Juilliard Opera Center's TRILOGY November 2008 Opera theaters have long been criticized for conservatism and a museum-like mentality. To revitalize the art form, solutions have been proposed such as: the need for fresh creations, contemporary and relevant to our times as well as new, bold, theatrical approaches to remove the cobwebs. In this short article, I don’t wish to address the ongoing and important debate about the relative merits of either the criticisms or the proposed solutions, but I enthusiastically support the idea that, to challenge routine, we need new experiences in opera theaters. To ensure that the suggested solutions themselves do not become routine or cliché ridden, I suggest another initiative. Unknown or rarely heard works, drawn from existing material, imaginatively juxtaposed, can be an abundant source of innovation. Works from different eras, musical styles, and national origins, with all their latent potential, can be combined in provocative and stimulating ways. I have decided to experiment with this idea. The art of the piano or violin recital is based on the coherent construction of a program of contrasting styles. The same can be said of any prototypical orchestral concert, not to mention many other contemporary forms that explore sound in distinct instrumental ensembles and acoustical spaces. I have never understood why, in general, we have not availed ourselves more of the recital model and allowed it to migrate to operatic theater. We certainly have not exhausted the exploration of short operas that can be presented in interesting combinations. Such an approach could give a hearing to works that otherwise might not see the light of day. The art of the miniature (if indeed one-act operas should be so designated) also has its place. The sketches of Rembrandt or Picasso are not less artistic because they lack the monumentality of, say The Night Watch or Guernica. Opera developed on the premise that a single work filled an entire evening. One-act opera20gained currency in the late 19th century in Italy, and, after Richard Strauss, in the German-speaking countries. The 20th century has fully accepted it. With the exception of certain pairings (the most famous being that of Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci) that have insinuated their presence into the canon, the art of combining two or more works in an evening has run behind its own artistic potential. Operatic triple bills have gained even less traction. Puccini’s Trittico, a masterwork and daring innovation in its time, was met with strong opposition from the composer’s publisher (delaying its realization for a decade) and the refusal of the composer’s greatest advocate, Arturo Toscanini to conduct it. But why shouldn’t “three in one” be an interesting and vital alternative from time to time? (The Metropolitan Opera’s Hockney/Levine Parade at the Met was an excellent example.) To give remarkable works too short to stand on their own a committed hearing, why not adopt an approach that is standard for piano recitals, chamber music concerts, or orchestral programs? THE GENESIS This union of Mussorgsky, Krenek, and Fleischmann owes its genesis to my lifelong desire to see on stage the former’s sketch for an uncompleted opera called The Marriage. By extraordinary happenstance, in my high school years a recording of this work by Mussorgsky fell into my hands at the Donnel Library. Already overcome with a passion for Boris Godunov, I jumped at the opportunity to hear it. I read the liner notes and understood that this short sketch paved the way for the work I loved so much. No score being available, I wore out my needle on the scratchy New York Library copy until it had to be returned. In the midst of a run of Khovanschina at the MET in 1988, I came across the score of The Marriage and resolved to perform it. After decades of conducting Mussorgsky’s large-scale works, as well as those of J anáèek, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Debussy, and Poulenc, the link became clear. Mussorgsky’s theories proposing the spoken Russian language as the cornerstone to a new musical language not only transformed Russian music; they deeply affected Western European music as well. I came to see The Marriage as Mussorgsky’s seminal work. I needed a work or works to accompany it. Ten years ago, in Paris, I received a copy of Benjamin Fleischmann’s Rothschild’s Violin. A spiritual grandson to Mussorgsky through his teacher Dmitri Shostakovich, Fleischmann also attracted my attention as yet another victim of the Nazi Regime (he was killed in the Siege of Leningrad at age 25). But the program still wasn’t right. From the beginning I imagined a non-stop, concise, and tautly constructed presentation without intermission. It was meant to be less than ninety minutes, no longer than Wozzeck, Salome, or a Mahler symphony. The bookends were there. Now it needed a center piece. I finally landed on the works of Ernst Krenek who himself had written a trilogy of one-act operas. I played with the cubes until they seemed to fit. I saw the musical links (Mussorgsky and Fleischman) and the historic (Krenek and Fleischmann, both victims of the Third Reich). I had a work of social satire (Gogol) and inspirational hard realism (Chekhov). The tripartite symphony had a humorous first movement and an expansive apotheosis for the finale. There were several Krenek works from which to choose. But then the dramaturgical link revealed itself. Marriage: before, during, and at its end; the preparation, the early years, and then the last. Three genres of social criticism are represented (comedy, farce, and short story) and three pictures of class stratification (petit bourgeois, nouveau riche, and poor). Krenek’s Heavyweight went into the center. In terms of length, the first half was comic, and the second half dramatic. In the spirit of Mussorgsky, I put forward this approach, three one-act operas in one, as a research experiment in the laboratory of our opera theaters. Part of the mission of universities and conservatories is to stimulate questions and propose new ideas. They are at their best when they do so. I am grateful to the Juilliard School for providing such a forum.

