The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki has written three operas, the latest of which-Die schwarze Maske-was the center of attention at this year's Salzburg festival. The work is half mystery play and half psycho-thriller, and it looks certain to join Penderecki's already extensive catalogue of popular success. But it tells us little about the composer that we do not know already.
Like The Devils of Loudun, completed in 1969 and first staged in Hamburg, and Paradise Lost, premiered in Chicago in 1978, Dae schwarze Maske is haunted by the theme of man's fall from grace into a state of helpless, hell-bent wickedness and destruction. There is plenty here to appeal to the modern imagination, including black magic, black comedy, blackmail, sex, and superstition; and by steering clear of the great issues of politics, philosophy, art, and religion, Penderecki works on a much more immediate level than many other contemporary opera composers.
But he has yet to convince us that he is a truly dramatic composer, able to lift the text onto a new psychological and atmospheric plane through the medium of music. What Dze schwarze Maske amounts to, therefore, is a veiled form of musical sensationalism -like a weak relative of the Salome of Richard Strauss-in Which Penderecki takes us through his usual spectrum of musical styles and tricks, and winds up with a succession of noisy climaxes.
These were transmitted with predictable accuracy and skill by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under the direction of Woldemar Nelsson. The quality of orchestral playing, the showcase nature of the Salzburg Festival, and its resources for casting and staging have always been outstanding attractions for any composer who has received a festival commission, and Salzburg has done Penderecki proud, with a cast of uniform strength and a shrewd staging by the East German director, Harry Kupfer.
Following successful performances in Salzburg of his St. Luke's Passion in 1970 and Magnificat in 1974, the commissioning of an opera from Penderecki in 1982 came as no surprise. The festival committee turned down several of the fifty-two-year-old composer's initial suggestions for a libretto, before eventually agreeing to an opera based on a little-known one-act play in German by the early twentieth-century Silesian author Gerhart Hauptmann. Penderecki made a special plea for Kupfer as stage director-he had been particularly impressed by Kupfer's staging of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman for the Bayreuth festival -and together they set about fashioning the play into a libretto.
Lasting about an hour and three quarters without an interval, the opera has rewarding roles for thirteen principals, as well as four smaller parts and an invisible chorus. Set in a small Silesian town in 1662, the action takes place in the home of the mayor, who has invited a group of distinguished but basically incompatible guests to a festive dinner. A background of plague, carnival, and religious intolerance provides an underlying air of falseness and tension. The mayor's good intentions have the opposite of the desired effect, as the spicy past of his beautiful wife Benigna returns to haunt her and envelope others in its diabolical Web. By the final curtain, only Lowel Perl, a wandering Jew, has survived to reffliect on the nightmare that has swept the rest of the household to their
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