BERLIN - Franz Schreker's "Der ferne Klang" ("The Distant Sound") was
hot stuff when it received its premiere in Frankfurt in 1912.  Reaching
the Berlin Staatsoper in 1925, it was still important enough to have its
tenor role assigned to Richard Tauber.  And then - nothing or something
close to that.  There were some performances here and there, including
sporadic revivals in German regional houses recently, but it took 76 years
before the opera returned to the house on Unter den Linden this month.
I suspect it may take another three-quarters of a century before the urge
returns to produce it again.  Is it that bad? No, it's just not good enough
to stay in repertory.

What happened? Why the initial success, the long neglect, the major
revival now? Answers to those questions and analyses of the work can take
up a lot of space.  I'd rather go with a short version first: "Klang" has
an incomprehensible, convoluted story (more so than most operas in this
genre in which texts are generally inferior to the music) and a very
strange, strongly derivative score - which I'd like to hear again.  But
to see the opera again - no.

Why bother with something native German speakers in the audience, even
some who have seen the new production several times, were asking me about?
I don't know and frankly, my dear. . .  Suffice to say, it's something
"Lulu"-ish, about a young (if far from innocent) girl suffering at the
hand of world in general, a world which has the look of "Cabaret."

Erich Wonder's phantasmagoric sets are weird and striking, but under
Peter Mussbach's direction, the dream/nightmare story of Grete becomes a
spectacle giving both nymphomania and sexual abuse a bad name.  Mussbach
handles the story with a vocabulary ranging from masturbation to rape, and
nothing in-between.  It's certain that sex has an important role in poor
Grete's story, but I doubt that's the only aspect to it.

The peep-show monotony might have been enhanced by a difficult casting
problem.  On the same night when nearby Komische Oper's "Falstaff" was
replaced the last minute by "La Boheme" because the singer in the title
role fell ill and there are no covers for a German-language Falstaff, THE
soprano who sings Grete in the Staatsoper - Anne Schwanewilms - continued
to be too ill to perform and, lacking a credible cover here too, a soprano
from the company, Carola Hohn, sang the role from stage right (doing a fine
job), while an actress actually appeared in the story.  Perhaps sexual
obsession, at the exclusion of nearly everything else, comes across better
when it's acted and sung by somebody of Schwanewilms' ability; in the
event, Mussbach's "concept" remained just that.

The "Tauber role" - with its difficult, high voice placement - was handled
well by Robert Kunzli.  Julien Salemkour conducted a great orchestral
performance, the Staatskapelle playing significantly better than during
the next night's routine "Parsifal."

The music - the single element I believe has kept "Klang" afloat -
is almost as strange as the stage end of the work, but it is far more
interesting and worthwhile.  Reports kept mentioning Debussy, but in this
great melange of styles and "sounds," that was far from the central element
to my hearing.  Imagine, rather, somebody pulling together early Schoenberg
("Gurre Lieder"), Korngold ("Violanta" and, more, "Die Tote Stadt"), the
obligatory "Tristan" bits, a pinch of Mendelssohn, auspicating Shostakovich
and Pfitzner, then stirring in some Russian folk music, jazz and extremely
early hip-hop - and then consider the possibility that the result is
curiously attractive!

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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