GRAMOPHONE November 2007

Introducing new evidence in an old case can reawaken the judiciary process in legal matters. In musicological circles, a newly written, succinct and coherent presentation of “old” facts can throw performing artists into mini crises. Exactly that is what happened to me after reading Jerry Bruck’s essay “Undoing a ‘Tragic’ Mistake”, recently published by the Kaplan Foundation. I suddenly found myself confronted with the type of musical challenge that “doth murder sleep” – one that has cost me tortured hours. The prospect of facing myself in the mirror, denying the evidence, became a waking nightmare. The order of the inner movements of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony has been a knotty problem for many decades. Having written the symphony with the Scherzo (S) as the second movement and the Andante (A) as the third, Mahler then switched the order, and never reverted to the original order again. All subsequent performances until 1919 were in the order A/S. Then Willem Mengelberg, on the “authority” of Mahler’s widow Alma, changed to S/A. He was the only one, however. There would have been no ambiguity, except for the 1963 publication by the International Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft of a critical edition by Erwin Ratz. Ratz posited that the order, as originally conceived, should be respected. Consequently, in the past 40 years, the symphony has been performed more often than not S/A, contrary to Mahler’s own practice. Ratz based his entire “historical argument” on Alma’s 1919 telegram to Mengelberg – “First Scherzo, then Andante”. But, as revealed in his own correspondence, he already doubted Alma’s credibility, as have many others. British scholarship and musicians were way in front on this issue and got it right from the beginning. Deryck Cooke, Norman Del Mar, Colin and David Matthews and Sir Simon Rattle all took the A/S route. I first conducted the Sixth in 1975 and have since performed it (in the context of hundreds of performances of Mahler symphonies) probably more that any other symphony. I return to it over and over, because its view of life and death closely reflects my own predisposition. And instead of proposing a more hopeful alternative, it evokes in me a profound visceral wrestle with man’s search for meaning. The prospect that it is all for naught ignites an incendiary 80-minute fire, which consumes and exhausts itself and me – and lays to rest, at least for the rest of that day, those torments. Until this summer I have always performed it in the order Scherzo/Andante. If I have had it wrong for 30 years, at least I feel I am in excellent company: Bernstein, Boulez, Haitink, Levine, Solti and Tennstedt to name a few. More than a decade ago, troubled by this question, I spoke with Henry Louis de la Grange, the author of the great three-volume biography of Mahler. At the time he felt that, given the degree of ambiguity, I should continue to follow my instincts. After reading Jerry Bruck’s essay, I became convinced that there is no longer any historical defence for Rat’s position. This summer, after 30 years of conducting the Sixth in the order S/A, I switched to A/S for a performance at a Mahler/Freud Symposium at the Aspen Institute and Music Festival. Two weeks later I repeated the experience with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival as a part of a multi-year complete Mahler cycle. This experience has provoked a dramatic challenge to the performer in me: what to do when your brain is convinced of one thing, and the “habits of a lifetime” as well as your heart tell you something else. To change positions on the weight of historical evidence is easier for the historian or musicologist than it is for the performing artist or the avid music lover. The moral imperative for a historian is to view history dispassionately. The musicologist studies music without necessarily directing that study towards performance. The performing artist, however, can be weighed down by emotion, and by the deep subjectivity of his perceptions, however objective he might strive to become. The greatest difficulty is in changing the view and relationship to a work which the artist has loved and admired, and with which he has communed and identified in one form. The challenge is to surrender an older view of the proportions, chemistry and implications for a newer one. The first moral mandate for a performing artist is, in my opinion, to render a work as closely as possible to the perceived intentions of the composer. Following that premise, even while loving the work in its “wrong form”, I feel obliged to retrain my feelings until I can “feel” the new form. There should be no further question once the composer’s intentions are plain. The history is clear and there are also strong musical arguments for the A/S order. The Sixth is in many ways the most “classical” symphony, with its overall sonata-form structure, first-movement repeat and in the A/S version, the key relationships (first, second and fourth movements in A minor and