Opera After Stunde Null by Emily Richmond Pollock a Dissertation
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Opera after Stunde Null by Emily Richmond Pollock A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Music in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in Charge: Professor Mary Ann Smart, Chair Professor Richard Taruskin Professor Martin Jay Fall 2012 © 2012 Emily Richmond Pollock All Rights Reserved 1 Abstract Opera after Stunde Null by Emily Richmond Pollock Doctor of Philosophy in Music University of California, Berkeley Professor Mary Ann Smart, Chair This dissertation discusses the musical, dramatic, and political implications of postwar German opera through the examination of four case studies: Boris Blacher’s Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1 (1953), Hans Werner Henze’s König Hirsch (1956), Carl Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten (1965). Both the composers’ musical decisions and the finished works’ critical and musicological reception demonstrate just how urgently the genre of opera was thought to be in crisis. Enabled by the myth of the “Stunde Null” or Zero Hour, many avant-garde composers shunned opera as artistically bankrupt and conservative, preferring instead genres that were less closely tied to the musical past. Opera’s coherence as a genre depended upon the maintenance and renewal of dramatic and musical conventions from eras both immediate and distant – a dependence that became politicized as the boundaries of “new music” were policed. Composers of new operas in this era were forced to attempt creative and productive solutions to the problem of how to write an opera in a milieu skeptical of opera’s potential for innovation. The reception of these operas reflects these concerns, as critics and musicologists alike sought to make sense of the pieces within the context defined aesthetically by operatic tradition and politically by the Stunde Null. If opera was a problem in general for post-war composers in Germany, each of the four operas in this dissertation represents one set of solutions. By referring to a varied dramatic and musical heritage, these composers looked for artistic touchstones that would allow them to position themselves in meaningful artistic lineages, whether Italian bel canto , Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk , Greek tragedy, or abstract theater. In Boris Blacher’s Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1 , the authors’ efforts to foil operaticism with nonsense opened the door for audiences to project their deepest fears onto the piece. The songs and arias in Henze’s König Hirsch , which Henze revised and crafted to be as lyrical and transparent as possible, made the opera a target of harsh criticism because it was too “conventional.” By contrast, Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann was met with both praise and confusion, for despite its striking effects, the piece’s extreme asceticism proved incompatible with the expectations of 2 an opera audience. Meanwhile, the ambition and message of Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten earned it accolades, but the smaller, more intimate opera that lurks behind the noisy surface contradicts the received idea that Zimmermann conquered the tradition of operatic expressiveness. The relationship of these operas’ musico-dramatic orientations to tradition is therefore indicative of their positions relative to the ideology of the post-war blank slate. Inasmuch as the aesthetics prized after Stunde Null were largely defined by a negation of tradition through the privileging of the radically new, the supposed conservatism of opera led many to declare it dead. But by approaching tradition more constructively, we can better understand the position of opera during this fraught era. i TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................... ii Dedication ............................................................................................................................... iv Chapter One: Introduction: Opera after Germany’s Zero Hour German Opera of the Present Day ..................................................................................... 1 The Problem of the Zero Hour ............................................................................................ 6 The Problem of Opera: Four Case Studies ........................................................................ 10 Chapter Two: The Significance of Nonsense: Boris Blacher’s Abstrakte Oper Nr. 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 16 Opera, Genre, and Linguistic Abstraction ......................................................................... 17 Making Music from Nonsense .......................................................................................... 25 Hearing Controversy and Politics in Abstraction .............................................................. 36 Chapter Three: Italy, Atonally: Hans Werner Henze’s König Hirsch Introduction: The Bondage of Convention ....................................................................... 45 Henze’s Bel Canto Opera .................................................................................................. 47 Manuscript Studies and the Transformation from Sketch to Song .................................. 52 Song, Sprachlichkeit, and the Delineation of Musical Register ......................................... 62 Melody, the “Renegade’s Hara-kiri” ................................................................................. 74 Chapter Four: The Opera Underneath: Carl Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann Introduction: Archaeology, Access, and Contemporary Orff Scholarship ......................... 79 An Opera without Music ................................................................................................... 84 Origin Stories I: Ancient Greece and the Opera ................................................................ 90 Origin Stories II: Ancient Greece in Germany ................................................................... 94 Traces of the Opera Underneath ...................................................................................... 98 Chapter Five: Imperfect Pluralities: Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten Introduction ................................................................................................................... 114 From Lenz to Literaturoper ............................................................................................. 118 Structure and Pluralism .................................................................................................. 124 Pre-compositional Sources and the Question of Serialist Intentionality ......................... 130 Characterizing Chaos ...................................................................................................... 135 The War at the Beginning ............................................................................................... 142 The Funeral Orator of Modern Opera ............................................................................. 145 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 148 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to the support of the DAAD and the Paul Sacher Stiftung, I was able to conduct research in Germany and Switzerland during the academic year 2010-11. The Akademie der Künste in Berlin, the Paul Sacher Stiftung in Basel, the Carl Orff Zentrum in Munich, and the publishers Schott (Mainz), Bärenreiter (Kassel), and Boosey and Hawkes (Berlin) generously granted me access to primary source materials. Particularly helpful were Ulrich Mosch and Tina Kilvio Tüscher at the Sacher Stiftung, Werner Grünzweig at the Akademie der Künste, and Thomas Rösch and Annette Lowack at the Orff Zentrum. I am immensely grateful to the members of my dissertation committee, who have been thoughtful and engaged readers and whose criticism has helped me to write more clearly and with more conviction. Martin Jay contributed his invaluable perspective as a scholar with a deep knowledge of German intellectual history. Richard Taruskin has supported me with his unique combination of skepticism and affection. Finally, as my principal advisor and mentor, Mary Ann Smart has pushed me to think and write more carefully, and has done more to shape my approach to opera and my ideal of what good musicology looks like than has any other scholar or teacher. To a great extent, my musicological worldview stems directly from the stimulating conversations with my wonderful compatriots at UC Berkeley. My yearmates Leon Chisholm, Laura Protano-Biggs, and Rachel Vandagriff have been particularly stalwart sources of help and inspiration. I fondly remember intense and enlightening seminars with my dear friends Emily Frey, Ulrike Petersen, Sean Curran, Jonathan Rhodes Lee, Anicia Timberlake, and Tiffany Ng. Of my “older siblings” at Berkeley, Lisa Jakelski, Rebekah Ahrendt, Bill Quillen, Noel Verzosa, and Adeline Mueller were especially encouraging and welcoming. I admire all of them both for the quality of their scholarship and for their genuine kindness. I would also like to thank three teachers who were exceptionally influential on my thinking about music before I got to Berkeley: Forrest Pierce, who as my composition teacher opened my ears to twentieth-century music, Jesse Rodin, who introduced me to musicology as an impressionable sophomore, and Anne Shreffler, who advised