Patrick Bade
Krenek, Korngold and Weill: An Operatic Battle 1927-1928

Patrick Bade - Krenek, Korngold and Weill: An Operatic Battle 1927-1928

- I’m talking tonight about a cultural musical battle that took place in Germany and Austria between 1927 and ‘28. And it was really a pivotal moment, a moment of change from a type of modernism that was still tinged with the luscious, late romanticism of Mahler and Strauss, and a move towards a much tougher, grittier, more aesthetic type of modernism. And there are three protagonists involved in this battle. Erich Korngold on the left. He was born in 1897. Ernst Krenek in the middle, and Kurt Weill on the right hand side. They were both born in 1900, so they’re near contemporaries. And of course, they were very young in 1927. Only Korngold had yet reached the age of 30. So all three extremely precocious composers. So, particularly the rivalry between Krenek and Korngold, two Jewish composers incidentally, became extremely intense. And the public got really involved in this. There was a lot of publicity. Here you can see cigarettes named after the rival operas, 'Das Wunder der Heliane’, and ‘Jonny Spielt Auf’. These two operas went head-to-head all over the German speaking countries, with rival premieres in each city. And ‘Jonny Spielt Auf’ was performed in no less than 42 different opera houses in this period. And in its first season, it achieved an incredible 421 performances. This is a map that shows you all the cities in Germany and Austria where ‘Jonny Spielt Auf’ was performed. The battle was most intense in the southern cities of Munich and Vienna, with the rising Nazis becoming very much involved in both cities. In Munich, there were Nazi protestors threw stink bombs at ‘Jonny Spielt Auf’, and they unleashed mice into the auditorium during the performance. And it got very, very nasty indeed in Vienna.

Now of course, Korngold was the son of the preeminent music critic in Vienna, Julius Korngold, you see him on the right hand side. He had been the leading, he was the successor of Hanslick, who had dominated the 19th century, had been a great proponent of Vagner of course. And so, he was a very distinguished, sort of an elder statesman of Austrian music at this time. And he was the critic of the ‘Neue Freie Presse’. Now that, I imagine most of you are familiar with that title, ‘Neue Freie Presse’, ‘cause Trudy’s talked about it very often. It was a liberal newspaper, and it employed Theodor Herzl, or Theodor Herzl was sent by the 'Neue Freie Presse’ to Paris to cover the Drafers case. But so, rather shamefully, Julius Korngold, who was of course very protective of his son, actually allied himself to extreme right wing protestors in Vienna, Nazi protestors. You can see this shocking poster here, on left hand side with swastikas on it, addressing the men and women of Vienna, and saying, “Our state opera has fallen victim to-” That’s a horrible phrase, really. A cheap Jewish negro defiling of the opera house, with this opera, which contained jazz elements. So, as the oldest of the three, as I said, was Erich Korngold, who was really one of the most astonishing musical prodigies that there has ever been. In some ways I find him more astonishing than Mozart. And of course, Mozart was writing symphonies before he was the age of 10, and he was writing operas in his teens. But you don’t really hear the mature Mozart until he’s reached his early twenties, I would say it’s about, not till you get to Idomeneo, and the Sinfonia Concertante that you listen to that music and straightaway you know, yes, this is Mozart.

