The Ghost Sonata (opera)

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Opera dates
Title: The ghost sonata
Shape: Chamber opera in three parts
Original language: German
Music: Aribert Reimann
Libretto : Aribert Reimann and Uwe Schendel
Literary source: August Strindberg : Spöksonaten
Premiere: September 25, 1984
Place of premiere: Hebbel Theater Berlin
Playing time: approx. 1 ½ hours
Place and time of the action: Stockholm, at the beginning of the 20th century
people
  • The old man, director Hummel [Jakob] ( bass baritone )
  • The student Arkenholz (high tenor )
  • The Colonel ( Character Tenor )
  • The mummy, wife of the colonel [Amalie] ( alto / speaking role )
  • The young lady, her daughter [Adele] ( soprano )
  • Johansson, servant at Hummel (tenor)
  • Bengtsson, servant to the colonel ( baritone )
  • The dark lady, daughter of the dead ( mezzo-soprano )
  • The cook at the Colonel's (old)
  • The milkmaid ( silent role )
  • The porter's wife (silent role)
  • The dead, consul (silent role)
  • Baron Skansorg, the gentleman (silent role)
  • Miss Holsteinkrona, Hummel's fiancée (silent role)

The Ghost Sonata is a chamber opera in three parts by Aribert Reimann , who also arranged the libretto together with Uwe Schendel based on August Strindberg's Swedish play Spöksonaten . The world premiere took place on September 25, 1984 by the Deutsche Oper Berlin in the Hebbel Theater in Berlin.

action

The following table of contents is based on the video of the world premiere and the information in Wolfgang Burdes Reimann biography. The scene instructions in italics are taken from Strindberg's template in the translation by Mathilde Mann published in the Gutenberg-DE project .

First part

Ground floor and first floor of the front of a modern house, but only the corner of the house that ends with a round salon on the ground floor, and on the first floor with a balcony and a flag pole. When the curtain rises, one sees through the open window the white marble statue of a young woman, surrounded by palm trees, brightly lit by rays of the sun. In the window on the left you can see hyacinths in pots, blue, white, pink. On the railing in the corner of the balcony, up a flight of stairs, a blue silk duvet and two white pillows. The windows on the left are covered with white sheets. It is a bright Sunday morning. In the foreground in front of the house is a green bench. In the foreground on the right a fountain, on the left a notice pillar.

At the beginning of the opera you see the old director Jakob Hummel reading the newspaper in front of the house in a wheelchair. At a well, the student Arkenholz asks a milkmaid for the ladle. She is a ghost that only the Sunday child Arkenholz can see. The student tells the girl how he helped care for the victims of a house collapse last night. Hummel wonders who the young man is talking to. But he just read about the accident in the newspaper and saw the student's picture in it. Since he looks familiar, he asks about his family. It turns out that Hummel and Arkenholz 'father were once embroiled in a speculation that ruined the latter. Hummel, however, feels completely at fault for this and claims that he himself lost his savings through Arkenholz's guilt. He offers the impoverished student a job in his house and introduces him to the residents and their complex network of relationships: the colonel can be seen through the window. His wife had been beaten by him, left him and still returned. now she sits in the house as a mummy and adores her own statue. The colonel's daughter lives in the hyacinth room. The old woman at the window was once his (Hummel's) bride. Now she doesn't even recognize him anymore, although they see each other every day. She has a daughter of the late consul who now works there as a porter - the dark lady. She was engaged to the consul's son-in-law, who was still married and who was soon to get a divorce. To his horror, Arkenholz now sees the ghost of the dead consul. After a whispered message from his servant Johansson, Hummel lets himself be pushed around the corner from where he wants to overhear "the poor". Johansson then informs Arkenholz of the cruelty of his master, who kills his enemies and can never forgive. He feels like his slave. In the meantime the old man has gathered a group of beggars who have to pay homage to the student. Arkenholz doesn't understand any of this.

