Schreker and the End of Opera-Formatted

Franz Schreker and the End of Opera Sherry D. Lee, University of Toronto, Canada Like many others, I first encountered the music of Franz Schreker through Der ferne Klang. I have discussed it at some length elsewhere1, and although there is a great deal more that could be said about it, for now I will focus on just one of its features, one which caught my attention from the beginning and has troubled me ever since : that is, the dire character of Schreker’s dramatic gesture of self-denial within the work. The opera is, of course, an early manifestation of Schreker’s preoccupation with operas about artistry and artist-figures. Here, near the outset of his career, a still-young composer writes an opera about an opera composer, and notably, one who is a failure. Bits and snatches of this character’s doomed opera are heard as part of the larger work in which it is embedded and, apart from their relatively advanced exploitation of the technologies of sound within theatrical space, the main point of their audibility is to create the opportunity for an instance of reflexivity. For some of the sounds of the embedded opera that drift through to us in the audience are unmistakably familiar as those from the opening scenes of the larger opera we have been listening to. And in the end, yes, the fictional composer Fritz dies without having realised a success, but more to the point, Schreker’s own opera closes with the same cadence as did Fritz’s second act, thus throwing us back into the middle of the plot of an operatic fiasco. It is a potent signal that can be deciphered even if we do not know about that other, autobiographical detail, that Schreker had initially planned to title his work not Der ferne Klang, but « Die Harfe », the same title that Fritz’s doomed opera bears. This negative gesture – which is not subtle, not an undercurrent, but is remarkably bald – comes to seem ironic in light of the tremendous 1 See LEE (Sherry), « A Minstrel in a World without Minstrels : Adorno and the Case of Schreker, » Journal of the American Musicological Society 58/3, 2005, p. 637-94. success of Der ferne Klang in 1912 and thereafter. But despite that success Schreker did not relinquish the motif of operatic failure, and it returns at its most blatant at the moment when the composer was, quite suddenly, facing real operatic failures of his own. Of course, Schreker’s penchant for creating artworks about art and artists, especially musicians and composers, is a proclivity that has been discussed time and time again. But one type of musician seems to have interested him in particular, and that was the minstrel. This fascination was manifest from the very beginning of his operatic endeavour : the nearly-forgotten Flammen, his first opera that predated Der ferne Klang but was never staged during the his lifetime, has a medieval setting and features a minstrel who, with the aid of his song and his lute, wins the love of a princess away from her absent husband who is fighting in the crusades. That the results are fatal can probably be guessed, but even so, only one person dies – yes, the princess herself – and there is every indication in the wake of this fatality that the social order has returned to normal and that things will go on as before : the prince shakes off the tragedy, the stage directions tell us, as though it were a bad dream. In Schreker’s last successful opera, Der Schatzgräber, the minstrel and his treasure- seeking lute cause enough disruption at the highest social levels that he is nearly punished by death. But he escapes and in the end the only casualty is, again, a single woman, the woman he loved. Schreker’s first minstrel, then, and also his most popular one, both turn out to be relatively harmless when compared with some of the others that populate his operatic oeuvre. Now, the minstrel is a lower class character. He is suspect, for many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that he wanders. The minstrel is always rootless. Further, his profession as entertainer gains him admission to environs where other members of his class might not typically be permitted, and his music enables him at times to transgress social boundaries, with dramatic and sometimes drastic results. Schreker’s minstrels – who are typically recognizable even when they are not explicitly designated as such – are often troublemakers. There are two of these characters in Das Spielwerk und die Prinzessin : the first one is dying as the opera opens, and we never hear directly from him, but he is the one whose violin playing was the only sound to which the magical Spielwerk would respond. It has been silent ever since his father drove him from home out onto the road, into a wandering existence, as a punishment for his immoral and excessive behaviour with the princess who is seduced by the carillon’s tones. The second is described only as « a wandering fellow » and is never given a name, but he plays a flute and it, too, magically evokes a response from the music box that has been locked in silence for so long. But in both cases the music called forth causes widespread dissolution and ruin for the entire town – in the words of Meister Florian, the carillon’s creator, « it drives to death the living and tears the dead from their rest » – and it turns out that the only way to right all this corruption is through a great conflagration that will destroy the evil musical instrument, a fire in which the princess, too, will burn. Das Spielwerk’s lack of critical success did not dissuade Schreker from exploring a theme with similar resonances nearly a decade later. There is a whole troupe of troublesome minstrel figures in Irrelohe, wherein a band of traveling musicians doubles as a roving team of arsonists. They are joined near the start of the opera by an old violinist who is convinced that the only way to purge the sins committed in the story’s past is through fire, and sure enough, the work ends with Irrelohe castle in flames. Despite its critical failure, Irrelohe’s embers continued to smoulder, and Schreker reignited them for the incendiary conclusion of Der singende Teufel, sending up a whole monastery and its diabolical pipe organ into smoke. The minstrel figure and the disastrous outcome, then, seem to go together : indeed, there is an intriguing intersection in Schreker’s works between such catastrophic elements and the repeated occurrence of artistic failure. Alongside his apparent pyromaniac streak – all those flickering, crackling fires that reduce the mysterious carillon, Alviano’s elysium in Die Gezeichneten, Irrelohe castle and the devilish medieval organ to so many ashes – failure is equally an idée fixe for him. From the early days of heady success with Der ferne Klang all the way through to the late struggles with Christophorus that was ultimately never heard during his lifetime, Schreker staged artistic failure from the very outset and reiterated it with remarkable consistency towards the very end. Further, he repeatedly used the operatic genre as a vehicle in which the very viability of opera itself could be called into question. His musician-figures are defeated and their creations prove all too combustible. Sadly, the bells tolling from the burning tower at the end of Irrelohe sounded an early knell for the death of Schreker’s operatic career as well, making his earlier motifs of failure appear prophetic. But on the other hand, in the wake of Wagner, a concluding conflagration or catastrophe should probably be considered, in fact, an operatic success. Perhaps the distance between Wagner’s masterful singers and Schreker’s unruly minstrels, or that between Brünnhilde and the princess of Das Spielwerk, is also in a sense the distance opera itself traveled – wandered, perhaps – from Wagner’s age to Schreker’s moment when so many things were uncertain, including the modern status and potential future of opera itself. As it happened, the latter part of Schreker’s operatic career coincided with the period of the greatest production of new opera in Austria and Germany in all of the genre’s history. For a few years, German stages saw a quantity of premières that seems astonishing today. At the same time, there was a growing worry and widespread debate about the future of opera in a post-war and post-Wagner age. Especially in the 1920s, the age of Zeitoper when Schreker’s career fortunes turned and his operas began to fail, there was talk everywhere of a crisis of opera. It was a frequent topic in the newspapers – for example, the new music journal Anbruch devoted no fewer than five special issues to the state of modern opera between 1926 and 1930 – but on a certain level it wasn’t news to Schreker, who had been facing the conundrum of « opera after Wagner » since the start of his career, and dealing with it in part by staging artistic and operatic crises and catastrophes, one after another. Schreker and his friend and colleague Arnold Schoenberg were among the many figures whose public statements of their views on the state of the genre of opera and its likely fate appeared in the press in the latter 1920s. When asked in 1926 by the Berliner Tageblatt whether there was an « Opernkrise », Schoenberg’s response was, in a nutshell, « yes », while Schreker’s was, essentially, « no » 2.

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