San Francisco Classical Voice

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 the work 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. Suffice it to say, it's something Lulu-ish, about a young (if far from innocent) girl suffering at the hands of the 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. Lacking a credible cover here too, the Staatsoper had one of its company sopranos, Carola Höhn, sang the role from stage right (doing a fine job), while an actress portrayed the role onstage. Perhaps sexual obsession, at the exclusion of nearly everything else, comes across better when 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 Künzli. 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 that 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 mélange of styles and "sounds," that was far from the central element to my hearing. Imagine, rather — somebody pulling together early Schoenberg (Gurrelieder), Korngold (Violanta and, more, Die Tote Stadt), the obligatory "Tristan" bits, a pinch of Mendelssohn, anticipations of Shostakovich and Pfitzner, then stirring in some Russian folk music, jazz and extremely early hip-hop — and then consider the possibility that the result might be curiously attractive!

(Janos Gereben is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group and technology editor for www.the451.com. You can contact him at janos451@earthlink.net.)

©2001 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved