Oberon (review)

The stage works of Carl Maria von Weber get a lot of respect. What they don't get is performances. Given their abundance of tunefulness and showcasing solos, Weber's operas should be big box office everywhere in the world. But with their problematic librettos and scenic demands (the spooky Wolf's Glen scene in Der Freischütz begs for the visual wizardry of a Steven Spielberg), they have never really caught on outside of Weber's homeland and have virtually disappeared even there. Indeed, the Earl of Harewood has fulminated that "Weber is one of the great composers of opera, and it is little short of scandalous that most opera-goers outside Germany have not witnessed a stage performance of his work."¹

Weber has had a spotty but distinguished history at America's leading opera house. The Metropolitan gave the U.S. premiere of Euryanthe—which The New Kobbé's Opera Book calls "the most consistent and ambitious of all Weber's operas"—in 1887, with a starry cast including Lilli Lehmann, Max Alvary, Marianne Brandt, and Emil Fischer under Anton Seidl's baton. But eventually, despite a new production in 1914–15 featuring Frieda Hempel, Johannes Sembach, Margarete Ober, and Hermann Weil, with Arturo Toscanini on the podium, the work received only nine more airings before vanishing for good. Similarly, Der Freischütz has long been Weber's most popular work, but it took almost a century (from 1884 to 1972) for the Met to rack up a mere thirty performances.

Weber's last opera, Oberon, or the Elf King's Oath, is most familiar to opera lovers in its German version, even though it was first performed at Covent Garden in 1826 in librettist James Robinson Planché's original English, with the soon-to-die composer conducting. When the Metropolitan staged the work, again in the vernacular, in 1918, with conductor Artur Bodanzky "improving" the Singspiel by replacing its spoken dialogue with recitatives that he composed himself, it had not been performed in New York City since 1870. With Rosa Ponselle and Giovanni Martinelli heading a polyglot opening-night cast, it enjoyed only thirteen performances before disappearing from the Yellow Brick Brewery's hallowed boards in 1921.

In his New York Times review, James G. Huneker seemed to doubt that audiences would flock to what he called "a very fascinating novelty . . . both as music and as a spectacle," but he made it clear how highly he esteemed the work. "Strictly speaking, Weber was as great an innovator as his follower, Wagner, not only historically but [also] actually. More original and prolific in musical invention, he has been a veritable Forty Thieves' cave for the plunder of later composers. All have helped themselves from his liberal hoard, but few have acknowledged their indebtedness: and he remains the chief source of the modern music-drama of which Richard Wagner is the supreme development. Weber was not the first poet to speak in terms of music, but he was the first in a long line to invest with the glamor [sic] of romance the music of opera. In the phrase of the psychiatrist he was a 'visual' and an 'auditive'; he saw his situations and landscapes and characters before he heard them, painted them in tone. He was a master of that elusive quality we call atmosphere."²

One way of circumventing Weber's situations and landscapes is to give his operas concert performances, which is how Eve Queler and her Opera Orchestra of New York approached Oberon on 23 February 1978. Freed from the need to depict the fairy bower of the Shakespearean title character and his attendant spirit Puck, the courts of the caliph of Baghdad and emir of Tunis, Charlemagne's palace, a shipwreck, a kidnapping by pirates, and the effects of a magic horn that can cause funeral pyres to disappear, Queler thus didn't even have to consider Bodanzky's solution to the work's practical problems, which was to reduce the original twenty-one stage tableaux to seven. That still left the daunting challenges of assembling a cast and...