Die Agyptische Helena
Lajowng
Librettists have a strange habit of disappearing from view as individuals in
their own right. For instance, everyone knows that Lorenzo Da Ponte
collaborated with Mozart of three of the greatest operas ever written–Le
Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and CosÌ fan tutte–but his name survives
primarily as a result of his association with the great composer. Of all the
librettists who should not be subject to such a fate, Hugo von Hofmannsthal is
the first who should come to mind. In German-speaking culture, Hofmannsthal
retains a stature the equivalent of his musical collaborator, Richard Strauss.
Independently of his many well-known works with Strauss, Hofmannsthal was an
Austrian man of letters with outstanding accomplishments in poetry, prose, and
drama. He was a founder of the Salzburg Festival. Even if he had never worked
with Richard Strauss, his writing would be required reading throughout Germany
and Austria.
Therefore, even though we often mistrust (with some reason) the
self-evaluations of authors and composers, the fact that Hofmannsthal believed
the libretto of Die ägyptische Helena to be the best he had produced should
make us take a close look at it. The ambivalent response to this work as an
operatic text is not recent; as James Miller points out in this afternoon’s
program notes, there is some uncertainty about its quality, particularly in
terms of its adaptability to music. But as Bryan Gilliam aptly notes, the
libretto has a rather peculiar genesis. What started out to be an effort at
comedy turned in the course of its development into something quite different,
something penetrating and psychologically resonant. Die ägyptische Helena is
indeed a serous reflection on love, marriage, and forgiveness. Its subject
matter, presented in a deceptively simple mythological vehicle, connects it
within the operatic repertoire to everything from Figaro to Lulu.
Hofmannsthal’s decision to make actions of the original story’s phantom
Helen into those of the "real" Helen changed the potential for comedy and a
farcical dynamic between stage and audience into a more direct opportunity to
go beyond the surface of mere romance into the complexities and contradictions
of love, sexuality, and marriage.
Contrary to popular opinion and instinct, these issues are not universal
categories. True they seem to plague every culture and generation, but they do
so in quite different ways. For the turn-of-the-century generation of Strauss
(1864-1949) and Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), an idealized category of the feminine
from early Romanticism and the Christian conception of marriage were
compromised by the work of two seminal figures whose influence cast a long and
permanent shadow over European thought and culture: Richard Wagner and Sigmund
Freud. Wagner, himself no paragon of marital fidelity, put on stage a narcotic
mixture of music, poetry, and drama that revealed to his middle-class audiences
the inherent tragedy in the tension between the pursuit of true love and the
constraints of everyday life, including human nature. If Kierkegaard understood
the Christian notion of love and marriage to be a terrifying stricture through
which an individual could display true faith in the sense of self-denial and
psychic transformation, Wagner’s work suggested another alternative. The
pursuit of the standard moral and ethical claims of mainstream contemporary
Christian thought–which demanded love of family, hard work, and fidelity from
the civilized European–suddenly appeared to be sacrifices without any
redeeming features whatsoever, let alone salvation. Tristan und Isolde
celebrates not only the tribulations of intense passion, but the idea that its
experience is preferable over the failure to experience it, over death after a
life without it. Wagnerian music and drama created a world of fantasy to which
Europeans, trapped in the drab routines of respectable middle-class life,
flocked. Wagner created an avenue of escape from the mundane into an arena of
the heroic and the ecstatic, a space where each individual might realize the
latent power of his own emotion and imagination. This is in party why Friedrich
Nietzsche, Europe’s most articulate foe of Christianity, initially embraced
Wagner, for he saw the composer as an apostle of an art which could transform
modern Europe and cause it to cast off the shackles of Christian morality and
connect itself once again to the sense of human power and passion celebrated by
the ancient Greeks.
