Franz Schreker: Die Gezeichneten

Abstract

My support for the project of “director's opera” is as firm as must be that of any liberal supporter of the wider project of live operatic production, particularly of works that have fallen out of the familiar repertoire. But it is qualified support, and I would regret the passing of criticism that drew upon historical or “text”-based arguments (however discredited these may be by conservative opera-goers' muttering over interval drinks). That the 2005 Salzburg Festival production of Die Gezeichneten should appear on DVD is an obvious testament to its critical success. It was presented in the Felsenreitschule on a set that comprised a vast, partly broken stone sculpture of a reclining female nude, over, under, and finally inside which the singers climbed or strolled. Accolades quite properly went to conductor Kent Nagano and to singers Robert Brubaker, Anne Schwanewilms, Michael Volle, and Robert Hale. All of these certainly perform and sing at a consistently high level, and Nagano's beautifully paced and passionately considered reading of this most passionate score is a prize for Schreker-devotees. Fast-paced performances of the extraordinary overture all too frequently turn this rare jewel into glitzy kitsch. As always with Schoenberg's “forgotten” Viennese contemporary, eternally fated to being “rediscovered,” the encounter in 2005 left some critics nonplussed and the rest searching for language with which to do justice to what Jeremy Eichler in the New York Times called “the vertiginous beauty of Schreker's music, but also the composer's theatrical gifts, his penchant for probing the unconscious drives and boundless yearnings of his characters in a world that is crumbling around them.”1