Today I attended an Opera League seminar on Die Gezeichneten (The Stigmatized), a 1918 opera by Austrian composer Franz Schreker. A couple things made today's seminar a bit different. First, the agenda only included one opera, a nice spring break from the usual two. Most of the time we get our brains snowed under an avalanche of minutiae about one opera, take a break, and come back for a second blizzard of operatic lore. Don't get me wrong, I've learned a ton from these seminars, as past blog posts clearly demonstrate (Ring Cycle, anyone?). Still, you can go home feeling drained, so I'm glad today we only had to focus on one, even if it still meant two lectures examining the opera from different angles. Another difference between today and the usual seminar is we had a special guest speaker. Usually our seminars feature the same alternating cast of professors from nearby universities: Simon Williams from UC Santa Barbara and UCLA's Mitchell Morris and Michael Hackett. Today, though, we had this guy from New Jersey named Christopher Hailey. The Opera League had good reason to fly in Chris. Dude's the director of the Franz Schreker Foundation for Music, which has offices in Mainz as well as Pennington, NJ, where Chris works.
Die Gezeichneten is the latest installment of LA Opera's ongoing Recovered Voices project, the brainchild of LA Opera's music director and chief conductor James Conlon. When Maestro Conlon came aboard in 2006, he brought the Recovered Voices project with him from his past gigs in Paris and Cologne. The way it works is, every spring, toward the end of the season, LA Opera will stage an opera by a Jewish composer whose work was censored by the Nazis. To hear Maestro Conlon tell it, Germany and Austria had a wealth of musical talent in the early twentieth century, but because many of the composers were Jewish or partly Jewish (some weren't Jewish at all), their work was censored and their names stricken from the record. Only in recent decades has a lot of this work come to light, and Maestro Conlon is doing his part to expedite the recovery process via Recovered Voices.
When he introduced Christopher Hailey at the start of the seminar, Dr. Allan Edmiston, who always moderates the seminars when he's not performing heart surgery at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, talked about first meeting Chris at one of LA Opera's pre-performance lectures back in the mid nineties. At the time, Allan didn't know the first thing about Franz Schreker. I myself know from past seminars that Allan's more of a Wagner guy. In fact, I think he's part of the Wagner Society of Southern California. Anyway, when he met Chris and listened to him go on about Schreker, Allan didn't waste a minute doing research. That research included the only official biography of Schreker, written by, you guessed it, Christopher Hailey. Entitled Franz Schreker: A Cultural Biography, it was published in 1993 and is now out of print, although you can find used copies on Amazon. As of this writing, Amazon has two used copies for $400 each. Allan joked that it must be Chris hording the remaining copies to get rich off them. Chris said he wished he'd thought of that, but no matter. Even if those $400 copies sell, he won't see a dime in royalties. Meantime, he's working on the second edition.
Chris has been a Schreker scholar since the seventies, a time when there wasn't much scholarship on Schreker, which is ironic. No mistake, Franz Schreker ruled Germany's music scene during the Weimar years (1920-1933). His operas were produced over a hundred times for a total of about a thousand performances. His only rival was Richard Straus. But you know what happened after Weimar, right? Yep. Hitler. In 1933 Hitler was elected Reichskanzler (Chancellor of the Reich), and anyone with even a drop of Jewish blood was in trouble. The anti-Semitism came to a boil even before Hitler officially took over. The National Socialists gave people like Schreker a really hard time. The tension climaxed in the summer of 1932 when Schreker was fired from his job as director of the Berlin Music School (Musikhochschule), a very prestigious position. The following year he lost his job as a music teacher at the Academy of the Arts (Akademie der Künste). 1933 ended with Schreker having a stroke. He died from complications three months later, just two days shy of his 56th birthday.
Schreker's life swung from one extreme to the other, from hot shit in Germany's opera scene to shunned and having his name expunged from the record. Allan drew on his medical expertise and said the whole reason Schreker had a stroke at 55 was due to all the stress of living in an increasingly anti-Semitic country. Specifically, Allan surmised that untreated hypertension was Schreker's undoing, as it was FDR's eleven years later. The tragic irony here is that, at the time, according to Allan, hypertension was thought to be beneficial for the brain. FDR had it for years, his doctors knew he had it, but they chose not to treat it because it was deemed healthy.
First lecture - The Rise and Fall of Franz Schreker
Chris kicked off the first lecture by going back to Schreker's childhood. His father Ignaz was a very successful court photographer. Chris used a video projector during the lecture, and the first image he showed us was a photo Ignaz took of composer Franz Liszt. It showed Liszt as an Abbé, a Catholic clergyman who took orders from the royal court. While Schreker was of Austrian ethnicity, he was in fact born in Monaco. "The most famous composer you'll ever know from Monaco," Chris said. Why Monaco? That's where his parents happened to be living at the time. Dad's photography work was freelance, so the family went wherever Dad could find customers.
Schreker's mom, Eleonore von Clossmann, hailed from a wealthy Austrian Catholic family. Ignaz, a Bohemian Jew from Budapest, converted to Protestantism so Eleonore's family would be more accepting of him. Why didn't he just convert to Catholicism? Perhaps it was too far a trip from Judaism, or perhaps it was for practical reasons. Maybe the Protestant schooling and exams were easier. Or maybe Ignaz was willing to stray only so far from his roots. Whatever the case, becoming a Protestant wasn't enough for Eleonore's parents. They disowned her after she married Ignaz. Bye-bye, family fortune.
After all the moving around, the Schreker family eventually settled in Linz, one of the largest cities in Austria and the state capital of Upper Austria. This was where disaster struck. In 1888, when Schreker was all of 10, his father passed away. As Chris pointed out, not only was there no such thing as health insurance in 1888, there was no such thing as life insurance. In one fell swoop, the Schreker family plummeted into abject poverty. They literally starved. One of Schreker's sisters died of malnutrition. Eleonore took the family to Vienna because it offered more job opportunities. At 14, Schreker was accepted into the Vienna Conservatory. Soon he was landing paid gigs, and it was only because of this that the family could eat.
Excerpt 1: The first musical excerpt Chris played was Schreker's rendering of Psalm 116 for a three-part women's chorus, orchestra and organ. Schreker composed it in 1900 when he was 22. It's a beautiful piece, but somber. Chris dubbed it a "melody for dead kids."
Schreker's big break, though, didn't come until he was thirty, at the 1908 Vienna Art Show (Kunstschau Wien). A dancer named Grete Wiesenthal and her sister Elsa commissioned Schreker to write a pantomime piece called Birthday of the Infanta, adapted from the short story of the same name by Oscar Wilde. It was one of a few fairy tales Oscar Wilde wrote in a collection called A House of Pomegranates. Schreker's pantomime version was a hit. It served as the Art Show's opening performance and had quite an effect on people. More importantly, it led to more work for Schreker, including more commissions from Grete and Elsa. Chris said it was no accident that this was his big break. He described Infanta as a giant leap in the evolution of his talent.