With the writings of Sigmund Freud (especially his Interpretation of Dreams
which found their way into the media of literature, music, and painting), the
traditional Christian denial of the sexual underpinnings of human behavior, the
erotic and the Dionysian, was exposed and discredited in the eyes of the
literature European public. What Max Weber called Entzauberung–the
de-magification, as it were, of Western culture–reached its peak before 1914,
suppressing both superstition and the hold of religion over the lives of
modern, urban, European citizens. In this new context, the conventional claims
and obligations of marriage, from the process of courtship to the raising of
children, seem to collapse form their own obsolescence. Marriage rites,
portrayed by Freud as dependent on the darkest sublimations of the human
psyche, could be viewed as an act of hypocrisy, counteracting the true nature
of humans, and extracting a toll of self-denial and deception that seemed
ultimately destructive. The figure of the Bohemian flourished as bourgeois
fantasy. In today’s parlance, the utopia of "family values" held little
allure and plausibility. Cultural critics at the turn of the century argued
that Europe was in the grip of a degenerate aesthetic, subverting all that
modernity had sought to achieve in terms of civility, science, and societal
progress. Nietzsche and Wagner, the heroes of the young, were seen as the chief
culprits.
This fundamental reassessment of values influenced the making of art in which
an explosive interest in human psychology and sexuality came to play a central
role. Both Hofmannsthal and Strauss were keenly aware of how difficult it was
in their own age to draw upon the traditions of artistic expression founded by
the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century masters–Goethe and
Mozart, for example. Hofmannsthal made his early reputation while still a
teenager as one of the most compelling lyric talents to write in German, but by
the early 1900s he experienced a profound crisis, in which he came to the
conclusion that the concept of language and poetry with which he had begun was
no longer relevant to his own time. Strauss, the son of a great horn player,
grew up with a youthful enthusiasm for the sort of music his father favored. A
precocious young man, he wrote in the conservative traditions we associate with
Brahms, Schumann, and Mendelssohn. Like Hofmannsthal, Strauss too had an
intense personal crisis, linked to an intense love affair with someone of whom
his family did not approve. But personal and artistic transformation were
synonymous events for both artists. In Strauss’s case his discovery of Wagner
led to self-reinvention as a composer. A conservative now turned radical, he
dazzled the world with his series of orchestral tone poems. After two failed
attempts at both comic opera and tragic music drama imitative of Wagner,
Strauss encountered sensational success with his operatic settings of Oscar
Wilde and Hofmannsthal’s modernization of Elektra. These subjects certainly
had special resonance for a public obsessed with sexual psychology and
intricate relationships. By the end of the twentieth century’s first decade,
both Strauss and Hofmannsthal were at the peak of their powers, and began their
long collaboration, of which Die ägyptische Helena is the last fully completed
product.
Yet here is where Strauss’s own story gets intricate. Despite his fascination
with Wagner, Strauss was to his dying day not in accord with the fashions of
the fin de siécle. For one thing, his true lifelong musical god was not Wagner
at all, but Mozart. For another, in apparent contradiction with his Also sprach
Zarathustra, Don Juan, and Salome, Strauss like Brahms was thoroughly
comfortable with the very middle-class lifestyle that was so under siege among
his fellow artists, writers, and thinkers. His greatest passion was
card-playing, and his personality seemed so commonplace that Gustav Mahler,
after hearing Salome, is reputed to have remarked how inconceivable it was that
someone so ordinary and bourgeois, so interested in simple material comforts,
could write such astonishing fresh and brilliant music. Strauss was no
Bohemian; he fashioned his life not only on the model of Brahms but of Haydn:
he considered himself the ultimate, highly disciplined craftsman.
