Love and War: The Sound World of Othmar Schoeck’s Penthesilea Tegan Ridge Over the past two millennia, the Amazonian Queen, Penthesilea, has been a frequent source of inspiration to writers, composers, and painters, who have focused on depicting the supposed contrast between her ‘gentle’ gender and battle prowess. My research investigates one such instance: Othmar Schoeck’s 1927 music drama, Penthesilea, a setting of Heinrich von

Kleist’s 1808 play of the same name, in which the love-mad Queen relentlessly pursues the object of her desire, the demigod Achilles. Schoeck, largely known for his Romantic compositional style, dabbled with modernist techniques in Penthesilea, which has complicated attempts at analysing the opera.1 Literary scholar Amy Emm, however, maintains that it is precisely the juxtaposition of the Romantic and the modern that creates the musical and dramatic tension necessary to define the opera’s narrative arc.2 My paper, building on Emm’s argument, provides a much-needed close analysis of these two styles; I suggest that Schoeck connects

Romanticism to the aforementioned perceptions of Penthesilea’s gender and modernist techniques to her aptitude for war.

My work on Schoeck’s Penthesilea began in GER425 – Romanticism, where I investigated Schoeck’s depiction of gender, a simplistic battle of the sexes when compared to

Kleist’s play, through a brief case study of the opera’s opening gesture. As this essay was grounded in literary criticism, I limited myself to but one musicological source, Hans-Joachim

Hinrichsen’s “Das ‘Wesentliche des Kleist'schen Dramas’? Zur musikdramatischen Konzeption

1 Chris Walton, Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 132-133. 2 Amy Emm, “ ’Jetzt trösten, jetzt verletzen seine Klänge‘: Kleist’s Agonism in Music,” in Heinrich von Kleist: Style and Concept: Explorations of Literary Dissonance, eds. Dieter Sevin and Christoph Zeller (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), 313-324. Tegan Ridge Patricia and Peter Shannon Wilson Undergraduate Research Prize von Othmar Schoecks Operneinakter ‘Penthesilea’”.3 I felt that Schoeck’s Penthesilea warranted deeper analytical discussion, and I thus approached Dr. Daphne Tan, Assistant Professor of

Music Theory, about continuing research as a semester-long independent study for TMU499.

In TMU499, I employed a variety of library services, such as interlibrary loan, to obtain sources in multiple formats, including hard-copy essays, books, and musical scores, from several

University of Toronto Libraries. To accomplish this, I used keyword searches in academic databases, such as the University’s Library Catalogue, JSTOR, and WorldCat, and requested that promising materials be sent to the library at UTSC via RACER. In addition to checking out physical items from libraries, I accessed media from streaming services, borrowed eBooks, and obtained electronic content held in archives outside of the University’s library system.

I conducted my research in both German and English, translating keyword searches and exploring synonyms alongside related terms, for example “Analyse/Analysis” and

“Musikwissenschaft” as well as “Gender/Geschlecht” and “Gender

Studies/Genderstudies/Geschlechterforschung”. I further narrowed the results by applying search filters such as ‘scholarly journals’, which allowed me to focus on secondary literature that had been published in peer-reviewed journals. Beyond this, I paid attention to how frequently certain scholars were cited, if the publications had been reviewed elsewhere, and how often these individuals contributed to scholarship on Schoeck, as regular contribution indicates a high degree of specialization.

3 Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen, “Das ‚Wesentliche des Kleist'schen Dramas‘? Zur musikdramatischen Konzeption von Othmar Schoecks Operneinakter ‚Penthesilea‘, “ in Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 59. Jahrg., H. 4. (Franz Steiner Verlag, 2002), 267-297, https://www.jstor.org/stable/930940

2

Tegan Ridge Patricia and Peter Shannon Wilson Undergraduate Research Prize To begin my research on Penthesilea, I focused my efforts on becoming familiar with the opera’s sound world. I visited the Music Library where I obtained the piano reduction for

