Patrick Bade
The German Singspiel: Mozart, Beethoven and Weber
Patrick Bade - The German Singspiel: Mozart, Beethoven and Weber
- [Lecturer] Now, I can already hear some people saying: “What is a Singspiel?” So, I’m going to start off by explaining that. It’s a type of German opera, that is sung in the vernacular German language. And the musical numbers in the singspiel are connected by spoken dialogue, rather than sung recitative. And the singspiel came into its own in the late 1770s as a result of the reforms, the attempted reforms of the Emperor Joseph II. Now, he had ruled for some years jointly with his very conservative, very Catholic mother, Maria Teresa. But she died, and he… When she died in 1780, and he reigned for 10 years. And he was one of those monarchs, like Catherine the Great, and like Frederick the Great, who was very influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment. And he attempted to introduce many reforms, most were very good ones. He brought in religious freedom, he reversed the measures his mother had taken to restrict Jews, he abolished the death penalty, he abolished serfdom. And one of his ideas, his, inverted commas, “Enlightenment ideas” was that everybody in his empire should speak the same language. He thought that would be a very good thing. I suppose theoretically it would’ve been. So, up to that point, opera, because it was an import from Italy, and at the court opera, all operas were sung in Italian with sung recitative rather than spoken dialogue.
And he ordered the Court Opera should now be called the National Singspiel, and that all operas should be in German. But like, so many of his reforms he met with resistance. The, Austrian aristocracy, they liked their opera in Italian, they were used to it in Italian. And so, it wasn’t a long-term success, it was only ran for five years, this idea of a National Singspiel. From 1778 to 1783. But because Mozart arrived, he threw off the shackles of the hated Archbishop of Salzburg, and he arrived in Vienna in 1781, full of hope and very ambitious. And he was overjoyed to receive a commission for the National Singspiel in 1781, and it was performed in 1782, And that is the opera “Die Entführung aus dem Serail”, “The Abduction from the Seraglio”. And it was a tremendous success, Or that there, if you know the film “Amadeus”, you’ll probably remember the scene, where Joseph II comes across as a bit of an idiot, saying: “Too many notes, dear Mozart, too many notes”. That’s not actually an accurate translation of what he said. What he actually said was: “It’s too beautiful for our ears”. “And there are an awful lot of notes”, which is not quite the same thing. It’s true, there are a lot of notes. So, the “Die Entführung”, “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, it’s the perfect Enlightenment opera. It also embodies many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. It’s set in Turkey, and at the end of the opera, the hero, or the moral person, the person with a highest sense of morality, turns out to be a Muslim.
So, this is very remarkable. It’s right, I know Trudy’s talked to you about the which a Jew is shown to be a moral person. But the idea that anybody, but a Christian, could be moral, was certainly something new, and a result of the Enlightenment. This is the little court theatre, where “Entführung” was first performed, and where “The Marriage of Figaro” would be performed a couple of years later. Now, as I said, it’s set in Turkey. Turkey had been really an existential threat to the Hapsburg Empire in the 16th and 17th centuries with the Turks besieging Vienna twice, in the 1520s, and then in the 1683. But after the momentous defeat of the Turks outside the walls of Vienna in 1683, the Turks were constantly driven back. And certainly, by the late 18th century, they were no longer seen as a serious threat. And people could look at them, perhaps. more blindly. On the left-hand side is a self-portrait of the Swiss artist, Jean-Étienne Liotard, who lived in Constantinople for two years, and he went native, and he dressed as a Turk. And that was for many Europeans, when he came back to Europe, you could see it says “J. E. Liotard” That it was painted in Vienna in 1744.
So, he travelled around Europe, dressed as a Turk. And for many aristocrats, that was past the free, saw the excitement of being depicted by a Turk. Now, I often think that if I were a Turk, I might be a little disconcerted by going around the old palaces of Vienna. Everywhere in Vienna you see images of defeated Turks. This is one, this is a sculpture, that’s in the lower Belvedere. And here the depictions of the Turks. In fact, these are two English aristocrats, William Ponsonby on the left, looking very posh. And the Countess of Coventry, fantasising about being an oddly Turkish harem on the right hand side. So, Liotard went all around Europe with a big case of Turkish costumes, that he could dress up his sitters. So Mozart also likes the exoticism of the Turkish setting. And this comes through in “The Overture”, or instantly, what I’m going to do tonight, I’ve just chosen four of the greatest masterpieces, that belong to this special genre of the Singspiel. And they are “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, “Magic Flute”, “Fidelio” and “Der Freischütz”. But we start… this is the overture to “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, which is what the, the Viennese called Janissary movement… er, music. The Turkish Shock Troops, the Janissaries. Before a battle, they would intimidate their enemies by playing this very noisy music with lots of percussion. And this is Mozart’s take on it.