Beneath the veneer of bourgeois ambition, egotism, and simplicity, there was in
Richard Strauss a profound capacity for insight into the very contradictions
and conflicts in values that characterized the modern human being and his
culture. In this sense, Strauss did not indulge in the rebellion of the fin de
siécle. With his marriage to Pauline d’Ahna (whom Strauss immortalized–not
necessarily to her liking–in his autobiographical opera Intermezzo, with a
libretto he wrote himself against Hofmannsthal’s advice), he entered into an
obligation akin to Kierkegaard’s definition. His wife, once a great soprano,
proved over time to be notoriously difficult, petty, and demanding. There is a
famous anecdote associated with the premiere of Die ägyptische Helena, which
recounts how when Strauss was trying to demonstrate a certain passage to the
conductor Fritz Busch, Pauline kept disrupting the rehearsal by meddling
onstage with the singers and their costumes. Strauss finally ceased conducting
and, in the pregnant silence that followed, pronounced with characteristic
irony the final line of Salome: "Kill that woman!" Nevertheless, unlike most of
his contemporaries, Strauss saw in the self-discipline of martial fidelity and
loyalty not the death of creativity, but its source. In the decade following
the premiere of Die ägyptische Helena, Alban Berg set Frank Wedekind’s
character of Lulu to music. Berg was supposedly the beneficiary of an ideal
marriage, but as scholarship has since revealed, he had an intense and
longstanding affair with the sister of Franz Werfel. No research, however, is
likely to uncover any infidelity on Strauss’s part. The very nature of
vacuous bourgeois family served Strauss as an environment in which a human
being might reach his fullest powers of imagination and find the best
possibilities for inspiration. The dialectic between the ordinary and the
extraordinary was for Strauss the dialectic between mundane living and art. One
did not miss the few opportunities to transcend the ordinary through art by
squandering them on an artistic lifestyle. Strauss’s self-imposed discipline
in his own private life created a wide interior expanse from which a profound
recognition of human everyday suffering and desire could flow forth in music.
Hofmannsthal was therefore an ideal partner for Strauss. His command of
language and deep respect for literary classicism was powerfully augmented by
an unusual musical sensibility. In contrast t some observations, it can be said
that few writers of that generation were possessed of as much connection to
musical culture as Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Beginning with Der Rosenkavalier,
their most famous and commercially successful collaboration, the two men wrote
a whole series of operas about love, loyalty, and marriage. But as a result of
these operas, Strauss the composer of Salome and Elektra was accused of
reversing his musical development and becoming a conservative. Despite its
success, Der Rosenkavalier was considered a manifesto against modernism. For
most of the century the rest of Strauss’s output, particularly between the
years 1914-45, were considered competent but not comparable to his earlier
successes. He acquired the reputation of being a gifted composer who had peaked
early and lived too long. Arabella, with a libretto which Hofmannsthal was
never able to revise, became successful only as an echo of Der Rosenkavalier.
Today’s listener, however, should view the standard account and critical
assessment of Strauss’s output with a hefty dose of skepticism. For when
Strauss became the bÍte noir of all advocates of twentieth-century musical
modernism (whether they were disciples of Stravinsky or Schoenberg), he still
remained the only apostle of tonality and the Romantic gesture from whom one
could not withhold respect. He hung around for the first half of the century
like the ghost of Banquo, a painful reminder of a guilty conscience. Yet
Strauss made his own pact with the devil by participating actively with and
allowing himself to be used by the Nazis. While he was certainly not a rabid
ideologue–his greatest motivations were his own venality and comfort, as well
as a desire to take revenge on all his contemporaries who dismissed him–there
is no way to defend his association with the Nazis. Strauss, who could render
human frailty more compellingly than anyone, who rarely camouflaged the
ambivalences and contradictions of human behavior and self-presentation, must
not be rationalized by his biography. This aspect of Strauss’s life is
relevant in part because modernist theorist such as Theodor Adorno have tried
to link Strauss’s allegiance to the musical language he employed in Die
ägyptische Helena with an aesthetic credo which was itself ethically
compromised as a logical partner of fascism and oppression. This ideological
linkage of aesthetic modernism and progressive anti-fascist politics itself
needs to also be treated with skepticism, not so much to defend Strauss but to
explain why composers like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Walter Braunfels, and
Marcel Rubin–victims, émigrés, and in some cases, political
progressives–shared Strauss’s anti-modern stance. Not every musical
modernist was a progressive, and not every adherent to nineteenth-century
musical romanticism was a fascist.
Since Strauss’s death, critical reassessment of his work has progressed much
too slowly. There are some among us who have argued (without great acceptance)
that Strauss’s work from the 1920s to the 1930s, particularly Die ägyptische
Helena, are high points in his artistic career. His choice of musical language
enhances not only the subject matter but Hofmannsthal’s verbal language. The
filigree-like delicacy and complexity of Strauss’s orchestration and
voice-writing always reveal the Mozart in him. No one at this afternoon’s
concert should have any doubt about the premised shared by the artists on stage
today that Die ägyptische Helena is not simply a curiosity or an interesting
if flawed work by a great composer, but rather that it is the kind of
masterpiece that needed a future generation to discover it and assign it to its
proper place in the mutable canon of artistic acceptance.
The fact that the opera has seemed static to some perhaps reveals a reductive
expectation of dramatic action. Strauss always urged conductors of his operas
to take great care when dealing with the massive orchestration not to sacrifice
the clarity of the sung words. As Mozart and particularly Wagner made evident,
music’s greatest moment in combination with text is its capacity to augment
and express inner thoughts that may not correspond to the spoken work, and in
fact may occur in opposition to explicit expression: this is the ongoing
internal dialogue that constituted our complex and ambivalent psychologies. On
the operatic stage, thinking without actions becomes representable in a way
that radically extends the possibilities of conventional theater. In this
sense, a Strauss opera of the 1920s is comparable to reading one of the great
psychological novels of the turn of the century–by Henry James, perhaps–in
which the real events occur as internal perceptions, invisible to the external
spectator but profoundly consequential.
Finally, in his mature years, Strauss achieved a synthesis of seemingly
contradictory styles. His music reflects the same intense ability to transform
and develop material that we so highly value not only in Mozart and Brahms, but
in Wagner and Berg as well. To a 1920s public enraptured by modernism and
aesthetic radicalism and obsessed with the irrational, Strauss offered a
contribution of his own which indicates how much he ultimately ran against the
grain of his times by being keenly aware of it. He abandoned all need to follow
fashion, but sought through the operation and musical traditions he so
cherished to compel his listeners to confront the possibilities and
consequences of heir own autobiographical struggles. He urged them to find
individuality and creativity not in a perpetual sequential search to recover
the excesses of new desire, romance, and fulfillment, but to accept the
challenge that mortality and morality offer us: to love, to marry, to live
productively in a necessarily limited world, and yet still to transform
loneliness, suffering, and disappointment not into resentments but into
occasions for self-recognition, wisdom, and the discovery of otherwise
unimaginable beauty. Hofmannsthal was right: not only does Die ägyptische
Helena possess his finest libretto, but it offers the vehicle for one of
Strauss’s most intensely introspective and alluring artistic statements. In
Die ägyptische Helena, we encounter the genuine modern heir to Mozart: a
composer who enables us, with the help of a great librettist, to experience our
own human frailties and sufferings without dilution, using the archetypes of
musical theater and mythology,. We should emerge from Die ägyptische Helena a
bit more reflective about our own lives for that experience.
Leo Botstein
LaJowng
Lajowng
I find this article to be quite compelling:
Librettists have a strange habit of disappearing from view as individuals in
their own right. For instance, everyone knows that Lorenzo Da Ponte
collaborated with Mozart of three of the greatest operas ever written–Le
Nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and CosÌ fan Tutte–but his name survives
Matthew B. Tepper
of his libretti for Richard Strauss: Hofmannsthal was a brilliant writer
and dramatist. He began his famous collaboration by producing a brilliant,
intense, and focussed drama, the libretto for _Elektra_. He spread his
wings with _Der Rosenkavalier_ and tried to be more daring and experimental
with _Ariadne auf Naxos_. After that, he began to spiral down into
needless complexity and pretentiousness with _Die Frau ohne Schatten_, hit
rock bottom with _Die Aegyptische Helena_, and then managed to recapture
some of the earlier sparkle with _Arabella_.
Just my opinion, of course. At least he didn't hit one note, as it were,
and stick with it for the duration of his career.