Alexander Zemlinsky, Schreker's friend and fellow composer, was especially affected by Birthday of the Infanta. Zemlinsky was a short ugly guy who had a passionate affair with Alma Mahler, wife of composer Gustav Mahler. She eventually broke his heart, and he never really recovered. He saw a lot of himself in Infanta's main character, the hunchbacked dwarf. In fact, so taken was he with the story that he adapted Infanta into a one-act opera entitled Der Zwerg (The Dwarf). Just to show you what a small world it is and how everything's tied together, LA Opera put on Der Zwerg only two years ago, toward the end of the 2007-08 season as that season's installment of Maestro Conlon's Recovered Voices project. It was half of a double bill with a one-act comic opera called Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) by Viktor Ullmann. Zemlinsky and Ullmann were also Jewish composers censored by the Nazis. Whereas the former fled to New York and passed away of natural causes during the war, Ullmann was shipped off to Auschwitz and eventually died there.
Excerpt 2: This was pretty cool. It was a recording of the pantomime Infanta Schreker himself made in 1927.
Excerpt 3: Five songs from 1909, the year Schreker met and befriended Arnold Schoenberg, who had a big influence on Schreker's music.
Also in 1909, Schreker married a singer named Maria Binder. He was thirty-one, she was seventeen. Maria eventually went on to have a pretty decent career and lived a good long while. Chris, in fact, actually got to know her a little back in the seventies. Not only that, but there was this German guy sitting in the audience, in the same row as me (I think his name was Peter), who wrote a gushing fan letter to Maria back in the sixties when he was in high school. Maria actually wrote back, and the two became pen pals.
Moving on with Schreker's career, if Infanta was his big break, his first taste of true stardom came in 1912 with the opera Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound). This was his second opera, his first being 1902's one-act Flammen (Flames). Der ferne Klang is a full-length, three-act opera with an original libretto by Schreker. Yes, Schreker was one of those rare composers, like Wagner, who wrote his own libretti. In a nutshell, Klang's about this composer named Fritz who's in love with this gal named Grete. They've known each other since they were kids, and it was always assumed they'd get married. Fritz, though, wants to wait. He wants to write a beautiful piece of music before he gets married, and before he can do that, he has to find the source of the "distant sound" he can't get out of his head. Years go by. About ten years later, Grete's this well-to-do gal in Venice who's got all the studs throwing themselves at her feet. While trying to decide which one she should marry, Fritz shows up. He's still haunted by the distant sound and hasn't been able to write the music he feels destined to write. Nonetheless, he wants to marry Grete. This one count who also wants to marry Grete challenges Fritz to a duel. Fritz is a musician, damn it, a lover, not a fighter, so he slinks away. Another five years go by. Even though he still(!) hasn't found the distant sound, he tries to write something anyway. He writes an opera. It sucks so bad, though, that on opening night the audience starts to riot during act two. By this point, Grete's become a prostitute. She's out walking the streets one night when she hears about the rioting and worries about Fritz. They find each other again, only for Fritz to realize that the so-called distant music was, in fact, Grete. He's pretty old at this point, but no matter, he starts revising the sucky opera, changing the ending. He ends up dying of natural causes in Grete's arms.
Pretty poignant, huh? German audiences thought so, too. Premiering in Frankfurt on August 18, 1912, Der ferne Klang was a smash. It played all over Europe, including Vienna, where by this point Schreker and Maria were pretty much settled. Not only was it a great story, but the music was new and modern, different even from Schoenberg, which says a lot.
Excerpt 4: Chris played us a selection from, you guessed it, Der ferne Klang. He described it as a whole new musical language, albeit a fragile language, an echo of Schreker's fragile childhood.
World War I broke out two years after Klang. As you can imagine, people had other things on their mind besides the arts, so suffice it to say that opera houses and theaters went dark.
Nonetheless, like any good writer, Schreker kept up the discipline. He holed himself up and wrote his ass off. And so it was that the topic of today's seminar, Die Gezeichneten, had its big premiere in Frankfurt on April 25, 1918, seven months before the war ended. Together with his next opera, Der Schatzgräber (The Treasure Hunter), which premiered in Frankfurt in January 1920, Schreker was officially king of Europe's opera world. His status as Strauss's chief rival was cemented. Critic Paul Becker called Schreker the answer to Wagner they'd all been waiting for. Chris explained that a compliment like that was double-edged. The Nazis loved Wagner. Hitler practically worshipped the man and would drag his top generals to the opera house to see stuff like Tristan und Isolde (during which, at one particular performance, said generals nodded off, to which, in the case of Tristan, I can relate). Schreker, however, was not so loved by the far right. It wasn't because of the music itself so much as Schreker's being half Jewish. Their official gripe was that Schreker's music was too "decadent," which I interpret as too "modern." Chris did say above that the music for Der ferne Klang was even newer than Schoenberg, who himself was very modern. "Modern" can be a four-letter word when you're talking about classical music.
In March 1920, two months after Der Schatzgräber's premiere, Schreker landed the super plum gig of head of Die Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Literally that translates to The High School for Music, but the German Hochschule is not the same as the American high school. Hochschule is a blanket term for any institution of higher learning that comes after high school. It could be a college or university or a vocational school or an arts institute. Whatever. They're all Hochschulen. What Americans think of as high school would be called Mittelschule in German. Yes, literally that means middle school, because from the German point of view, it comes in the middle, after Gymnasium but before college.
Anyway, Die Hochschule für Musik was a very prestigious music school, perhaps the most highly regarded in Germany. Chris described it as Julliard, Curtis, and USC all rolled into one. The faculty there were the crème de la crème, and Schreker was hired to be in charge. Awesome, huh? Die Hochschule became his base of operations.
Excerpt 5: The opening chords of the opera Irrelohe, Schreker's follow-up to Der Schatzgräber . It premiered in Cologne in March 1924 with Otto Klemperer conducting. Otto Klemperer was one of the most awesome conductors of the twentieth century. That he'd conduct Schreker's work is another indication of our man's status. While it premiered in 1924, Schreker actually started working on it in 1919, right after the war ended. Chris referred to Irrelohe as Schreker's "war opera." He said it's also a good example of how, like most good composers, Schreker listened to the world. He was super sensitive to what was going on around him and filtered these aural observations through his music.
