Judith (Matthew)
| Opera dates | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Judith |
Andrea Mantegna : Judith and Holofernes, 1431 |
|
| Shape: | Opera in two acts |
| Original language: | German |
| Music: | Siegfried Matthus |
| Libretto : | Siegfried Matthus |
| Literary source: |
Friedrich Hebbel : Judith , Old Testament |
| Premiere: | September 28, 1985 |
| Place of premiere: | Komische Oper , East Berlin |
| Playing time: | about 2 hours |
| Place and time of the action: | Before and in the city of Bethulien, at the time of the Old Testament (around 350 BC or 600 BC) |
| people | |
|
In the Babylonian camp
In Bethulien |
|
Judith is an opera in two acts by Siegfried Matthus based on Friedrich Hebbel's tragedy Judith from 1840 and texts from the Old Testament . The world premiere took place on September 28, 1985 in the Komische Oper in East Berlin.
action
The following table of contents is based on the video recording of the world premiere production, supplemented by some interpretative notes from Sigrid Neef and Piper's Encyclopedia of Music Theater.
first act
Place of the city of Bethulien, located on a mountain plateau and secured by fortress walls; at the foot of the mountain the camp of the Babylonians
The Babylonians under their captain Holofernes lay siege to the Hebrew city of Bethulia. They are sure of victory and haughty. Almost all peoples have already submitted to them. Only the residents of Bethulia are still resisting, but they are already suffering deeply from the privations of the siege. The religious differences in both camps are clear. Many gods are worshiped by the Babylonians - but they do not speak or act. Although Holofernes ordered that the god to be worshiped should be drawn by lot, he now orders that his people should sacrifice to a god "whom everyone knows and does not know". In contrast, Jehovah, the invisible God of the Hebrews, himself has power over his people. The prophet Daniel and the high priest Osias call on his behalf to persevere.
Holofernes urges his people to bring their problems to him and not be afraid to complain about their superiors. A soldier accuses his captain of having raped the female slave he captured. Holofernes sentenced the defendant to death - and also the soldier for his boldness. When his chamberlain reports that he had already sent for the affected slave, Holofernes rebukes him for having foreseen his intentions. He does not want to be “unlearned”. Secretly he longs for an equal opponent. He would love one of them - but still defeat them in battle and die with him.
In Bethulien, the beautiful young widow Judith talks to her servant Mirza. She is still untouched because her husband avoided physical contact with her because of a "holy shower" and died a few months after the wedding. She rejects a new marriage with the courting Ephraim. However, at night she dreams of jumping into the arms of her God who appears as a man and sinking into it as if into an abyss.
In a simultaneous scene, Judith thinks on one side of the disturbing events of her wedding night, while on the other Holofernes remembers his “victories over female nature”.
A messenger reported that King Nebuchadnezzar had ordered that from now on only he himself was to be worshiped as a god. Holofernes then has all idols destroyed.
In the beleaguered Bethulien the situation becomes more and more desperate. While the prophet Daniel continues to urge, in God's name, to persevere, his brother Ammon advises that the gates be opened. Daniel prevails and incites the people to stone Ammon.
Holofernes curses King Nebuchadnezzar for his arrogance. He could not bring his great thought to an end, but only make it ridiculous.
In the face of the impending conquest, Ephraim urges Judith to marry. This is the only way he can continue to protect himself. Judith makes him the condition that he first go to the enemy camp and kill Holofernes. Since Ephraim doesn't dare to do that, Judith decides to do it herself.
Holofernes announced that the last people who would humble themselves before him should be the only one to be destroyed. To forestall this, the kings of the surrounding countries send messengers offering their submission. Achior, a Moabite captain, tells of the fearlessness of the Hebrews. He advises to find out whether they have sinned against their God. Only then is it possible to defeat them. Holofernes orders him to be taken to the city as punishment, where he is to share the fate of the besieged.
Judith begs God for a sign.
Holofernes announces that he will worship the Hebrew God if the Bethulians should submit to him. He offers a glass of wine to Jehovah.
Judith continues to plead for a divine sign. She hopes a hero will appear and make her intervention unnecessary. But she receives no answer. There you come - from God? - the idea of using their beauty to destroy Holofernes.
In Bethulia, Daniel and the high priest admonish the desperate people to persevere.
While Judith pleads with God that only bad things will be reported to her from Holofernes, so that she does not find any reason to waver, he raves about the intoxication of blood and wine.
The Hebrew Hosea calls for the city gates to be opened. Again Daniel contradicts and asks the people to stone him. Hosea, however, demands a divine judgment. Daniel should be thrown into the fire. If he survived, the gates should be kept locked. Daniel dies in the rehearsal. When the city gates are about to be opened, the Moabite Achior appears and explains to the Hebrews that Holofernes swore not to let anyone live. They prefer to die by their own hands. If God doesn't send help by the following day, they will kill themselves. Judith asks Achior about Holofernes' character and learns of his pride and cruelty. Your decision is now made.
