The way of promise
| Work data | |
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| Title: | The way of promise |
| Shape: | Oratorio in four acts |
| Original language: | German |
| Music: | Kurt Weill |
| Libretto : | Franz Werfel |
| Premiere: | January 7, 1937 |
| Place of premiere: | Manhattan Opera House |
| Playing time: | 3 to 6 hours |
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The Way of Promise is a Jewish oratorio in several acts by Franz Werfel and Kurt Weill , which was first performed in New York in 1937 in English translation under the title The Eternal Road . At that time it was directed by Max Reinhardt . The German-language premiere took place in Chemnitz in 1999 .
content
The piece combines Zionist ideas with current events at the time of its creation and biblical motifs: Jews save themselves from a pogrom in a synagogue . The government has already decided to expel all Jews from the country, the rabbi of the community was unable to achieve anything through a petition. Now he proposes to his congregation to retrace the history of Judaism from its beginnings to the present and begins to read from the Torah . The Old Testament figures from Abraham to Jeremiah appear. Finally it is announced that the church of Israel must now emigrate. The community is driven out of the synagogue by soldiers and experiences an apparition of the Messiah .
Musical traditions
Weill used elements of synagogue chants as well as choirs in the tradition of Bach passions and Mendelssohn oratorios in the composition . According to Helmut Loos, Weill “used traditional orchestral sounds and compositional methods for the biblical piece […] that […] could only offend the fans of the Threepenny Opera ”, and “worked in the best operatic tradition with memory motifs […] and dramaturgically well calculated increases ". Sometimes, according to Loos, Weill's music is “indulgent to kitsch”. Loos certified it as “the best oratorio tradition” and pointed out that both the form and the theme of the opera oratorio were quite common in the first decades of the 20th century. In addition to Arthur Honegger's Roi David from 1921, Schönberg's oratorio Die Jakobsleiter and his opera Moses und Aron , Zoltán Kodály composed the Psalmus hungaricus in 1923 and Willy Burkhard 1935 The Face of Isaiah , were written during this time . Paul Dessau's Hagadah shel Passover shows some parallels with the path of promise . In a Spiegel article on the occasion of the Chemnitz performance one could read about the way of the promise : “This philharmonic colossus has nothing of the ordinary drive of the“ Threepenny Opera ”, Weill's evergreen hit. Instead, it sounds like Mahler and, strangely, Handel's “ Messiah ”, Mendelssohn can be heard and, just a few bars later, Stravinsky's “ Wüstling ”. "
prehistory
At the suggestion of the American theater manager Meyer Wolf Weisgal , Max Reinhardt began planning a monumental play with Old Testament content in the 1930s. He won Franz Werfel as a librettist , although he had given up his Jewish religious affiliation in 1929 on the occasion of his marriage to Alma Mahler-Werfel . Kurt Weill wrote the music. He later stated that The Path of Promise had meant a step in its development: “The Eternal Road, however, brought me further on the path I had already taken in the Threepenny Opera and Mahagonny , towards a new form: real, lively, modern Musical theater in which music is an equal partner in terms of its expansion and inner meaning. "
According to the political circumstances, the topic aroused interest at this time. Arnold Schönberg had already written his work The Biblical Way in 1927 , which also dealt with the establishment of a new Jewish state. In 1934, Weisgal's first meeting with Werfel and Weill took place at Leopoldskron Castle. During these conversations, Weisgal resisted the mixing of Christian and Jewish ideas that Werfel had initially undertaken. In 1935 Werfel was able to finish work on the libretto. His text was published by Zsolnay in Vienna that same year . The world premiere in New York was also planned for 1935, initially under the title The Road of Promise , then as The Eternal Road . Weisgal hoped to repeat or even surpass his success with The Romance of a People of 1932. The premiere was planned for December 23, 1935, but had to be postponed ten times before the play could be shown for the first time in 1937.
The New York version
Max Reinhardt arrived in New York on October 5, 1935 and cast several leading roles in the biblical drama before traveling to Los Angeles . The casting of the other actors and singers was left to his assistant director Francesco von Mendelssohn . At this point in time there was no English translation of the textbook. Mendelssohn initially worked with a summary by Franz Werfel, since the translator Ludwig Lewisohn first had to be commissioned by Weisgal and was hardly available for queries after he had retired to Vermont .