As sound technology started evolving in the 1920s, Schreker became a fan. Actually, Chris said Schreker loved all the new stuff coming out, the cars, planes, radios, recording, studio broadcasting, you name it. On the screen he showed a photo of Schreker and Maria taking a joy ride in a pretty awesome car. Another photo showed Schreker emerging from a plane.
Excerpt 6: Kleine Suite for Small Orchestra, 1928. This was a 78" Schreker composed specifically for the radio which, you have to remember, had just been invented five years earlier, which is why Schreker had only a handful of instruments from the orchestra playing at any one time. The mic could only pick up so much, so Schreker didn't want to overdo it. Kleine Suite is a very linear piece for the new age of sound. It's also melancholy.
Excerpt 7: An excerpt from a scene in Schreker's final opera, 1932's Der Schmied von Gent (The Blacksmith of Ghent). Believe it or not, this one's a comedy, something out of character for Schreker. Chris explained that Gent was Schreker's wishful projection of himself overcoming the intense pressure and prejudice he dealt with 24/7 living in an environment peopled with a growing contingent of extreme right-wingers. This particular scene is when the female devil character shows up to seduce the blacksmith.
After the excerpt, Chris projected a photo of Schreker taken the night Gent premiered. He was standing with a group of people, among them the conductor as well as the singer who played the blacksmith, a guy named Wilhelm Ode. Schreker didn't know that Wilhelm was a member of the Nazi party. He was secretly siding with the protestors making a racket outside the opera house that same night, calling for Schreker's ouster. Wilhelm Ode went on to become one of Hitler's favorite singers. Chris then showed us a studio portrait of Schreker taken around the same time. He looked terrible. The stress of living amidst anti-Semitism had clearly aged him. He was fifty-four or so when the photo was taken but looked a good ten years older, no kidding.
Chris concluded his first lecture by pointing out the recurring theme in Schreker's oeuvre: A disconnect from reality. Schreker dug Wagner's theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, an adaptation of the Classical Greek theory about a single work containing all the different art forms (e.g. it's not just a play, it's a play, a poem, a song, etc., all in one). However, Schreker tempered his subscription to Gesamtkunstwerk (literally "total art work") by saying if you're not too careful, that "total art work" can suck you in and blind you to reality. Because the reality is, most art works represent a stand-alone artistic genre, not all of them simultaneously. At any rate, Schreker's criticism of this excessive idealism shows up in all of his operas in one form or another. To hammer home the point, Chris projected a color(!) photo of his wife Maria in 1925. She was all dolled up as Grete from Der ferne Klang, complete with a striking red wig. Seriously, I wish I could show you this photo, it was quite something, and it'd never occur to you it was taken that long ago, the color was so crisp. Anyway, I reckon Grete is one way Schreker warns the audience about losing their grip on reality.
Excerpt 8: Act two of Klang. This is ten years after the first act, after Fritz has rejected Grete's marriage proposal so he can search for that distant sound and write beautiful music. Act two shows us how Grete, in stark contrast to her circumstances in act one, is now living the high life as a courtesan in Venice. This is when the singer playing Grete would wear an outfit like what Schreker's wife was wearing in that photo. As a courtesan lording over the people in a bordello on a small island in Venice, Grete's lost all touch with reality. As for the music, you've got distant choruses, gypsy bands, and a bunch of other stuff. Don't forget that Schreker was born and lived the first ten or so years of his life in Monaco, so writing about Venice sort of took him back to his Mediterranean youth. Chris called Klang's second act a snapshot of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Excerpts 9 and 10: The end of Klang. The final song features distant bells. Indeed, Chris said that throughout the opera Schreker used the motif of a distant sound or music, a metaphor for something Fritz, and the rest of us, can never quite reach. Chris said Klang encapsulates musical philosophy: The centrality of sound, beguiling yet fragile. And as he said above, the fragility in the music was born out of Schreker's poverty-stricken childhood and watching his sister literally starve to death.
Second lecture - Enigmas of the Soul: Intro to Die Gezeichneten
After lunch, Chris came back to the stage to give us a more Gezeichneten-focused lecture. He started out by telling us that Franz Schreker's real name was Franz Schrecker. Now you may not think "ck" is so different from just "k," but that only means you don't know German. I studied the language for seven years, so I can see that Schrecker comes awfully close to the adjective schrecklich, which means awful, appalling, dreadful, etc. In 1900, when he was twenty-two and pretty serious about making it as a musician, Schreker dropped the "c" in the vain hope that people wouldn't think he and his music were schrecklich. At first it didn't work, even with the long "A" sound his surname took on due to losing the "c." As I said up in the first lecture, it wasn't until his thirties when he made the big time and his surname's spelling no longer mattered.
Excerpt 1: Speaking of Schreker's big break, Chris played a rendition of the 1908 pantomime Birthday of the Infanta. This particular excerpt is from the scene where the hideous dwarf protagonist spots his reflection. I mentioned in the first lecture that Schreker's pal Alexander Zemlinsky wrote his opera Der Zwerg based on Infanta, but what I didn't mention was that Zemlinsky actually hired Schreker to write the libretto for Der Zwerg. While writing it, Schreker became so attached to the story that he wanted to compose the score as well. Zemlinsky wouldn't budge on that point. Schreker relented. He knew Zemlinsky's backstory, how he'd had his heart trampled upon by Alma Mahler.
Now here's another thing I left out in the first lecture (actually, Chris left it out on purpose): Schreker himself also had an affair with Alma. What can I say? Gal got around. When Chris told us this during the second lecture, he showed us a full-body shot of Schreker, and someone from the audience pointed out the resemblance between Schreker and Mahler. I reckon Alma had a certain type she was attracted to.
Chris started talking about Die Gezeichneten's plot. You've got three main characters: The good but ugly Alviano, the hot Carlotta, and the dashing asshole Count Tamare. While these three characters are very different from one another, they're all marked by fate. The story is set in 16th century Genoa, but as Chris pointed out, it could just as well have been set in fin de siècle Vienna, when Schreker wrote it. Alviano builds an island called Ilyseum, which Chris compared to Catalina Island because of a brochure he still had in his pocket from the hotel he was staying at. Alviano builds the paradise island himself but won't live there because he doesn't want to ruin the tropical beauty with his hideousness.
Excerpt 2: Excerpt from the overture to Die Gezeichneten . It's a long cello-clarinet-bass line, which Chris said sonically captures Alviano's state of mind, his longing.
Excerpts 3 and 4: More from the overture. Excerpt 3 is Tamare's part, "No Problem Tamare," as Chris described him. This part of the overture is big and brassy, kind of like his character. Tamare considers himself, like James Cameron, king of the world. And then the next excerpt was another part of the overture that represents Carlotta. It's slower, more mysterious.