third in E flat). This last is in sharp distinction to Mahler’s characteristic progressive tonality. On a purely subjective level, I found the contrast between the first movement and the beginning of the Andante much more satisfying than once again hearing the repeated thumping of the timpani immediately after the first movement. Its reappearance at the beginning of the third movement is far more effective. Yet, to my mind, the emotional climax of the entire symphony, Mahler’s most personal self-revelation, is to be found towards the end of the Andante. In the A/S order I feel it occurs prematurely. The connection from Scherzo to Finale seems weakened. Even on a more objective level, I still cannot completely accept the argument that there is no musical defence for the order S/A. It is more complicated than simply rendering a definitive judgement on the basis of performance practice alone, especially, as de la Grange suggested to me, Mahler’s own objectivity might have been much clouded at the time. Historical and musical evidence must be considered together. As a patently absurd comparison, little is known of the history surrounding the writing and performance of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony. Let us say that a letter was found indicating that Mozart had chosen to reverse the order of the middle movements, or an even sillier idea, that the Finale should be placed in the middle. The letter might be authenticated, but its content would fly in the face of everything we know of the period, and hence a performance following these indications would and should be rejected as ridiculous. For me, by far the strongest musical argument for S/A is not to be found in the Sixth alone but by study of all the symphonies. From the beginning, following the model of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Mahler showed a predilection for placing the slowest movement in penultimate position preceded by a scherzo. On several significant occasions, (No. 3, No. 9 and Das Lied von der Erde) the slowest movement would actually be the last. The deeply emotional slowest movement is always to be found towards the end of the symphony. Whether grotesque and ironic (Symphony No. 1), meditative or spiritual (Nos. 2 and 4), sentimental and confessional (Nos. 5 and 6) or nocturnal and lyric (No. 7), the slow movements usually open the way to a vast dramatic last movement or in the case of the Fourth, a mystical space. In turn, these last movements chart a course from a human confrontation with the gods and eventual triumph (the First Symphony), and apocalyptic/spiritual finale (the Second), a child’s vision of Paradise (the Fourth) and a joyous life affirmation (No. 5), to a musical romp (No. 7). Symphony No. 9 defies comparison by placing the faster movements between two slower movements, and the Tenth Symphony would seem to follow suit. In all of these cases the slow penultimate movement is directly preceded by the movement in 3/4 or 3/8. These movements, combinations of Ländler, scherzi and songs, usually have strong satiric or ironic content, and precede those powerful slow movements. Dad Lied von der Erde alone has two examples of S/A (first to second movement and fifth – although in 4/4 – to sixth). This would all point to an obvious conclusion. The order Scherzo/Andante is not the exception to Mahler’s practice. It is the rule! There is not a single other example of interior movements in the order A/S. One could argue that the second movement of Symphony No. 2 is slow followed by a scherzo but, I would argue back, it is not the slowest movement and it falls in the category of the 3/8 Ländler. This symphony simply has two inner movements in three and they both precede the slow movement. And even the Third Symphony, with its six movements, parallels the Second with a 3/4 movement in second place, followed by another scherzo in 2/4, both preceding a slow nocturnal movement, and then again a luminous angelic allegro (not a scherzo but at least light and joyous in character), that precedes the final Adagio. None of this proves that Mahler was wrong to want to change the order of the inner movements of the Sixth. By definition, he cannot be wrong: the composer’s wish is our command. But for me, it boils down to this – should the order be S/A because it is a fundamental Mahlerian characteristic, or A/S, precisely because it is the exception and that its unique status makes it special? The formal debate argues A/S. The emotional and dramatic debate is simply put: do you prefer or not to have the Andante (with its meditative beauty passing to personal confession and ending with anguished outcry) precede the Scherzo (which is, in turn, acerbic, ironic, charming and humorous, then crepuscular)? Do you want the soul-searching first and the op-ed page second, or vice versa? The paradox to all of this is, though it matters terribly what Mahler wanted, that the cataclysmic effect of the Finale obliterates all that preceded it. When the last crash comes, nothing, including the order, seems to matter at all.