Second part

In the dark, the outlines of the mummy appear behind a wallpaper door, which disappears again after a short monologue, one of Strindberg's supplemented poems about loneliness.

In [the Colonel's] round saloon; in the background a white stove with a Stutz clock and candelabra and a mirror above; on the right anteroom with the perspective of a green room with mahogany furniture; on the left is the statue, shaded by palm trees, can be covered with a curtain; on the left in the background door to the hyacinth room, where the young lady sits and reads. You can see the colonel's back, who is sitting and writing in the green room.

Johansson and Bengtsson, the Colonel's servant, prepare what they call the “ghost souper” of the old residents' meeting, which they have been holding regularly for twenty years to nibble on pastries in silence or chatting about trivialities. Bengtsson points out the Colonel’s wife to Johansson, who because of her sensitivity to light lives in the cloakroom, looks like a mummy and thinks she’s a parrot. She comes out of her room for a moment, babbles like a parrot and then recites the original text of her previous monologue in Swedish. Hummel also appears uninvited to this meeting. The mummy, his former lover Amalie, confronts him. She tells him that she has already told her husband everything about their relationship and wants to know why he wants to set up her daughter Adele, who is actually his child, with the student. Hummel assures her that Arkenholz will soon be rich through him. Amalie accuses Hummel of his crimes. He justifies himself with the fact that he had to take revenge because the colonel seduced his bride.

The Colonel steps in and gets straight to the point: Hummel has bought up all of his promissory notes and he wants to know what he's going to do with them. The old man demands to be allowed into the house at any time from now on, which actually belongs to him now. Bengtsson must be fired. In addition, Hummel can prove that the colonel cheated on his title and lost his military rank long ago. He was once the “lackey” and “parasite” of a “certain kitchen”. For now, however, Hummel wants to keep this to himself. The colonel greets the arriving student and the other guests and introduces them to each other: his daughter (who always sits in the hyacinth room), Miss Holsteinkrona (Hummel's former fiancée), Baron Skansorg (a jewel thief) and the mummy. While the others are silent, Hummel holds a monologue in which he explains his “mission in this house”: He wants to pull out “the weeds”, expose the “crime” and enable his daughter, who cannot breathe here, to make a fresh start. As soon as the clock strikes, everyone else's time is up. He hits the table with his crutch. Then the mummy rises and declares that it can stop time. Hummel himself is also a criminal, a “thief” who “stole” her with false promises and personally murdered the consul in order to take away his promissory notes. He also "stole" the student by making false claims about his debts. Bengtsson knew better about another crime by Hummel. The servant reveals that Hummel lived like a parasite in his kitchen for two years. He also lured the milkmaid onto the ice and murdered it because she was a witness to one of his crimes. The mummy orders him to hand over the promissory notes and the will, go to her closet and hang himself there. The old man obeys and the mummy locks the door behind him: “It is done! God be gracious to his soul! "

third part

A room in a somewhat bizarre style, with oriental motifs. Everywhere hyacinths in all colors. On the stove sits a large Buddha image with a flower bulb between the knees, from which the stem of an ascalon bulb has shot up, bearing the spherical inflorescence with the white star flowers. In the background on the right is a door to the round salon: there you can see the colonel and the mummy sitting idle and silent, only a piece of the death umbrella is visible; on the left a door after the sideboard and the kitchen.

Adele reads a poem by Strindberg about the "hidden" (God), goodness and forgiveness. The student talks to her about the flowers she has loved since childhood, although they do not return their love and she feels numb from their scent. Arkenholz tells her the secret of flowers: “The root disk that rests on the water is the earth; the stem rises, just like the world axis, at its upper end sit the six-pointed star blossoms. "Adele adds the reference to the stars:" Sirius, yellow and red, is the daffodil with its yellow and red calyx and the six white rays . ”Both realize that they share a common thought. But when the student asks her if she would like to be his bride, Adele asks for delay and patience.

