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by David Hamilton
Richard Strauss in the mid-Thirties
Though the performance lacks color and polish, Angel gives us the Strauss-Zweig Die schweigsame Frau complete in its first recording, and for all the work's dramatic and musical flaws it is welcome.
Eleventh among Richard Strauss's 15 operas, Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) was the first after the death of Hugo von Hoffmansthal and-Strauss hoped-the first of many in a new collaboration with the Austrian novelist, playwright, and biographer Stefan Zweig. The libretto was completed on January 17, 1933; two weeks later, Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Zweig was Jewish, and by the time the new opera was finally performed in Dresden on June 24, 1935, Strauss had learned just how limited was his clout-and even his privacy-as Germany's greatest living composer. He did manage to have Zweig's name printed on the program, but, to his intense humiliation, an irate and compromising letter he had sent to Zweig was intercepted and sent to Hitler. Direct collaboration was no longer possible, and Zweig declined to work under a pseudonym; instead, he passed his ideas on to the servile and uninspired theatrical historian, Josef Gregor, who made the libretto for Friedenstag with Zweig's direct assistance. (Capriccio, too, was a Zweig idea, which Strauss eventually took away from Gregor, turning it over to Clemens Krauss.) The whole sad story can be read in the Strauss-Zweig correspondence, recently published in English by the University of California Press under the title A Confidential Matter.
Zweig had earlier won great success with his adaptation of Ben Jonson's Volpone (made without direct reference to the original, on the basis of a detailed synopsis in a French history of English literature!), and to Strauss he proposed another Jonson subject. Epicoene or the Silent Woman (1609) is a comedy dealing with a society in which both the distinctions of gender and the proper uses of language have become blurred and distorted. Its action combines two plots of considerable antiquity: the one about the foolish old man whose intention to wed is foiled when a young man is substituted for the supposed spouse (at least as old as Plautus' Casina), and the one about the foolish old man who, seeking peace and quiet, marries a timid young girl and discovers her to be a shrew in mouse's clothing (a version of this by the fourth-century Greek satirist Libanius had been translated into Latin and published just a few years before Jonson's play). As far as retaining the social overtones and the verbal imagery of Jonson's comedy is concerned, Zweig might as well have worked from a synopsis, as he did with Volpone (in fact, he worked from hvo German translations by Tieck)-but this was doubtless good sense, for the dual sea-change of translation and musical setting would pretty well have smothered them anyway. Also jettisoned was the central feature of the Plautus plot, the transvestite spouse; the libretto's bogus wedding is to a real woman-in other words, pretty much the plot of Don Pasquale (which of course stems from the same antique ancestors). What remains from Jonson otherwise are a couple of characters. The play's rich uncle, Morose, is a ludicrous creature who can bear no noise except the sound of his own voice. Zweig "humanizes" him into the retired sea captain Sir Morosus, whose distaste for noise stems from eardrums damaged by a gunpowder explosion-but paradoxically this rationalization of his complaint, and the gradual revelation that he has a sympathetic side, make the plot to deceive him rather less palatable. While Jonson's conspirators use noise to unmask a grotesque faker, Zweig's use it to torture a man with a genuine physical affliction; the fact that Aminta (the Norina figure) feels sorry for him as she makes him miserable does not make the goings-on more palatable.
From Jonson, Zweig also takes the figure of the barber who organizes the plot (Doctor Malatesta, as it were), but the rest of the characters are his own invention. The nephew whose inheritance is at stake, Henry, has disgraced himself by leaving the university and joining an Italian opera troupe that is about to open a season at London's Haymarket Theatre, and by marrying one of the singers, Aminta. The rest of the troupe fills in the necessary roles in the mummery marriage and divorce proceedings (it's not at all clear how a bunch of down-at-the-heels Italian singers have become so fluent in English-and in dialects, yet-that they can carry off this elaborate set of impersonations, but one of the advantages of writing this opera in German is that you don't have to face that question squarely). Zweig never got quite clear on the chronology; having introduced the opera company, he had to abandon the original 1609 period. An initial date of 1760 was changed in later copies of the score to 1780, but in the last act Aminta and Henry sing excerpts from seventeenth-century operas (actually Straussian pastiches), while Strauss elsewhere inserts quotations ranging from the Fitzwilliarn Virginal Book to Die Frau ohne Schatten, which makes anachronism into an article of faith. In a letter to the
STRAUSS, R.: Die schweigsame Frau, Op. 80.