The Language of Music, or the Music of Language

Moravian folk music, verismo drama and the Czech language find a bold new synthesis in Leoš Janácek's Jenufa

"Folk songs contain the whole human being, body, soul, and environment." (Leoš Janácek)

Leoš Janácek's Jenufa, which premiered on January 21, 1904, after almost a decade of composition, represents the convergence of several strands of contemporary cultural developments. These were some of the questions of the times: Is there a universal language of classical music? (That was the position of those who had inherited the great Italian/Germanic tradition.) Or is there a music idiom to be created that finds its roots not in the international language of the courts of Europe but in the mother tongues of the common people? (That was the position of the Russian Mussorgsky, the Moravian Janácek and, later, the Hungarian Bartók.)

Was folk music a source of occasional delight, to be used as amusing diversion in a more sophisticated art form (as in Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven)? Or was it a treasure trove of human wisdom, unlocking the human soul and powerful spiritual and psychic energies to be transformed into a new music? Is musical theater still best served, as it was from its Florentine roots, by sources from classical history and mythology, Nordic gods, medieval knights, stories of the great and mighty, of kings and queens? Or is it best served by looking for inspiration from the daily drama of contemporary common people?

The choice to explore the latter became a trademark of verismo opera. We associated it with the last decade of the Italian 19th century, and we associated with the names of Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Puccini.

Leoš Janácek was to find and resoundingly answer these questions to his own satisfaction. Music was to spring from the mother tongue, the language of folk song, and theater was to be served from the dramatization of common folk's lives. Jenufa stands as a perfect synthesis. Janácek researched Moravian folk music for decades. He adamantly defended the Czech language against the overwhelming domination of German. A Russophile, he turned eastward to celebrate Pan-Slavism.

He chose a shocking drama by Gabriela Preissová, a young feminist, who belonged to a movement claiming a place for the voice of women writers. She recounts a tale of the murder of an infant, a story that could be written today, and in so doing, implicates a rural society dominated by social and religious prejudice, sexism and the inequalities of class. But this tale of love and a woman's place in the world turns into an inspiring ode to forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion and mature love.

There are no stick figures in this drama. Each character is animated by his or her contradictions and, above all, obsessions. The repetitive rhythmical nature of Janácek's music seems almost to abstractify obsession and turn it into a character itself. Kostelnicka's obsessive determination to impose what she sees as "God's will" leads her to become a murderess. Laca shows a predisposition towards violence, but learns to love more fully through insight and acceptance. Števa, who profits by his good looks and superficiality, perhaps does not evolve, but is at least subdued.

Jenufa embodies the power of transcendence. Like Donna Elvira, she loves a countryside's minor equivalent of Don Juan. Through a series of misfortunes, she consistently demonstrates her capacity to evolve with compassion, comprehension and premature wisdom. Her face is scarred; she bravely bears her illegitimate child, mourns his death, tolerates Kostelnicka's ravings, and bears up under scandal on the morning of her wedding. In the face of this, she forgives all of her transgressors and embraces the future with equanimity and strength.

Throughout operatic history, the texts of operas, their libretti, were fashioned in order to provide a composer with the material necessary for his creative muse. At times, in the 19th century, libretto-writing descended to the level of factory-like handiwork. Rare were the occasions that a play was to be converted directly into an opera. Mozart and da Ponte shortened and arranged Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro into an opera. Da Ponte, in the preface to the original libretto, wrote "I have not made a translation of that excellent comedy, but rather an imitation, or, let us say, an extract."

There are few, if any, Italian operas which are literal translations of dramatic works. Verdi extensively cut and recast in order to fit his needs. Puccini confronted this challenge with pared down versions of Tosca, Madama Butterfly and Il Tabarro.

It was not until the second half of the 19th century that the idea to take a text and rigorously set it to music began to exert a fascination. It corresponds with the burgeoning freedom from the domination of Western Europe (of mostly Italian and German influence) that resulted in the development of nationalistic music (significantly Russian, Czech and to a lesser extent, French). Mussorgsky's seminal work The Marriage, based on Gogol, was a first step toward realizing his theories of creating a musical language that is born of the spoken language.

Janácek, without direct knowledge of any of these works (he precedes Richard Strauss and Zemlinsky) was attempting to do the same thing by using the spoken Czech language as a starting point and inspiration to discover a less tangible musical language based on the intonations (not imitation of) of the spoken word in the context of its expression of a multiplicity of emotive and dramatic situations.

Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande (based on a play by Maeterlinck), Strauss' Salome and Zemlinsky's A Florentine Tragedy (both based on works by Oscar Wilde), are all examples of literal renderings. (Debussy wrote his opera in the original French, while libretti for the Strauss and Zemlinsky operas are in German translations of, respectively, the French and English originals.)

So the time was ripe to forgo writing an opera libretto so that it "fits into the music" but to boldly submit to a text for which the music will have no fear of not finding its own voice. Preissová's text provides the link between 19th-century romanticism and a preview of 20th-century social criticism. In this work, the countryside, with its folk customs and culture, is not picturesque or decorative; it is a protagonist in Janácek's dynamic, hair raising and uplifting music drama.

