"''Das Schloss Dürande' was his last opera, by far his longest, and in many senses the one with the highest degree of musical inspiration. But the libretto is so drenched with Nazi vocabulary that it will in future at best be heard in concert or on CD. It shall probably never been seen on stage again – and let’s hope it isn't.' Back in 2002, this was the apodictic opinion of Schoeck’s biographer Chris Walton about the opera 'Das Schloss Dürande', which was first performed at the Berlin State Opera in 1943, at the height of the Second World War.
"The libretto by Hermann Burte, for which Schoeck was also in part responsible, remains from today's perspective the weak point of the opera. Its style is awkward, and the quality of the verses is variable. Alongside pretty, ingenuous, folksy verses and hearty revolutionary songs, we also find amateurish rhymes and linguistic embarrassments. Today, it’s the national-socialist phrases and ideological elements of the libretto that are most problematic. But Schoeck’s music is of such high quality that it is more than worth re-engaging with the opera today.
"The Bern University of the Arts (HKB) accordingly embarked on a project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to investigate the opera’s genesis in the context of the German/Swiss cultural exchanges of its time (the results have since been published in book form: ''Als Schweizer bin ich neutral'. Othmar Schoeck's Oper 'Das Schloss Dürande' und ihr Umfeld' – ''As a Swiss, I’m neutral'. Othmar Schoeck’s opera 'Das Schloss Dürande' and its milieu'. Schliengen: Edition Argus 2018). At the same time, Francesco Micieli was commissioned to get to grips with Burte’s text and embark on a radical act of prising it apart – the rhymes in particular. After some hesitation, Micieli agreed: 'It needs a large-scale act of de-kitschification. For me, the novella remains the source we must draw upon, and whose language we should endeavour to approximate'.
"Micieli’s new text is an object lesson in libretto-writing. In it, he endeavours to re-engage with Eichendorff's original text in a reflective, mediating fashion. The ideological, artistically problematical verses are here replaced, while the dramaturgical significance is heightened of the struggle songs and the folk-like verses inserted by Burte.
"So in concrete terms, what were the challenges Micieli faced, and what was his approach to solving
them?
(Armand, hält den Becher)
'Heil dir, du Feuerquelle,
Der Heimat Sonnenblut!
Ich trinke und küsse die Stelle,
Wo deine Lippen geruht!'
(Armand, holding the goblet)
'Hail to thee, thou spring of fire,
The blood of our homeland's sun!
I shall drink, and kiss the spot
where your lips touched!'
'Heil', 'Feuerquelle', 'Heimat', 'Sonnenblut' – all these are core words in the vocabulary of the Third Reich (the 'Lingua Tertii Imperii' as Victor Klemperer called it). They are here condensed in a pathosladen context and intensified by the exclamation marks and the end rhymes. The alliteration 'Heil – Heimat', with its echoes of Stabreim, serves to dot the i's, as it were. The second half of the strophe is pedestrian, pretentious and crassly different in tone. These four lines alone demonstrate how the duo of Burte and Schoeck accommodated themselves to the Nazi regime and how the vocabulary, pathos, rhymes and linguistic banalities of the text disqualified their opera for later generations. The solution proposed by Micieli is radically different – it is a kind of textual counter-proposition, though one that actually reflects the pianissimo that Schoeck wrote in his score at this point:
'Komm leise da herüber
zum schattig verschwiegenen Baum.
Ich trinke und küsse die Stelle,
die deine Lippen berührt.'
'Come softly over here
To the secluded shade of the tree.
I shall drink, and kiss the spot
That your lips have touched'.
Francesco Micieli’s new version sees itself as a creative experiment in reaction to the original libretto. It is without rhyme, without any pomp, and it is gentle. Astonishingly, the prosody of the German text fits better here, too. The furtive invitation 'Komm leise da herüber' masks the metre, suppressing all accents. And 'schattig, verschwiegend' points to a different world, to that of dreams.
"Micieli’s chosen artistic approach to his task is intentionally ahistorical, for he is convinced that the opera cannot be performed any other way (as already explained through its reception history above). His arrangement in a sense carries over the procedures of historical performance practice into the creative process, taking up ideas that Schoeck and his contemporaries had already considered at the time, but had only realised in part.
