The name of the opera is “The Distant Sound.” Yet the new production at Bard College’s SummerScape, which opens Friday night, will probably focus on plenty more than just sound. If it holds true to the festival’s recent track record, it will also be spectacular to look at.
Last year’s staging of “The Huguenots” was a feast of visual wonder with enormous set pieces, imaginative costumes and, most memorably, numerous staged references to famous paintings, starting with a tableaux of Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”
Returning from his success with “The Huguenots” is director Thaddeus Strassberger, winner of the 2005 European Opera Director’s Prize.
“It’s another big production and orchestrally it’s a huge sound. We’ve decided to set it in the time of Schreker,” says Strassberger, referring to the almost forgotten Franz Schreker (1878-1934). An Austrian composer, conductor and teacher, he was hailed during his day as the most successful theatrical composer since Wagner. “The Distant Sound” is the second of his nine operas and is about a composer who forsakes a woman to pursue a mirage-like sound.
“I prepared by spending reading about his life and listening to his other works. Some significant correlations between the main character’s quest and autobiographical elements of Schreker’s own experience soon emerged,” says Strassberg. “We’re looking at the inter-war years and the conflict between 19th century romanticism and the post-war 20th century.”
To translate history and sound into a theatrical experience, Strassberger is again turning to pre-existing visual works. Rather than religious iconography, as with “The Huguenots,” this time it’s the emerging medium of photography and film.
“Celluloid, plastics, and film-developing technologies were beginning to forever alter the world these characters inhabit,” says Strassberger. “The very first image that you’ll see in our production is a huge photograph of a forest scene. Right away, we see a natural world that is filtered through man-made machines.”
Famous paintings are also part of the visual language. Strassberger, who’s collaborating with set designer Narelle Sissons, says they won’t be quoting previous works, as he did with the literal reproductions of paintings in “The Huguenots.” Instead, it will be a more subtle process of “referencing” such artists as George Grosz, who painted caricatures of Berliners in the 1920s, and Otto Dix, another German painter who’s grotesque style raised the ire of the Nazis.
Explaining such selections, Strassberger says, “There’s a bit of irony and cynicism that begins to seep in during the 20th century.”
Bard’s new production is the first American staging of “The Distant Sound,” which debuted in 1912 in Frankfurt. Just four years ago the college’s president Leon Botstein conducted the American Symphony Orchestra in the opera’s American concert debut. Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Tommasini called the work an “arresting masterpiece.”
It’s become a summer tradition at Bard’s Fisher Center for such obscure and forgotten behemoths to be revived on a lavish scale and play for hardly more than a week. (There will be only four performances of “The Distant Sound.”) It’s exceptional in an era when most opera companies must join forces in order to share the financial burdens of any new productions, especially of unknown works.
Strassberger sounds rather philosophical about the month of intensive rehearsals that goes into such a short run.
“We’re not creating a finished product,” he says, “but starting a dialogue and hoping to inspire other people to explore the composer’s work.”
Schreker: The Distant Sound
Fisher Center, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson
Friday, July 30, 2010
It’s surprising that composers haven’t written more operas about being a composer. At first glance, Franz Schreker’s “Der ferne Klang” (The Distant Sound) is the exception. It’s about Fritz, a composer who forsakes his marriage and most everything else of value in order to chase after some ethereal music he hears either in his head, or off in the distance, or out of the orchestra pit.
But really the opera shows what a mess ensues every time he renews contact with his long suffering wife Grete. Families of high strung artists might have some identification.
The opera premiered in 1913 in Frankfurt and made the career of Schreker who died in 1934 in Berlin. Bard College’s new production, which opened Friday night at the Fisher Center, was it’s American staged debut. As part of the college’s SummerScape festival, it’s the latest oversized historical oddity dug up by visionary Leon Botstein, who conducted the performance with the American Symphony Orchestra.
Just as Fritz can’t quiet get a grip on that distant sound, the entire opera is a bit vague and out of focus. Thaddeus Strassberger’s staging, with sets by Narelle Sissons, only heightens the elusiveness of everything, with an emphasis on reflective surfaces.
The opening scene shows the weightiness of domesticity, with the living room furniture all tied together by heavy rope. From a visual perspective, the second scene is the most captivating of the night. Grete sits in a movie house and muses about her plight. We see her through a scrim, onto which is projected a black and white film about a lonely women. The historic footage -- from Fritz Lang’s 1921 film “Der Mude Tod” (The Tired Death) — is beautifully edited to follow the contours of the live music.
Schreker’s writing has some highly dramatic interludes and snappy bits for the character roles. In contrast, the arias are long and wandering, floating and hovering on the edge of tonality.
Tenor Mathias Schultz, as Fritz, sang even his highest notes with a firm and sturdy voice. But he always looked hunched and distraught if not in outright pain. In the role of Grete, soprano Yamina Maamar was best when the character was far from Fritz, trying to build her own life even if in a brothel.
The lively second act happens in a cabaret decorated with dozens of etched mirrors. The women from the chorus parade in and out, wearing one new set of feathery costumes after another. Bard’s lavish productions always make even the most curious pieces worth attending.
Originally published in the Times Union.
Images courtesy Bard College.
I’m assuming this is your review, which I read in the TU–somewhat appalled after seeing the piece Sunday. Why no comment on the art-vs-life theme which is what the piece is actually and explicitly about instead of the difficulty of living with one of those high-strung artistic types? How did you think that Grete was Fritz’s wife? (Both the synopsis and the opera itself amply refute that.) Any comments on how the direction transformed the final scene? Did you even bother to stay for the last act?
Schreker deserved better. So did the audience, which clearly loved the work.