ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Recorded April 22-24, 2015 at Clarke Recital Hall, University of Miami, Coral Gables, Florida Director of Recording Services/Engineer: Paul Griffith Producer: Thomas Sleeper This recording underwritten by the Paul Underwood Charitable Trust. The Death of Webern was commissioned in 2011 by The Pocket Opera Players and premiered on October 10, 2013 at Symphony Space, New York. Thanks to The Philosophical Library for permission to use source material from THE DEATH OF WEBERN Hans Moldenhauer’s book The Death of Anton Webern: a Drama in Documents. AN OPERA IN ONE ACT MUSIC BY MICHAEL DELLAIRA LIBRETTO BY J. D. MCCLATCHY The score is dedicated to Brenda Wineapple, and is available from American Composers Alliance (BMI), www.composers.com. WWW.ALBANYRECORDS.COM TROY1613 ALBANY RECORDS U.S. 915 BROADWAY, ALBANY, NY 12207 TEL: 518.436.8814 FAX: 518.436.0643 ALBANY RECORDS U.K. BOX 137, KENDAL, CUMBRIA LA8 0XD TEL: 01539 824008 Cast & Chamber Orchestra from the © 2016 ALBANY RECORDS MADE IN THE USA DDD WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL. Frost School of Music, University of Miami Alan Johnson, CONDUCTOR THE DEATH OF WEBERN In the final days of World War II, when the air raids over Vienna became a daily, deadly THE DEATH OF WEBERN occurrence, Anton Webern and his wife, Wilhelmine, fled the city with the aim of reaching AN OPERA IN ONE ACT the village of Mittersill, more than two hundred miles away. The journey was harrowing— MUSIC BY MICHAEL DELLAIRA LIBRETTO BY J. D. MCCLATCHY nearly twenty miles of it conducted on foot, with heavy rucksacks on their backs. Yet a few days later, they arrived safely in the sleepy Alpine village, where they saw out the end of the war. After a difficult summer, Webern longed to return to Vienna. Although he Cast & Chamber Orchestra from the had not written a note since the death of his son in battle earlier that year, he was hopeful Frost School of Music, University of Miami of reinvigorating his career, now that the Nazis—who had deemed him a degenerate Alan Johnson, CONDUCTOR composer—had been defeated. All his plans, however, came to nothing. On the night of September 15, 1945, Anton Webern was killed, shot three times in the stomach by an American soldier. CAST (in order of appearance) CHAMBER ORCHESTRA For many years, the circumstances surrounding the bizarre incident remained a Hans Moldenhauer Kevin Short Flute/Piccolo Trudy Kane mystery. It was known that the Weberns had gone to the village that night to have dinner Military Officer Eric J. McConnell Clarinet/Bass Clarinet Margaret Donaghue Raymond Bell Chris O’Connor Violin Scott Flavin at the home of their daughter Christine and her husband, Benno Mattel. Afterward, the Anton Webern Tony Boutté Violoncello Ross Harbaugh quiet, unassuming Webern went outside to smoke a cigar and was confronted by the Paul Amadeus Pisk Eric J. McConnell Percussion Peter White soldier. Three shots were fired in the dark of night, thus ending the life of one of the State Department Clerk Zaray Rodriguez Piano/Organ Anastasia Naplekova greatest composers of the 20th century at the age of sixty-one. Archivist 1 Mia Rojas Music Director/Conductor Alan Johnson Not until the musicologist Hans Moldenhauer launched an inquiry fifteen years Archivist 2 Ana Collado Cdr. George F. Lord Adam Paul Cahill later would some semblance of the truth become known. It is his obsession that drives The Jenkins Mario Almonte Death of Webern, the second collaboration between Michael Dellaira and the librettist J. D. Heiman Jeffrey Williams McClatchy. The mood is set from the onset, with a brooding woodwind line punctuated Helen Bell Maria Fenty Denison by the sharp report of the snare drum, as Moldenhauer sits alone onstage, wondering why Murray Carl DuPont Amalie Waller Esther Jane Hardenbergh this responsibility has fallen to him, why nobody else had taken an interest in Webern’s death before. In times of war, of course—and its aftermath—confusion reigns, papers are misplaced, and the death of a single man, even one as important as Anton Webern, can be forgotten. Not surprisingly, when Moldenhauer writes to the U.S. Secretaries of State and quest becomes something more than a search for facts in a pile of dusty documents. Upon Defense, inquiring about any documentation relating to Webern’s stay in Mittersill, he gets learning that Raymond Bell is no longer alive, Moldenhauer visits Bell’s widow at her home nowhere. He tries an archivist at the War Records Division. Again, no luck. The deeper in North Carolina. She recounts for him the facts of her late husband’s life, that he was a he wades into bureaucratic channels, the more determined he becomes. Indeed, much of well-liked man who died an alcoholic—and