Franz Schmidt
Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln

Stig Andersen (tenor; John)
Rene Pape (bass; Voice of the Lord)
Christiane Oelze (soprano)
Cornelia Kallisch (contralto)
Lothar Odinius (tenor)
Alfred Reiter (bass)
Bavarian Radio Chorus and Orchestra/Franz Welser-Moest
EMI ZDCB 7243 5 56660 2 Total time: 61:01 + 45:47

Summary for the Busy Executive: Wow.

Forty years ago, very few outside Austria knew the name Franz Schmidt.
An essay by Harold Truscott in Robert Simpson's volume The Symphony: From
Elgar to the Present Day whetted my appetite and probably those of many
others, but until Zubin Mehta's pioneer Decca stereo recording of Schmidt's
fourth symphony, the music went largely unheard.  As far as I know, no
major conductor with an international career consistently championed
Schmidt's work (unlike the case of Mahler), although the situation has
greatly improved.  The standard rap against Schmidt was that his music
didn't "travel" outside Austria, and consequently it apparently was seldom
given the chance to prove that it could.  At least we now have recordings
of all the symphonies.  Recordings of other works are kind of dribbling in.

As a composer, Schmidt stands fairly close to Mahler and also Reger.  Each
of men's music faces, like Janus, two centuries: the nineteenth and the
twentieth.  Each brings Romanticism to a peak, and each gazes like Moses
on Horeb toward Modernism, without fully entering into it.  I'd call it
transitional music, were Mahler and Schmidt, at least, not so completely
convincing on their own.  Furthermore, music histories tend to present
musical eras as cleanly separate: the idea that once Beethoven enters his
middle period, there are no more Classical composers.  In reality, however,
movements tend to bleed into one another, like colors on a spectrum.
Modernist prophets appear early (eg, Mussorgsky), and Romantics hang on.
Georg Schumann, a Wagnerian, died in the Fifties.  And, of course, elements
are often blended in the same composer - Mahler and Mussorgsky conspicuous
examples.  In short, no single composer fully represents his time but
embraces a larger or smaller piece of it.

Schmidt's music falls into roughly five periods of development, four of
which are conveniently represented by his symphonies - the first symphony
for the first period, the second for the second, and so on.  The fifth
period includes only his last composition - Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln
(the book with seven seals) - of what I've heard, by far the greatest thing
he wrote, and that's saying something.  Its premiere in Vienna earned for
him a huge success, but its visibility sank with that of the composer.  I
would recommend this to any lover of Mahler or Bruckner without hesitation
- one of the supreme examples of late Romantic Viennese music.  I believe
this CD counts as its first recording, roughly sixty years after Schmidt
composed it.  I haven't heard even of a lot of live performances as
recently as ten years ago, and I first encountered mention of the work
in Truscott's 1967 essay.  Indeed, Welser-Moest is the only one I know
of who's programmed it recently.  It's a masterpiece, overwhelming in
its impact.  I don't hesitate to call it the greatest Romantic
chorus-and-orchestra work since Mahler's Symphony of a Thousand.  It has
the same grand scale and amazing craft in handling large forces.  I suspect
its obscurity due mainly to its considerable performing difficulty.
Welser-Most scheduled a performance with the Cleveland Orchestra and Chorus
and had to postpone it by at least a year.  I have no idea how long he
worked with the Bavarians, but this is one great account.  It confirms both
the stature of the work and of the conductor who can both keep its tight,
complex textures clear and still make music.  This is a performance of both
sweep and astonishing detail.  On the basis of this reading alone, I'd call
Welser-Moest one of the best conductors now working.

The nineteenth-century oratorio has two main strains.  One continues the
practice of Handel: essentially, a collection of separate numbers, as in
Mendelssohn's Elijah.  The other creates a continuous, through-composed
fabric, as in Wagner's Liebesmahl der Apostel or even the two movements
of Mahler's Symphony No. 8.  Both approaches have their advantages and
drawbacks.  With separate numbers, one sacrifices the flexibility of the
drama.  With the continuous flow, one risks sinking into a formless swamp.
Elgar combines the two approaches in his oratorios: there are definite
sections one can point to (eg, the "Demons' Chorus"), but the composer
weaves them into a continuous line.  Schmidt does the same, with the added
wrinkle that he uses a comparatively small stock of ideas and varies them
as he would vary a set of symphonic themes.  It wouldn't surprise me to
learn that Mahler's Eighth influenced him in this regard.  We end up with
an extremely tight work.

