Amy Emm

The Legacy of Kleist’s Language in Music: Schoeck, Wolf, Bachmann, and Henze

Although Kleist’s oeuvre has inspired many musical works, few have made a lasting contribution to the repertoire. This essay examines the extent to which Kleist’s celebrated language has hindered successful musical adaptation. It sur- veys some better-known Kleist adaptations from orchestral music and opera, in order to explore the role Kleist’s language has played for composers and libret- tists from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-first centuries.

In 2007 Hans Neuenfels directed an acclaimed revival of Othmar Schoeck’s one act opera, Penthesilea (1927),1 based on Heinrich von Kleist’s play of the same name. Culture and music critic Peter Hagmann’s laudatory review summarizes the problems surrounding Kleist’s reception in music:

Penthesilea by Othmar Schoeck does not exactly belong among the pillars of the repertoire, but the one-act opera from 1927 is not entirely unknown. And again and again, the piece came to a curiously armored, unpleasantly loud tone, which left Heinrich von Kleist’s well-formed sentences incomprehensible over long passages and drove the listener to exhaustion. The case is completely and agreeably different in this first-class production from the Theater Basel, which commemorates not only the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, but also attends exemplarily to the 20th century repertoire.2

First, although Kleist has a substantial and diverse legacy in music, it has mostly been forgotten. Kleist’s plays, short stories, anecdotes, poems, epi- grams, and even his letters have inspired a range of musical works, from

1 Othmar Schoeck, Penthesilea (Zürich: Musikhaus Hüni, 1927). 2 “Penthesilea von Othmar Schoeck gehört zwar nicht gerade zu den Stützen des Reper- toires, aber ganz unbekannt ist der Einakter von 1927 nicht. Und immer wieder kam das Stück zu einem eigenartig gepanzerten, unangenehm lauten Klang, der die wohl- geformten Sätze Heinrich von Kleists über weite Strecken unverständlich bleiben liess und den Zuhörer in die Erschöpfung trieb. Das ist in dieser erstklassigen Auf- führung durch das Theater Basel — das damit nicht nur an den fünfzigsten Todestag des Komponisten erinnert, sondern auch beispielhaft das Repertoire des 20. Jahr- hunderts pflegt — ganz und wohltuend anders.” Peter Hagmann, “Wenn Küsse Bisse werden: Hans Neuenfels inszeniert Penthesilea von Othmar Schoeck im Theater Basel,” in NZZ Online, Neue Zürcher Zeitung AG, 5 Nov. 2007: . Retrieved on 30 October 2011. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 60 Amy Emm incidental music, overtures, preludes, symphonic poems, and chamber music, to operas, choral works and Lieder.3 Yet few of these works have entered into the repertoire. As with Neuenfels’ production, the revival of twentieth century Kleist compositions tends to be motivated by commem- oration, rather than by pure music appreciation. Second, the concern with preserving Kleist’s language haunts his musical reception. Operatic Kleist adaptations in particular are subject to the critique that when Kleist’s lan- guage is replaced by, or forced to compete with, music, the resulting work only degrades or oversimplifies the original.4 Thus Hagmann goes on to praise the arrangement and re-orchestration of Schoeck’s score by conduc- tor Mario Venzago and dramaturg Hartmut Becker because it rendered more of Kleist’s language audible. Hagmann’s critique suggests that the sec- ond problem derives from the first, namely that efforts to do justice to Kleist’s language produce difficult musical works that are exhausting to lis- ten to. Kleist reception in music thus has a reception problem of its own, parallel to Kleist’s contemporaries’ experience of his language as difficult and alienating.5 While the question of musical qualities is perhaps best left to musicologists, this essay will explore from a literary perspective how musical adaptations attempt to reflect or evade the tensions of Kleist’s language. It will consider examples of Kleist reception in instrumental music and in opera, before concluding with some thoughts on the directions of Kleist’s musical legacy in the twenty-first century.

3 The most recent reliable bibliography of musical works inspired by Kleist remains Klaus Kanzog’s “Heinrich von Kleist und die Musik: Eine Bibliographie,” in Werke Kleists auf dem modernen Musiktheater, ed. by Klaus Kanzog and Hans Joachim Kreutzer (Berlin: Schmidt, 1977), pp. 172–210. Selected updates may be found in Kai Köhler’s handbook entry “Musiktheater,” in Kleist-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. by Ingo Breuer (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009), pp. 456–458. Irene Krieger’s overview serves as a starting point for further research: Die Bedeutung der Musik für Heinrich von Kleist und die Vertonungen seiner Werke (Freiburg: Centaurus Verlag, 2010). 4 The problem of meaningful musical adaptation is not limited to Kleist’s works, as twentieth-century debates over the quality of Literaturoper attest. See Carl Dahlhaus, Vom Musikdrama zur Literaturoper: Aufsätze zur neueren Operngeschichte (München: Katz- bichler, 1989). 5 Kleist’s language in performance provoked a variety of reactions from his contem- poraries: for instance, a reading of Die Familie Schroffenstein triggered laughter, ac- cording to Heinrich Zschokke, quoted in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. by Helmut Sembdner (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008), vol. 1, p. 919, (Subse- quent citations as “SW” with volume, page, and line numbers), and readings from Penthesilea that introduced pantomimed scenes by Henriette Hendel-Schütz met with incomprehension in the Vossische Zeitung; Penthesilea’s tragic actions “sah man her- nach besser, als man es vorher gehört hatte” (SW 2, p. 1009, n. 862).