Jakob Lenz (opera)

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Opera dates
Title: Jakob Lenz
Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz drawing by Heinrich Pfenninger (1777)

Jacob Michael Reinhold Lenz
drawing by Heinrich Pfenninger (1777)

Shape: Chamber opera in thirteen pictures
Original language: German
Music: Wolfgang Rihm
Libretto : Michael Frohling
Literary source: Georg Büchner : Lenz
Premiere: March 8, 1979
Place of premiere: Hamburg State Opera (Opera stable)
Playing time: approx. 1 ¼ hours
Place and time of the action: The Alsace , 1778
people

Jakob Lenz is a chamber opera in thirteen pictures by Wolfgang Rihm (music) with a libretto by Michael Fröhling based on the story Lenz by Georg Büchner . It was premiered on March 8, 1979 in the Opera stable of the Hamburg State Opera.

action

The opera describes the progressive spiritual disruption of the poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz during his historically documented three-week stay with Johann Friedrich Oberlin in the Vosges . It is less about a representation of the external events than about "a condensed musical psychogram" of the protagonist.

1st picture. Lenz walks mechanically, then more and more rushed as if on the run through the mountains. Its run culminates in a "drawn out, animal-like" scream. He hears voices calling out to him the words “Spirit!” And “Come!” And plunges into a body of water in front of the house of the pastor and philanthropist Johann Friedrich Oberlin.

2nd picture. Oberlin comes out of the house, startled by the noise. Lenz claims that he would only take a bath and came to bring greetings from Christoph Kaufmann . When he mentions his name, Oberlin recognizes him as the poet by whom he has already read several works. He leads him to his room and says good night to him.

Interlude

3rd picture. Lenz lies sleepless in bed brooding. He thinks of God and of whom he loves Friederike Brion . Voices torment him with the words "In this world I have no 'boyfriend". Lenz runs out and jumps into the water to cool off.

4th picture. Oberlin finds Lenz in the water for the second time. He suggests walking together through God's nature. Lenz is said to use the healing power of the sun. At the sight of the clouds, Lenz begins to dream. A group of farmers working in the area gathers around him like a community. You give him hope.

5th picture. With Oberlin's permission, Lenz preaches to the farmers in the form of a longing prayer. The farmers sing a chorale: "Suffering be all my gain". In awe and lost in thought, Lenz goes back to the house. He doesn't notice that his friend Kaufmann has meanwhile arrived.

Interlude

6th picture. Oberlin and Kaufmann talk about the mental state of their friend. Both want to help Lenz. Oberlin withdraws so that Kaufmann can speak to him alone. After Kaufmann greeted him with gentle irony, Lenz complains about his dwindling creativity. They both talk about literature for a while. Then Kaufmann gets down to business: he has brought letters from Lenz's father and his family is asking him to come back home. Lenz exclaims that he would rather die and runs away.

7th picture. In the mountains alone, Lenz writes the poem "How mild and sweet the coolness of the evening falls". The voices reappear and announce Friederike's imminent death. To save her, Lenz rushes back to Oberlin.

Interlude. Two children are singing in the canon: “He was warm in his heart, now it's so tight, so poor! He wants to go ... "

A kind of dream image.

8th picture. In the middle of the night Lenz enters Oberlin's room and asks him about his lover. Oberlin has no idea what he's talking about. Lenz feels the irresistible urge to rush to Friederike immediately. Before the eyes of Oberlin and Lenz, the room is transformed into the mountains.

9th picture. The voices dance a sarabande in the shape of mountains to the words "In this world I have no joy".

10th picture. Lenz finds a dead girl laid out, surrounded by mourners. He takes the girl for Friederike, tries in vain to bring her back to life with the words “Stand up and walk”, and frantically races off.

11th picture. Lenz walks aimlessly through the area until morning breaks. The voices call out to him that after the death of his beloved he must die himself to see her again. However, his half-hearted suicide attempt fails.

Interlude

12th picture. Kaufmann brings Lenz back to Oberlin. There Lenz fantasizes that he murdered his lover. When he got more and more into a frenzy, the two of them put him in a straitjacket that Kaufmann wisely brought with him. Nonetheless, Lenz jumps up and walks around with his jacket on, first whispering, then calling ever louder for Friederike.

Last picture. Oberlin and Kaufmann are appalled by the condition of their friend, who now only stutters the word "consequently". The two realize that there is nothing more they can do for him. They move away quickly.

layout

The story Lenz by Georg Büchner , used as a template, consists primarily of a representation of the protagonist's emotional situation. There are only a few sections with direct speech. That makes setting an opera to music problematic. Rihm saw the text as a “description of the state within a disintegration process” and, in his own words, designed “the main character himself as a multi-layered level of action”. He described the music as “extreme chamber music, always on the go into the main character. Although Lenz acts or tries to act or believes to act on many levels, he has no room for maneuver. That is why it is closely interwoven with the sound that surrounds it ”. Rihm described the complexity of his relationships with the environment in the form of the six “voices”. They fuel Lenz's madness and ultimately cause his collapse. In contrast, the other two named persons, Oberlin and Kaufmann, are treated one-dimensionally.

The main character is assigned a chord consisting of a tritone with a minor second (b-f-gb), which also provides the coloring of the six voices. This “shimmering” sound is already at the beginning of opera, and it dominates the music especially in key positions. Due to its composition of a pure fifth and tritone ("diabolus in musica"), of "intact and deformed consonance", it symbolizes the "deviation from normality and the friction with it" (Bermbach).

Lenz's singing part alternates between singing, spoken chanting and spoken text. It is based on the title role in Alban Berg 's opera Wozzeck, which is also based on a text by Büchner .

Tonal and atonal elements mix in music . Rihm also processed older forms of music. The saraband rhythm and a landler appear. A few times there are approaches to arias, and as a large form he uses a rondo known as "rondorelief" . The treatment of the main character's story of suffering is dramaturgically reminiscent of an oratorio of the passion . The music is intended to be rhetorical and there are elements of the musica poetica and parody technique . There are also echoes of the Christian chant , the motet and the madrigal . At the end of the second picture, Oberlin quotes the hit So ein Tag, as beautiful as today. Rihm said the following about the purpose of these mixed styles:

“A person like Jakob Lenz on stage is complicated simply because there are several stages in it. The music must represent these constantly present stages. I tried to do this in the most direct way: the musical layers were not neatly separated, but kept constantly present until they - each obeying their own dramaturgy - had to break out. "

- Wolfgang Rihm : Codes of disturbance in the Jakob Lenz program booklet . Hamburg State Opera 1979

The chamber orchestra has an unusual composition of a few wind instruments, a harpsichord and three cellos as well as a larger percussion . Since the softer instruments such as flute, horn or violin are missing, the result is a rather dry sound that emphasizes the language. The instrumental ensemble is mainly used as an accompaniment or illustrative. An example of the latter is the drum rhythm, reminiscent of an accelerated heartbeat, to the words “must run, must run” at the end of the third picture.

Ulrich Schreiber pointed out that the characters Oberlin and Kaufmann can also be interpreted as products of Lenz's imagination, since in his perception they blend with Goethe (Kaufmann) and Herder (Oberlin). A few years before Lenz, Goethe had a brief love affair with Friederike Brion , from the end of which she suffered for a long time. The amalgamation of the characters takes place through a "musical schizography [...] as an almost uninterrupted rondo whipped up by percussion and electronically amplified harpsichord" (Schreiber).

The high point of the work is the extensive discussion of the three characters in the sixth picture. Here Rihm musically refers to his Hölderlin Fragments, which premiered in 1977 .

orchestra

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

Work history

Wolfgang Rihm's second chamber opera Jakob Lenz was composed between December 1977 and June 1978 on behalf of the Hamburg State Opera . He dedicated it "to the memory of my honored teacher Eugen Werner Velte ". The libretto was written by Michael Fröhling, who combined elements from Georg Büchner's story Lenz with poems by the poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz , letters from his friends and the report by Johann Friedrich Oberlin . Lenz, who suffered from schizophrenia, spent three weeks with the latter in the Vosges Mountains without finding any relief.