But Korngold was producing incredibly mature music at the age of 10 and 11, and was a source of wonder to the older composers around at the time. This is a drawing on the left hand side where you can see them all standing around, absolutely astonished by the genius of this little boy. You could recognise Siegfried Vagner, Max Reger, the conductor, Nicky Strauss and Oigen dal Ber at the end of the piano. There is the young Korngold at the time. His Op. 1 is the most incredible work. I really recommend you get to know it if you don’t know it already. In some ways, I think it’s the most wonderful thing he ever wrote. He just hit the ground running with a work of incredible complexity and technical sophistication as well as emotional maturity. How does this happen? I mean, Mendelssohn is another case. Reynaldo Hahn is another case. I don’t know whether it is a phenomenon, whether it’s a specifically Jewish phenomenon. I remember asking this question to an audience at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, and the answer coming back from the audience almost in unison, ah, yes, Jewish mothers. I think there is a cultural thing, isn’t it? There is a cultural thing that this enormous attention to the education of small children in the Jewish community, that sometimes it can see it seem almost forced. Certainly, I don’t know if it was an altogether happy experience for Korngold. He really did have, in a way, the parents from hell. And on the occasion of the premier of this piece, can you imagine an 11 year old having a piece of music that was premiered by the great cellist, Buxbaum, by the violinist, Arnold Rosé, and by Bruno Walter at the piano.

And at the end of the performance, a huge row broke up between Mr. Korngold and Mrs. Korngold about the performance. One saying it was performed too fast, and the other one saying it was performed too slow. They’re walking down the street, there was little Erich trailing behind them, and eventually got a word in. And he said, “Well, actually I was very pleased with it, I thought it was just right.” And the mother and the father, they both turned around and they shouted him, “You just shut up.” So, almost as astonishing was the success of his opera ‘Die tote Stadt’. He’s still only 21 years old when he composed this piece that was a huge international success. It reached the Metropolitan following year in 1921 with the superstar, Maria Jeritza, who you see on the left hand side in the main role. It’s just had a series, a run of performances at the English National Opera. And I was lucky enough to see one just over a week ago. It’s a weird opera, really. I mean, it’s incredibly complex score, and a rather, I mean, a strange thing about Korngold, he just seems such a nice person, really, a family man, loving son, loving husband, loving father. But all this weird kinkiness in his operas, you think, well, what’s going on in his psyche underneath the surface in the climax of ‘Die Tote Stadt’ that the hero strangles his mistress with the hair of his dead wife. Beat that for perversity. Well, I think he did try and beat it really with his next big ambitious opera, ‘Das Wunder der Heliane’. It was in fact the most ambitious work of his career, and he hoped very much that it would be his greatest masterpiece. But it got very mixed reviews. And in the end, I suppose in the battle between ‘Jonny’ and ‘Heliane’, it was ‘Jonny’ that came out on top.

And ‘Heliane’ was dismissed by most critics as being rather passé and backward-looking. It is an enormous score which requires a huge orchestra, absolutely huge, you know, bigger than Vagner or Strauss, multicoloured rich orchestration and incredibly sumptuous lush harmonies. So I’m going to play you the opening scene of this opera with offstage choirs and you get a sense of this extraordinary rich iridescent harmony and orchestration. Shades of Marla there. The opera is based on an unpublished play that was written by a minor expressionist poet called Hans Kaltneker. It’s not known how Korngold came across this text ‘cause I said it was unpublished and Kaltneker had died. He was very, very short-lived, and he died before Korngold set to work on the opera. But apparently, Kaltneker had written the piece with Korngold in mind and hoped that it would be, so maybe it was a relative or a friend of Kaltneker who gave it to Korngold. And it’s a rather sort of pretentious, symbolic plot. It concerns a kingdom, a mythical kingdom where the king is very depressed because his wife cannot love him, and he’s so depressed that he forbids love throughout his kingdom, that nobody is allowed to love. But a beautiful stranger arrives in the land, and he’s preaching love. And the king has him arrested and thrown into prison. And in the night before he’s supposed to be executed, the queen goes to visit him in his prison cell, and they fall in love with one another, of course, on the spot. And she does a kind of slow strip tease. She first of all, reveals her hair, and then she reveals one part of her body after another, and eventually is completely naked in front of him.

