A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: One-off Masterpieces Pt2
Continuing my perusal of one-off masterpieces, works by composers who do not make my pantheon of greats, but have produced a few works of genius, I would like to include here the Czech Jewish composer Viktor Ullmann, who was born in Tĕšín, which presently lies on the border between the Czech Republic and Poland, but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A German speaking Jew, like Mahler and Kafka, young Viktor had a reasonably comfortable upbringing. His father was an officer in the Imperial army, finally reaching Colonel, and he proved richly talented musically. He worked closely with Schőnberg in Vienna and Zemlinsky in Prague, and his musical style was beginning to emerge from the atonality of his Viennese mentor into something more fluid and personal. He worked for a time as a conductor in Zürich and became very involved in the Anthroposophy movement founded by Rudolf Steiner.
Realising that the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany spelled danger for Jews, he removed to Prague, where he studied, composed, wrote articles and became a well-known figure. Trapped by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1942, he was deported to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt north of Prague, and, despite the horrors and deprivations in that little town, crammed into a small space with far too many people, he was a major factor in the unbelievable flourishing of the Arts there.
I was lucky enough to be involved in a BBC documentary, ‘The Music of Terezín’, made in 1993, which has musical excerpts and interviews with former residents, and is one of the most moving television documentaries ever made. Some of the interviews are heart-breaking, but some are heart-warming too in their compassion and forgiveness. One interviewee, an actress who survived to tell the tale, says: “Only the Germans knew we were sentenced to death. What we were doing was dancing under the gallows”. In this strange insular environment, people who had no hope created hope through, particularly, music. They played for themselves, but they were endlessly creative, and out of this madness, an opera, ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’ was created, written by Ullmann.
It was a satire on the lunacy of Hitler and Nazism, about a mad emperor who declares that life must become one endless war. The personification of Death, the role I played, could take no more of this barbarity, and decided to go on strike. No one could die, and therefore the emperor’s decrees were worthless. The only solution was that the emperor would have to relent, and Death demanded that he, the emperor, would have to be the first to die, if Death were to return to his job. The crazy power of the emperor would be destroyed, and normal life (and death) could resume.
Somehow, this extraordinarily strong work was permitted to get as far as the Dress Rehearsal by the German authorities, until the Gestapo worked out what it was all about, closed the show down and removed all those involved to Auschwitz, where nearly everyone died. Except, by the most amazing quirk of Fate, the singer who was performing Death, the great Czech bass, Karel Berman, who survived and who appears in the documentary, holding his own copy of the role that Ullmann had written for him. He also sings, at the age of well over 70, a haunting song by another Terezin composer, Pavel Haas, from a group of Czech songs on Chinese themes written in the camp, and which I have performed myself, many years later, at the Edinburgh Festival. I always wanted to meet Berman, but he died before I had the chance. Indeed, all these remarkable people are now dead, but the power of their story, and their extraordinary courage, lives on in the documentary. Please watch it.
I appeared in two productions of ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’, one in London with Mecklenburg Opera, and the other starting life in Liège in Belgium, under the auspices of the Théatre de la Monnaie in Brussels, where it played twice, as well as Ghent, Antwerp and Sarajevo. Over the course of my 40-year career, I have taken part in many operas and concerts, all over the world, but perhaps the one I am most proud of is the role of Death in ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’. When we were invited to take our production to Sarajevo, to reopen the Municipal Theatre and the Arts Festival, after the devastating Yugoslavian war of the 1990s, it was a truly humbling experience to play Death in a place where he had very clearly not gone on strike. The reaction of this group of war-torn people to our performance was wonderful, and the realisation that, even just venturing out of their front doors over the last few years had invited sniper fire from the hills above, brought home to all of us how privileged we were to be there, and how important music can be when darkness is all around.
‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’ may not be a masterpiece on the level of ‘Falstaff’ or ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, but it is a very significant work, of great depth and emotion, and I have no hesitation in writing about it in this series of articles.
And now, as they say, for something completely different! Not many people have heard of Umberto Giordano, but he was responsible for one of the most exciting and thrilling verismo operas ever written, ‘Andrea Chénier’.