The premise of western music of the 18th and most of the 19th century was that it was a language whose laws were to be discovered, codified and applied. Each new generation was to inherit them and contribute to a developing expression within its universe. If it was related to its linguistic roots at all, (largely Italian and German), it was not self consciously so. Janácek's starting point could be described as rejecting the Western model of the "language of music," and striving to create new sounds which are the "music of language." And by language, he meant Czech.

His music, by this methodology, would be unlike any that preceded it. Jenufa was premiered two and a half months before Dvorak's death. Thus, the mantle symbolically passed from those giant 19th-century shoulders, to those of Janácek. He would certainly became the greatest Czech composer of the 20th century. Like Mussorgsky, his supreme genius transcended it nationalist roots, and attained the universal. He had inherited much from Smetana and Dvorak, both of whom had poured the Czech soul into Western musical syntax. Janácek unleashed the entire Slavic soul, broke the Western mold, and created a sound universe of his own.

© 2007 by James Conlon. All rights reserved.

Ludwig van Beethoven, the colossus who bestrode classical music, whose magnificent shadow stretched across the entire 19th century, and whose music has been treasured, loved and admired through the 20th into our own time, wrote one opera: Fidelio. This master of symphony, piano sonata, trio and string quartet abandoned his predilection for so-called “absolute music” and entered the profane theater.

He disdained the Italian Mozart/DaPonte operas (which he did not like) but turned rather to the Singspiel (a popular form of musical theater in the vernacular with alternating music and dialogues). Mozart had transformed this popular genre from the purely comic to the sublime when he produced The Abduction from the Seraglio (whose two great humanistic themes are fidelity in love and the power of magnanimous forgiveness) and The Magic Flute (whose Enlightenment and Masonic themes cross over into contemporary political ideas of human dignity and of society’s responsibility to protect it through reason, wisdom and truth).

Beethoven took these themes and developed them combining his own political convictions (inspired by the French Revolution) and his idealization of marriage and feminine virtue. He was often disillusioned with the political events of his time, and was never to realize any lasting personal relationship at all. But he poured this striving for a perfect world and a perfect union into the form of the now more enlightened Singspiel, and produced a unique masterpiece in the form of Fidelio. The developing form demands enhanced content, which in turn will exert even more influence on that form.

Great moral themes require great moral characters. None is greater than that of the heroine, Leonore. She goes one step beyond Mozart’s heroine of The Seraglio, Konstanze (representing Constancy). Steadfast in her love, she resists and renounces until her beloved rescues her. Leonore, disguised as a young man, Fidelio (Faithful), does more. It is she who rescues her husband. Beethoven created a new and unique heroine. This “drama set to music” is borrowed from the fashionable French “rescue opera” of the time. Beethoven turned this form into high art in the same manner in which Mozart had shown the way with the Singspiel.

But there is no precedent to this “modern” woman who rescues her noble and honest husband, unjustly imprisoned for speaking out against injustice. She exemplifies ingenuity, courage, moral determination, invention, boundless personal devotion and commitment to justice. Unlike the vast number of operas based on romantic love, where reason and passion are antagonists, Fidelio’s protagonist shows us that the demand of heart and brain can be integrated and placed in the service of the “Other” and the “Greater Good.”

The first act descends from light to dark, and the second in contrary motion. Leonore, like Orpheus, metaphorically goes into the underworld to rescue her beloved, offers him bread in a Eucharistic act of compassion, and literally frees him from the shackles of tyranny.

Heroism, the Ideals of the French Revolution, Humanism, Triumph over Political Tyranny and Evil, the Rights of Man, Idealized Conjugal Love: all of these are Beethoven’s great themes. Like Napoleon, Beethoven invaded the operatic terrain from a foreign land, so-called absolute music. The protean power of the symphonies is distilled into theatrical and lyrical form: the celebration of the great statesman of the Eroica, the triumph over conflict of the Fifth, the eulogizing of the fallen soldiers of the Seventh. The Ode to Joy of the Ninth parallels the choral finale of Fidelio which celebrates its heroine and the idealized humanistic world that Beethoven sought, and succeeded in capturing, in the perfection of his music.

Concerning the Third Leonore Overture Beethoven, in his constant revision and reworking of Fidelio, wrote four different overtures. As the opera was originally called Leonore, the overtures acquired numbers and were called Leonore I, II and III . They were superseded by the present Fidelio overture. In a tradition sealed by Gustav Mahler’s performances in 1904 (although already practiced in the 19th century), the Leonore III overture was inserted between the two scenes of Act Two.