Die Gezeichneten was produced over two dozen times between its April 1918 premiere and 1932, when Schreker's work was outlawed. To many people, especially the extreme right-wing assholes, Die Gezeichneten contained sexual amoral connotations. Some even considered the opera itself a sexual crime. Chris called it a metaphor for Germany's last World War I gasp. Yes, the opera established Schreker's reputation, but when viewed in the main, his rep was established on the wrong track. Schreker was a moralist who wanted to use Die Gezeichneten as a way to force people to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror and reckon with all the flaws they saw. Those who thought Schreker relished the sexual details completely misunderstood him. Schreker was holding up a mirror to Weimar Germany, and Weimar Germany didn't get it.
Excerpt 5: Carlotta sings about her painting. "I paint souls."
Excerpt 6: End of act I. Carlotta wants to paint Alviano as she sees him. She's been watching him from her atlier as he takes his morning walks. He's obviously reluctant, but she seduces him into agreeing.
Excerpt 7: Act II, the painting scene. Chris mentioned having seen American soprano Evelyn Lear perform this role. Evelyn, whose still alive today, in fact she just turned eighty-five, was a very famous opera singer back in the fifties and sixties. Opera singers, like pro athletes, are often deemed long in the tooth sooner than most people are given that label, but she had staying power. In fact, she didn't really hit her prime until her forties. The year she turned forty she scored a Grammy for Best Opera Recording for singing the role of Maria in Wozzek.
All of act three takes place on the island Ilyseum. Here's where Schreker pulls out all the musical stops. "Gesamtkunstwerk on steroids" was how Chris put it. The whole act is one huge crescendo. Not only do you have all the characters (and in opera, each character is usually represented by a different musical motif, so you can imagine the clashing notes here), you also have what in movie terms would be called cuts. Act three's got a bunch of scenes, in other words, and so you've got the spotlight flitting from one cluster of action to the next, the way you'd cut from scene to scene in a movie or TV show. And as is typical in movies, the closer the plot builds to the climax, the quicker the cuts. Such is the case here. Suffice it to say that Schreker's libretto for Die Gezeichneten makes life very complicated for stage directors. Schreker made act three cinematic before that word meant anything. He "prefigured cinema" was the way Chris put it.
Excerpt 8: Act three overture. We get a sonic bird's eye view of the island.
Excerpts 9 and 10: More act three music - Carlotta and chorus. Lots of buildup here. "Crescendo galore," Chris said.
Excerpt 11: This was funny. Right away the music reminded me of Star Wars, that one piece of music John Williams always used when the storm troopers show up. Only here, this is the music that plays when Genoa's Council of Eight shows up on the island. The Council of Eight was real, by the way, and Genoa's not the only Republic to have had one. They were basically an oligarchy of wealthy (and therefore influential) merchant families who collectively ran the show. When they show up here, they're not necessarily against the idea of having orgies on the island, they just want to be sure word of this place doesn't get out. After the excerpt, Chris asked us if we could hear the Star Wars influence. He's pretty sure John Williams drew from that for the storm trooper motif. In fact, Chris said John Williams borrows from Schreker all the time.
That was the last excerpt Chris played. After this, he showed us stills from various productions of Die Gezeichneten over the decades, illustrating the different ways it's been staged and how each stage director brings his/her own vision to the project. It's always neat to see stuff like this. I got a really good taste of stage director interpretation last year during all the Ring Cycle stuff. I'll bet you the Ring operas, more than any others, have experienced the widest variety of interpretations.
Anyway, this was pretty interesting too. The first still was from a sort of Frankenstein-esque interpretation. Another showed the characters in white collar business suit attire. Yet another one showed Alviano as a cross dresser. The fourth had Alviano as a naked bald guy. Chris told us that was from a Stuttgart production touring in Amsterdam. He also mentioned a Salzburg production of Die Gezeichneten that had pedophilia taking place on Ilyseum. Yikes. The current LA Opera production is directed by Ian Judge. Chris gave us a heads up that Ian has Carlotta get gang-raped in act three. Wow, really? This is LA Opera, right? Chris disagrees with that interpretation, but he does respect Ian enough that if he were Ian's boss, he wouldn't make him change it.
At this point Chris opened it up to questions from the audience. One person asked what happened to Schreker's students after he died. Chris said about half stayed, the other half were exiled for being Jewish. Some of the exiles landed in Hollywood and found success as soundtrack composers. That's not surprising at all. As a movie buff, I can safely say, after hearing these excerpts, that Schreker's music definitely lends itself to film. But Chris also pointed out that his students were not just facsimiles of Schreker. They didn't just emulate the master, they experimented and innovated and branched out into all manner of musical styles and genres, not to speak of career paths. One of the students who stayed in Germany ended up composing the soundtracks to all of Leni Riefenstahl's stuff. Obviously that must've been one of Schreker's non-Jewish students.
Someone else in the audience asked why Schreker himself never made the move to Hollywood. Surely he'd've found success there. Chris said that he very nearly did. Indeed, it was looking like a sure thing in 1931. The Los Angeles Times even had an article about it. Schreker was plenty famous enough at that point that any major career move, or thoughts thereof, would generate international buzz. The article talked about how the L.A. city leaders were going to have a formal ceremony welcoming Schreker. The whole thing fell through, though, because of money. Remember, this was 1931. The Great Depression was just warming up. After this, it was thought Schreker would move to Chicago, but that didn't pan out either for the same reasons.
Another audience question had to do with the sets from the 1920s production stills Chris had projected earlier. Considering how Germany suffered hyperinflation at that time (e.g. wheelbarrows of marks for a loaf of bread), how were they able to afford such elaborate set pieces? Chris pointed out that the hyperinflation only lasted until 1923. From '24 until the crash of '29, the economy was relatively normal. Plus, it wasn't such a big deal back then for opera companies to have money. It's not like today, where opera companies are constantly dialing up the donor solicitations. I can't tell you how much stuff I get in the mail from LA Opera asking me to support them. I mean, I go to just about every opera they put on, and yet that's not enough. Why don't I a make a gift? A one-time donation that would make me an Angel or whatever? You get the idea. If I had the money, I might, but buying tickets is the best I can do at the moment. I hope I don't sound like I'm griping. I understand where they're coming from. Putting on an opera is expensive. Advertising in the L.A. Times is exorbitant. I'm sure they're constantly trying to break even. But back in the twenties, opera companies weren't so desperate. Their budgets always allowed for great sets because people went to the opera all the time as a matter of course, the way they go to the movies today. Back then, every city and town had a resident opera company. That said, Chris pointed out that the sets weren't always grand as the photos implied. In fact, the world premiere of Die Gezeichneten in April 1918 had a low budget and minimal set pieces. Of course, World War I was still raging. Germany's coffers were depleted, and most opera and theater companies were dark. Budgets were tight all around.