I don’t know quite how they brought this off in the 1920s, I presume, with the aid of body stocking, or maybe with a screen, I don’t really know. And then, they are caught together with her naked, and she’s put on trial and she describes her appearance of going to him and the whole business of showing him her hair and her feet, and then finally her body. So, it’s an incredibly demanding opera of the singers. And the tenor part is absolutely impossible. It’s kind of real hell of tenor stuff. And the soprano part is pretty tough too. So, one of the Vienna premier, was inevitably the great Lotte Lehmann, who was the darling of the Vienna public. She later said it was the favourite of all her roles. And that’s really saying something, considering that she sang premieres of many operas by Strauss and Puccini. But it’s certainly a role I think that suits her, her temperament with this sort of clashing emotionalism. So here is Lotte Lehmann who sang in the Vienna premier of 'Das Wunder Der Heliane’. Move on to the second part of this scene, where the very gorgeous, very Viennese-sounding melody, really, almost waltz-like, but it builds up it to a tremendous, ecstatic climax. It’s obviously rather indebted, I’d say, to the Liebestod of Isolde. We’re going to hear this in a modern recording with Anna Tomowa-Sintow, another very, very fine singer. So you can have a better idea of the lushness and the beauty of the orchestration. Ernst Krenek was a Czech at the time, many people thought he was Jewish, but in fact, he wasn’t. And this opera is about the conflict between tradition and modernity.

And we have juxtaposed a traditional European composer, der Komponist Max, you can see here on the programme, and a black-American jazz violinist, Jonny, of the title. And Jonny comes to Europe with a jazz band. And he steals a beautiful violin that belongs to a virtuoso performer. And here is a collage of images from ‘Jonny Spielt Auf’. I mean, it’s very problematic opera. I think it was then, and it is now. At the time for the Nazis, they hated the way that jazz was introduced, and they hated that a black character becomes the hero. And at the end of the opera he triumphs. There he is with the violin that he’s stolen, and it’s become his and it belongs to him. It’s not performed very often these days. I think, as I said, it’s problematic these days for other reasons. And, I’m sure that many of you will react with rather shock and horror to the image I’m showing you now of the performers in blackface. And it was hugely controversial, great protests in Germany last year, Munich, when it was performed there. And they made the decision to have the characters perform in blackface as they were in the original 1920s production. So the other thing that many people objected to at the time was the, this is of course, well before Gershwin and Porgy and Bess, this is a decade earlier, that elements of jazz should be heard in the sacred German opera houses of Munich and Vienna.

So I’m going to play you a scene takes place in a Paris hotel with Jonny and his jazz band playing in a neighbouring room. And there is a jazz-loving chambermaid who Jonny gets her to help him steal the violin. So first of all, we’re going to hear the jazz band playing in the distance, and then we’ll hear a short duet between Jonny and the chambermaid. You can hear of course that the musical language is much less lush, much harsher than the musical language of Korngold. Incidentally in the Vienna premier of that, it was the great, Elizabeth Schumann, who sang the jazz-loving chambermaid. This is a scene towards the end that takes place in a railway station. So that was already a bit of a shock, I think for many people at Vienna State Opera to see a modern railway station represented on the stage. And this is Jonny arriving at the railway station, carrying the stolen violin, and about to take a train and go back to America. And this is one of the multiple original cast recordings. I mean there were multiple original casts. This is Ludwig Hoffman, I’m not sure which city. I think it might have been Berlin, in which he sang in the original cast. So it, as I said, had initial, this enormous, enormous success, and even reached the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1929 with Friedrich Shaw, the leading Wagnerian baritone at the period as Jonny. But the success was short-lived, and of course the Nazis hated it. And the very moment that the Nazis took power, it was effectively banned in Germany and then later, of course, in Austria, and it faded from the repertoire.

