Der zerbrochene Krug and Alexander Zemlinsky: Der Zwerg (review)

• Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

• Performances Attended: February 17 and March 1, 2008

• Conductor: James Conlon

• Director: Darko Tresnjak

• Set Design: Ralph Funicello

• Costume Design: Linda Cho

• Lighting Design: David Weiner

• Choreography: Peggy Hickey

• Cast for Der zerbrochene Krug

• Judge Adam: James Johnson

• Eva: Melody Moore

• Frau Marthe Rull: Elizabeth Bishop

• Ruprecht: Richard Cox

• Judge Walter: Steven Humes

• Court Clerk Licht: Bonaventura Bottone

• Cast for Der Zwerg

• The Dwarf: Rodrick Dixon

• Donna Clara, the Infanta: Mary Dunleavy

• Ghita: Susan B. Anthony

• Don Estoban: James Johnson

When James Conlon accepted the position of music director of the Los Angeles Opera two years ago, he insisted on two conditions: the Opera would agree to stage all of Wagner’s major operas as soon as possible, and they would make a major commitment to the twentieth-century music suppressed, directly or indirectly, by the Nazis as “degenerate.” This has turned out to be an exceptionally canny conjunction, and part of a welcome enrichment of the LA Opera’s repertoire as it enters into a new phase of rapid growth. Patrons who might object for ideological reasons to the staging of so much Wagner have been reassured by the inclusion of operas by composers, mainly Jewish, who suffered at the hands of Wagner’s champions in the Third Reich. And those who may be suspicious of composers they may never have heard of are often pleased to discover harmonic continuities between these operas and their Wagnerian predecessors. There is indeed a kind of dialectical logic to these projects, which began unfolding in tandem last year. The long-anticipated LA Opera Ring, directed by Achim Freyer, will open in 2009, and last winter a renewed version of David Hockney’s Tristan und Isolde was followed by a double bill of a new production of Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg (The Dwarf ) and the U.S. premiere of Viktor Ullmann’s Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug), as the first installment of an ongoing project called “Recovered Voices.” Both were directed by Darko Tresnjak, the Co-Artistic Director of San Diego’s Old Globe Theater, and conducted by Conlon.

Conlon has tirelessly promoted works from this period of Germanic music and has made an enormous contribution to their rediscovery in the United States, performing them frequently and making important recordings of Schreker, Ullmann, and Schulhoff, as well as nearly a dozen discs of music by Zemlinsky. In its 2006–07 season, the LA Opera presented a Vorspeise of the Recovered Voices project in the form of an unstaged suite of pieces from Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten, Braunfels’s Die Vögel, Krenek’s Jonny spielt auf, Ullmann’s Der Kaiser von Atlantis, Schulhoff’s Flammen, and Korngold’s Die tote Stadt, along with a complete (unstaged) performance of Zemlinsky’s Eine florenti-nische Tragödie. This performance was assembled and promoted with impressive rapidity after Conlon’s appointment, but it did not give a sense of how he would approach these works as fully-staged productions. It did, however, provide Conlon with an occasion to introduce and explain his three linked motivations in Recovered Voices.

First, the project is historical, meant to expand the public’s account of twentieth-century Germanic opera, introducing works by composers who were widely admired in their time but fell into relative obscurity largely because of the catastrophic circumstances of history. Secondly, Conlon’s intention is ethical, meant to right a wrong (at least to some small degree), by counteracting the Nazis’ attempt to suppress this music and to destroy the people who made it. And, finally, Conlon’s motivation is aesthetic, to bring to the stage some astonishingly good but rarely performed operas—works, he argues, that deserve to be part of the standard repertoire and which will be recognized as such once they have become more familiar. In some ways, this last goal stands in tension with the other two, since it is based on the belief that this music is outstanding in purely musical and dramatic terms. We must, at least...