The recent run of Kurt Weill’s Der Protagonist at Venice’s Teatro Malibran offered a welcome opportunity to hear a great composer’s first and unjustly neglected opera. While its premiere in Dresden in 1926 received wide acclaim, this work has sunk into obscurity today, receiving just one performance a decade.
The plot is a lurid amalgam of Ariadne auf Naxos, I Pagliacci, and Wozzeck, drawn almost verbatim from a play by librettist Georg Kaiser, a preeminent but now forgotten Weimar playwright. In it, a brilliant young actor (“the Protagonist”) harbors a shameful secret, namely his passionate erotic love for his innocent sister, who sparks his jealousy by falling for another man. An off-stage aristocrat (“the Duke”) commands the actor’s troupe to provide after-dinner entertainment, first demanding a comedy about infidelity, then a tragedy about a jealous lover. Frustrated by both life and art, the Protagonist cracks. When his sister unexpectedly enters the room in mid-rehearsal, he violently stabs her to death.
Underlying the melodrama is a romantic theme common to Kirschner street scenes, Nolde nudes, Strindberg plays, Berg operas, and other Expressionist art. The horrors of fragmented modern society generate isolation, loneliness and anxiety, corrupting those who play along, and leading those who seek their own truths become outsiders toward madness and death.
To capture the atmosphere, director Ezio Toffolutti’s Venice production reset the action from Shakespearian England to Weimar Germany. The intent was to invoke the contemporary aesthetic of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (aptly subtitled A Symphony of Horror) and other silent films—a aesthetic link proposed by musicologist Bryan Gilliam.
Yet the execution fell short. Instead of the mysterious illumination and sharp lines of Expressionist cinema, we got a bare rectangular room, cluttered with furniture and crude throws, all over-illuminated with flat lighting. Worse, in lieu of the spooky stillness of Murnau’s understated direction, we got a childishly overacted parody of silent cinema.
This crass approach undermined the basic emotional thrust of Murnau’s famous film. What elevates it above any subsequent Dracula film—except the remake by Werner Herzog, which parallels it almost exactly—is not better scream-shots or edgy design elements. Rather, it is the pitiable loneliness and calm resignation of the central character, Court Orlok. He may be a vampire, but he is human. He moves resignedly through a dreamscape, aware that he cannot avoid destroying himself and the woman he loves. In Venice, this element of all-to-human tragedy went missing.
So we were left with the musical score. It is an extraordinary accomplishment by a precocious composer of astonishing brilliance and versatility. Weill, then just 23 years old, created a kaleidoscope of Weimar’s rich musical landscape. Busoni, Stravinsky, Strauss, Berg, Bartók, and even Schoenberg flash by in a single act of barely over an hour. At first hearing, the result may seem episodic, even chaotic. Yet it is a coherent statement held together by virtuosic orchestration and by urgent rhythms deftly shifting from duple to triple to quadruple meter. The score is distinctive and original, not least because as the opera unfolds we catch more glimpses of the minimalist, cabaret-inspired style that would emerge fully in Weill’s later masterpieces with Berthold Brecht.
Best of all is a strikingly original final scene. A march-like theme and variations crescendos, ending in a set of jagged chords as the Protagonist commits the crime. Then an eerie tick-tocking celeste accompanies sinuously intertwined piano woodwinds and strings, as he drifts into full insanity—the outside world reduced to forlorn and distant cries for “Ein Arzt!” (“A doctor!”). A brass fanfare accompanies his final boast about having given a perfect performance, only to echo into an eerie silence at the curtain.
Such music demands much from those singers and instrumentalists, doubly so because almost none had sung or played a note of it previously—or, probably, would ever do so again. All forces responded creditably. The Teatro Fenice orchestra offered a propulsive and precise account, also (near as I could tell) close to note perfect.
The singers, drawn from German regional houses, were perhaps not the ideal vocalists Weill might have imagined: the tone production was sometimes effortful, and in some cases the diction less than clear. Yet they deserve credit for a precise and emotional account. Special praise goes to the commitment and clear diction of German tenor Matthias Koziorowski as the Protagonist, a character who hardly leaves the stage, as well as to the elegantly restrained legato of tenor Alexander Geller in the small role of the “Hausmeister des Herzogs.” (What an Erik he would make!)
While veteran conductor Markus Stenz kept the ensemble admirably tight, the unrelentingly loud and percussive style he drew out trampled the delicate and transparent style of this fragile score. One would never have guessed that markings of forte or fortissimo in Weill’s score are few and generally reserved for final chords and orchestral interludes. This further undermined the human side of the drama. In this regard, the sole studio recording of this work is far more satisfying.
Nonetheless, kudos to Teatro Fenice for staging an unfamiliar opera of this quality. Companies take note: this work deserves to be heard far more often! It would make a fine double bill with a roughly contemporary work: I propose Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg, but Schoenberg’s Erwartung or Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle would work as well.
Andrew Moravcsik
Der Protagonist
Opera in one act by Kurt Weill
Libretto by Georg Kaiser based on his own play of the same name
Cast and production staff:
Protagonist – Matthias Koziorowski; Catherine, Schwester – Martina Welschenbach; Der junge Herr – Dean Murphy; Der Hausmeister des Herzogs – Alexander Geller; Der Wirt – Zachary Altman; John, 1. Schauspieler – Szymon Chojnacki; Richard, 2. Schauspieler – Matteo Ferrara; Henry, 3. Schauspieler – Franko Klisović.
La Fenice Orchestra. Conductor: Markus Stenz. Director, sets, costumes and lighting: Ezio Toffolutti.
Teatro Malibran, Venezia, May 10.
Top image: Protagonist (Matthias Koziorowski) and Catherine, Schwester (Martina Welschenbach), with stage musicians behind.
All photos © Michele Crosera