Free Shooting Through Bohemia

...The powers of hell have been thwarted by the blameless maiden's bridal garland, woven of roses consecrated by an ancient holy man who appears himself from the depths of the forest to abolish the barbarian practice of the Trial Shot, and to commute Max's sentence from perpetual banishment to a year of probation...

...Supporting the glorious vocal writing is an orchestral part that everywhere matches it in suppleness, vigor, bloom, and grace...

...Weber commands equally the most delicate and the broadest effects...

...For certain it is that Kubelik's foursquare interpre tation does not deserve to be deemed the performance of record...

...Not long ago, a new recording of Der Freischutz on the London label hit the market, and it has been receiving extravagant, wholly untenable praise in the press...

...In Friedrich Kind's libretto, mockery has an easy target...

...Even a single note of Weber's in a recitative, like the flute's F-sharp suspended in ineffable tranquillity as Agathe shears from Unison in a falling arpeggio, can summon up a whole moonlit landscape of sentiment...

...Solo winds and strings rise from the ensemble to comment and embellish, like the dancing oboe in Annchen's first aria, the serene clarinet in Agathe's prayer, or the gravely playful flute that curls and twines around the Hermit's words of pardon...

...By means of ill-gotten, magic ammunition, Kaspar shatters Max's confidence, and then seduces him to the haunted Wolf's Glen to pour seven enchanted bullets that will never miss...

...His protean syncopation has often been noted...

...Analogies are laughably easy to draw...

...Musicologists have traced Max's idiom to French models in the forgotten heroic dramas of Mehul...

...in a duet with the apprehensive bride and a trio with the two troubled lovers, her affectionate high spirits sparkle in glittering counterpoint to their more exalted vein...

...The curtain falls amid rejoicing, with the prospect of a happy wedding day a twelvemonth hence...

...In the prelude to Agathe's prayer, it is only the entrance of the solo cello that resolves a hovering rhythmic ambiguity...

...The story, briefly, runs thus: Max, a young sharpshooter employed as a gamekeeper by Kuno, the head forester of Bohemia, loves Agathe, his master's daughter, and has his blessing to marry her...

...I am the dove!'' Moments later she revives, singing in calm rapture, "I breathe yet...

...Only Rolf Boysen, fierce and unremitting in Samiel's brief, crucial interjections, is truly at one with the soul of his part...

...The shot rings out...

...The heart of the mystery of Der Freischutz lies in Weber's score, which is as various, free, and open to the common understanding as the light of heaven scattering through broken clouds...

...the bride falls-but from fright, unharmed...

...Across centuries and national boundaries, their sibylline, cheerless tidings of the irreducible destiny of humankind, of birth and dying, flash un-dimmed...

...Firearms are potent symbols...

...But on the morning of the wedding day, the hopeful suitor must first prove his worthiness by firing the Trial Shot, hitting whatever mark Ottokar, the reigning count of Bavaria, will indicate...

...At Ottokar's behest, Max takes aim at a white dove...

...Even as Max pulls his trigger, the unrecognized Agathe cries out, "Don't shoot, Max...

...Where he sets out to paint in bolder strokes, as in Kaspar's jagged drinking song or most fearfully in the Wolf's Glen scene with its electrifying rifts of meter from common time to six eighths to alla breve and its massed deployment of his full sonic battery, Weber attains the scale and breath of epic...

...In time they may grow more discerning and demand better...

...Kurt Moll, whose organlike resonance and ceremonious dignity seem to revive a better, olden time, ought to be ideal as the Hermit...

...the critical event, the public demonstration of the groom's marksmanship...

...Led by Rafael Kubelik, the Symphony Orchestra of the Bavarian Radio at no point rises above the level of good middle-European routine, and the cast, though by today's standards illustrious, is altogether uninspired...

...But even in the few passages where Weber has been shown to be derivative, he never sounds formulaic, and in any case, his most memorable inventions are elsewhere...

...Under Kubelik, his performance is in fact strangely prosaic...