CAST: Aminta Jeanette Scovotti (s)
Isotta Carola Nossek (s)
Housekeeper Annelies Burmeister (ms)
Carlotta Trudeliese Schmidt (ms)
Henry Morosus Eberhard Buchner (t)
The Barber Wolfgang Schüne (b)
Morbio Klaus Hirte (b)
Sir Morosus Theo Adam (bs-b)
Vanuzzi Werner Haseleu (bs)
Farfallo Helmut Berger-Tuna (bs)
Parrot Johannes Kemter (spkr)
Dresden State Opera Chorus, Dresden State Orchestra, Marek Janowski, cond. [Helmut Storjohann and Heinz Wegner, prod.] ANGEL SZCX 3867, $24.98 (three SQ-encoded discs, automatic sequence).
original costume designer, Zweig wrote that he had envisaged the England of Handel and George III, referring to Rowlandson's drawing of Vauxhall Gardens.
That doesn't matter very much in practice, though it is symptomatic of some sloppy thinking. And Strauss, perhaps in an excess of joy at having discovered a distinguished new collaborator, wasn't nearly as critical of Zweig's work as he used to be when sizing up the theatrical and musical potential of Hofmannsthal's. (Neither Strauss nor Zweig ever mentions Don Pasquale in the correspondence; it's hard to believe that neither of them knew Donizetti's work-after all, it was performed in Salzburg, where Zweig lived and Strauss often visited to hear his own works, in the summers of 1930 and 1931!) The "blend of noble lyric poetry and farce" which to Strauss constituted "an entirely new genre of opera buffs" is in fact not very well constructed. The lyricism keeps getting in the way of the farce, even toward the end of the otherwise tightly made first act, and rather seriously so in Act II, when the mock wedding is much delayed by a duet between Morosus and the disguised Aminta. Clumsy, too, is the undercutting of what should be the climax of this act, the moment when "Timida" (Aminta in disguise) suddenly becomes a noisy termagant; a previous elaborate intrusion of supposed sailors from Morosus' old ship (actually the Italians in disguise), followed by the entire neighborhood, has already worn out our ears as well as the poor old man's.
To these problems must be added the weight of Strauss's music. Not that he doesn't try to keep it light. He uses a deal of spoken material, sometimes unaccompanied, sometimes over a light musical background. He makes closed forms that, especially in the first act, move matters along expeditiously and maintain good pacing.
He exploits that chamber-orchestra style of marzipan rococo devised for the Bürger als Edelmann-Ariadne pastiche, and also what remains in his Till Eulenspiegel vein.
Alas, the cumulative weight of all the notes-the insistently strenuous vocal writing, the complex ensembles, the ceaseless virtuoso elaboration of the motives-saturated orchestral textures-simply overwhelms the already tenuous (i.e., somewhat Teutonic) lightheartedness of the drama and the often only workmanlike quality of the musical ideas. Especially by the third act, Strauss's never strong artistic discipline has collapsed, and he abandons any consistency of style, grasping at straws for inspiration. The final peaceful monologue for Morosus, rather than transfiguring his musical material, merely repeats it-the curtain scene is a deadly anticlimax.
And yet there is-as always with Strauss-much characteristic and inventive writing. The Overture (written after the opera was finished) is a jolly and ingenious confection from the opera's leading motives.
In Act I, Morosus' complaints about noise in general and bells in particular are set to novel and apt music (though the quodlibet of operatic quotations that accompanies the first of these fails to sound clearly in the recording). The barber's music is lively, and his development of the conspiracy at the end of Act I builds very well, though it never quite recovers its momentum after being briefly sidetracked by an unnecessary slower section. Even the ill-placed duet for Morosus and Aminta in Act II is musically sound, if rather obviously indebted to the Sachs/Eva scenes in Meistersinger.