And that about does it for the Opera League seminar on Die Gezeichneten. I really love these seminars. Not only do I learn a ton about operas and the people who compose them, but my appetite for the opera in question becomes whetted. I'm very curious about this piece.
Die Gezeichneten is the latest installment of LA Opera's ongoing Recovered Voices project, the brainchild of LA Opera's music director and chief conductor James Conlon. When Maestro Conlon came aboard in 2006, he brought the Recovered Voices project with him from his past gigs in Paris and Cologne. The way it works is, every spring, toward the end of the season, LA Opera will stage an opera by a Jewish composer whose work was censored by the Nazis. To hear Maestro Conlon tell it, Germany and Austria had a wealth of musical talent in the early twentieth century, but because many of the composers were Jewish or partly Jewish (some weren't Jewish at all), their work was censored and their names stricken from the record. Only in recent decades has a lot of this work come to light, and Maestro Conlon is doing his part to expedite the recovery process via Recovered Voices.
When he introduced Christopher Hailey at the start of the seminar, Dr. Allan Edmiston, who always moderates the seminars when he's not performing heart surgery at Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, talked about first meeting Chris at one of LA Opera's pre-performance lectures back in the mid nineties. At the time, Allan didn't know the first thing about Franz Schreker. I myself know from past seminars that Allan's more of a Wagner guy. In fact, I think he's part of the Wagner Society of Southern California. Anyway, when he met Chris and listened to him go on about Schreker, Allan didn't waste a minute doing research. That research included the only official biography of Schreker, written by, you guessed it, Christopher Hailey. Entitled Franz Schreker: A Cultural Biography, it was published in 1993 and is now out of print, although you can find used copies on Amazon. As of this writing, Amazon has two used copies for $400 each. Allan joked that it must be Chris hording the remaining copies to get rich off them. Chris said he wished he'd thought of that, but no matter. Even if those $400 copies sell, he won't see a dime in royalties. Meantime, he's working on the second edition.
Chris has been a Schreker scholar since the seventies, a time when there wasn't much scholarship on Schreker, which is ironic. No mistake, Franz Schreker ruled Germany's music scene during the Weimar years (1920-1933). His operas were produced over a hundred times for a total of about a thousand performances. His only rival was Richard Straus. But you know what happened after Weimar, right? Yep. Hitler. In 1933 Hitler was elected Reichskanzler (Chancellor of the Reich), and anyone with even a drop of Jewish blood was in trouble. The anti-Semitism came to a boil even before Hitler officially took over. The National Socialists gave people like Schreker a really hard time. The tension climaxed in the summer of 1932 when Schreker was fired from his job as director of the Berlin Music School (Musikhochschule), a very prestigious position. The following year he lost his job as a music teacher at the Academy of the Arts (Akademie der Künste). 1933 ended with Schreker having a stroke. He died from complications three months later, just two days shy of his 56th birthday.
Schreker's life swung from one extreme to the other, from hot shit in Germany's opera scene to shunned and having his name expunged from the record. Allan drew on his medical expertise and said the whole reason Schreker had a stroke at 55 was due to all the stress of living in an increasingly anti-Semitic country. Specifically, Allan surmised that untreated hypertension was Schreker's undoing, as it was FDR's eleven years later. The tragic irony here is that, at the time, according to Allan, hypertension was thought to be beneficial for the brain. FDR had it for years, his doctors knew he had it, but they chose not to treat it because it was deemed healthy.
First lecture - The Rise and Fall of Franz Schreker
Chris kicked off the first lecture by going back to Schreker's childhood. His father Ignaz was a very successful court photographer. Chris used a video projector during the lecture, and the first image he showed us was a photo Ignaz took of composer Franz Liszt. It showed Liszt as an Abbé, a Catholic clergyman who took orders from the royal court. While Schreker was of Austrian ethnicity, he was in fact born in Monaco. "The most famous composer you'll ever know from Monaco," Chris said. Why Monaco? That's where his parents happened to be living at the time. Dad's photography work was freelance, so the family went wherever Dad could find customers.
Schreker's mom, Eleonore von Clossmann, hailed from a wealthy Austrian Catholic family. Ignaz, a Bohemian Jew from Budapest, converted to Protestantism so Eleonore's family would be more accepting of him. Why didn't he just convert to Catholicism? Perhaps it was too far a trip from Judaism, or perhaps it was for practical reasons. Maybe the Protestant schooling and exams were easier. Or maybe Ignaz was willing to stray only so far from his roots. Whatever the case, becoming a Protestant wasn't enough for Eleonore's parents. They disowned her after she married Ignaz. Bye-bye, family fortune.
After all the moving around, the Schreker family eventually settled in Linz, one of the largest cities in Austria and the state capital of Upper Austria. This was where disaster struck. In 1888, when Schreker was all of 10, his father passed away. As Chris pointed out, not only was there no such thing as health insurance in 1888, there was no such thing as life insurance. In one fell swoop, the Schreker family plummeted into abject poverty. They literally starved. One of Schreker's sisters died of malnutrition. Eleonore took the family to Vienna because it offered more job opportunities. At 14, Schreker was accepted into the Vienna Conservatory. Soon he was landing paid gigs, and it was only because of this that the family could eat.
Excerpt 1: The first musical excerpt Chris played was Schreker's rendering of Psalm 116 for a three-part women's chorus, orchestra and organ. Schreker composed it in 1900 when he was 22. It's a beautiful piece, but somber. Chris dubbed it a "melody for dead kids."
Schreker's big break, though, didn't come until he was thirty, at the 1908 Vienna Art Show (Kunstschau Wien). A dancer named Grete Wiesenthal and her sister Elsa commissioned Schreker to write a pantomime piece called Birthday of the Infanta, adapted from the short story of the same name by Oscar Wilde. It was one of a few fairy tales Oscar Wilde wrote in a collection called A House of Pomegranates. Schreker's pantomime version was a hit. It served as the Art Show's opening performance and had quite an effect on people. More importantly, it led to more work for Schreker, including more commissions from Grete and Elsa. Chris said it was no accident that this was his big break. He described Infanta as a giant leap in the evolution of his talent.