...As Annchen, Helen Donath sounds her notes with commendable accuracy but no touch of charm...

...Rene Kollo, the reigning Ersatz-Heldentenor, has neither the suavity for Max's flowing passages nor the heft for his declamatory ones...

...But the anthropological skeleton key unlocks only commonplaces, and the skeleton key of ethics, with its twin web of good and evil, is no better...

...After Max's shooting-match fiasco at curtain rise, the peasants start snickering at him off the beat...

...Ottokar, the stalwart, hasty voice of worldly authority, and the Hermit, the loftier, bardic messenger of the divine will, are heard only in the third-act finale, first contrasting, then wonderfully reconciled...

...Folklore, reflecting life as it is lived in accordance with local custom, has no such staying power...

...With all eyes on them, the young couple go to their nuptials like terrified lambs to the slaughter...

...Though pinched and stentorian at the top of his range, bass Peter Meven, the Kaspar, provides a partial exception to the prevailing lack of luster...

...At every turn, the tale of the spotless youth and virgin (each in separate ways subject to baleful influence and saved by a higher, benign intervention) supports a crude psychosexual reading...

...But nothing in his supreme operatic endeavor surpasses the beauty and imaginative fullness of his evocation of the sunflecked forest, captured in winds and brasses, lush, nurturing, and unfathomable...

...For the Trial Shot, only the satanic charge is left...

...Hildegard Behrens, a flamboyant Salome for Karajan and in Solti's Fidelio an impassioned Leonore, finds no link with Agathe's mellower, reflective tones...

...Matthew A. Gurewitsch has written on music and dance for the New Leader, the New Republic, Saturday Review, and other publications...

...Deflowering is a rite of passage...

...Her theatricality finds no outlet, and her vocalism falters...

...the key prop, a gun loaded with charmed bullets...

...The London Freischutz has a single virtue: It is not apologetic (which is more than can be said for the New York City Opera's grudging brochure copy advertising this fall's premiere of the opera in a new translation by Andrew Porter...

...twas but the scare that threw me down...

...All the same, any reading that makes the score accessible to new generations is rendering some kind of service...

...Kaspar, another of Kuno's gamekeepers, whose advances Agathe has rejected, has sold his soul to Samiel, the Evil One, and schemes to save himself by destroying the pending marriage, driving Max to despair, and substituting Max's soul for his own...

...Crammed with motifs from Bohemian legend and tradition, Carl Maria von Weber's sublime Gothic opera Der Frei-schutz (first mounted in Berlin in 1821) has suffered outside its native territory from the kind of parochialism that fancies itself enlightened...

...The bird is Agathe, mysteriously transformed...

...It is Kaspar who lies writhing in his blood, expiring, cursing God, his soul forfeit to the fiend...

...Besides the bullets, the garland, and the bride-turned-bird, the supernatural apparatus features a rash of dreams and portents: a lunar eclipse, falling ancestral portraits, a misdirected funeral wreath, and more...

...No less remarkable than Weber's rhythms are his melodies, from the childlike ingenuousness of the bridesmaids' song of the garland to the manly vigor of the hunters' chorus, from Max's lyric reminiscence in his aria to Agathe's radiant outburst of joyous expectation in hers...

...What Kaspar does not say and Max does not know is that the last of them is Samiel's to guide as he pleases...

...and Kaspar's first-act vengeance aria follows models available from Neapolitan stock...

...From a distance, it looks quaint, and nothing makes the mind feel more piercing and superior than an encounter with a foreign taboo...

...Above all, there are the churning, restless strains associated with the infernal Samiel (a speaking role, and a most laconic one), strains heard both in the overture, which leads an independent life on the concert stage, and repeatedly in the course of the action...

...Annchen, whose role in the action is but to hang a painting and dress her cousin Agathe for the wedding, has two arias, both gems...

...Even at the periphery of the drama, the characters' vocal lines convey personality and roundness...

...His forbidding timbre and driven articulation convey the right tortured spirit...

...Unlike Weber's masterpiece, it is not for all time, but for a day...

...The theme is marriage...