Another problem was the choice of venue. At first it was planned to show the piece in a huge tent in Central Park . As agreed in 1934, the set was to be designed by Oskar Strnad . But Reinhardt gave up this idea again and signed Norman Bel Geddes without informing Strnad. Instead of the tent, he now favored the Hippodrome Theater , which, however, was busy with the production of Jumbo . So the Manhattan Opera House was rented, which had not been used for ten years. Norman Bel Geddes had the proscenium boxes torn out of this house in order to gain more space for his monumental synagogue stage design. Above that, a stage was set up for the crowd scenes and above this another one for the choir. In order to be able to transport the scenery to the different levels at all, several elevators had to be installed behind the stages. Because of these construction activities, rehearsals could not be held in the Manhattan Opera House. They avoided the Adelphi Theater , where rehearsals began on October 31, 1935. It quickly became clear that the schedule could not be adhered to. A water ingress, which flooded the theater while drilling for the lower stage, drove Weisgals MWW Productions, Inc. almost to ruin; the already very high cost of production increased by another $ 200,000 as a result of this occurrence. The premiere of the play was initially postponed to January 4 and then to February 1936, but on February 10, 1936 the actors' union prohibited further rehearsals because Weisgal could no longer pay the fees. Werfel then left for Vienna, Reinhardt for Hollywood, where he had film engagements. The premiere of Eternal Road has been postponed until next winter.
Weisgal finally managed to find a new co-producer and financier in Crosby Gaige and to win Albert Einstein himself as a promotional supporter of his project. It is possible that he made contact with the Flexner family and Felix Warburg , who supported the project. Meanwhile, Francesco von Mendelssohn, who had only got to the US on a visitor visa , was unhappy in exile and had started to drink, moved to Pacific Palisades and then traveled to Mexico in order to be able to re-enter the US on a regular immigrant visa. His sister, Eleonora von Mendelssohn , gave a banquet in favor of the play. In October, Weisgal signed a new contract with Reinhardt, which allowed him to rehearse for three weeks in the now converted Manhattan Opera House. From November 14, 1936, Francesco von Mendelssohn tried to bring the rehearsals back to the same level as in February. First, however, numerous roles had to be filled. One month after the rehearsals were resumed, Max Reinhardt took over their management himself. Benjamin Zemach took care of the choreography of the dancers .
In addition to 14 choir singers, 100 singing extras and 35 dancers, 59 main actors appeared in the piece, most of whose roles were prominently cast: Samuel Goldenberg played Moses , Lotte Lenya played Miriam, Sam Jaffe the adversary, Rosamond Pinchot Bathsheba, Florence Meyer the priestess who dances around the golden calf. In addition to the actors, 159 other people were employed such as stage technicians, stage workers and administrative staff, 1772 costumes were required, and although the orchestra pit had been removed by the renovation work and the music therefore had to be played from the tape in a recording by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski , At the request of the union, 16 musicians were hired, whose game took place in an adjoining room and was broadcast live in the auditorium. 757 spotlights were needed for the 200 different lighting moods of the piece. The cost of this was $ 60,000.
The premiere had meanwhile been set for January 4, 1937, but was canceled and postponed again because a competing event was to take place on the same day. The dress rehearsal for The Eternal Road , which was attended by Klaus Mann among others , took place on January 6, 1937. However, when the security inspection took place the next afternoon, the responsible fire commissioner appealed. Despite his major security concerns, he did not dare to prohibit the performance of the play, as The Eternal Road had meanwhile already resulted in production costs of $ 463,000, making it the most expensive Broadway production to date that had ever taken place. As a result, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia was picked up from his apartment in a police car to personally carry out the inspection. La Guardia approved the premiere on condition that all rework requirements were met within two days. The premiere could take place on January 7, 1937. The start was set at 8 p.m., but was delayed until 8:43 p.m. The performance lasted three hours and seven minutes, which was unusually long by New York standards, and there was restlessness in the upper echelons because the five-story stage structure could not be fully seen from there. A Billboard critic mocked himself for having expected his little puppy to grow into a fully grown dog after he finally got home from the theater, but for the most part the criticism was positive. The Daily News gave the production four stars, which was the highest possible accolade for this paper, and the critics of the New York Times , the New York Journal of Commerce and other papers were also very positive. Erika Mann, on the other hand, who only saw the piece later, found it “stupid and operatic”.
The piece was initially played successfully in New York, albeit in an abridged version, and reached 153 performances by the time it was last performed on May 16, 1937. Max Reinhardt, however, had to return to Hollywood in January 1937 and left the management to Francesco von Mendelssohn. This soon complained about the lack of work discipline among the singers and actors. The mood was bacchanic, the course of the third act chaotic, he wrote in a telegram to Reinhardt in January. Reinhardt was also informed by Rudolf Kommer that both the stage design and the production had been changed without his consent. After Weisgal demanded a 33 percent cut in fees and at least implemented a 12.5 percent cut and dismissed 14 actors, the mood in the ensemble deteriorated further. Mendelssohn complained to Reinhardt about this, while Weisgal complained that Mendelssohn was constantly drunk and sometimes did not show up at all. As a result, management terminated Francesco von Mendelssohn's employment contract on February 13 with immediate effect. That same evening he tried to disrupt the performance and tell the audience how ungrateful they had been towards him, but was prevented from doing so by four stage workers. Since, according to his own account, von Mendelssohn was not simply drunk, but above all overworked, Reinhardt intervened in his favor and had him hired again in mid-March. Not only the differences in the direction of the play were problematic, but also the high financial outlay. With nine largely sold-out shows a week, the average weekly grossing was $ 22,000, but the cost over the same period was $ 29,312 each. Even further austerity measures could not change that much. At the last performance, a matinee for Weisgal's benefit, the spotlights were switched off before Weisgal could even read Reinhardt's telegram that was brought to him on stage. Only in the light of a match could he still decipher Reinhardt's message: "The light that we lit together [...] will continue to shine through the history of the theater and the Jewish people."