"Schoeck reacted critically to the text that Burte gave him, even while he was at work on the opera. He did not like its dramaturgy at all, and his own scenario pointed more clearly back to Eichendorff. Schoeck was also vehemently opposed to any psychological simplification. Burte was obviously out of his depth in trying to turn his personae into operatic characters possessed of an equal degree of ambivalence to their originals in the novella. His depictions are overwhelmingly simplistic. The dreamlike quality of Eichendorff is lost, and everything is translated into concrete action. Schoeck brought his own suggestions, but often felt as if he was banging his head against a brick wall, and complained bitterly about it. In some places he simply changed the text himself, though from our viewpoint today he didn’t do so often enough. His first biographer, Hans Corrodi, was able to get him to include two poems by Eichendorff in the finished libretto. All the same, not all the problems of Dürande can be laid at Burte’s door as commentators have been wont to do. The composer himself also brought in a number of ideas that cannot but seem dubious to us today.
"After the opera's second production was a flop – it took place at the Zurich City Theatre, also in 1943 – Schoeck’s circle of friends endeavoured to save what they could and proposed making the necessary repairs. The literary scholar Emil Staiger suggested cuts to Schoeck, along with improvements to the worst of the libretto's rhymes. Gerd Albrecht made a half-hearted attempt to revive the opera in Berlin in 1993, but this failed too – though the music itself received praise: 'The music more or less tries to win back the typically Eichendorffian atmosphere that the libretto had lost.' One critic even suggested writing a new libretto: 'They didn’t succeed in saving the opera. For that, it will need a new text.'
"Our new text has adapted some 60% of the original and succeeds in both creating a different tone and reinventing the characters. The demeanour, dramaturgy and overall utterances have been altered. It is as if a new opera has emerged, whose motto is 'Back to Eichendorff!'. This approach uses literary means to analyse what goes on when you re-write a libretto. What happens with the language, how does its demeanour change, and how does this alter the psychology of the characters, their disposition and the dramaturgy? And what does this mean for the text’s relationship to the music? How does the process of enlarging on Eichendorff actually take shape? It is essentially a kind of restitutive update (Willi Schuh, the former music critic of the 'Neue Zürcher Zeitung', might have called it a 'retrotransfer').
"Practical issues come first: 'Just how slavishly do you have to keep to the number of syllables and stresses, and how freely can we let it unfold?' Time and again, the discussion about the work in progress came back to the significance of the actual process: 'This engagement with the libretto sees itself as a kind of 'artistic laboratory', and doesn’t really aim to be complete.'
"In a further step, the initial, poetic version had to be made congruent with the vocal lines, which was Mario Venzago’s task. A syllable was omitted here, one added there, while this or that stress was altered and the melodic line and the rhythms adjusted appropriately. The varying literary quality of the original text posed a particular challenge. The style of Micieli’s language – and of Eichendorff’s – is at times fundamentally different from that of Burte, making 'fractures' evident when they clash up against each other. Leaving such ruptures visible might be an acceptable mode of operation when restoring a physical work of art, for example, but they can hinder the musical flow of an opera. As a result, smoother transitions had to be achieved: 'Francesco [Micieli] can also proceed more freely. Often the right words come through simply when you play the music.'
"It is relatively easy to cope with small changes to the numbers of syllables and to shifts in the placement of accents, but the challenge is far greater when you’re dealing with a quite different amount of text to be sung. As a shrewd man of practice, however, Venzago was able to make suggestions that might otherwise have seemed quite unusual: 'Because I had too much text (and because you simply can’t churn out the text when you’re singing high notes), I’ve place the voices on top of one another.'
"When adopting passages from the original novella, some passages intentionally remained in the third person, which creates quite new effects. Here, the participants in the process had to rethink things scenically. What happens when you speak in the third person; when is this at all feasible, and when not? If it’s not just a matter of Gabriele speaking in the third person, but of having her words divided up between her and her brother Renald, then the result is a double act of alienation that reflects her somnambulistic character, but also her uncertainty, indeed her heteronomy. Ultimately, the interlacing of the siblings' text creates a subtle sense of inner commonality.
"This reworking of 'Das Schloss Dürande' aims to restore to the international operatic stage a significant opera of late-tonal Modernism that in the long term will have to find its own way into the repertoire alongside the works of Richard Strauss, Leoš Janáček, Franz Schreker and Alexander Zemlinsky. Its late-Romantic style, which is common to the 'lyrical' Schoeck of the songs and the 'dramatic' Schoeck of the opera 'Penthesilea', here explores the very boundaries of what the idiom would allow. At the same time, both these aspects of his oeuvre are so closely interwoven that the result in Dürande – which we are now able to rediscover for ourselves – is wholly autonomous and appropriate to its subject, almost postmodern in conception, and still capable of sweeping us off our feet today." (Thomas Gartmann. From the liner notes.)