So even if “The Abduction from the Seraglio” is essentially an Enlightened opera, and one that is preaching brotherhood of man, and forgiveness, and so on, Mozart and his librettos still had quite a lot of fun with stereotyping Turks and the English, actually. This is, I’m going to play you a piece of spoken dialogue here. As I said in these singspiele, the in-between the arias and the ensembles, the dialogue is spoken. And so here, this is Osmin, who’s in charge of the harem of Pasha Selim. And Pasha Selim has bought some Christian captives. They’ve been captured by pirates. Konstanze who is an aristocratic lady, and her servant Blonde, who’s an English woman, and Blonde’s fiancé Pedrillo, who’s Spanish. So, as I said, there’s a lot of kind of national stereotyping in this opera, and you’ll see it rather amusingly in this little dialogue, I’m afraid Osmin is a definitely a caricature of how Turks were perceived as being very cruel and very brutal. And Blonde, she’s a very perky young English woman. And there’s a piece of dialogue, Which I used to use a lot actually, when I was in Germany, particularly with the: The elderly lady, who adopted me. I think I’ve mentioned her before, this Countess Otty, She was always saying to me, she was always telling me I had bad manners because I wouldn’t kiss the hand. And I’d say to her: “I don’t kiss the hand”. Which is a paraphrase of what she says when he says, “You are my slave”. And she says: “Slave? Get real. I’m an Englishman woman and born to freedom’.
Then I move into the following duet, very delightful, very funny. I mean, Mozart is so good at this sort of thing. He does it with such lightness of touch, and it still brings a a smile to audiences today. So you have a duet between a very deep bass, Osmin, and Sarastro in "The Magic Flute” have some of the deepest notes that have ever required from a bass, going right down to bottom Ds and Es. And there’s a very funny musical moment really, when Blonde… He goes down into the depths of his voice, and she’s a little soaperette, she’s the highest soprano, but she tries to imitate him, going down to the bottom of her, her voice. And then in the second section of the duet, you hear Osmin lamenting: “Englishmen, what fools you are to allow your women to have their own way”.
Now, Mozart was going through a very happy phase, optimistic phase of his life. He was young, he was 25. He, as I said, he’d thrown off the shackles of his horrible master, the Archbishop of Salzburg, who treated him so insultingly. So, he was free, and he was having a lot of success, and he was in love, and he was engaged to a young woman called Constanze Weber. So it’s no coincidence, really, that the heroine of the opera is also called Constanze. And he had the hero Belmonte, he’s a Spanish nobleman, who comes to Turkey to try and rescue her from the harem. And in this area, he expresses his love for, and his longing for Constanze. So, this is Mozart really, I think, expressing his longing for his Constanze just before their marriage. And the aria, it expresses this so wonderfully: “Full of anxiety, full of fire, my heart full of love is beating”. And I love the way the music expresses this. The beating of the heart, and all the, the lovesick longing. And of course, marvellously, marvellously sung here by Richard Tauber, great Austrian tenor, who is absolute perfection, I think, in this aria.
Tenderness and praising.
Hear the swelling breast, emotion.
So, Belmonte introduces himself to Pasha Selim, pretending to be a garden designer. This is very, of course, very Enlightenment period. The period of the English garden capability, brown and so on. So he’s offering to redesign the gardens for the Pasha. And in this scene I’m going to play you now, it’s a quartet for… As Belmonte is reunited briefly with Constanze, and… Oh! Pedrillo, who’s come with him. So you’ve got the two pairs of lovers, because Pedrillo is the fiancé of Blonde. And so this is… I can’t play you the whole scene, I wish I could, because it’s too long, it lasts over 10 minutes. But it’s an early example of, I think, the most remarkable feature of Mozart’s mature operas. These wonderful ensembles gone even longer, they can last 15-20 minutes in “The Marriage of Figaro”, and “Don Giovanni”, and so on. And ensembles in opera, of course, are very important. Trios, Quartets, Quintets, even Sextet, in an Italian opera in, say, Verdi or something like, say the Sextet from Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”, that there’ll be a high point in the drama. And everybody, it would traditionally, at the time, they would stand at the centre of the stage, still, and they would all express their different emotions. It’s a moment of stasis in the drama. Famously Victor Hugo, who wrote the play on which Rigoletto was based, said how much he envied Verdi, that he was able to do this quartet from Rigoletto, and you had the four voices intertwined, and they’re all expressing very different emotions simultaneously. It’s obviously not something you can do in a spoken play.
