Die Gezeichneten (review)

• Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin

• Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor

• (chorus master Rupert Huber)

• Salzburg Festival 2005 (live recording)

• Euroarts DVD 2006

• Conductor: Kent Nagano

• Director: Nikolaus Lehnhoff

• Television Director: Andreas Morell

• Set Design: Raimund Bauer

• Costume Design: Andrea Schmidt-Futterer

• Lighting Design: Alexander Koppelmann

• Alviano Salvago: Robert Brubaker

• Carlotta Nardi: Anne Schwanewilms

• Count Vitelozzo Tamare: Michael Volle

• Duke Adorno: Robert Hale

• Ludovico Nardi (the Podestà): Wolfgang Schöne

My support for the project of “director’s opera” is as firm as must be that of any liberal supporter of the wider project of live operatic production, particularly of works that have fallen out of the familiar repertoire. But it is qualified support, and I would regret the passing of criticism that drew upon historical or “text”-based arguments (however discredited these may be by conservative opera-goers’ muttering over interval drinks). That the 2005 Salzburg Festival production of Die Gezeichneten should appear on DVD is an obvious testament to its critical success. It was presented in the Felsenreitschule on a set that comprised a vast, partly broken stone sculpture of a reclining female nude, over, under, and finally inside which the singers climbed or strolled. Accolades quite properly went to conductor Kent Nagano and to singers Robert Brubaker, Anne Schwanewilms, Michael Volle, and Robert Hale. All of these certainly perform and sing at a consistently high level, and Nagano’s beautifully paced and passionately considered reading of this most passionate score is a prize for Schreker-devotees. Fast-paced performances of the extraordinary overture all too frequently turn this rare jewel into glitzy kitsch. As always with Schoenberg’s “forgotten” Viennese contemporary, eternally fated to being “rediscovered,” the encounter in 2005 left some critics nonplussed and the rest searching for language with which to do justice to what Jeremy Eichler in the New York Times called “the vertiginous beauty of Schreker’s music, but also the composer’s theatrical gifts, his penchant for probing the unconscious drives and boundless yearnings of his characters in a world that is crumbling around them.”¹

Appropriately enough, this is a quote from the back cover of the 2006 DVD that also bore a sticker, again citing the New York Times, proclaiming it the “rediscovery of the year.” As a paid-up devotee of Schreker’s operas, I must join this chorus of praise, but only while sounding some deliberately dissonant notes. The reluctant tones in my response may be critical equivalents of that quality of “something dangerous and strange at the heart of Schreker’s music,” the discovery of which Alex Ross, in the New Yorker in 2005, attributed to director Nikolaus Lehnhoff. Ross went on to suggest that this quality of danger and strangeness “guarantees that it will have an uneasy future.”² Or is it this kind of production, however fêted, that will accomplish this? A number of the 2005 reviews suggested that Lehnhoff was and is a director to be reckoned with, a director about whom one minds one’s words.³ Ross nevertheless allowed a few to slip out when he confronted the events on the island of Elysium in act 3, set in Alviano Salvago’s classical-aesthetic theme park in the bay of Genoa. Not without merit was Ross’s comparison of its “mechanical sexual ritual” to the “boring orgies in Pasolini’s Salò and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.” He went on:

In Lehnhoff ’s vision, the girls who have been abducted into Elysium are not teenagers, but mere children, and they are not only raped but murdered. It is a grisly tableau out of Egon Schiele or Otto Dix. European opera stages are full of such unspeakable acts nowadays, and they usually have no dramatic point. Lehnhoff, who in other productions has proved anything but a sensationalist, knows what he is doing. . . .The musicologist Christopher Hailey, who has long campaigned for a Schreker revival, observes that the operas work best if they are done in the highest possible style. The Salzburg performance, despite a series of awkward cuts, came close to the ideal.⁴

While Ross left veiled just what “the highest...