In January of this year, when discussing plans for these performances of Fidelio with the late Edgar Baitzel, the Company’s chief operating officer, he expressed to me his wish that the Leonore III overture be included. As a tribute to him, together with the orchestra of LA Opera, we dedicate this performance to honor his memory.

James Conlon

© 2007 by James Conlon. All rights reserved.

"There is an optimistic version of romanticism in which what the romantics feel is that by going forward, by expanding our nature, by destroying the obstacles in our path…we are liberating ourselves…and allowing our infinite nature to soar to…greater heights and to become wider, deeper, freer, more vital, more like the divinity towards which it strives.

But there is another, more pessimistic version of this…a notion that although we individuals seek to liberate ourselves…there is something in the dark depths of the unconscious or of history…which frustrates our dearest wishes." (Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism)

Dichotomy and inner struggle fueled the muses of the nineteenth century. Richard Wagner harnessed those muses and changed the artistic world. His music dramas thrived on those contradictions and struggles, and left us with an artistic legacy that provoked and engendered other polemics and conflicts.

Musicians, poets, artists, critics and opera audiences have adored, detested, deified, condemned, admired and rejected Wagner, his music and his prose. His person, and the sometimes violent reactions his works provoke, are extensions of those conflicting versions of Romanticism to which Berlin refers. The vast cosmic canvas upon which his works were conceived is mirrored by the tremors these very works caused.

And yet, though this composer wrote more about the theory and practice of his art than any other in our history, and has been written about perhaps more than any other composer, his actual dramatic material is remarkably simple. I mean this not in the sense that it is not complex, but that, through the repeated of use of archetypes and themes, he revisits several issues in the course of ten operas.

The Male Protagonist Wagner viewed himself as a misunderstood genius who, due to his superior gifts and understanding, was a hero; as such, he was also an outsider. Each of Wagner's male protagonists is an outsider in his own way. Each comes from a different place from the world in which he finds himself. Some have dared (like Adam and Eve) to eat the forbidden fruit or tempt the gods. The Dutchman makes his pact with the devil. Tannhäuser braves the revelations of Venusberg. Lohengrin literally comes from another spiritual world.

Both Tannhäuser and Walther von Stolzing are projections of the composer as young heroes who bring the "New Music" to the world. Tannhäuser defies the father figure (as represented by the Landgrave and, more distantly, the Pope) to do so and Walther is adopted by the "good" father in the form of Hans Sachs.

The Female as Masculine Projection of the Protagonist Wagner's women embody the "self sacrificing eternal feminine" (a masculine projection) and are usually the bearer of the composer's most potent cosmic force, "Redemptive Love." Senta, Elisabeth, Elsa, Isolde and Brünnhilde prove their love by dying for their men. Only Eva, in the non-tragic Die Meistersinger, needn't. All are virginal and "chaste" at the beginning of the opera and (with the exception of Brünnhilde and perhaps Isolde) remain so at the end of the opera.

Venus represents the absolute triumph of eroticism. The splitting of the feminine principle into competing sensual and spiritual components (e.g. Venus and Elisabeth) is emblematic of the nineteenth century's inability or unwillingness to harmonize these seemingly conflicting forces. Wagner will revisit this in Parsifal, not with two characters, but by incorporating them both, in unreconciled form, in the person of Kundry.

Some important dramatic themes in the later operas are presented in Tannhäuser. For example, it is no accident that a medieval singing contest is at the center point of both Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger. Their subjects are art and love. Walther and Tannhäuser, though their fates are different, usher in a new age of art. Parsifal will relive the erotic/spiritual struggle as Tannhäuser does, and he will encounter and resolve them in a different way.

Redemptive love may be the proposed panacea for the universe, but we, and the world, have to endure suffering first. Renunciation is, perhaps, the antidote to that other ubiquitous force: desire. In Tristan, desire-not hope-springs eternal. It can only be satisfied through death. If the Ring has any protagonist at all, it is not a person nor a God, but a cosmology that demonstrates that desire, in the form of lust for power, drives human (and godly) actions and leads to universal cataclysm. The renunciation of this desire must precede redemption, rebirth and the restoration of the world's natural order.

Tannhäuser lives the Faustian struggle. Unable to integrate spiritual and sensual love, he ventures out of his society to Venusberg, where he feels he experiences erotic love in a way none of his acquaintances have. Embued now with a message, when he returns to society, he feels simultaneously superior and rejected. The artist sings his song of praise of Venus, reveals a "new unheard of music" He is now outsider, artist and genius. He is a projection of Wagner's image of himself.

Big themes, one and all. Dated? Perhaps. Politically incorrect in our day? Possibly. Irrelevant? Not in the slightest. Tannhäuser, only second in the series of ten great Wagnerian operas, encompasses it all, seemingly in the "pessimistic" version of Romanticism. (Tannhäuser never triumphs, Elisabeth dies.) But, to my mind, by experiencing this drama in the opera house, we actually live a part of the "optimistic" version to which Berlin refers, and allow our "infinite nature to soar."

A Note on the Performing Version Every time Tannhäuser is produced a choice must be made between competing versions of the opera (all of them legitimate, in my opinion). The Dresden version (actually two essentially similar versions from 1845 and 1847) features a formal closed overture that is well known to concertgoers. The Paris version (1861) vastly expands the scene in Venusberg and the role of Venus, and adds the ballet (Bacchanale), which flows directly from the shortened overture. The Vienna version (1875) restores the original Dresden overture and recomposes the beginning of Act One, then continues on the same as the Paris version.

There are two sides to the discussion of the Paris version. It gives greater weight to the role of Venus, the polar opposite to Elisabeth in the flesh/spirit dichotomy. On the other hand, Wagner's musical language had developed during the fifteen years that separate the Dresden and Paris versions (during which time he wrote Tristan), and the stylistic break is evident. Some feel that this is advantageous, arguing that the enhanced chromatic harmony of the Vienna version better represents the intense, magically unreal erotic world. Others feel the presence of the Bacchanale accomplishes these goals, and does not diminish the rest of the work by making it sound regressive. Although I have performed the intact Paris version in the past, I have come around to that view for the moment. For the 1961 Bayreuth Festival, the composer's grandson Wieland Wagner chose to begin Tannhäuser with the Paris version, continuing through the end of the Bacchanale; he then reverted to the Dresden version. This solution has met with a great deal of critical favor in recent years. Ultimately, with small differences, this is what LA Opera has adopted on this occasion.

James Conlon February 24, 2007

© 2007 by James Conlon. All rights reserved.

Out of the depths I cry to Thee, O Lord. Hear my Prayer - Psalm 130

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground. - De Profundis, Oscar Wilde

There is no greater sorrow than thinking back upon a happy time in misery. - Inferno, Canto V (the story of Francesca da Rimini ), Dante Alighieri

De Profundis ad Lucem: From the Depths to the Light by James Conlon

The Garden of Eden is a paradise lost. The preconscious memory of a perfect existence plays a strong role, I believe, in our need for music. Yearning, nostalgia, sorrow-all are heightened by the often unconscious sense of a bygone and better existence. Our subject in this festival is not the fall from grace, but the cry from the metaphorical depths and, through cathartic music, the healing of the spirit.

Each piece of music in this festival is inspired by a great literary source. Literature and music have made strange bedfellows throughout history. At times locked in passionate embrace, at others they turn their backs on each other like disappointed lovers. They are governed by different laws. Music has inspired poetry, novels, critical analyses, and essays. Literature has been the point of departure for oratorios, operas, lieder, symphonies, ballets, and even chamber music. Music starts where words stop, goes the saying, and I believe it is easier to transform the written word into music than to express the musical in even the most brilliant collection of words.

That said, the music we are listening to is not a translation or a reduction of the literature but a free association and muse for each composer's fancy. Ideas are difficult to translate into music. But the feelings engendered by any of these abstractions can find their place alongside the more accessible materials of drama or poetry. The need to have our feelings mirrored-our feelings of loss, exaltation, alienation-has stimulated artists throughout Western civilization. And the nineteenth century flung itself at the expression of feelings with a fervor and genius unparalleled the history of music. This rich and enriching process of distilling the essence of feeling from literature led right to the gate of the twentieth century and beyond, to our own day.

Another unifying factor in the conception of this festival is Florence, the city of the Renaissance. With the exception of Oscar Wilde's Birthday of the Infanta and Salome, every work and artist on our programs in some way relates back to the city of the rebirth of classical antiquity, the city that gave birth to the modern era of classical music and, specifically, to opera.

The works we explore are also works of homage. As Verdi in his Requiem pays homage to the great writer Alessandro Manzoni, who defined and unified modern Italian just as Dante had legitimized spoken Italian as the literary language of the future, wresting Latin from its monopoly on written expression, so Tchaikovsky and Liszt pay homage to Dante himself. And so do we pay homage to Oscar Wilde, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Franz Schreker. Wilde's influence on classical music has received little attention. Three one-act operas (Richard Strauss's Salome, and Zemlinsky's The Dwarf and A Florentine Tragedy) were created within two decades of his death. Wilde's aesthetic outside the Anglo-Saxon world, where his works were unjustly suppressed, found more sympathetic appreciation in German-speaking countries. Yet both Zemlinsky and Schreker suffered under Nazi anti-Semitism and were suppressed politically, as Wilde was silenced on the grounds that he threatened public morals.