Performers: Berner Symphonieorchester, Mario Venzago
1.1. Akt I: 'Ein Junger, Fremder Mann'
1.2. Akt I: 'Am Liebsten Würd Ich Nach Dem Fremden Zielen'
1.3. Akt I: 'Still! Da Amtet Es Im Wald'
1.4. Akt I: 'Renald, So Falsch, So Dumm!'
1.5. Akt I: 'Sie Beteuerte, Dass Sie Es Nicht Wisse'
1.6. Akt I: 'Wie Heuchlerisch Du Das Erzählst!'
1.7. Akt I: 'Was Hast Du Da-Zeig Her!'
1.8. Akt I: 'Gute Nacht, Mein Selig Vater Und Mutter'
1.9. Akt I: 'Gabriele, Sie Lauschte Am Fenster'
1.10. Akt I: 'Verzeih Mir, Bruder, Im Zimmer Ist Eine So Dumpfe Luft!'
1.11. Akt I: 'Was Will Sein Stampfen Und Pochen?'
1.12. Akt I: 'Gabriele! Alles Leer!'
1.13. Akt I: 'Ich Hab Gesehn Ein Hirschlein Schlank'
1.14. Akt II: 'Angelus Domini'
1.15. Akt II: 'Eine Gems Auf Dem Stein'
1.16. Akt II: 'Sie Legte Den Kopf Auf Ihr Bündel'
1.17. Akt II: 'Es Ist Nun Der Herbst Gekommen'
1.18. Akt II: 'Ich Möchte Mich Gerne Bei Nacht Verirren'
1.19. Akt II: 'Wein Gereift Im Sonnenstrahl'
1.20. Akt II: 'Renald Dubois, Warum So Gehetzt?'
1.21. Akt II: 'Wie, So Geschwind Wieder Bei Kräften?'
1.22. Akt II: 'Wer Beschreibt Die Große Freude'
1.23. Akt II: 'Ich Schwang Mich Auf Vom Gitter'
1.24. Akt II: 'O, Wie Mich Der Gedanke Mitten Ins Leben Trifft!'
1.25. Akt II: 'Der Zweite Schluck Vom Neuen Wein'
1.26. Akt II: 'Er In Paris, Sie Hier Im Kloster!'
1.27. Akt II: 'Gestern, Brüder, Könnt Ihrs Glauben!'
1.28. Akt II: 'Endlich Am Ort Der Ehrwürd'gen Frauen'
1.29. Akt II: 'Zum Teufel, Wo Sind Meine Sachen?'
1.30. Akt II: 'Hi Hi! Sie Sind In Paris!'
1.31. Akt II: 'Bleibe Er Brav!'
2.1. Akt III: 'Ihr Leute Von Paris!'
2.2. Akt III: 'Sie Kommen Aus Dem Süden Her, Sagen Sie?'
2.3. Akt III: 'Er Will Sein Recht Vom Grafen Von Dürande'
2.4. Akt III: 'Ein Advokat, Ein Niemals Angelangter'
2.5. Akt III: 'Herz, In Deinen Sonnenhellen Tagen'
2.6. Akt III: 'Wer Ist Der Herr, Den Wir Erwarten?'
2.7. Akt III: 'Mein Diener Nicolas Hat Den Raum Bestimmt'
2.8. Akt III: 'Ich Kann Dein Held Nicht Sein!'
2.9. Akt III: 'Fortgespült Der Garten'
2.10. Akt III: 'Nachts Durch Die Stille Runde'
2.11. Akt III: 'Herr Wirt, Die Polizei!'
2.12. Akt III: 'Nun, Lieber Graf, Erwacht Vom Träumen?'
2.13. Akt III: 'Der Liebste Ist Davongegangen'
2.14. Akt III: 'Gefunden! In Nacht Und Bangen'
2.15. Akt III: 'Der Jäger Frei'
3.1. Akt IV: 'Was Für Eine Welt!'
3.2. Akt IV: 'Achille, Hyppolit Ferdinande!'
3.3. Akt IV: 'Nur Knapp Entkommen!'
3.4. Akt IV: 'Da Draussen Gellt Die Verrückte Zeit'
3.5. Akt IV: 'Lasst Mich Herein, Ich Muss Zum Grafen!'
3.6. Akt IV: 'Könnt Ich Mich Niederlegen'
3.7. Akt IV: 'Auf Die Höh'n! Die Schauer Wehen!'
3.8. Akt IV: 'Wie Von Nacht Verhangen'
3.9. Akt IV: 'Da Steht Im Wald Geschrieben'
3.10. Akt IV: 'Ich Bin Zu Spät!'
3.11. Akt IV: 'Mein Liebster! Bei Dir!'
3.12. Akt IV: 'Der Wind Hat's Gebracht Und Genommen'
3.13. Akt IV: 'Gerächt Die Schande Der Schwester'
3.14. Akt IV: 'Da Ist Der Alte Baum Nicht Mehr'
flac/24-bit
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