The subtitle is promising; the first half of the twentieth century saw the creation of several good operas based on classical subjects, of which the three most regularly performed are Strauss' Elektra and Ariadne auf Naxos, and Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex. There are also some Greek-based operas from that period which hover on the fringes of the standard repertoire, among them Strauss' later Die aegyptische Helena, Daphne and Die Liebe der Danae, Szymanowski's successful transplantation of the Bacchae to medieval Sicily in King Roger, Enesco's very impressive Oedipe, and the Antigones of Honneger and Orff.
The title, roughly Directions, Detours and Misdirections, is intriguing. It is therefore disappointing that the second and third of the three chapters are devoted to different specific aspects of the work of one composer, Carl Orff, and the only chapter which discusses a wider range of operas and provides a cultural/historical perspective is the first: ‘Departure from the “Total Work of Art” – Emancipation from Antiquity: the German Language Music Theatre in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century’ by M. Meier.
This chapter occupies just over half of the book. It starts, unfortunately, from the misapprehension – so widespread now that it is almost impossible to correct – that Wagner used the term Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) to describe his own ‘stage festival dramas’, The Nibelung's Ring and Parsifal. He did not; he coined the word to describe the tragedies of Aeschylus, which include poetry, music, stage action and dance – and this last medium, as Wagner was well aware, played no part in his own work.
M.'s chapter may not be of much interest to most readers of CR, since he limits his study to works composed in Germany which try to continue the late Wagnerian aesthetic. This comprises texts often written by the composer himself, continuous music on a large scale with a plethora of leitmotifs and solemn, elevated subject matter. M. does not specially favour works which themselves draw on ancient Greek sources – though he does have time to discuss the fascinating case of August Bungert, a composer of mediocre gifts who none the less wrote a tetralogy of operas based on the Odyssey and died in 1915 leaving a parallel tetralogy based on the Iliad only in sketches. He hoped to build a festival theatre for them, a sort of western Bayreuth, at Bad Godesberg on the Rhine. Also, Strauss' Elektra features alongside Salome in M.'s discussion of operas which develop the psychological insights to be seen in Wagner's late works. Otherwise there is nothing of ‘die Antike’ in the operas – by Humperdinck, Strauss, Pfitzner, Schreker and Korngold – treated in this chapter.
M. guides his readers deftly, intelligently and with an extensive bibliography; but few will agree with his high estimates of Pfitzner's Palestrina and Korngold's Die Tote Stadt, and those who know the operas will not find anything very new. Above all, there is no fulfilment of the promise to chart ‘the departure from the total work of art’ and ‘the emancipation from antiquity’. The fact is that ancient literature was never very important in the post-Wagnerian style of opera (Strauss always excepted). When Greek tragedy did become the chosen subject matter for operas again after around 1925 – in the work of Milhaud, Stravinsky, Honegger, Enesco and Orff – their music came from perspectives which explicitly rejected Wagner and his legacy; and all these composers, except Orff, were French or had settled in France.
Leonhardt's chapter on the treatment of speech and ancient poetry in the work of Orff is by contrast a significant and original contribution, though the subject is not very congenial. Orff's Antigonae uses every word of Hölderlin's at times almost unintelligible attempt at a literal translation of Sophocles; the dialogue scenes are composed as virtually unaccompanied declamation, and the choruses are set to the accompaniment of no less than six pianos and a large percussion section. It is an opera to be endured rather than enjoyed.
However, L. has important insights to offer. He notes that Orff virtually is unique among composers in setting the whole text of the ancient work, either in the original language (Prometheus Bound and the oratorio Catulli Carmina) or in German as with Antigonae and Oedipus; and he discusses Orff's conversations with Thrasyboulos Georgiadis, a Greek musicologist who maintained the importance of the accentuation and rhythm of the ancient Greek text. L. cites scholars who, in the light of this friendship, believe that Orff gave primacy to a strong rhythmic schema. But he then shows, first with Catulli Carmina and then with Antigonae, that Orff paid attention in developing his setting not to any implicit rhythms and accents in the text, or even to its meaning, but to ‘the sounding constellation of the vowels and consonants, quite independent from the sense of the text’ (p. 84). L. cites Dibelius: ‘the word was for Orff a musical object, a piece of material for composition. He heard in speech sound-colours and rhythms, the altering sounds of vowels and the accents of consonants, which are treated directly as musical phenomena’ (p. 85). L. then compares passages from Hölderlin's Antigonae with those from a more modern translation of Sophocles, and demonstrates that while – he concedes – Hölderlin is often unintelligible and always difficult to understand, his translation has the acoustic properties that Orff needed to inspire his setting; the modern translation is by contrast, it is argued, too ‘smooth’ (viel glatter, p. 89).
The last and shortest chapter is Leopold's ‘Orrfeo: Carl Orff Arranges Monteverdi’. It is a discussion of the ‘arrangement’ by Orff and his textual collaborator Dorothee Günther of Monteverdi's Orfeo; this was first performed and published in 1925, and Orff continued to revise it until a definitive edition appeared in 1940.
Orff's ‘Bearbeitung’ – a word which can cover a multitude of sins – would find little favour in our own age of historically informed performance of early music. Orff described it as ‘a free new arrangement for the German stage’ and as ‘not a restoration but a resurrection for the modern theatre’. Half the characters and most of the fourth and fifth Acts are omitted; and by extensively rewriting the text Orff turned Monteverdi's story of the power of music into a story about the power of love. The apotheosis of Apollo and Orfeo at the end of the original opera is transformed by a new text into a duet for Orfeo and Euridice, celebrating their deliverance from the underworld; and L.'s close analysis of the messenger-speech shows, as she claims, that Orff is ‘worlds apart’ from the original concept of Monteverdi and his librettist Alessandro Striggio. The new German text completely blurs the ancient Greek distinction, observed in Monteverdi, between the roles of the messenger and of the chorus, as Orff's text includes extensive reflections on, rather than just description of, the events narrated. Again and again the new text ‘thoughtlessly’ (L.'s word, p. 119) destroys Monteverdi's careful unity between text and music; even Euridice's despairing cries of Orfeo's name, at the crucial moment when he has turned to look at her and loses her, disappear from the new version. And of course the opera is totally re-scored for a modern orchestra, losing many of Monteverdi's sparse but well-plotted instrumental effects. L. rightly notes that Orff loved Monteverdi, from the time when, as a young student, he first became acquainted with the music of the Renaissance master; but she concludes that that love was ‘so passionate, selfish and gross, that it just about crushes the object of its love’ (p. 127). She is right.
