On Friday, I attended an all-too-rare performance of Arnold Schoenberg’s “Gurre-Lieder” at Carnegie Hall. I confess, I prefer the alternate spelling, without the hyphen, but since everything about “Gurre-Lieder” screams excess, I might as well swing for the fences. The American Symphony Orchestra was led by the indefatigable Leon Botstein, always one of my heroes for resurrecting underperformed repertoire and presenting it in a scholarly context. (Unfortunately, I missed the pre-concert talk.) Ostensibly, the Carnegie performance was planned to honor Schoenberg’s 150th birthday, the actual anniversary of which will fall in September. But any performance of “Gurre-Lieder” requires no excuse.
This is not your grandpa’s Schoenberg – the high priest of dodecaphony who changed music forever and scared your grandma off buying tickets – but rather your great-grandpa’s Schoenberg – young, passionate, and all juiced up on Romanticism. Take Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler, toss them in a blender, and turn it up to 11. The composer embarked on the piece between 1900 and 1903 and completed it, after the interval of a few years, in 1911. The result is monumental post-Romanticism in its full flowering. The scoring itself is colossal, with vocal soloists, speaker, and three choruses. Its two-hour running time is epic and absorbing.
“Gurre-Lieder” (“Songs of Gurre”) weaves texts by Jens Peter Jacobsen into a tapestry of doomed love, blasphemy, and damnation, unfurled at Castle Gurre in medieval Denmark. But it is a Middle Ages steeped in myth and legend. The work climaxes with a harrowing evocation of the Wild Hunt, with ghostly and supernatural beings roaring across the night sky, and concludes with an opulent sunrise.
For all his laudable achievements, Botstein often takes heat for not being the most inspiring of conductors. It’s true, I didn’t feel quite as much juice radiating from the stage as I did the last time I heard the piece, with Simon Rattle, at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in 2000. But Carnegie is a much larger hall. Acoustically, the vocalists were difficult to hear, from my vantage in the Dress Circle; but one would have to be the most reckless of heldentenors even to attempt to pierce the sonic blast of a 150-piece orchestra.
Even so, all of the singers had their moments. The efforts of Dominic Armstrong to convey the ardor, brooding, and bitterness of King Waldemar were often frustrated by being swallowed up by his instrumental neighbors. He was best heard in the second half as, bereft at the murder of his mistress, Tove, by his wife, Queen Helvig, Waldemar essentially shakes an angry fist at God. For this, the king is condemned for all eternity to lead a pack of ghosts and reanimated skeletons on a nightly, hell-for-leather tour about the gloomy castle and its environs.
The fearful sight is recounted by a pious Peasant, sung on Friday by bass-baritone Alan Held. Held was easier to make out, since Schoenberg’s orchestration of the latter half of the oratorio is more forgiving, in some regards, the composer having returned to complete the work after a hiatus, during which he obviously learned a thing or two about transparency.
Carsten Wittmoser, as the speaker, supplied the uncanny narration in sprechstimme, an eerie netherworld of blended speech and song, which Schoenberg would explore more fully in “Pierrot Lunaire.”
In one of those grotesque comic interludes of a kind seemingly so popular among Central European post-Romantics, tenor Brenton Ryan came across best among the male soloists, as he went the furthest to inhabit his part as Klaus the Fool. You really could imagine this jester being swept along against his will, face-to-tail, on horseback.
Of the women, the palm went to Krysty Swann as the melancholy Wood Dove, who delivers the news of Tove’s death. Felicia Moore, as Tove, again had to push against the orchestra, though she seemed to be a good choice for the role. Both successfully landed their high notes.
The chorus – though it seemed smaller than what I am accustomed to seeing in this work (I count 80 singers in the program; Schoenberg called for 200) – was appropriately rowdy and powerful when needed.
No team of unamplified singers is ever going to go up against “Gurre-Lieder” in a hall of that size and be heard by everyone. Under the circumstances, supertitles would have been a great help and a sensible choice. Instead, the audience muddled through the old-fashioned way, with the very wordy text reproduced in the program in microscopic font to be discerned in semi-darkness.
By coincidence, Friday also happened to be the anniversary of the birth of Werner Klemperer, son of conductor Otto Klemperer and two-time Emmy Award winner for his memorable turn as Colonel Klink on “Hogan’s Heroes.”
Klemperer provided the sprechstimme as the Speaker on the late Seiji Ozawa’s recording of “Gurre-Lieder,” appearing alongside James McCracken, Jessye Norman, and Tatiana Troyanos. The recording was taken from a live performance, so it may well be the same as the one on this video, or at the very least it was taken from the same series of concerts. Klemperer makes his entrance at around 1 hour and 34 minutes in. And yes, he speaks fluent German.
What you see in the video is wonderful, of course, but it is but a pale reflection of the visceral impact of experiencing the work live.
I saw Klemperer (the son, not the father, alas) in person several times, narrating Beethoven’s “Egmont” with the Philadelphia Orchestra, playing the Majordomo (another speaking role) in a concert performance of Strauss’ “Ariadne auf Naxos,” again with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and as emcee for a starry gala for the Opera Company of Philadelphia – all at the old Academy of Music. I missed him in his Tony-nominated turn as Herr Schultz in the 1987 Broadway revival of “Cabaret” – which my parents attended – because I chose to hear the New York Philharmonic that night. (Kent Nagano conducted George Benjamin’s “Ringed by the Flat Horizon” and Béla Bartók’s “The Wooden Prince,” and Bella Davidovich was the soloist in Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2.)
As I said, the last time I heard “Gurre-Lieder” live was in Philadelphia in 2000, with Simon Rattle conducting. The audience was whipped into ecstasies with that one. Most memorably, in the moment’s silence following the last decay of the music, and just before the explosion of frenzied applause, there came from somewhere in the balcony a deeply satisfied “YEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!”
The Philadelphia Orchestra gave the work its first American performance under Leopold Stokowski in 1932. Needless to say, because of the forces involved, and the expense in mounting it, it is seldom done, but when it is, it pleases the crowd mightily.
Happy belated birthday, Werner Klemperer (1920-2000), and thank you, Leon Botstein and the ASO!
Werner’s dad conducting Schumann in Philadelphia
I’ve written about Otto Klemperer many times on this site, as here:
