I was hoping that maybe things were good enough in Europe that opera houses could have been reopening, but no such luck, apparently: this was recorded on February 28, which must have been just before everything came crashing down. Urgh.
Well, whatever it is, it's a rarity: Schreker's last opera, and in a pronouncedly different idiom from the other two I've seen from him. Instead of the sort of difficult expressionism that we saw there, this is in more of a folk idiom, both musically and storywise. It takes place in Belgium (the city of Ghent; maybe the title makes that apparent), and the title character is Smee, a blacksmith. He's having trouble due to having been slandered a rival blacksmith, so he decides to commit suicide, but some demons convince him that it would be a better idea for him to sign away his soul in exchange for seven years of prosperity. So he does, but then he's not feeling too good about the situation after the time has elapsed. But then a family of beggars shows up, a husband and wife and their son, and Smee and his wife treat them generously, and they reveal themselves as Joseph and Mary with baby Jesus (?!?). As a reward, they offer him three wishes. He wishes for no one to be able to get down from his plum tree, or get up from his chair, or escape from his burlap sack unless he lets them; they must think he's extremely strange, but this is what he's come up with to escape from Hell, and his wishes are granted. He uses the wishes to capture the demons that come for him and gets his soul back, but they destroy his smithy and he is no longer rich. Finally, he dies, but is allowed into neither Hell nor Heaven. But when he recounts the story of how he tricked and defeated the demons, he gets to go to Heaven after all. There's also a political valence to all this: it takes place during the Eighty Years' War when Belgium was trying to gain independence from Spain, and the demons are represented as actually being Spanish higher-ups.
It's a fun kind of story, if sort of goofy as presented. But on balance, I'd say it's my favorite of Schreker's operas that I've seen. However, we must talk about the Operavision production, from Belgium's Opera Ballet Vlaanderen. It's very colorful, in an appealing way, so please enjoy the Der Schmied von Gent coloring book (seriously--that's a real thing you can download). The first two acts feature a revolving set with the city of Ghent on one side and the mouth of Hell, complete with giant Moloch statue, on the other. The characters are made up with all kinds of greasepaint. It's a lot of fun.
And yet, the third act may have been more jarring than any transition I've ever seen in any opera or anything. So as I mentioned above, there's a political aspect to this, and someone apparently decided that that should be expanded upon, and the third act, I shit you not, is all about the Belgian Congo. Seriously. The entire opera pauses for like five minutes to broadcast a Congolese Declaration of Independence from 1960. There's Congolese art all over the walls. And--most bafflingly of all--Smee's spirit for some reason turns into King Leopold, with the military uniform and jutting-out beard.
Now sure, this is important history, and it's probably true that Belgium hasn't adequately reckoned with its crimes. Former colonial powers rarely do. And yet, shoehorning them into this unrelated opera doesn't work on any level whatsoever. It's weird and distracting and arbitrary and makes the final act into something borderline incomprehensible. The grim truth is: you'd never know it from the first two acts, but this is Regietheater. Stealth Regietheater, we might say. I've mostly avoided such things, but this is the second of such I've seen from Operavision, after that bad production of La Juive. It's too bad, because it's obvious that the producers here have talent to burn. It's just that they used that talent in a misguided way. I can see through the production to the opera beneath well enough to appreciate it anyway, but damn, man.
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