that when he drank, he would admit to having the libretto consists of fragments from statements, correspondence, sworn affidavits—the killed a man. “It wasn’t like he was saying it to me,” she remembers. “Or even to himself. lifeless language of official documents transformed into art, not only by McClatchy’s poetic It sounded like he was talking to some ghost in the room.” Amalie Waller, Webern’s sensibilities but also by Dellaira’s judicious use of melody, harmony, and rhythm. Note, eldest daughter, relates a tale just as sorrowful, singing plangently of the desperation she for example, how a driving ostinato in the bass line can help emphasize the doggedness of felt on the morning of September 16, when she found her father’s corpse on the floor of Moldenhauer’s pursuit. the Annakirche chapel, his eyes still open, a look of terror frozen in his dead stare. What Eventually, he learns that the 42nd Infantry of the U.S. Army had been present in justice had there been, Amalie wonders, in the senseless killing of “a man who was himself Mittersill at the time. Tracking down a soldier named Martin Heiman, Moldenhauer a victim of the Nazis, a man who had so much more beauty to give the world?” discovers that Webern’s son-in-law Benno Mattel had been engaging in black market Webern’s brief, luminous compositions altered the course of 20th-century music. activities, and that a sting operation had been set up for September 15. For Webern, it was Dellaira’s score contains some wonderful moments of homage, for example in the early a case of wretched timing. After dinner on that fateful night, he and his wife, along with scene in which Moldenhauer recalls visiting Mittersill for the first time, seeing Webern’s Christine and the three young Mattel children, retired to another room. This is when a grave and the house where the shooting took place, gazing upon the bullet holes still soldier named Andrew Murray and an Army cook named Raymond Bell arrived to arrest visible on the façade. Here, as if to underscore the sense of nostalgia and longing, Dellaira Mattel. At some point, Webern went outside to smoke. Bell didn’t know there were others quotes from Webern’s early Passacaglia, Op. 1—his first mature work and one of the last in the house, and when he heard footsteps, he went outside to investigate. What happened he wrote before breaking with tonality. There are also moments when Dellaira’s writing next can never be known, but soon thereafter, Webern staggered inside and died. Though approaches a Webern-like aesthetic: the economy of scoring and expression, the extreme Bell would later claim that Webern had provoked him, it would seem unlikely that dynamic contrasts from note to note and measure to measure, the distillation of a musical Webern—5 foot, 3 inches and just 110 pounds after a summer of serious illness—could idea to its constituent elements. There is even, in the sixth scene—in which Webern have posed a physical threat. lectures on the nature of musical law and the evolution of twelve-tone music—a lovely use None of this is dramatized in The Death of Webern. We learn the details from the of klangfarbenmelodie, the division of a line among several instruments, each taking up a retrospective testimony of Heiman, Murray, and others. (There is a marvelous canon in the melodic fragment in turn, thereby imbuing the line with different sonorities and textures. scene in which Moldenhauer and Heiman meet, each circling around the other—circling Schoenberg had coined the term, but it was Webern who used the technique to such around a truth that proves ever elusive.) This is the point in the opera when Moldenhauer’s marvelous effect time and time again. Dellaira, however, is not beholden to a single style—he veers seamlessly from LIBRETTO and the forces of evil . that man is killed by dodecaphony to lyrical tonality, from severity to wistfulness and nostalgia, from a passage those he looked on as his saviors. of lovely Bach-like polyphony to lines reminiscent of 20th-century minimalism. Ultimately, Scene 1 of course, this isn’t so much Webern’s story as it is Moldenhauer’s. And at the end, A stage empty of anything but a long wooden Why? the scholar finds himself alone in his study once more, knowing so little still. Why did table. At one end sits HANS MOLDENHAUER, What am I doing here? Raymond Bell shoot Anton Webern on the night of September 15, 1945? What precisely a man in his mid-fifties. He is a musicologist teaching at the conservatory he founded in What am I looking for? happened? In this final soliloquy, Moldenhauer bemoans the lies, the half-truths, the Spokane, Washington, after having fled from What can I prove or change? impossibility of knowing when “no one wants to remember.” Given the lingering air of Germany in 1938.