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Top 3 worst UK exports: Mad-cow; Hoof-and-mouth; Charlotte Church
Jeffrey Friedman
oy兀earthlink.net (Matthew B. Tepper) wrote:
> After that, he began to spiral down into
>needless complexity and pretentiousness with _Die Frau ohne Schatten_, hit
>rock bottom with _Die Aegyptische Helena_,
I dunno, Matthew, there's something in me that finds in
the Omniscient Seashell an amazing anticipation of
Usenet. You just gotta love an opera with a singing
Conch.
Jeff
Jeffrey F. Friedman
je...@friedman.com
j...@ix.netcom.com
REG
Jeffrey Friedman <j...@ix.netcom.com> wrote in message
news:9bqn6f$hmo$1...@nntp9.atl.mindspring.net...
Lajowng
music than the libretto. I think the story is a strange one, but I like it.
The music is very beautiful.
LaJowng
A Tsar Is Born
"Lajowng" <laj...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20010420150940...@ng-fn1.aol.com...
> I find this article to be quite compelling:
Compelling and amusing yes.
Convincing no.
Have you ever attended a performance of Aegyptische Helena?
You won't find THAT compelling.
The fact is: the second act of this opera is not merely static, it is
dramatically pointless. And the music Strauss wrote for it rose to the
absence of occasion.
Naturally Botstein would say it was a great libretto and a masterpiece only
to be discovered in our time -- these are program notes from the concert
performances he gave of it. (Voigt was a terrific Helena -- the Aithra was
great, too; I've forgotten her name.)
It's a mediocre opera, the very least of their collaborations, the very
worst of Hofmannsthal's librettos. Act I has many charms, the long duet for
the two sopranos brings out (as you'd expect) the best in RS, but if you
leave the theater after "Zweite Brautnacht", Helena's aria that opens Act
II, you won't miss a thing.
Hans Lick
atsar...@hotmail.com
Daniel Kessler
A Tsar Is Born wrote:
> "Lajowng" <laj...@aol.com> wrote in message
> news:20010420150940...@ng-fn1.aol.com...
> > I find this article to be quite compelling:
>
> Compelling and amusing yes.
> Convincing no.
> Have you ever attended a performance of Aegyptische Helena?
> You won't find THAT compelling.
>
> The fact is: the second act of this opera is not merely static, it is
> dramatically pointless. And the music Strauss wrote for it rose to the
> absence of occasion.
>
> Voigt was a terrific Helena -
Well, I guess we all have our opinions. I saw Borkh do it in Munich in 1964
and even she couldn't bring any life into the piece. I also heard Jones in a
concert version in which she did manage to make something out of "Zweite
Brauthnacht" more so than did Voigt. I was in the hall and looked at Voigt,
she never raised up her head from the score in that estatic or all estatic
arias to show what emotions Helen must be feeling. It left me cold. Price, in
the recording manages to convey some of the zest that a soprano should feel in
that moment but Voigt, in my opinion, didn't have a clue.
Daniel Kessler
outside this opera.
Mark D. Lew
<dkes...@pop.cybernex.net> wrote:
> I recently met someone in Paris whose name was Da'ud. I'd never heard of it
> outside this opera.
That's the Arabic form of "David". Quite common in Islamic countries.
mdl
A Tsar Is Born
"Daniel Kessler" <dkes...@pop.cybernex.net> wrote in message
news:3AE1A203...@pop.cybernex.net...
> I recently met someone in Paris whose name was Da'ud. I'd never heard of
it
> outside this opera.
It is Arabic for "David" and has been a common name in the region for at
least 4000 years.
Of course, Aithra sends Helena and Menelaus off in precisely the OTHER
direction.
Hans Lick
Matthew B. Tepper
<3ae22e08$1...@news.starnetinc.com>:
Here in Los Angeles it is not at all unusual to meet somebody named Carmen.
Lis K. Froding
oy兀earthlink.net (Matthew B. Tepper) wrote:
>
>Here in Los Angeles it is not at all unusual to meet somebody named Carmen.
>
>--
>Matthew B. Tepper
I worked with someone called Carmen in New Jersey. She was from Hong Kong.
Lis
Ancona21
>>
"A life crowded with incident, I see."--Lady Bracknell
Ancona The Earnest