Alexander Zemlinsky, Schreker's friend and fellow composer, was especially affected by Birthday of the Infanta. Zemlinsky was a short ugly guy who had a passionate affair with Alma Mahler, wife of composer Gustav Mahler. She eventually broke his heart, and he never really recovered. He saw a lot of himself in Infanta's main character, the hunchbacked dwarf. In fact, so taken was he with the story that he adapted Infanta into a one-act opera entitled Der Zwerg (The Dwarf). Just to show you what a small world it is and how everything's tied together, LA Opera put on Der Zwerg only two years ago, toward the end of the 2007-08 season as that season's installment of Maestro Conlon's Recovered Voices project. It was half of a double bill with a one-act comic opera called Der zerbrochene Krug (The Broken Jug) by Viktor Ullmann. Zemlinsky and Ullmann were also Jewish composers censored by the Nazis. Whereas the former fled to New York and passed away of natural causes during the war, Ullmann was shipped off to Auschwitz and eventually died there.
Excerpt 2: This was pretty cool. It was a recording of the pantomime Infanta Schreker himself made in 1927.
Excerpt 3: Five songs from 1909, the year Schreker met and befriended Arnold Schoenberg, who had a big influence on Schreker's music.
Also in 1909, Schreker married a singer named Maria Binder. He was thirty-one, she was seventeen. Maria eventually went on to have a pretty decent career and lived a good long while. Chris, in fact, actually got to know her a little back in the seventies. Not only that, but there was this German guy sitting in the audience, in the same row as me (I think his name was Peter), who wrote a gushing fan letter to Maria back in the sixties when he was in high school. Maria actually wrote back, and the two became pen pals.
Moving on with Schreker's career, if Infanta was his big break, his first taste of true stardom came in 1912 with the opera Der ferne Klang (The Distant Sound). This was his second opera, his first being 1902's one-act Flammen (Flames). Der ferne Klang is a full-length, three-act opera with an original libretto by Schreker. Yes, Schreker was one of those rare composers, like Wagner, who wrote his own libretti. In a nutshell, Klang's about this composer named Fritz who's in love with this gal named Grete. They've known each other since they were kids, and it was always assumed they'd get married. Fritz, though, wants to wait. He wants to write a beautiful piece of music before he gets married, and before he can do that, he has to find the source of the "distant sound" he can't get out of his head. Years go by. About ten years later, Grete's this well-to-do gal in Venice who's got all the studs throwing themselves at her feet. While trying to decide which one she should marry, Fritz shows up. He's still haunted by the distant sound and hasn't been able to write the music he feels destined to write. Nonetheless, he wants to marry Grete. This one count who also wants to marry Grete challenges Fritz to a duel. Fritz is a musician, damn it, a lover, not a fighter, so he slinks away. Another five years go by. Even though he still(!) hasn't found the distant sound, he tries to write something anyway. He writes an opera. It sucks so bad, though, that on opening night the audience starts to riot during act two. By this point, Grete's become a prostitute. She's out walking the streets one night when she hears about the rioting and worries about Fritz. They find each other again, only for Fritz to realize that the so-called distant music was, in fact, Grete. He's pretty old at this point, but no matter, he starts revising the sucky opera, changing the ending. He ends up dying of natural causes in Grete's arms.
Pretty poignant, huh? German audiences thought so, too. Premiering in Frankfurt on August 18, 1912, Der ferne Klang was a smash. It played all over Europe, including Vienna, where by this point Schreker and Maria were pretty much settled. Not only was it a great story, but the music was new and modern, different even from Schoenberg, which says a lot.
Excerpt 4: Chris played us a selection from, you guessed it, Der ferne Klang. He described it as a whole new musical language, albeit a fragile language, an echo of Schreker's fragile childhood.
World War I broke out two years after Klang. As you can imagine, people had other things on their mind besides the arts, so suffice it to say that opera houses and theaters went dark.
Nonetheless, like any good writer, Schreker kept up the discipline. He holed himself up and wrote his ass off. And so it was that the topic of today's seminar, Die Gezeichneten, had its big premiere in Frankfurt on April 25, 1918, seven months before the war ended. Together with his next opera, Der Schatzgräber (The Treasure Hunter), which premiered in Frankfurt in January 1920, Schreker was officially king of Europe's opera world. His status as Strauss's chief rival was cemented. Critic Paul Becker called Schreker the answer to Wagner they'd all been waiting for. Chris explained that a compliment like that was double-edged. The Nazis loved Wagner. Hitler practically worshipped the man and would drag his top generals to the opera house to see stuff like Tristan und Isolde (during which, at one particular performance, said generals nodded off, to which, in the case of Tristan, I can relate). Schreker, however, was not so loved by the far right. It wasn't because of the music itself so much as Schreker's being half Jewish. Their official gripe was that Schreker's music was too "decadent," which I interpret as too "modern." Chris did say above that the music for Der ferne Klang was even newer than Schoenberg, who himself was very modern. "Modern" can be a four-letter word when you're talking about classical music.In March 1920, two months after Der Schatzgräber's premiere, Schreker landed the super plum gig of head of Die Hochschule für Musik in Berlin. Literally that translates to The High School for Music, but the German Hochschule is not the same as the American high school. Hochschule is a blanket term for any institution of higher learning that comes after high school. It could be a college or university or a vocational school or an arts institute. Whatever. They're all Hochschulen. What Americans think of as high school would be called Mittelschule in German. Yes, literally that means middle school, because from the German point of view, it comes in the middle, after Gymnasium but before college.
Anyway, Die Hochschule für Musik was a very prestigious music school, perhaps the most highly regarded in Germany. Chris described it as Julliard, Curtis, and USC all rolled into one. The faculty there were the crème de la crème, and Schreker was hired to be in charge. Awesome, huh? Die Hochschule became his base of operations.
Excerpt 5: The opening chords of the opera Irrelohe, Schreker's follow-up to Der Schatzgräber . It premiered in Cologne in March 1924 with Otto Klemperer conducting. Otto Klemperer was one of the most awesome conductors of the twentieth century. That he'd conduct Schreker's work is another indication of our man's status. While it premiered in 1924, Schreker actually started working on it in 1919, right after the war ended. Chris referred to Irrelohe as Schreker's "war opera." He said it's also a good example of how, like most good composers, Schreker listened to the world. He was super sensitive to what was going on around him and filtered these aural observations through his music.
As sound technology started evolving in the 1920s, Schreker became a fan. Actually, Chris said Schreker loved all the new stuff coming out, the cars, planes, radios, recording, studio broadcasting, you name it. On the screen he showed a photo of Schreker and Maria taking a joy ride in a pretty awesome car. Another photo showed Schreker emerging from a plane.
Excerpt 6: Kleine Suite for Small Orchestra, 1928. This was a 78" Schreker composed specifically for the radio which, you have to remember, had just been invented five years earlier, which is why Schreker had only a handful of instruments from the orchestra playing at any one time. The mic could only pick up so much, so Schreker didn't want to overdo it. Kleine Suite is a very linear piece for the new age of sound. It's also melancholy.
