite, for, in a move that genuinely shocked me, Erik shoots dead first the Dutchman, upon his self-revelation, and, following her final words, Senta too. Then comes the ‘redemptive’ ending, where one might have expected Dresden. Viewing the two lovers upon a now-empty stage, one continues to question, though not necessarily to discount, the claims Wagner makes for redemption. His music may point us to Tristan, but that only begs further questions.