The world premiere took place on March 8, 1979 in the Opera stable of the Hamburg State Opera . Members of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra played under the direction of Klauspeter Seibel . The staging was by Siegfried Schoenbohm and the stage design by Brigitte Friesz . The three main actors were Richard Salter as Lenz, Ude Krekow as Oberlin and Peter Haage as a businessman.

Jakob Lenz developed into one of the most frequently performed new chamber operas over the next few years. The Musiktheater im Revier Gelsenkirchen showed it in the same year in a production by Thomas Rübenacker (conductor: Volkmar Olbrich), which proved to be even more successful than the premiere production and as a guest performance at the Theater im Marstall in Munich (1980) and in Frankfurt am Main , Paris, Rennes, Bonn, Salvador Bahia, Buenos Aires, São Paolo, Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte . By the year 2000 there were already around fifty new productions. The following performances, for example, can be verified:

Recordings

  • 19./20. December 1983 - Arturo Tamayo (conductor), Berlin Chamber Orchestra , Schöneberger Boys' Choir .
    Richard Salter (Jakob Lenz), William Dooley (Oberlin), Ernst August Steinhoff (businessman), Josef Becker, Klaus Lang, Barbara Scherler, Regina Schudel, Helga Visnievska and Barbara Vogel (voices), Göktürk Baruta and Christian Preinesberger (children).
    Studio shot.
    harmonia mundi LP: 16 9522 3 (2 LPs).
  • November 16, 2006 - Olivier Dejours (conductor), Orchester National de Bordeaux Aquitaine, Jeune Polyphonie Vocale d'Aquitaine, Membres du Chœur de l ' Opéra national de Bordeaux .
    Johannes Kösters (Jakob Lenz), Gregory Reinhart (Oberlin), Ian Caley (businessman).
    Live from Bordeaux.

Web links

Commons : Jakob Lenz (opera)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ The six voices are not intended as supporting roles or as a choir, but mostly acting main roles, nature or real people.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wulf Konold : Jakob Lenz. In: Rudolf Kloiber , Wulf Konold, Robert Maschka: Handbuch der Oper. 9th, expanded, revised edition 2002. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag / Bärenreiter, ISBN 3-423-32526-7 , pp. 604–605.
  2. ↑ a b c d Wolfgang Schreiber: Jakob Lenz. In: Attila Csampai , Dietmar Holland : Opera guide. E-book. Rombach, Freiburg im Breisgau 2015, ISBN 978-3-7930-6025-3 , pp. 1471–1473.
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Frank Siebert: Jakob Lenz. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 5: Works. Piccinni - Spontini. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-492-02415-7 , pp. 249-250.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced students. 20th Century II. German and Italian Opera after 1945, France, Great Britain. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-7618-1437-2 , pp. 273-275.
  5. ↑ a b c Udo Bermbach (Ed.): Opera in the 20th century. Development tendencies and composers. Metzler, Stuttgart 2000, ISBN 3-476-01733-8 , pp. 505-508.
  6. ↑ a b c Supplement to the LP box harmonia mundi 16 9522 3.
  7. ↑ Information in the score.
  8. ↑ a b Information on the works of the Universal Edition , accessed on August 14, 2019.
  9. ↑ a b c d e f Jakob Lenz. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , pp. 745-746.
  10. ↑ Opernwelt 3/1982, p. 55.
  11. ↑ Jakob Lenz. In: Amanda Holden (Ed.): The Viking Opera Guide. Viking, London / New York 1993, ISBN 0-670-81292-7 , pp. 862-863.
  12. ↑ Opernwelt 3/1989, p. 56.
  13. ↑ Opernwelt 7/2008, p. 14.
  14. ↑ Andrew Clements: Jakob Lenz - review. London 2012 performance review. In: The Guardian , April 18, 2012, accessed August 16, 2019.
  15. ↑ Uwe Schweikert : Empathy for someone who is lost. In: Opernwelt , December 2014, p. 4.
  16. ↑ Götz Thieme: performance of the year. In: Opernwelt Jahrbuch 2015, p. 28.
  17. ↑ Opernwelt , August 2018, p. 36.
  18. ↑ Opernwelt , May 2019, p. 48.
  19. ↑ a b Wolfgang Rihm. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005.