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OPERA REVIEW
January 10, 2005
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By Janos Gereben
For someone understandably reluctant to relive the Holocaust, I fought a losing battle for the past two days. Tonight's opera, Udo Zimmermann's Weisse Rose, performed by City Concert Opera in the San Francisco JCC's Kanbar Hall, followed Sunday's US premiere in the Castro Theater of Oliver Hirschbiegel's Downfall, about the last days of Hitler. The outcome of this strange coincidence was an improbable surprise. The film about the monsters of the bunker engaged and moved; at two and a half hours, it went by in a flash. The opera about the heroic, tragic victims of the Nazis came across as a noble but failed effort; at 70 minutes, it seemed much too long.
The music and, especially, San Francisco Opera dramaturg Wolfgang Willaschek's libretto, stand at a distance, not reaching out, not inviting in. The work exists in itself, it does not communicate. The text — about a real-life Catholic brother and sister, who joined the anti-Nazi resistance movement called "The White Rose," and were eventually captured and executed — aims at conveying the atmosphere and feelings of the characters, but it ends up as an episodic, dense, at times incomprehensible libretto. Just one example: the sister's cries to their mother, accompanied by a repeated "There is no happiness without truth"; if there is a deep meaning in the context and juxtaposition, it may be just too well hidden.
The music is also fragmented and inconsistent, with a few attempts to impose physical pain on the audience; some lyrical passages that seem calculated, not felt; and miscalculated, ugly portions, such as an unending crescendo portraying approaching footsteps or extensive quotes from military marches as the characters speak their opposition to the regime.
For this listener, the only instances of what felt genuine in the production came from the singers and the musicians — not from the composer or librettist. Emma Moon's flute, Kurt Rohde's viola and Leighton Fong's cello reminded one of what integrity in music is all about, with performances both straightforward and passionate. Carole Schaffer sang the role of Sophie Scholl with utmost — at times excessive — commitment, making up in intensity what she lacked in German diction. (The other soloist, Dale Tracy, fared better with the language, but not so well with the music, partially because his role was inferior to hers.) Tom Busse conducted the City Concert Opera Orchestra. Zimmerman, 61, is known both as a composer and as an opera administrator with a stormy history. Having succeeded Goetz Friedrich as head of Deutsche Oper Berlin, he was forced out of the position in a clash with Christian Thielemann. He wrote his first version of this opera in 1967, about Hans and Sophie Scholl, 21 and 24, who were executed in 1943, the year of Zimmermann's birth. The version with Willaschek's libretto dates from 1986.
(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the
Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janosg@gmail.com.)
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