This has great consequence for Schmidt's choice of subject.  The Book
of Revelations has appealed to artists of all sorts for its breadth of
vision, stunning imagery, and ringing (not always comprehensible) poetry.
The book simply read aloud makes a splendid noise all by itself.  Adapting
the work to other media has seldom succeeded.  Even a master like Duerer
gets flummoxed by the wealth of imagery, which overwhelms his drawings and
turns them into an odd sort of kitsch.  Vaughan Williams's Sancta Civitas
succeeds by relentless cuts (the entire oratorio lasts a little over half
an hour) and leaves the listener with the fleetingness of the vision.
Schmidt uses not only Revelations but also textual elaborations, many based
on psalms.  I don't know whether he wrote them.  Schmidt's is the only
work I know that takes in the full measure of Revelations and yet keeps a
definite shape.  He does this by choosing a symphonic idiom that needs room
to make its point and by a mastery of form and drama.  There is a wide
range of expression: from pastoral simplicity in the description of the
Lamb of God to hair-raising complexity that pushes tonality up to the edge
and occasionally steps over.  To create this wide range, Schmidt requires
six soloists and large chorus, as well as a huge orchestra.  He asks for
a Heldentenor as well as a "normal" tenor, the first representing St.
John who announces his vision in carillon-like music and who narrates, the
second used for various characters and lyrical commentary.  The chorus also
takes many parts, from angels to humanity destroyed in the Apocalypse to
the army of martyrs.  This is, above all, a dramatic oratorio, in that its
points are made through characters.

Aside from the strength of every section, Schmidt also gets great effect
through contrast.  The riders' havoc is a matter not only of immense powers
and grand vistas but also of one or two individuals overawed by what
happens around them.  After the destruction wreaked by the rider on the
pale horse, two numbed survivors brokenly try to talk of what they have
seen.  Indeed, each has trouble recognizing the other as human - a quiet
moment after a noisy one, and all the more powerful for the immediate
contrast.

The range of Schmidt's expression is most easily heard in the five
fugues (four for voices, one for organ) of the oratorio.  The first,
for the solo quartet, depicting the praise of the four beasts ("Heilig
ist Gott der Allmaechtige" - holy is God the almighty) is the simplest and
most harmonious.  Although a fugue, it moves very much like a chorale.  The
second, a "war" fugue, tells of the second rider, sent to make men war with
one another.  It's filled with trumpet calls and snare drums, with the
idiom itself highly chromatic but the actual themes sharply incised.  The
third depicts the earthquake loosed by the sixth seal.  This, technically
speaking, is tonal music, but you'd be hard pressed to identify the tonic.
In fact, it reminds me very much of Schoenberg's freely atonal music of
roughly twenty years previous.  Though the music portrays chaos, it is not
chaotic itself.  You get the feeling of whirlwinds and humanity's cries
coming out of vortices, and, as Emily Dickinson said of the effect of real
poetry, "the top of your head coming off" - so ear-stretching, you may find
yourself raising your eyebrows over your sideburns.  The organ fugue
harkens back to the Lisztian fantasia-fugue, like Liszt's own fugue on BACH
- highly chromatic, with the feeling of improvisation.

The final fugue is a beaut: a quadruple fugue - four subjects combining
and recombining as the chorus and the seven trumpets call the souls to
the last judgment and praise the judgments and the reign of the Lord.
"Difficult" doesn't begin to describe it.  The conventional composer would
probably end here or at least in some glorious blaze, but Schmidt avoids
the conventional.  His "Hallelujah" chorus is appropriately grandiloquent,
but it leads to a late-Romantic version of Gregorian chant, given to the a
cappella male chorus singing in unison.  The actual end is St. John
exhorting all to heed his vision, sung to the opening carillon-like music.

The performance isn't perfect, any more than every performance of Mahler's
Eighth I've ever heard.  It's big, hard, complex, and complicated.  Strings
are here and there rhythmically ragged.  How the choir gets through some
of its stuff, particularly the "earthquake" fugue, I don't know.  I know
I would be hanging on by my fingernails.  But they do get through it.  In
fact, everyone does and triumphantly, to boot.  The diction from everyone
is excellent, even considering those sections where the music seems to
throw off more lines than one human being can comprehend.  Amidst the
mighty whirlwinds, the performers communicate.  One hears music and drama,
rather than notes.  A great moment, and one of the simplest, describes the
long silence in heaven after the Lamb opens the seventh seal.  The music is
so bare, it tempts one to slide over it.  Welser-Moest, however, pours
intensity into it.  This isn't a break, but anticipation.

The sound is acceptable, if not remarkable.  The main problem of balance of
forces and textural clarity has been solved.

Steve Schwartz