So, it’s actually the last of the three works I’m talking about tonight that really established itself, or despite, of course, also inevitably being banned by the Nazis. But the ‘Dreigroschenoper’, the ‘Threepenny Opera’, of Kurt Weill with the text by Bertolt Brecht, was a sensational success in Berlin in 1928, and was equally successful shortly afterwards in Paris. So it really escaped out of the German speaking world into the wider world. It’s, of course, a very political piece. Brecht, and at this point, anyway, Kurt Weill were very left wing. They later parted ways politically, and it’s inspired by the ‘Beggars Opera’. The 18th century English musical was actually exactly 200 years earlier, ‘cause it was 1728 that the 'Beggar’s Opera’ was performed in London. Very important for the history of theatre in London. It was regarded as extremely subversive. It was very critical of the corruption of the governments of the day, of the time of Walpole, Sir Robert Walpole, and it was regarded as so subversive, and so dangerous, and so inflammatory that censorship was introduced for everything that appeared on stage in London as a result of this, and not actually dropped until the 1960s. This is, of course, was one of Hogarth’s paintings inspired by John Gay’s ‘Beggar’s Opera’ in the 1720s. And I want to play you two excerpts from the original cast of 1928. Firstly, the very, very famous ‘Mack The Knife’, of course, very familiar to all of you in many, many different versions.

I’m sure pretty well everybody you can think of has recorded it. But none for me are quite as haunting as this version with Kurt Gerron. I mentioned him before when I was talking about the Berlin theatre scene. A man of quite extraordinary talents, brilliant actor, filmmaker, and with such a characteristic voice, such an individual timbre of the voice. Nobody for me quite matches him in this music. Of course, a man who came to the most terrible and tragic and appalling end imaginable during the Holocaust. He was, of course, forced to perform that in front of his Nazi jailers in Vestaburg, and later in Terezín Stadt, where he was persuaded by the Nazis to make this notorious propaganda film about the Terezín Stadt, which unfortunately, did not save his life in the end. So, my last excerpt to play you is with the immortal Lotte Lenya, who was married, I think she was married twice actually, ‘cause I think they divorced and remarried to Kurt Weill. And I imagine that many of you will be familiar with her post-war recordings of Kurt Weill, which became very famous in the standard recordings. It’s quite interesting to hear her recorded in 1928. It’s a very different kind of voice. I think in the ensuing decades, there must have been a lot of cigarettes, and probably a lot of alcohol consumed. And the voice descended, but it sounds quite sweet here. Although of course the sentiments of revenge and hatred in this song are anything but sweet. The very, very different mood from the one that we started with. So, let’s see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments:

Q: Is it possible to get an annotated script of Threepenny Opera?

A: Annotated? I’m not sure what you, you could easily get the script of it, very easy. I mean, every CD recording would have it. I’m sure you could find that online actually.

No, Julius Korngold went, 'cause Erich Korngold left for Hollywood in 1935, and worked for Warner Brothers, produced 12 films, and he got his family out. So the whole family got out, and they all survived in California.

The 'Heliane’ piece sounded quite Hollywood. Well that’s, you know, that is because Korngold created the sound of Hollywood. It’s not like, I mean people often just say, “Oh, it’s very Hollywood” of Korngold’s music in a very dismissive way. But it’s not like he was imitating the films. He created the sound of the films. Sounded like the Pierrot song, you’re thinking, of course, the famous Pierrot song from ‘Die tote Stadt’. Yes, in the sense that even though it’s sort of building up like a Liebestod, it has this very kind of lilting, Viennese quality to it. You’re quite right, Barbara. Korngold invented Hollywood music. It sounds like the newspaper Nazi article was calling ‘Jonny’ woke. What goes around? I mean, it is, I’m not sure which Nazi article you are refer- Maybe it was the one I showed you? The poster. But it is so strange that ‘Jonny’ is in trouble today as it was at the time, but for very different reasons.

Yes, you’re quite right. ‘Cause there was an all-black opera, I mean by Scott Joplin. But you know, of course that was, I think it was partly, of course, the problem that with 'Jonny Spielt Auf’, that it wasn’t all black. I think they might have been better able to accept it, but it was the fact that Jonny is having an affair with a white chambermaid, and so on.