But Mozart goes much, much further than this, because you’ll see that all four are very, very sharply characterised. That the noble lovers express themselves with a calm nobility, and the servants - in a much more lively and comical way. So you’ve got those different strands woven together, but also Mozart uses these ensembles to move the drama forward. So, it’s not a moment of stasis or stillness. There is a continuing change of mood and action. So, it starts off, you’ll hear, as they meet one another, full of joy and rapture, as an ecstatic reuniting, but then the two male lovers suddenly start to become… to express some kind of anxiety or worry. And so we, go from a major key into a minor key, and then the two women pick up this, and say: “What’s the problem, what’s the problem?” And then, very hesitantly, the two men, again, in their very different ways, Belmonte is doing it in a much more polite and noble way, and Pedrillo in a much more earthy way. They say: “Well, what we really want to know, is have you been faithful to us?” Of course, the two women are absolutely outraged by this. And, you know, extremely hurt, that their, virtue has been doubted. So, the two men are convinced and they apologise. And then the whole thing ends with them literally kissing and making up. So, I’m going to play you, as I said, part, not the whole, of this extended scene. It’s the joyous reuniting.
Change to the minor key. And you hear the hesitation, the embarrassment.
I think we’re better to move on, because we’ll run out of time. And the opera ends with it turns out, that when Belmonte reveals, that he is a Spanish aristocrat, and it turns out that his father has exiled Pasha Selim from his homeland in North Africa. So, he has an extra reason to treat Belmonte and Costanze very harshly. But instead, he decides to show his moral superiority by forgiving them and releasing them. And we have another ensemble at the end, joyous ensemble. And you can see the words: “Nothing is as ugly as revenge”. “That you have to be generous, you have to be humane”. So, this, again, very, very much the sentiments of the Enlightenment.
So, Mozart, as you know, had a tragically short life, dying at the age of 37. And he wrote a further five operas after “Entführung”. And, of these, only one was in German, because, as I said, the whole experiment with the National Singspiel came to an end in 1783. So, by the time he wrote “The Marriage of Figaro”, of course it was back reverted to Italian texts and sung recitative. But, so, he wrote one more singspiel, that was not for the Court Theatre, it was for the commercial theatre, had a very different kind of audience. Not an aristocratic audience, very much a more popular audience. So, and it was a commercial venture, and it was commissioned by a man called Emmanuel Schikaneder, who is an actor manager, we would say. Like Mozart, he was a member of the Freemasons. And Freemasons, of course, were also promoting the ideas of the Enlightenment. So, his “Magic Flute” is also, very much, an Enlightenment opera, you see. This is the famous David Hockney production for Glyndebourne in the 1970s, “Die Zauberflöte”. Wisdom, sense, nature. This is a, mid-extract card, For showing “The Magic Flute”. And, so we have these little homilies, being very delivering the morality of the Enlightenment. So here, the three boys, and they’re, saying: “Superstition shall vanish”. Superstition, you could say, represented by the Catholic church. We’re going to move on to a more Enlightened age of wisdom.
Now, Bach, as you may remember, or, I’m sure you’ll know, after… by the time he died, he was considered very old fashioned, and he was soon forgotten. And it wasn’t really till Mendelssohn rediscovered him in the 19th century, that his reputation revived. But Mozart was somebody, who did know about Bach, and continued to respect him, and to be influenced by him. So, here’s another one of these scenes of, you know, sort of a morale, a moral being delivered to the audience by the armoured men. And has very much the character, really, of Bach chorale from a cantata. But with secular, rather than religious meaning.