Schoeck’s work; I later scanned it at Kelly Library. To accompany the now-digitized score, I sought audiovisual materials on mainstream media channels such as Google, uncovering trailers for stagings of the work by the Landestheater Linz and the Oper Bonn.4 In addition, I found two full audio recordings of the opera on Naxos, the classical music streaming service available through the University; one was taken from a performance in 1957, conducted by Ferdinand

Leitner, the other was recorded in 1999 under Mario Venzago.5 I listened to both versions and read the accompanying digitized liner notes on Naxos, which unfortunately contained little information aside from the performer’s names and advertisements for other CDs released by the publisher. The recording of the 1957 performance contained unusual sonic artefacts; consequently, I opted to work with the 1999 recording due to its unmarred audio quality.

After developing a ‘feel’ for the sound world of Penthesilea and a stronger understanding of its overall structure, I oriented my efforts toward finding extant scholarship on Schoeck’s opera. Since the aforementioned liner note investigation was not enlightening, I returned to

Hinrichsen’s article and pursued the scholars most frequently cited, namely musicologist Richard

Eidenbenz and biographer Chris Walton. I located physical copies of both Eidenbenz’ 1929 analysis of Penthesilea as well as Walton’s 2009 book on Schoeck’s life and works at

4 Landestheater Linz, “Penthesilea,” performance trailer uploaded 12 May 2019, YouTube video, 01:26, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInXHxYWFr4; Oper Bonn [Christian Miedl], “Schoeck: Penthesilea,” performance trailer uploaded by Miedl Music on 31 Jan 2018, YouTube video, 01:57, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBsAo8u5QgQ 5 Othmar Schoeck, Penthesilea, Basel Symphony Orchestra and Czech Philharmonic Choir. Mario Venzago. With Yvonne Naef, Renate Behle, James Johnson, et al. Recorded August 1999. Musique Suisses, 2005. 01:35:06. https://utoronto-nml3-naxosmusiclibrary-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/catalogue/item.asp?cid=MGB-6232; Othmar Schoeck, Penthesilea, Stuttgart State Orchestra and Stuttgart State Opera. Ferdinand Leitner. With Martha Mödl, Res Fischer, Stefan Schwer, et al. Recorded 1957. Walhall Eternitz Series, 2008. 01:17:22. https://utoronto- nml3-naxosmusiclibrary-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/catalogue/item.asp?cid=WLCD0225. 3

Tegan Ridge Patricia and Peter Shannon Wilson Undergraduate Research Prize Downsview; I requested that they be delivered via interlibrary loan to the UofT at Scarborough

Library, closer to my home. Other articles I obtained electronically via JSTOR and the Library

Catalogue. Curiously, despite the wealth of electronic media available to me, the old-fashioned approach proved most fruitful. While shelf reading in the German literature section (PN) at

Robarts Library, I found an essay by German Studies scholar Amy Emm tucked in a book not on

Schoeck, but on Kleist. Emm’s argument ultimately became integral to my final paper.

I did, however, reach an impasse. Try as I might, I was unable to locate a video recording of the entirety of the opera. None of the databases mentioned contained listings for video materials, but due to the existence of the aforementioned trailers, it was clear that performances had been filmed. I e-mailed Dr. Timothy Neufeldt at the Music Library requesting his help in finding the seemingly ephemeral recordings. Dr. Neufeldt located an archive in Germany maintained by the Dresden Semperoper, who staged Penthesilea in 2008, and suggested that I contact them about obtaining a recording of their performance. The archivist in Dresden informed me that while a video does exist, due to copyright law, it was only viewable at their archive. As a substitute, they scanned and provided me with a copy of the program, which was embedded with photographs taken from their performance. Humorously, their program contains an excerpt from Hinrichsen—my research inadvertently came full circle, beginning and ending with the same article.6

6 Hans Joachim-Hinrichsen, cited in the program for the Landestheater Linz‘ performance run of Othmar Schoeck’s Penthesilea (Dresden: 2008), 32-33; Hinrichsen, “Das Wesentliche,” 276, 269, 283. 4