Bittersweet Birdsong
SIMON, JOHN
On Music BITTERSWEET BIRDSONG By John Simon The most interesting CD series I know of is the ongoing one from London called Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music). That was the Nazis' name for...
...Unfortunately, Matthias Gome's light baritone, flexible enough, is not duly portentous...
...In 1946 Adenauer summoned Braunfels back to Cologne, where he rebuilt the Academy and continued as composer and concert pianist...
...Then Zeus (read Jehovah) punishes the apostasy with a storm that demolishes the aerial stronghold, and the two mortals return to earth...
...The music they wrote, sometimes in the camps, is a fitting memorial to their brutally truncated or uprooted lives—and it is offered in generally distinguished, finely recorded performances...
...Braunfels handles exposition and dialogue competently, but in a somewhat retrograde, archaizing manner...
...No sooner is the city built than various opportunists from earth try to profit by it...
...That was the Nazis' name for the work of Jewish and other politically undesirable composers, many of whom died in concentration camps, while the luckier ones escaped to England or America...
...And as far as art is concerned, I can do it much better on my own...
...Harshly put, yet more or less true...
...This is the big ballet number, as all the other birds join in the festivities...
...Old Comedy," as it is called, has been described by the classicist Peter D. Arnott as "at the same time pure entertainment and penetrating satire, a valuable medium of social comment, written in verse highly spiced with slang and echoing the language of the street...
...As he leaves, struggling to understand it, the song of the unseen Nightingale is heard again...
...The two men were sung by Karl Erb and Alfred Jerger...
...Emil Schipper was Prometheus...
...One of the Greeks, Pisthetaerus, takes Zeus' daughter Basileia (Sovereignty) in marriage and becomes ruler of Cloudcuckooland...
...Even the great nocturnal love scene between Hoffegut and the Nightingale, compared by Haas to Tristan and by Oliver to Meistersinger, poetic and engaging as it is, does not seem to me to reach the sublime...
...Also Strauss, who by 1920 had got as far in his operatic catalog as Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918...
...They go to consult the bird-king Tereus, a former mortal monarch transformed into a hoopoe, and finally suggest that the birds build a fortified aerial city, Cloudcuckooland...
...Sour grapes, surely, as corroborated by his next line: "Oh, if I had only learned here the one thing that I could use now: flying, flying...
...But Hoffegut, the idealist, understands the virtues of the flight of fancy...
...According to Haas, "Ratefreund finds contentment in the pleasures of domesticity...
...But because his music now found few takers, he again withdrew to Lake Constance...
...Fighting off tears, he heads downward...
...The Hoopoe has a fine, regal theme, just as the disapproving Eagle has a somberly ominous one...
...There is a night of romance for Hoffegut and the Nightingale as well...
...next year came word that the triumphant expedition against Sicily had ended in a total rout...
...His Hoffegut (here Good Hope, though Hope-for-Good seems nearer the mark) and Ratefreund (Loyal Friend, though I would prefer Friend-Counselor) come from a modern big city to where the birds live in no pain or hatred, only happiness and love—albeit not without stabs of yearning, as the Nightingale discloses in her rapturous opening aria...
...but Braunfels did not adhere to the original...
...The storm music fulminates magisterially...
...There is quite a bit of Wagner in him, and, in the canny orchestration, of Berlioz...
...It was conducted by Bruno Walter and hailed by both audiences and critics...
...A stellar cast helped...
...Now if only someone hereabouts would mount this opera, preferably as designed by Maurice Sendak...
...The very names of the Athenians, Euelpides and Pisthetaerus, are significant: Hopeful and Trusting in R. H. Webb's version, Hopeful and Blarney in Arnott's...
...Forthwith, though, things become more uneven...
...Instead of emigrating, he went into internal exile at Lake Constance, portraying himself as one stone in the dam against the evil flooding Germany...
...But the love duet, despite its charm, cannot stand up to Strauss' meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne, Bartók's handling of Judith and Bluebeard, Janâcek's final outpourings for Jenùfa and Laca...
...The latest CD in the series (London 448679-2)is Walter Braunfels'operaDie Vögel (The Birds), based rather loosely on Aristophanes' comedy...
...I think the best answer to that question is Michael Oliver's observation in his recent Gramophone review: "Not a masterpiece, perhaps, but as [Bruno] Walter said, a work that 'gives value to life.'" Braunfels' is not a great voice in operatic music, one that you immediately and indelibly recognize as unique...
...it too is thwarted...
...Braunfels' opera may have been more helpful in reconciling Germany to its defeat in World War I. (Ironically, the premiere's Nightingale and Hoffegut, Maria Ivogiin and Karl Erb, became real-life spouses, but eventually divorced...
...Wolfgang Holzmair is the impeccable Hoopoe, and the supporting cast is first-rate...
...Hoffegut lingers behind with an aria exquisitely blending elation and melancholy that recapitulates the opera's beginning, and ends as the Nightingale's highest notes are heard a last time...
...Hoffegut feels that the Nightingale's kiss has eternally, beautifully transformed him...
...If you know your Aristophanes, you must be wondering what sort of nightingale there is in his 414 BCE comedy...
...The pragmatic materialist wants palpable benefits from the land of the imagination...