Excerpt 7: An excerpt from a scene in Schreker's final opera, 1932's Der Schmied von Gent (The Blacksmith of Ghent). Believe it or not, this one's a comedy, something out of character for Schreker. Chris explained that Gent was Schreker's wishful projection of himself overcoming the intense pressure and prejudice he dealt with 24/7 living in an environment peopled with a growing contingent of extreme right-wingers. This particular scene is when the female devil character shows up to seduce the blacksmith.
After the excerpt, Chris projected a photo of Schreker taken the night Gent premiered. He was standing with a group of people, among them the conductor as well as the singer who played the blacksmith, a guy named Wilhelm Ode. Schreker didn't know that Wilhelm was a member of the Nazi party. He was secretly siding with the protestors making a racket outside the opera house that same night, calling for Schreker's ouster. Wilhelm Ode went on to become one of Hitler's favorite singers. Chris then showed us a studio portrait of Schreker taken around the same time. He looked terrible. The stress of living amidst anti-Semitism had clearly aged him. He was fifty-four or so when the photo was taken but looked a good ten years older, no kidding.
Chris concluded his first lecture by pointing out the recurring theme in Schreker's oeuvre: A disconnect from reality. Schreker dug Wagner's theory of Gesamtkunstwerk, an adaptation of the Classical Greek theory about a single work containing all the different art forms (e.g. it's not just a play, it's a play, a poem, a song, etc., all in one). However, Schreker tempered his subscription to Gesamtkunstwerk (literally "total art work") by saying if you're not too careful, that "total art work" can suck you in and blind you to reality. Because the reality is, most art works represent a stand-alone artistic genre, not all of them simultaneously. At any rate, Schreker's criticism of this excessive idealism shows up in all of his operas in one form or another. To hammer home the point, Chris projected a color(!) photo of his wife Maria in 1925. She was all dolled up as Grete from Der ferne Klang, complete with a striking red wig. Seriously, I wish I could show you this photo, it was quite something, and it'd never occur to you it was taken that long ago, the color was so crisp. Anyway, I reckon Grete is one way Schreker warns the audience about losing their grip on reality.
Excerpt 8: Act two of Klang. This is ten years after the first act, after Fritz has rejected Grete's marriage proposal so he can search for that distant sound and write beautiful music. Act two shows us how Grete, in stark contrast to her circumstances in act one, is now living the high life as a courtesan in Venice. This is when the singer playing Grete would wear an outfit like what Schreker's wife was wearing in that photo. As a courtesan lording over the people in a bordello on a small island in Venice, Grete's lost all touch with reality. As for the music, you've got distant choruses, gypsy bands, and a bunch of other stuff. Don't forget that Schreker was born and lived the first ten or so years of his life in Monaco, so writing about Venice sort of took him back to his Mediterranean youth. Chris called Klang's second act a snapshot of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Excerpts 9 and 10: The end of Klang. The final song features distant bells. Indeed, Chris said that throughout the opera Schreker used the motif of a distant sound or music, a metaphor for something Fritz, and the rest of us, can never quite reach. Chris said Klang encapsulates musical philosophy: The centrality of sound, beguiling yet fragile. And as he said above, the fragility in the music was born out of Schreker's poverty-stricken childhood and watching his sister literally starve to death.
Second lecture - Enigmas of the Soul: Intro to Die Gezeichneten
After lunch, Chris came back to the stage to give us a more Gezeichneten-focused lecture. He started out by telling us that Franz Schreker's real name was Franz Schrecker. Now you may not think "ck" is so different from just "k," but that only means you don't know German. I studied the language for seven years, so I can see that Schrecker comes awfully close to the adjective schrecklich, which means awful, appalling, dreadful, etc. In 1900, when he was twenty-two and pretty serious about making it as a musician, Schreker dropped the "c" in the vain hope that people wouldn't think he and his music were schrecklich. At first it didn't work, even with the long "A" sound his surname took on due to losing the "c." As I said up in the first lecture, it wasn't until his thirties when he made the big time and his surname's spelling no longer mattered.
Excerpt 1: Speaking of Schreker's big break, Chris played a rendition of the 1908 pantomime Birthday of the Infanta. This particular excerpt is from the scene where the hideous dwarf protagonist spots his reflection. I mentioned in the first lecture that Schreker's pal Alexander Zemlinsky wrote his opera Der Zwerg based on Infanta, but what I didn't mention was that Zemlinsky actually hired Schreker to write the libretto for Der Zwerg. While writing it, Schreker became so attached to the story that he wanted to compose the score as well. Zemlinsky wouldn't budge on that point. Schreker relented. He knew Zemlinsky's backstory, how he'd had his heart trampled upon by Alma Mahler.
Now here's another thing I left out in the first lecture (actually, Chris left it out on purpose): Schreker himself also had an affair with Alma. What can I say? Gal got around. When Chris told us this during the second lecture, he showed us a full-body shot of Schreker, and someone from the audience pointed out the resemblance between Schreker and Mahler. I reckon Alma had a certain type she was attracted to.
Chris started talking about Die Gezeichneten's plot. You've got three main characters: The good but ugly Alviano, the hot Carlotta, and the dashing asshole Count Tamare. While these three characters are very different from one another, they're all marked by fate. The story is set in 16th century Genoa, but as Chris pointed out, it could just as well have been set in fin de siècle Vienna, when Schreker wrote it. Alviano builds an island called Ilyseum, which Chris compared to Catalina Island because of a brochure he still had in his pocket from the hotel he was staying at. Alviano builds the paradise island himself but won't live there because he doesn't want to ruin the tropical beauty with his hideousness.
Excerpt 2: Excerpt from the overture to Die Gezeichneten . It's a long cello-clarinet-bass line, which Chris said sonically captures Alviano's state of mind, his longing.
Excerpts 3 and 4: More from the overture. Excerpt 3 is Tamare's part, "No Problem Tamare," as Chris described him. This part of the overture is big and brassy, kind of like his character. Tamare considers himself, like James Cameron, king of the world. And then the next excerpt was another part of the overture that represents Carlotta. It's slower, more mysterious.
Die Gezeichneten was produced over two dozen times between its April 1918 premiere and 1932, when Schreker's work was outlawed. To many people, especially the extreme right-wing assholes, Die Gezeichneten contained sexual amoral connotations. Some even considered the opera itself a sexual crime. Chris called it a metaphor for Germany's last World War I gasp. Yes, the opera established Schreker's reputation, but when viewed in the main, his rep was established on the wrong track. Schreker was a moralist who wanted to use Die Gezeichneten as a way to force people to take a good, long, hard look in the mirror and reckon with all the flaws they saw. Those who thought Schreker relished the sexual details completely misunderstood him. Schreker was holding up a mirror to Weimar Germany, and Weimar Germany didn't get it.