It’s kind of ironic, that this opera, which is the ultimate Enlightenment opera, all about the brotherhood of man and, you know, rising above our baser instincts, and so on, actually has some of the most non-PC texts in any opera ever written. In fact, it’s been a very long time, since I’ve seen a performance of “The Magic Flute” in which the original text is used without censorship. There are moments in the text which are outrageously racist, and there are other moments which are outrageously misogynistic. This is the character of Monostatos, who is black, and he actually sings the words: “Black is ugly, white is beautiful, therefore, because I’m black and ugly, I have to rape this white beautiful woman”. Well, it was, I supposeб you could get away with it in the days before the surtitles, when probably a lot of people, outside of Germany anyway, wouldn’t necessarily have understood the words, but you can’t add that, really, in large letters above the stage. And there are other moments, in the score, where there are little lines delivered, like, you know, “Women talk too much”, and “They’re stupid”, and “They should do what their husbands tell them”, and so on. So, as I said, the opera was commissioned, and the libretto largely created by Emmanuel Schikaneder, who was not a professional singer. So, and he took the part of Papageno, And, so the music for Papageno is really quite simple, and has a very folkloric quality to it.
So, he didn’t have access to the expensive Italian singers, employed by the Court Opera. They had to use German singers, but they must have been some, a lot of remarkable vocal talent in Vienna, local vocal talent at the time. And, there is some extremely, notoriously demanding arias in “The Magic Flute”. They, you are likely to hear, in a performance “The Magic Flute”, you are likely to hear the highest notes and the lowest notes, that you’ll ever hear in the Opera house. The Queen of the Night goes up to top F - an F above top C. So, here is the Queen of the Night, sung by Erna Berger, in the Beecham recording, zooming up to her top Fs.
Now we’re going to hear the great Ukrainian Jewish bass, Alexander Kipnis, in my opinion, the greatest Germanic bass. Germanic, well he largely in the German repertoire of the 20th century. And here we will hear him going down to his wonderfully sonorous bottom E.
Actually, that’s the first verse. We didn’t get to the bottom E that comes at the end of the second verse. Now we move on to Beethoven, who was, undoubtedly, one of the greatest composers who’s ever lived, but a not a natural opera composer. And he only completed one opera in two versions. First version, “Leonore”, second version called “Fidelio”. The final version having its premier at the Theatre an der Wien in 1813, this is the Theatre an der Wien, and Mozart was actually… Um, Beethoven was living in it when he wrote the opera. And that theatre, of course, still exists. It’s singspiel. The French equivalent of Singspiel is opéra-comique. An opera that has spoken dialogue. So, the original version of Carmen, for instance, is an opéra-comique. And “Fidelio” was always categorised in France as an opéra-comique, but it’s not really a bundle of laughs. There are some jolly scenes in the first act between, you so often get this in the, the Singspiel and later in operettas, there’ll be two pairs of lovers. There is a noble pair, and a humble working class pair. Marzelline and Jaquino are the humble lovers in “Fidelio”, and clearly Beethoven was aiming for something of the comic delight of the scene, that I played you earlier on, between Osmin and Blonde. But, it seems to me, it doesn’t really… in fact, I’m not going to play it to you, because it seems to me, it sounds like Mozart in heavy boots. He just didn’t have the lightness of touch for that kind of music, that Mozart had. And, I mean, there’s no doubt that “Fidelio” is one of the greatest operas ever written, but it seems to me to be more a collection of great moments, sublime moments, rather than a coherent opera, and unified opera. And, I’m going to give you at least some of the sublime moments, starting with the Act 1 Quartet in a version I find intensely moving. In this qartet it’s more like an Italian ensemble, than a Mozart ensemble. Because it is a moment of stasis, where everything stops, and everybody expresses their inner emotions.
It’s Marzelline who thinks that Fidelio is a boy, and she’s in love with him. And Rocco, the father, who looks benignly, Fidelio, who is rather worried about finding herself in such an ambiguous situation, and Jaquino, who is jealous. So they all have different feelings that they’re expressing in this quartet. Now, the version I’m going to play you, was recorded in 1932, so just before the Nazi takeover. And it’s a… I find it a very, very beautiful version. Anna Berger, who starts off the quartet, is singing Marzelline, and the dramatic soprano, Henriette Gottlieb is singing Fidelio. This was one of the last things she did, because as she was Jewish, she… her career was ended the moment the Nazis took par in early 1933. And, tragically, she died in the Holocaust. She was murdered by the Nazis. I think, she actually died, in a cattle truck on the way to a concentration camp. A wonderful singer, and you can hear in this recording, very beautiful voice, really at the height of her powers. And I do wonder, in a way, why she didn’t, maybe she just felt she was too old, she was 50, to go and start in another country, cuz she certainly sounds like she could have. And, as you can see from the photograph on the left, I met Anna Berger in 1989. We talked one day for seven hours nonstop. And she talked about Henriette Gottlieb. And also in her autobiography she talks about her, and she says: “You know, we were colleagues”, they obviously got on well together. And then one day she was there, and the next day she wasn’t. And in her autobiography she says, you know: “I’ve asked myself ever since, why didn’t I know what had happened? Could I have known? I could have known. Maybe I just didn’t want to know”. Which is more honest than many people remembering their time in the Third Reich. But anyway, here is this very beautiful quartet in this, I think, extraordinarily beautiful and moving version.