It’s on my list, Ludwig Hoffman, is that he has a wonderful voice. I will talk about him actually in my next lecture. He comes into my next lecture. He’s one of the leading Wagnerian baritones, both in Germany and at the Met in the period.

Robert Allen, as a matter of interest, Krenek’s ‘Jonny Spielt Auf’ includes one of the earliest use of the telephone in opera. Yes, of course, there’s a scene with the telephone, isn’t there? Yes, and you’re quite right, yes. Interesting, there’s a little talk there. The telephone in opera. Of course, the greatest telephone in opera is ‘La Voix Humaine’ by Poulenc, which is based on a play of 1931. And the opera itself was post Second World War. What was heroic about a black music- It’s symbolic, Gean, of the fact that this is the new world, the new culture. And so, his appropriation of the violin is in the thinking of the composer is justified. Interesting, there’s a recent Munich production of ‘Jonny’ was beset by demand from self-appointed group of activist sensors, mostly students.

Yeah, I know, I agree with you actually. It was a kind of fascism, and very ugly incident. Interesting that you say that.

Q: To what age is an opera singer, male/female, able to perform on stage oldest?

A: It varies enormously. And there, you know, there are roles like, like the Emperor in ‘Turandot’, where you can have singers in their eighties performing it. I think Giovanni Martinelli was in his eighties when he performed it. It varies enormously. I mean, I’m very sad that Plácido Domingo’s career ended the way it did, ‘cause I’ve heard him in recent years. He was well into his seventies, and still singing very beautifully.

This is Francene who saw it in 1954, I’d love to know what the cast was. It was very likely actually to have been Lotte Lenya in New York in 1954. 2011, Swiss writer, Charles Lewinsky’s novel, 'Gerron’, was published. I assume about Kurt Gerron. He’s a man, of course, who has received terrible abuse and criticism because of his supposed collaboration with the Nazis. But I always quote Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who said, “You don’t judge people in hell.” And I personally have enormous sympathy with Kurt Gerron, and I would not want to blame him for what he did.

Yes, the recent revival of ‘Jonny’ in Germany did use singers in blackface. It was meant to be a critique of the period. Maybe it was a bit too sophisticated for all those young students. I don’t think they got what they were trying to do with that production. There was, interestingly, another character who was very clearly depicted on stage as a caricature Jew in the way that Nazis would’ve seen a Jew. It’s a tricky thing to bring off. Not everybody gets, in those sort of things, what the intention is. Is it true that in the US, Korngold didn’t get recognition for quite some time? That’s, of course, Korngold had very early recognition, ‘cause he had a absolutely tremendous success with 'Die tote Stadt’ in 1921. And the film music was certainly recognised.

He won several Academy Awards and it was hugely successful. But of course, that in a way did him in and that, so when his wonderful violin concerto, such a gorgeous violin concerto, and now of course, standard repertory, everybody loves it. But when that was first performed at the time, one critic famously dismissed it as “More corn than gold”. And that was one of those cheap jives, of course, that really stuck. And so, in fact, yes, there was a kind of double whammy that he suffered from like many Jewish artists of this period to first of all, have your work trashed and banned by the Nazis, and then to survive the war, yes, great that he survived the war, but then to find when he came back to Europe, that he was regarded as passé, and he was too associated with the movies, and nobody was interested in his serious work for a very long time.

Is Margaret agreeing about Domingo? What did I mean? Yes, well, ‘cause I think once they went to America, I mean, Weill was still, I think he, you know, Brecht was of course a committed communist, and continued to be that after he went to America, and once Weill went to America, although he did write some quite, say, shall we say, well, if you want to use the word, woke pieces. He wrote pieces that were politically aware and liberal, and tending to left wing sympathies. But he certainly wasn’t prepared to identify, like Brecht as a communist.

And that seems to be it for today. Thank you very much for listening, and I’ll see you again on Wednesday.