The cook appears in the door and sings her vampire song: “They suck, they suck the juice out of us and we out of them.” Adele fears her because she belongs to the “vampire family Hummels” and devours them. Although she deprives her courts of all power, it is not possible to dismiss her because she is one of the tests in the house. The student explains his doctrine to her from his own story, which is riddled with errors and deceptions: "If you remain silent too long, still water forms that rots, and that's how it is here in the house." At first he thought the house was a paradise, but it did the colonel was not real and his supposed benefactor turned out to be a criminal: “Where is there truth? Where is there faith? Where can you find what keeps what it promises? ”He suspects that Adele does not want to marry him,“ because you are sick at the source of life ”. Desperately she replies: “Woe! Woe to us all. Redeemer of the world, redeem us, we will perish! ”She collapses like dead. Arkenholz sings her a lullaby as an obituary: "And when you wake up again, may a sun that doesn't burn." A white light fills the room. At the end Arkenholz repeats Adele's song from the beginning of the third part: “I saw the sun. So it seemed to me that I was looking at the hidden. "

layout

orchestra

The chamber music ensemble of the opera includes the following instruments:

music

After the success of his great opera Lear , Reimann knew that he had to take a different approach in his next stage work. He himself wrote: “I had to go to the extreme - probably like my whole life is going - and this extreme was the compulsion for me to reduce myself. And to reduce it so that actually only the skeleton remains and the concentration is so strong that every accessory has to be dropped. "

Reimann combined the three acts by means of metamorphosis, as he conceived the work as a chamber opera without a break .

At the beginning, two musical structures are superimposed. Wind tremolos anticipate the music of the old guests of the ghost soup in the second part. They are juxtaposed with the complex sounds of the solo strings with a quarter-tone melody of the cello played in the flageolet . Reimann had already tried out the four-note compositional style in several previous works. Here it becomes the determining musical medium. It stands for the “otherworldly world”, in which, according to Reimann, there is neither major nor minor. This intermediate part is always assigned to the violoncello. Such alienated chords also appear at the beginning of the third part, as if they indicate that Adele already belongs to the otherworldly world.

Reimann saw this work less as an “opera with instruments” but on the contrary as “a piece of chamber music with singing”, an “ensemble piece for twelve players” in which each instrument is “just as important as the singers”, but “without the theatrical one Background".

Reimann essentially characterizes the individual scenes with the help of an instrumental basic color including typical motifs and a certain sentence structure. This is colored in a characteristic color as required. At the same time, individual figures or milieus are assigned typical instrumental colors. For the old age there are “selective piano actions”, for the “dusty milieu” of the old lady a harmonium cluster. When the mummy enters, the "ailing, plushy, saturated sound" of this instrument is heard.

Each part is sung in its own specific way, since “everyone [...] has his own psychogram, his own way of expressing himself. That must be based on the structural development of the singing voice, as well as the musical environment that surrounds the person concerned. ”According to Reimann, the extremely high and coloratura part of the student indicates his special ability to look into the otherworldly world. The voice of the old man, a bass baritone , shows his aggressive attitude towards life. The Colonel's dubiousness, however, is exposed through his operetta-like character tenor role. The trumpet is assigned to him as an instrument, which corresponds to his illusion of a military career. A flute plays around the fragile-looking young lady who is surrounded by the web of lies of the others.

The monologue of the mummy at the beginning of the second part is accompanied by a double bass playing in a high register, which is supposed to represent the tension in her inner state. Reimann conceived her alto part essentially as a speaking role , “because she is the only one in the whole piece that speaks the truth and exposes the old man. […] She cannot sing like the old man, otherwise she would not be in this function. ”Only in the moment before she yells at the old woman do she soar into it that she falls back“ into the old singing ”of her youth. Her song at the beginning, "which she has been singing continuously for 40 years", is "outside her role".

Reimann used his own translation for the song at the beginning of the third part, as the older translation seemed too imprecise to him. In contrast to the original, it is not sung by the student, but by Adele.

