oh glowing night
by Douglas Messerli
Franz Schreker (libretto and music) Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized),
presented by the LAOpera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance I
attended was on Sunday, April 18, 2010
As this opera's curtain goes up, the local nobles of Genoa, to whom
Alviano Salvago has given over his island, have turned this paradise into a
nightmarish world where they have taken the kidnapped young daughters of
Genoese locals and raped them. Fearful that his own ugly appearance might spoil
the beauty of his creation, Salvago has not himself gone to the island since
its transformation, but now that he has discovered what has become of his
masterwork, he is determined to sign it over to the city and its people, thus
laying open the hidden grotto where the nobles have taken their prey.
The libretto of Schreker's 1918 opera,
which he first wrote at the request of his fellow opera composer Alexander
Zemlinsky (whose Der Zwerg/The Dwarf was
presented in the same series in 2008), is a strange mix of stories that
parallel tales of inner and outer beauty by Oscar Wilde, fictions of secret
sexual orgies celebrated by the rich (such as Arthur Schnitzler's later Dream Story), and other Viennese fin-de-siècle tales of decadence,
Freud's psychological theories, and including the older myth of the hidden
grotto of Venusburg, the temple of Venus. What becomes immediately apparent is
that Die Gezeichneten's Renaissance
Genoa is a shadow portrait of turn-of-the-century Vienna.
A bit like early American filmmaker D.W. Griffith, Schreker planned his
opera to include an enormous chorus and a large orchestra of 120 or more, along
with a complex storyline that moves in many directions. The LA Opera
production, hampered by their larger production of Wagner's Ring cycle and
recent financial woes, were forced to diminish these cinematic aspirations; yet
the Los Angeles production, directed by the ever-popular James Conlon, did well
with a smaller 72-piece orchestra, and projection designer Wendall K.
Harrington, lighting designer Daniel Ordower, and director Ian Judge to
effectively call up some of Schreker's filmic ideas through a series of
well-lit projections in back of and upon a constantly changing scrim.
It is, however, hard to recreate the sense of manic action and grandiose
proportion with such a small cast as this production was allotted. The grand
orgy scene in Act III had to be represented by a single naked couple, the woman
raped by the man. But I believe the audience understood the shock of the
original work.
The music of The Stigmatized,
influenced by Richard Straus and, obviously, Richard Wagner, simultaneously
points to elements of Debussy and Puccini; yet Schreker is original in his
determination to take his Wagnerian intensity into new territory where there is
hardly ever a resolve, and what might begin as a stirring aria, such as
"Oh Glowing Night," trails off in incompleteness. Indeed, one might
say, despite the over-arching abstraction of Schreker's stated ideas, there is
no
The issues here—and they are often clumsily presented as just that,
opposing ideological forces—concern the battle between the ideal and the real,
between beauty and beast, between the forces of guilt, and the eternal battle
between sin and retribution and love and transfiguration. Despite his
self-loathing and the concurrent resistance to passion, Salvago represents
desire unfulfilled. Similarly, the beautiful Carlotta, daughter of the Genoese
mayor, suffers from a heart condition and is, accordingly, afraid of giving
herself over to love. Carlotta, like Salvago, is an artist, a painter who has
watched him pass her studio and witnessed him, one day, standing straight up
against the sun proudly before retreating to his crippled decrepitude, painting
him as such; she needs only his face. Fearing she is toying with him and
terrified of being hurt once again, he nonetheless agrees to go to her studio, where
she admits her love. For a few seconds, it seems that these reluctant lovers
have found themselves and might suddenly spring to life, but both avow their
devotion without consummating it.
Meanwhile, the nobles, in their attempt to thwart the gift of Salvago's
island to the city, seek to gain the support of the Duke, who must approve the
city's accessions.
One of the nobles, Tamare has fallen in love with Carlotta as well, and
admits to the Duke not only his love, but the secret grotto and the scandalous
events within. The Duke now has little choice but to veto the acquisition for
fear that all the nobles of Genoa will be exposed.
Tamare, rejected soon after by Carlotta, vows he will make her his
whore. When Carlotta, joining the local citizens, visits Elysium, he gets his
opportunity and succeeds, as she is overcome by his and the island's
sensuality.
With this somewhat ludicrous series of
events and situations, Schreker sets up the battle between Tamare, the brave
but cruel lover, and Salvago, who, with self-loathing, has sublimated his
desires. The rich are opposed to the everyday citizens, the evil tyrants of
flesh to the ideal of beauty and love. Fortunately, despite his heavy-handed
thematic, Schreker, as I mentioned, neither in his music nor his libretto,
takes a stance. Salvago may be a sympathetic dreamer, but he is, as Tamare
insists, a man who refuses to love life, to take charge of destiny and enjoy
the pleasures of the flesh. If Tamare is a fallen man, Salvago, in anger for
Carlotta's statement of preference for Tamare over himself just before she
dies, takes revenge, and in doing so reveals his own fallen condition. Both men
have been "marked" or "drawn," words close to the German
meaning of Die Gezeichneten.
The opera ends in near absurdity as the hunchback goes mad, slowly
crawling through the crowd, as the orchestra, which has so artfully kept the
ever-flowing joy of life in motion, comes to a crashing halt. The glowing sky,
we now perceive, is an explosion, as Salvago's island is soon to be set afire.
The shimmering sky that we witnessed was more like from the fires of hell
itself.
Schreker, as one might expect, was labeled a degenerate artist by the
Nazis, and after he was removed from his position as Director of the Musikhochschule in
Berlin, died of a stroke in 1934, two days before his 56th birthday.
Los Angeles, April 19, 2010
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2010).
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