explaining to the us what evil is all about
by Douglas Messerli
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor) The Weimar
Republic: Germany 1918-1933 Weimar Nightfall / Los Angeles
Philharmonic / the concert I attended was on Sunday, February 16, 2020
The great Bauhaus architect/designer Oskar Schlemmer did the original
costumes, choreography, and sets for the Hindemith performance, which was so
controversial that it was removed from the State Theater in Stuttgart in 1921,
after only its second performance. This work might be one of the most often
performed work of an absolute flop of first performances that ever existed.
Despite its terribly dark tones, however, Hindemith’s 1919 work is not
only highly lyrical, but filled with beautiful romantic flourishes, with 3
flutes, an English horn, rumbling brass, clarinets, drums, tam-tam, cymbals,
strings, and 2 harps—along with a full chorus (in this case the talented Los
Angeles Master Chorale, headed by Grant Gershom), and eight singers led by
Madeleine Bradbury Rance (as the woman) and Christopher Purves (as the Man). In
the Sunday production I saw Alaysha Fox replaced Anna Schubert as the First
Maiden, and there are 2 others who observe the horrors of the woman and man in
their sexual mis-match, ending in love and murder.*
Hindemith, highly disturbed by his World War I service in the regimental
band and later experiences deep in the trenches, came back from the War
disorientated, but yet re-energized to create his musical compositions. He
composed this work at the at the age of only 24.
The
LAPhil performed this work with their usual professional polish, soaring along
with the composer’s score in its often lush rises and flourishes; yet I felt it
seemed somehow a bit toned down, particularly after hearing, a couple of weeks
ago, the absolutely thrilling renditions by Gustavo Dudamel of Rachmaninoff and
Stravinsky (a concert that I will never be able to remove from my head thank
heaven). It may have been that the seemingly heavy metal cut-out shards created
by director Simon McBurney and production designer Anna Fleischle to suggest
the breakup of the Weimar world, may have slightly muted the normally glorious
sounds of the Walt Disney Concert Hall.
As
a short prologue to this piece reminds us, all of the composers and writers
involved in this project, having to escape Nazi Germany for their religious
convictions and being classified by Hitler and others as “degenerate” artists,
eventually made their way to the US, and ultimately arrived in Los Angeles,
helping to create the long literary and musical legacy that survives still
today.
Escaping to Los Angeles, German authors along with Weill and Brecht
attempted to bring their somewhat formulized notion of world-wide evil to the
US, in the central piece of the evening, the delightfully evil Seven Deadly
Sins, with two versions of a character named Anna (Nora Fischer, dressed in
a slinky blue gown) and her theatrical other, in this case a dancer (Gabriella
Schmidt).
Together the two figures travel from their Louisiana home to visit the
major cities of the US, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, seven cities
of course, discovering their personal attachments to Sloth, Pride, Wrath,
Gluttony, Lust, Greed, and Envy, yet gradually overcoming each before returning
to their Louisiana home and, presumably, redemption.
Here, with somewhat Brechtian staging, the singer and dancer do not
remain on stage but move through the orchestral seats in order to engage the
audience with their sins.
I
can just say that when Fischer sings that state’s name in German, it sent
shivers down my spine, the same way Weill’s and Brecht’s great Rise and Fall
of the City of Mahagonny made me feel about a state I could not even
imagine living in, Alabama. In their works, in which the whole of the American
continent was made to feel the same sins of the world they had had to abandon,
they helped the culture to perceive they were not to be isolated from what was
happening in the whole world, and, even more importantly, that they were not
innocent from its sins. The Seven Deadly Sins were not “over there,” but
scratching the backs of everyone in LOUisIANA, Al-abMAMA” and everywhere else
where we might have lived.
For
the world in which we today live, there can be no better lessons than these and
other European émigrés taught us through their arts. O please, send us
your…tired, poor, and even your rich. We need them, as this LAPhil concert
clearly reveals to us.
*For a full script of that play, see Murderer
the Women’s Hope by Osksar Kokoschka on this blog.
Los Angeles, February 20, 2020
Reprinted from World Arts Review
(February 2020).
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