Work history

Aribert Reimann's chamber opera Die Gespenstersonata was written in 1982/1983 on behalf of the Berliner Festspiele GmbH. The libretto is based on August Strindberg's Swedish chamber play Spöksonaten , which the composer translated into German with Uwe Schendel and arranged for the music. Its version essentially follows the dramatic structure of the original. In the second part he added a poem by Strindberg. He also tightened the text and changed it in some places. He partially assigned the dialogue texts to other people. This affects, for example, the dialogue between Adele and Arkenholz in the third part. After his opera Ein Traumspiel from 1964, this is Reimann's second setting of a Strindberg drama. He wrote the roles for the singers of the premiere, especially the actress of the mummy, Martha Mödl , because he had temporarily “lived in the spirit” with the ensemble.

The world premiere by the Deutsche Oper Berlin took place on September 25, 1984 as part of the Berliner Festwochen 1984 in the Hebbel Theater . Friedemann Layer directed the Ensemble Modern and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie . The production was done by Heinz Lukas-Kindermann , costumes and stage design by Dietrich Schoras. Hans Günter Nöcker (Alter, Director Hummel), David Knutson (Student Arkenholz), Horst Hiestermann (Colonel), Martha Mödl (Mummy), Gudrun Sieber (Fräulein), Donald Grobe (Johansson), William Dooley (Bengtsson), Barbara sang Scherler (dark lady) and Kaja Borris (cook). Critics then rated the opera as Reimann's best music theater piece to date.

The chamber opera, which can be performed with little effort, is one of the composer's most frequently performed works. The website of the Schott Music publishing house names the following productions (as of July 2020):

Recordings

literature

  • Luigi Bellingardi: Alcune riflessioni sulla “Ghost Sonata ” by Aribert Reimann. In: Sabine Ehrmann-Herfort, Markus Engelhardt (ed.): "Vanitatis fuga, Aeternitatis amor". Wolfgang Witzenmann on his 65th birthday (= Analecta Musicologica. Vol. 36). Laaber, Laaber 2005, ISBN 3-89007-603-3 , pp. 689-695.
  • The ghost sonata. In: Wolfgang Burde : Reimann. Life and work. Schott, Mainz 2005, ISBN 3-7957-0318-2 , pp. 301-325.
  • Jürgen Maehder : Studies on Aribert Reimann's musical theater. Musical dramaturgy in "Lear" and "The Ghost Sonata". In: Jürgen Kühnel , Ulrich Müller , Oswald Panagl (Hrsg.): Musiktheater der Gegenwart. Text and composition, reception and canon formation. Müller-Speiser, Anif / Salzburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-902537-11-9 , pp. 342-373.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m The Ghost Sonata. In: Wolfgang Burde : Reimann. Life and work. Schott, Mainz 2005, ISBN 3-7957-0318-2 , pp. 301-325.
  2. ↑ a b c d information on works from Verlag Schott Music , accessed on July 9, 2020.
  3. ↑ a b Work of the Week: Aribert Reimann - Die Gespenstersonate at Verlag Schott Music , June 19, 2017, accessed on July 19, 2020.
  4. ↑ The Ghost Sonata. In: Amanda Holden (Ed.): The Viking Opera Guide. Viking, London / New York 1993, ISBN 0-670-81292-7 , p. 855.
  5. ↑ a b c The Ghost Sonata. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , pp. 738-739.
  6. ↑ Peter P. Pachl : Aribert Reimann's chamber opera “Ghost Sonata” in the workshop of the Berlin State Opera. Review of the performance in Berlin 2017. In: Neue Musikzeitung , June 26, 2017, accessed on July 19, 2020.
  7. ↑ September 25, 1984: “Ghost Sonata”. In: L'Almanacco di Gherardo Casaglia .
  8. ↑ Information on the DVD of the world premiere on the Arthaus Musik label , accessed on July 9, 2020.
  9. ↑ a b Aribert Reimann. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005.