There's much felicity of detail to offset the limited satisfaction that the totality yields.
What is certain, Die schweigsame Frau turned out to be anything but the light comic opera its authors intended, just as Die ágyptische Helena ended up far from the belle Héléne manner that Strauss had hoped for. Miraculously, Strauss was finally, in Capriccio, to recover his touch, to bring matter and manner back into proportion. But not in this work.
Angel's recording brings to nine the number of Strauss operas that have been recorded commercially ( Helena, recorded last spring in Detroit, will raise the total to ten). So far, the later operas have been introduced to records in performances of considerable distinction: Walter Legge s Angel productions of Ariadne (conducted by Karajan) and Capriccio (conducted by Sawallisch) are models of style and virtuosity; Die Frau ohne Schatten (London) and Daphne (DG) were conducted by Karl Bohm at the height of his powers; the Solti Arabella (London) is also an impressive piece of work. These recordings made the best possible cases for the operas.
The Dresden Schweigsame Frau is less convincing, if only because no individual performance strikes us-as did Schwarzkopf's Ariadne and Countess, Seefried's Composer, Rysanek's Empress and Schoeffler's Barak, Gueden's Daphne and Zdenka, Wunderlich's Leukippos, Della Casá s Arabella-as a masterful realization of the character in question. There is competence and earnestness here, but not avid re-creation.
Most debilitating are the limitations of Theo Adam's Morosus. The part is extravagantly written (by the same composer who now and then wrote low F sharps for the violins even though he knew they couldn't be played on any violin in captivity), from top F down to D flat below the bass staff. The extremes aside, it demands much firm legato tone in the center of that range, and this Adam cannot provide. He's played the part on-stage a good deal, and makes appropriate gestures; not enough of them are projected with convincing security.
Aminta the silent woman is required to be silent all the way up to top E-a Zerbinetta who can ride over heavier ensembles and thicker scoring; the twenty-five-year-old Maria Cebotari created the part, to Strauss's great satisfaction (though her contemporary recordings leave one wondering about that upper range). For Jeanette Scovotti, the range is accessible, and she has few serious difficulties with intonation, so it seems churlish to wish for more variety of color, more fullness of tone for the melodies in the middle range-but these would help.
Wolfgang Schóne is a lively Barber, Eberhard Büchner a dry and wooden Henry (the original singer of this part was Martin Kremer, a Dresden Spieltenor; in 1959 at Salzburg, Fritz Wunderlich made his first international impact as Henry, and such a voice and style surely did enhance what is in fact some of Strauss's pleasanter writing for tenor). The ensembles are more vigorous than polished, suffering-as does much of the performance-from a strenuous air that is less the result of excess vigor than of insufficient attention to dynamic shading. Nor does the loss of detail in the rather resonant acoustic enhance our perception of Strauss's subtleties.
This recording gives us the complete score, for which I am grateful. Doubtless, cuts are desirable in performance; Bohm, who conducted the uncut Dresden premiere, took out nearly a third of the piece for the 1959 Salzburg performances. But it seems desirable that we should have at least one complete recording of such a work, so that listeners can make up their own minds about the work's difficulties without possibilities having been foreclosed by someone else's decisions. (It may be, of course, that cutting isn't the answer, or that the best cuts from the point of view of pacing also remove necessary plot material. Sometimes flawed works cannot be repaired.) The booklet includes, usefully, pictures of the original Dresden designs, and essays by Ernst Krause, a Strauss biographer who should not have committed such errors as these: a reference to Zweig's "translation" of Vol pone; a statement that in 1933 Zweig "first went to Austria" (but he had always lived there!); and a story about Strauss visiting Hitler personally that, although reported in Zweig's memoirs, seems to be a misunderstanding on his part, supported by no firsthand evidence.
(High Fidelity, Oct. 1979)
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