Excerpt 5: Carlotta sings about her painting. "I paint souls."
Excerpt 6: End of act I. Carlotta wants to paint Alviano as she sees him. She's been watching him from her atlier as he takes his morning walks. He's obviously reluctant, but she seduces him into agreeing.
Excerpt 7: Act II, the painting scene. Chris mentioned having seen American soprano Evelyn Lear perform this role. Evelyn, whose still alive today, in fact she just turned eighty-five, was a very famous opera singer back in the fifties and sixties. Opera singers, like pro athletes, are often deemed long in the tooth sooner than most people are given that label, but she had staying power. In fact, she didn't really hit her prime until her forties. The year she turned forty she scored a Grammy for Best Opera Recording for singing the role of Maria in Wozzek.
All of act three takes place on the island Ilyseum. Here's where Schreker pulls out all the musical stops. "Gesamtkunstwerk on steroids" was how Chris put it. The whole act is one huge crescendo. Not only do you have all the characters (and in opera, each character is usually represented by a different musical motif, so you can imagine the clashing notes here), you also have what in movie terms would be called cuts. Act three's got a bunch of scenes, in other words, and so you've got the spotlight flitting from one cluster of action to the next, the way you'd cut from scene to scene in a movie or TV show. And as is typical in movies, the closer the plot builds to the climax, the quicker the cuts. Such is the case here. Suffice it to say that Schreker's libretto for Die Gezeichneten makes life very complicated for stage directors. Schreker made act three cinematic before that word meant anything. He "prefigured cinema" was the way Chris put it.
Excerpt 8: Act three overture. We get a sonic bird's eye view of the island.
Excerpts 9 and 10: More act three music - Carlotta and chorus. Lots of buildup here. "Crescendo galore," Chris said.
Excerpt 11: This was funny. Right away the music reminded me of Star Wars, that one piece of music John Williams always used when the storm troopers show up. Only here, this is the music that plays when Genoa's Council of Eight shows up on the island. The Council of Eight was real, by the way, and Genoa's not the only Republic to have had one. They were basically an oligarchy of wealthy (and therefore influential) merchant families who collectively ran the show. When they show up here, they're not necessarily against the idea of having orgies on the island, they just want to be sure word of this place doesn't get out. After the excerpt, Chris asked us if we could hear the Star Wars influence. He's pretty sure John Williams drew from that for the storm trooper motif. In fact, Chris said John Williams borrows from Schreker all the time.
That was the last excerpt Chris played. After this, he showed us stills from various productions of Die Gezeichneten over the decades, illustrating the different ways it's been staged and how each stage director brings his/her own vision to the project. It's always neat to see stuff like this. I got a really good taste of stage director interpretation last year during all the Ring Cycle stuff. I'll bet you the Ring operas, more than any others, have experienced the widest variety of interpretations.
Anyway, this was pretty interesting too. The first still was from a sort of Frankenstein-esque interpretation. Another showed the characters in white collar business suit attire. Yet another one showed Alviano as a cross dresser. The fourth had Alviano as a naked bald guy. Chris told us that was from a Stuttgart production touring in Amsterdam. He also mentioned a Salzburg production of Die Gezeichneten that had pedophilia taking place on Ilyseum. Yikes. The current LA Opera production is directed by Ian Judge. Chris gave us a heads up that Ian has Carlotta get gang-raped in act three. Wow, really? This is LA Opera, right? Chris disagrees with that interpretation, but he does respect Ian enough that if he were Ian's boss, he wouldn't make him change it.
At this point Chris opened it up to questions from the audience. One person asked what happened to Schreker's students after he died. Chris said about half stayed, the other half were exiled for being Jewish. Some of the exiles landed in Hollywood and found success as soundtrack composers. That's not surprising at all. As a movie buff, I can safely say, after hearing these excerpts, that Schreker's music definitely lends itself to film. But Chris also pointed out that his students were not just facsimiles of Schreker. They didn't just emulate the master, they experimented and innovated and branched out into all manner of musical styles and genres, not to speak of career paths. One of the students who stayed in Germany ended up composing the soundtracks to all of Leni Riefenstahl's stuff. Obviously that must've been one of Schreker's non-Jewish students.
Someone else in the audience asked why Schreker himself never made the move to Hollywood. Surely he'd've found success there. Chris said that he very nearly did. Indeed, it was looking like a sure thing in 1931. The Los Angeles Times even had an article about it. Schreker was plenty famous enough at that point that any major career move, or thoughts thereof, would generate international buzz. The article talked about how the L.A. city leaders were going to have a formal ceremony welcoming Schreker. The whole thing fell through, though, because of money. Remember, this was 1931. The Great Depression was just warming up. After this, it was thought Schreker would move to Chicago, but that didn't pan out either for the same reasons.
Another audience question had to do with the sets from the 1920s production stills Chris had projected earlier. Considering how Germany suffered hyperinflation at that time (e.g. wheelbarrows of marks for a loaf of bread), how were they able to afford such elaborate set pieces? Chris pointed out that the hyperinflation only lasted until 1923. From '24 until the crash of '29, the economy was relatively normal. Plus, it wasn't such a big deal back then for opera companies to have money. It's not like today, where opera companies are constantly dialing up the donor solicitations. I can't tell you how much stuff I get in the mail from LA Opera asking me to support them. I mean, I go to just about every opera they put on, and yet that's not enough. Why don't I a make a gift? A one-time donation that would make me an Angel or whatever? You get the idea. If I had the money, I might, but buying tickets is the best I can do at the moment. I hope I don't sound like I'm griping. I understand where they're coming from. Putting on an opera is expensive. Advertising in the L.A. Times is exorbitant. I'm sure they're constantly trying to break even. But back in the twenties, opera companies weren't so desperate. Their budgets always allowed for great sets because people went to the opera all the time as a matter of course, the way they go to the movies today. Back then, every city and town had a resident opera company. That said, Chris pointed out that the sets weren't always grand as the photos implied. In fact, the world premiere of Die Gezeichneten in April 1918 had a low budget and minimal set pieces. Of course, World War I was still raging. Germany's coffers were depleted, and most opera and theater companies were dark. Budgets were tight all around.
And that about does it for the Opera League seminar on Die Gezeichneten. I really love these seminars. Not only do I learn a ton about operas and the people who compose them, but my appetite for the opera in question becomes whetted. I'm very curious about this piece.