...Through the Nightingale's kiss Hoffegut has attained the world of the imagination, the world of art...
...they are sent packing...
...This stands for nature and mankind in concert (in both senses of the word), and for inspiration coming to him who deserves it...
...There are passages that, with their repeated phrases, could almost be by Mozart...
...often, as Haas notes, "half a dozen excited birds twitter together, each with its own song...
...The new citadel stands seemingly impregnable, saluted by Ratefreund and the birds...
...with a tempest they destroy the fortress...
...Braunfels' libretto is passably translated by Philip Weiler...
...There follows the dove wedding ballet music, playful yet not without genuine sentiment and a touch of solemnity...
...The birds defy him, and the angry voice of Zeus summons up the winds...
...The unfortunate thing about Die Vögel is that its purest invention, its loveliest passage, is the four-minute diatonic orchestral introduction on which most of what follows is based...
...without equaling their original in spirit, wit or melodic substance...
...In his Richard Strauss, Ernst Krause comments: "Such men as Nikolaus von Reznicek, Joseph Marx, Franz Schmidt, Bernhard Sekles, and Walter Braunfels adopted from Strauss the brilliance of his orchestral technique and the externals of his procedures...
...and the idealist or artist, whom the vision will, in however melancholy a fashion, sustain throughout a life among uncomprehending mankind...
...When the Nightingale joins in to describe the world of the birds and her own sentiments with many an ach and ah, the loveliness continues...
...He hears her "song of longing," Frithjof Haas' synopsis tells us, and "manages to woo the little bird into his arms...
...This when Debussy, Janâcek and Bartok—to name only three prime examples—had already shown new ways of dealing with nonaria material...
...None...
...From here they could rule both men and gods: gobbling up the seed on earth and intercepting the steam of hecatombs that nourishes the gods...
...By the time of The Birds, the arrogant Athenian leader Alcibiades had already gone over to Sparta...
...Lother Zagrosek conducts the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin to excellent effect...
...Aristophanes' secular farce has become a spiritual tragicomedy...
...Aside from his misreading myrtles (Myrthen) for midges (Mücken), there is some excess verbiage (e.g., "boldness and audacity" for simple Dreistigkeit) and occasional timidity, as when the thickets überzuckert (sugar-besprinkled) by the Nightingale's song become "sweetly transformed...
...Ratefreund jesuitically declares he will not shed tears over anyone or anything: "One is much better off in the big city...
...Although a good Catholic, Braunfels (1882-1954) was of partly Jewish descent and therefore removed by the Nazis from running the Cologne Academy of Music, cofounded by him in 1925 at the urging of the then Lord Mayor Konrad Adenauer...
...Earlier, there are successes in inventing appropriate melodies for a large variety of birds...
...In his Memoirs, Walter referred to it as "one of the most interesting works to appear while I was active in Munich," something to "think back on in gratitude...
...At daybreak, Hoffegut falls into a trancelike faint when the Nightingale flutters back into the forest...
...Not so in Braunfels, whose Christian and Romantic retelling even interpolates some verses by the Romantic poet Joseph von Eichendorff...
...The world premiere of The Birds, Braunfels' second opera, took place in Munich on November 30, 1920...
...This is a dreamy melody at its most ethereal carried by the shimmering violins...
...There is no wedding at opera's end, but in the newly erected Cloudcuckooland two doves celebrate their nuptials...
...Braunfels' libretto is aparable for how seeking Utopia affects different natures: the materialist, who finally gets nothing from it...
...Next, a delegation from the gods tries to interfere...
...Yet it isn't a dream either, it is a poem that resonates inside me, without my having words for it...
...In Ratefreund's Papagenoish curses of the storm the music is again Mozartian, but quickly turns into the Straussian wistfulness of the unseen Nightingale's parting song...
...Soon Prometheus arrives with warnings against arousing Zeus' wrath...
...It was also allowed to mock the gods...
...What about the music...
...Ornithes tells of two Athenians dissatisfied with the warmongering in their city who set out to seek Utopia...
...and, best of all, the Nightingale was the great Hungarian coloratura soprano Maria Ivogün, Richard Strauss' favorite Zerbineria...
...Stirringly managed, too, is the attack of the birds on the two men, who defend themselves with pots for helmets and skewers for spears...
...It wants to become a living form, which it cannot be," he reflects...
...The 2-CD London recording has a superb Nightingale in Hellen Kwon, a potent Hoffegut in the tenor Endrik Wottrich, and, in Michael Kraus' Ratefreund, a baritone who copes well enough with the low-lying tessitura...
...Dawn Arrives in Act Two with jolly, chirpy, bustling music that contrasts effectively with the Nightingale's touching farewell...
...The pusillanimous Ratefreund, who hid in a cave, and the more pious Hoffegut, who weathered the storm in a swoon, are now witnesses to the birds' chorale of praise to Zeus' power and justice, in which Hoffegut joins...
...Not until the first of three revivals of The Birds, starting in Karlsruhe in 1971, was interest in his work rekindled...
...Aristophanes' warning came too late...
...Well, it is not that simple...
...They are comic, unheroic characters...
Vol. 80 • October 1997 • No. 16