The opera, loosely based on the life of the French poet, André Chénier, a victim of the Guillotine in 1794, was premiered at La Scala, Milan in 1896, and was a triumph, particularly for the singer of the title role, Giuseppe Borgatti, apparently a late replacement. Borgatti went on to become the first Italian to successfully tackle the great Wagnerian tenor roles and seems to have had a fantastic technique. He sang the premiere of ‘Chénier’ at the age of 25, which is scarcely credible, and it was only his deteriorating sight that prevented him from having a longer career, although he turned to singing teaching later in life, claiming Heddle Nash and Willi Domgraf-Fassbaender (father of Brigitte, but a fine baritone in his own right) as star pupils.
The role of Andrea Chénier is one of the most demanding, but also the most satisfying of tenor roles. There are great roles for soprano and baritone too, and countless minor characters, as the exciting story of love and politics in pre- and post- Revolutionary France propels us to the heroic but tragic end at the hands of Madame la Guillotine. I have never sung in the opera, and indeed, never seen it, but it is one tenor who is to blame for my obsession with it.
Readers will have seen my recent interview with the young tenor Freddie De Tommaso on the EMR Blog, and will, hopefully, remember his love for the Italian tenor Franco Corelli. I first heard the EMI recording from 1963 with Antonietta Stella, Corelli and Mario Sereni about 30 years ago, and it quickly became one of my favourites. Indeed, attendees at our parties firstly in Hackney and latterly in Edinburgh could usually set their watches by the extremely loud playing on our HiFi system of this recording, with Corelli belting out high notes as if it were the easiest thing in the world.
All the great tenors of the last hundred and thirty years have sung Chénier, but for me no one has come close to Corelli, and I would encourage our readers to seek out the recording, conducted by Santini, with the Rome Opera House orchestra. I guarantee satisfaction!
Another opera that I have never sung in is ‘Der Freischütz’ by Carl Maria von Weber, who was born in 1786, into a musical family in Lübeck. I am including Weber in my nearly group, because he was enormously influential in the development of German Romantic opera, and, due to his early death at the age of only 40, died at the peak of his powers. Again, I have decided to write about a composer whose work strangely affected me at a very young age. In my teens, as I began to become obsessed with opera, my parents bought a double album of opera highlights, the Enjoyment of Opera, Parts 1 and 2! This introduced me to a huge number of well-known and lesser- known operas, including ‘Der Freischütz’ (which translates roughly as the Freeshooter), with the famous scene in the “Wolf’s Glen”.
The opera itself, in the Singspiel tradition of the Magic Flute, has musical numbers connected by spoken dialogue. The plot is a marvellous concoction of German folk tale, jolly huntsmen and pacts with the Devil, and is hard to stage in the modern era without descending into Kitsch.
However, the scene in the Wolf’s Glen, where the evil huntsman, Kaspar, takes the hero Max to meet Samiel, the Black Huntsman (a speaking role only, but seriously creepy) to make seven magic bullets, is one of the great supernatural scenes in all opera, and, listening to the recording on that ancient disc, with the wonderful German bass, Gottlob Frick as Kaspar, I was mesmerised.
Weber was invited to London in 1826, to conduct his latest opera, ‘Oberon’, written for the Royal Opera there. Its English libretto, based on Wieland’s German poem ‘Oberon’ and the mediaeval French epic ‘Huon de Bordeaux’, was complicated, to say the least, but it seems to have been a success. Sadly, Weber was suffering from tuberculosis, and died soon after the opening, bringing a most promising career to a dramatic end. Various composers and writers have tried to complete some of Weber’s other works, notably Gustav Mahler, about whom I have recently written, but it is still ‘Der Freischütz’, and particularly the Wolf’s Glen Scene, that have preserved his memory. He wrote a fair body of songs, some for guitar accompaniment, an instrument of which he was a master, and also set some Scots songs at the request of the extraordinary George Thomson, including ‘John Anderson, My Jo’, by Burns.
My final composer in this article is Kurt Weill, two of whose stage works I have been closely involved with, ‘Die Sieben Todsünden’ (The Seven Deadly Sins) and ‘Die Dreigroschenoper’ (The Threepenny Opera).