The correspondences among the works we will hear are many. In its essence, this is all music of genuine and powerful feeling, music that exemplifies the best in art from another time and place, and that in its enduring impact-its power to cry out, to mirror our own emotions, and to heal-challenges our inclination to measure other eras and cultures from the perspective of our own.

© 2007 by James Conlon. All rights reserved.

“Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate… Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?” - Siegfried Sassoon

After 1945, those who performed, wrote or taught classical music worked in a culture scarred by omissions. These were not of their making but were part of the legacy of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. With its racist ideology and systematic suppression—particularly (although not exclusively) of Jewish musicians, artists and writers—the Third Reich silenced two generations of composers and, with them, an entire musical heritage. Many, who perished in concentration camps and others, whose freedom and productivity were curtailed, were fated to be forgotten after the war. Their music seemed to have passed with them, lost in endless silence.

However, more lost music has survived than was at first thought. It has taken decades of dedicated work to recover and publish it. We must now mitigate a great injustice by working to revive the music of those whose only “fault” was that they were Jewish, or that they were opposed to or deemed offensive by an authoritarian regime.

But that is not the only reason to restore these works. I believe that the spirit of this “lost generation” now needs to be heard. The creativity of the first half of the 20th century is far richer than we think. Alongside Stravinsky, Strauss and other major and more fortunate figures, the varied voices of composers from Berlin, Vienna, Prague and Budapest, whether Jewish, dissident or immigrant, reveal much about the musical ferment of their time. Their music, I believe, is accessible and relevant. Further, our own American heritage owes an enormous debt to those who emigrated to Hollywood and Broadway, bringing their distinctive personalities with them, and creating a style that has since become distinctly American.

The cliché “there are no lost masterpieces” reveals our own ignorance. Entire civilizations, along with their masterpieces, have been destroyed by war since the beginning of human history. Various forms of censorship have repeatedly affected artists and works, and continue to do so.

The suppression of these composers and musicians caused the greatest single rupture in what had been a continuous seamless transmittal of German classical music. This centuries-old tradition, dating from before Johann Sebastian Bach, was passed on from one generation to the next. It was nourished by the free expression of an often contentious creative exchange between conservative traditional artistic modes of expression and competing currents of innovation and iconoclasm. The policies of the Third Reich destroyed the environment in which this could flourish, murdering an entire generation of its greatest talents, uprooting a garden with its creative polemics and dialectics, forcing those who survived to scatter where there was no comparable artistic milieu in which to live and create. This immense self destructive act seriously damaged its most cherished tradition, killed its caretakers, and buried a “lost generation” and its spirit within.

There are three aspects to be taken into consideration: moral, historical and artistic. Undoing injustice, when one can, is a moral mandate for all citizens of a civilized world. We cannot restore to these composers their lost lives. We can, however, return the gift which would mean more to them than others: to play their music. Our perspectives on the history of 20th-century classical music are incomplete because an enormous quantity of works has remained unplayed, and the lives of its composers largely ignored. History is not only made by its “big names,” its warrior kings, dictators and most famous artists, but by the collective action of all of those artists who lived in a given era. The 20th century needs to be rescrutinized after we acquaint ourselves with the voluminous music cast out by the Nazi suppression.

Neither moral nor historical considerations would be reason enough for revival were it not for the artistic quality of what was lost. This cannot be judged by a single hearing of tokenistic or uncommitted performances. Judgments, if indeed they must be made, can only be made after those performing and listening over the course of years have given the spirit of that era sufficient time to be fully digested.

I now perform this music regularly, in the hope that it will find its place in the standard repertoire. I devote myself to programming works by this group of composers wherever possible. The list of names is long, including works by Alexander von Zemlinksy, Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Bohuslav Martinu, Erich Korngold, Karl-Amadeus Hartmann, Erwin Schulhoff, Franz Schreker, Walter Braunfels, Ernest Krenek, Hanns Eisler, Erich Zeissl and Kurt Weill, to name just a few.

By keeping alive their music and that of other victims of totalitarianism, we deny those past regimes a posthumous victory. The revival of this music can serve as a reminder for us to resist any contemporary or future impulse to define artistic standards on the basis of racist, political, sectarian or exclusionary ideologies.

The answer to Sassoon’s question is: it is we, now, who can begin to “absolve the foulness of their fate.”

James Conlon New York, October 2006

© 2007 by James Conlon. All rights reserved.