Of course, I have to play “The Prisoner’s chorus”, one of the most beautiful choruses in all of opera. Now, “Fidelio” is an opera about resistance to tyranny. So, it was an opera, that picked up huge amounts of meaning and symbolism during the Second World War. It was, of course, the opera that was chosen to reopen all the German opera houses after the second World War. They’d nearly all been bombed when they were reconstructed, that it was the choice of all the opera directors to try and start a new era. So, this is the scene where the prisoners, who’ve been locked up in dark dungeons are briefly allowed out into the sunlight.
Oh? No, it isn’t. I think I have to move on. Sorry, you’re not going to get that. So, I’m going to move on to the Second Act in the dungeon, where Leonore’s husband has been imprisoned and she comes down with Rocco to dig his grave. And we have a scene of melodrama. Melodrama, which is where you have spoken dialogue over a musical accompaniment. This is from another, I think, very remarkable, very removing performance, that this is a live broadcast of a performance in New York in 1941 from the Met. And every single participant in this performance really must have been feeling it so strongly. The contralto Bruno Walter, he was of course an Austrian Jewish refugee, had just managed to get out of Paris in time, in 1940. The tenor, René Maison was a refugee from occupied Belgium, Kipnis, again, Ukrainian, but his career had been German up until 1934. He was also a refugee. And the great Kirsten Flagstad, her country had just been invaded. Her husband was back in Norway, and she was just about to make the very Leonore-like decision to give up her career and go back to be with her husband in Nazi-occupied Norway. So, I’m playing you this, partly because I think there’s a tremendous tension and emotion in this performance. But also the beauty with Flagstad and Kipnis, you have two of the most beautiful voices, two of the most powerful and beautiful voices of the 20th century. And I think it’s wonderful also, not only they’re singing voices, how beautiful and powerful their speaking voices are. In the spoken part.
Now, I’m afraid I’ve completely run out of time. So, I feel bad about leaving out Weber, but, I think, I should finish, and I’m going to go into the questions.
Q&A and Comments:
Q: “Called a Broadway musical these days”, Myrna.
A: Yes. Cuz they’re very, kind of, distinctions between all these different theatrical musical forms of grand opera, opera, opéra-comique, and then operetta, and the musical. There are quite blurred borders, I’d say, between one and another.
Mike Pullover is a friend, is present from an American friend. “The sextet is not only a high-point in drama, but also a high-point in comedy”. That’s true. And The “Barber of Seville” has wonderful ensembles in “The Barber of Seville”.
“Who’s the libretto for the…” In fact, Mozart is thought to have had quite a big role in creating, the working with, I’m trying to remember the name of the librettos. But Mozart, sent… there are letters surviving, that show that Mozart actually had a big influence, and had quite a lot of input into the Seraglio.
“Faithfulness also comes up in "Così fan tutte”. Well, Mozart himself, in his letters, was often very anxious about the faithfulness of Constanze, whether she really was constant to him. So, I think, it’s probably also a reflection of his personal attitudes. I think, I did comment on the racist depiction. I mean, nowadays, as I said, nobody does it, I don’t think. As it was originally intended, it would be impossible to do so.
“Despite the thread, that count as superstition in the church… the thread of three… trinity”. Yes. Yes, I take all your points about that. My opinion today on the censorship of “The Magic”… I, you know, I’m generally, I’m not in favour of censorship, but I just think, you know, in, as I said, in the days where you have surtitles, you simply can’t have that in big letters over the stage for a modern audience.
Q: Yes, Rocco uses “du”, because… er… Does Leonore use “du” back to him?
A: I’d need to think about that. But you know, you as if he’s the boss, and Leonore, Fidelio, his young assistant, so it’ll be appropriate for him to use the “du” form.
Thank you, Ruth. Thank you everybody. And I’m sorry to have only given you really just over half the lecture. I’m afraid I’m always too ambitious, especially when including musical excerpts that take so much of the lecture.
But see you for Wagner next time.