In 2013, I sang the role of Peachum in ‘The Threepenny Opera’ at West Green House Opera, in a production which offered a gentle take on Brecht and Weill’s satire. It had been premiered in Berlin in 1928, at the height of the Weimar Republic, giving a Marxist critique of the Capitalist world, based on the play by John Gay, ‘The Beggar’s Opera’ of 1728, and I had previously sung Peachum in Britten’s version in a problematic production in Rouen. This German version, full of the smoky sexiness of Berlin cabaret, was a very long way from the 18th century world of Gay’s original, and we were lucky at West Green to have perhaps the finest contemporary exponent of Weill’s music in the Australian, Meow Meow, as Jenny. Despite the ridiculous name (I’d love to see her playing alongside Lady Gaga), she was a splendid trouper, and great performer, as was Alison Bell as the other dame in the show, Polly Peachum. This piece is, of course, most famous for the song, Mack the Knife, Mackie Messer, sung by Macheath, the notorious criminal. Although this song has been covered by a thousand singers, it is actually a gruesome, bloodthirsty ditty about murder, making Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’ seem like a walk in the park! My role, Peachum, the controller of all London’s beggars, seemed a decent sort of fellow compared to others in the show! We had quite a famous German actor playing a sort of Greek chorus, which was interesting except for the fact that his English was limited and heavily accented. Our first rehearsal with him started badly as he had to declaim the work’s title several times, and we had to explain to him that it was the ‘thrupenny’ opera not the ‘three penny’ opera! Nonetheless, it was quite exciting to be in a show as iconic as this, and the genius of Weill’s music combined with the biting humour of Bertolt Brecht’s words made it a one-off experience.
I wrote about the astonishing Terezin opera ‘Der Kaiser von Atlantis’ earlier, and, in the late 1990s, the Théatre de la Monnaie at Brussels combined our production of it with Kurt Weill’s ‘Die Sieben Todsünden’ in a double bill, directed and set by the same German team of Sabine Hartmannshen and Bettina Neuhaus, who had so brilliantly triumphed with the Ullmann opera. It was a huge success, so much so that it was repeated two years later at the same venue. For the second run, the theatre brought in Mark Stringer, the American conductor who worked extensively with Leonard Bernstein in his later years, and we had the added fantasy of performing with the fine German soprano, Anja Silja, one of the greatest singers of the 20th century, as Anna 1.
This is a strange work, a sung ballet, premiered in Paris in 1933, the last collaboration between Weill and Brecht, with the lead role split between a singer and a dancer as Anna 1 and Anna 2. Lotte Lenya, Mrs Weill, who had also played Jenny in the original “Dreigroschenoper”, was the original Anna 1, so we were part of a tradition of serious note! (Lenya also played the role of the murderous Rosa Klebb in the Bond film ‘From Russia with Love’!).
Anna 1 is the cynical impresario and Anna 2 is the emotional, artistic beauty, split personalities. The Family, as a sort of Greek chorus, are a male voice quartet, with the bass (me) as the Mother, who comment on the career of Anna working her way through various American cities in each of which she/they encounter one of the seven deadly sins of the Bible, eventually making enough money to buy a little home on the Mississippi. The enigmatic epilogue leaves open the question of whether this has been a successful life. Has morality been abandoned to find worldly satisfaction? Was morality worth striving for?
The production brilliantly had us, the family, sliding along the roof of a house looking down on the events and stories of the journey. It was a brilliant double bill, and a show in which I was inordinately proud to have taken part. Its success in Brussels meant that concert versions of the opera/ballet were invited to Norway and Holland, and I found myself singing in the concert hall in Oslo, and, most thrillingly, in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the greatest concert halls in the world. The added excitement of the Amsterdam show was that the famous Hungarian composer Péter Eőtvős conducted us, and my lovely compatriot Marie McLaughlin sang the role of Anna 1. This was my first meeting with Marie, and I was lucky enough to sing with her years later at Covent Garden in ‘Gianni Schicchi’.
I hope you have been tempted to find out more about these one -off composers I have written about here. As I said, we are always happy to get some feedback from our readers, within reason and the boundaries of decency, so feel free to comment on any of the articles I have been writing over the past year.