The production deficit reached a record $ 500,000. Instead of planning a tour of the USA and possibly also to London, as announced on April 12, 1937, the producers were involved in legal disputes about the outstanding royalties until 1942. For Francesco von Mendelssohn, the financial failure of the piece led to a break with Kurt Weill, who after the end of the performance series described him as "as disgusting as rarely anyone" and as "completely untalented".
The Chemnitz version
In Chemnitz, on the occasion of Kurt Weill's hundredth birthday and in connection with a scientific conference about the composer, a German-language version of the work was performed for the first time under the dramaturge Gerhard Müller . He judged the piece to be a masterpiece: "It is a large-scale folk opera with impressive bel canto gestures and impressive choirs and a grand march as a musical symbol of the path of the Jewish people". Directed by Michael Heinicke , the conductor was John Mauceri , the sets and the costumes came from David Sharir . In addition to 62 choir members from Chemnitz, 30 singers from the Leipzig Synagogue Choir and 48 singers from the Cracow Opera were also involved.
After twelve performances in Chemnitz, Heinicke's production, for which Richard von Weizsäcker had taken over the patronage, was also shown in New York, Tel Aviv , Krakow and at the Expo 2000 in Hanover . This fulfilled the demands of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New York, to which Lotte Lenya had transferred the rights to Weill's works.
Gottfried Blumenstein described the Chemnitz performance as "rather a failure than a success" and particularly accused Heinickes of the "simple-minded director" for not having exhausted the possibilities of the piece and mainly delivering an orgy of equipment. Weill's music appears "in this context rather as a patchwork of arbitrary and sometimes well-known melodic phrases, than as a captivating musical and dramatic production". However, because of its basic conception, the work is condemned to be superficial and the change from Jewish self-hatred to noble martyrdom, as demonstrated by the figure of the adversary, is not very convincing.
Later performances
In 2006 the first part of the play, Die Erzväter , was shown in Halberstadt Cathedral . The concert performance in Bremen on the occasion of the Evangelical Church Congress 2009 was limited to excerpts from the work.
literature
- Thomas Blubacher, Is there anything better than longing? The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn , Henschel ³2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 , esp. P. 247 ff.
- Jonathan C. Friedman : The literary, cultural, and historical significance ot the 1937 biblical stage play "The eternal road" . Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2004
Web links
- Report on the Chemnitz production
- Pictures of the Chemnitz performance
- Thomas Ziegner: Weg der Verheißung - The Eternal Road by Werfel and Weill II - Notes and photos on the production in Chemnitz 1999
Individual evidence
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 16, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~musik/web/institut/agOst/docs/mittelost/hefte/Heft7_BildUndText.pdf_042-045.pdf
- ↑ Klaus Umbach : MUSIC: Hallelujah with Hawaiian guitar . In: Der Spiegel . No. 18 , 1999 ( online ).
- ↑ a b http://www.hagalil.com/archiv/2000/02/weill.htm
- ↑ The Path of the Promise in the antiquarian bookshop portal ( Memento from June 30, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
- ↑ http://www.freidok.uni-freiburg.de/volltexte/2931/pdf/Notenpapier_2.pdf
- ^ " The Eternal Road , In Endless Quest of a Stage," John Rockwell, The New York Times (October 5, 2003)
- ↑ a b Thomas Blubacher, Is there anything better than longing? The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn , Henschel ³2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 , p. 256
- ↑ Thomas Blubacher, Is there anything better than longing? The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn , Henschel ³2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 , p. 254
- ↑ quoted from: Thomas Blubacher, Is there anything more beautiful than longing? The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn , Henschel ³2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 , p. 258
- ↑ Thomas Blubacher, Is there anything better than longing? The siblings Eleonora and Francesco von Mendelssohn , Henschel ³2008, ISBN 978-3-89487-623-4 , p. 258
- ↑ http://www.uni-protocol.de/nachrichten/id/49497/
- ↑ http://www.nmz.de/artikel/nach-langer-odyssee-in-der-alten-welt-angelangt
- ↑ http://www.harztheater.de/wegderverheissung
- ↑ http://www.glocke.de/index.php?neu=true&nav=6&sub1=0&sub2=0&menu_id=3&P_ID=3778
