Here's an interesting thing: years before Schoenberg started messing around with serialism and his twelve-tone system, he was writing straightforwardly Wagnerian romantic music, including this extended cantata, which dramatizes poems by the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. This performance is the first time it's ever been done up in operatic fashion.
The music is beautiful; I don't know what else to say. The above description probably tells you about everything. The first part only involves solo singers, but the second half has some very dramatic choral music. The story...well, is pretty abstract, but it involves this kind, Waldemar, and his mistress Tove, who dies. Um. And then Waldemar summons some undead warriors, as you do. And then, uh, it ends.
Well, we have to consider what kind of thing this is: so what exactly is a cantata? As far as I'm able to determine, it's like an oratorio, the difference being, it has a different name. Seriously, these terms seem pretty close to interchangeable. If you google "cantata vs oratorio," you are told that an oratorio is generally longer (but this is two hours, not massive but definitely as long as many oratorios), and that a cantata is more likely to be used in religious settings (but this is secular and plenty of oratorios are religious). So...yeah. But THE POINT IS, as generally happens when you dramatize oratorios or cantatas or whatever, you can kind of tell that it was not originally an opera. Not that that's a bad thing, but you generally get something much more abstract: like, here we have people singing third-person narration that you can't attribute to any given character, and the action is as much seen as told.
That's fine; I don't mind. But I do find it a little bit perplexing that, for something that was always going to be a little bit abstruse, the director decided that its first-ever operatic production should be so inscrutable, even beyond what would be like in any event. Seriously, just try to say what's actually happening in most of this. Why is there a guy painted white carrying an illuminated balloon that keeps popping in? Why is there a giant fish-car near the end? What is HAPPENING here?!?
Well, okay, I still enjoyed it. It's not reasonable to expect a piece like this to seamlessly transform into an opera, and it's very interesting to hear this other side of Schoenberg: I don't think I've heard to pieces by a single composer more different than this and Moses und Aron. If you want to see it, that youtube video will be up for the next week, after which you'll have to buy the DVD.
It wouldn't surprise me if you were meant to overlook the man carrying the balloon in a “do not look under the curtain” kind of way, and see the light-yellow, gleaming balloon on the black background as being the Moon drifting through the night sky
ReplyDeleteWell, except that he eventually sings, and he certainly isn't dressed unobtrusively.
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