While Judith gets into revenge fantasies and is viewed by the Bethuli as the promised miraculous salvation, Holofernes mocks his victims. He does not fear their vengeance. His people sing of the "miracle of wine". Judith gets ready to go to the enemy's camp with her maid Mirza.
Second act
Army camp with Holofernes' tent
The Babylonian eunuch tells of Holofernes' sleep. He dreamed that someone wanted to strangle him and attacked the supposed opponent with a dagger. He stabbed himself in the chest, but fortunately survived. Holofernes himself interprets the event in such a way that he also has power over death.
When the arrival of a beautiful woman is reported to him, Holofernes lets her step forward. He likes to see all women - with the exception of his mother. He is happy that he never met her: “What is a mother for her son? It is the mirror of his impotence from yesterday or tomorrow. "
Judith steps forward, flatters Holofernes and asks him for mercy for her people, whom God is angry with. She tries to make this role of compassionate palatable to him. Holofernes explains that by asking her to do just that, she's making that impossible. Nevertheless, both are fascinated by each other. Holofernes agrees to spare her, her relatives and friends.
Ephraim comes in. He first lets Holofernes promise that his life will be spared, and then tries to kill him. The guards stop his attack. When Ephraim tries to kill himself out of shame, Holofernes prevents this too, because he has promised him his life. He has the assassin locked in the cage of his late favorite monkey, where he is supposed to learn the tricks of his predecessor.
Gradually Judith began to doubt whether she would be able to carry out the murder. She calls out to Holofernes: “I hate you, I curse you. Now kill me! ". Holofernes this only arouses more. He "forcibly pulls Judith into his bedchamber".
The chamberlain mocks Judith's maid Mirza. This worries about her mistress, whose soul she sees endangered. After giving herself to Holofernes, Judith steps out of the tent again without having carried out her plan. She tells Mizra about her inner conflict and looks again in the tent after the quietly sleeping Holofernes before she finally manages to behead him.
After the fact, Judith continues to feel insecure, because she can only be justified by the consequences. She prays to God for peace and happiness for her people. The Babylonians get confused by their dead leader. They become victims of the Bethulians who are now raging among them with “butchery courage”. Achior now worships the Hebrew God, and their high priest praises Judith's act as a divine miracle. She is glorified as the savior of her fatherland. Ephraim, however, calls her the "whore of Israel" and mistreats her. Judith watches the rest of the event silently with growing horror. In the end she sees no other way out than to kill herself.
The opera is concluded with a finale in Passacaglia form, in which Judith's downfall is mimicked - according to the score, the “depiction of Judith's destruction with the participation of all characters in the plot and using previous events shown and reported in an unreal time” and context ". The choir begs: “Lord, save me! Hear my prayer and let my screams come to you. Save me from the excrement so that I do not sink [...]. Hear me, Lord, turn to me in your great mercy and do not hide your face, for I am afraid. You know my shame, shame and shame; my adversaries are all before you. […] I am miserable and I feel pain. Lord, save me, save me! "
layout
In contrast to the biblical narrative, Judith's deed is not simply glorified in Hebbel and Matthus, but is psychologically motivated and questioned. Here she does not sneak secretly into the tent of her opponent, but lets herself be officially announced and is confronted with her own motives for action in a conversation with him.
In the opera, Matthus juxtaposed some actually consecutive scenes simultaneously. The self-abandonment of Judith corresponds to Holofernes's overconfidence. Both believe that their actions are carrying out a divine command. In monologues, the protagonists express their innermost feelings and desires, which are directly confronted with the external actions. Of particular importance is Holofernes' monologue, in which he belittles his own mother: What is “also a mother for her son? It is the mirror of his helplessness from yesterday or tomorrow. ”In a similar way, Judith, standing in front of the sleeping Holofernes, realizes that the divine mission and her own sensual needs are inseparable. This irritating quality of Hebbel's drama was usually defused in the history of the performance by giving the two main characters a special position as “great characters” who felt drawn to each other due to their resulting loneliness. Matthew himself initially adopted this interpretation:
“ Harry Kupfer suggests the 'Judith'. 'Judith'? - this is the Old Testament story - a drama by Hebbel. Dark memories of pictures in museums. I read the Hebbel - once (what is this about today?), Twice (a dramatic story!), Three times (verily, an operatic subject!) And again and again. This is my subject! I'll make an opera out of it! What wonderful protagonists! The female-believing Judith, the male-unbelieving Holofernes. Big and lonely in their longing for equal partners. In unusual circumstances, they meet and burn together. The age-old battle between the sexes, the current emancipation of women. An eternally valid story with foreboding references to the present. They still have to be found and designed. "
A month later he saw the content of the drama more differentiated:
“It wasn't important to me to just find a reason or a justification for the act of Judith and to shape it. It was precisely this woman's great confusion, her self-consciousness in her own thinking, her lack of clarity about the deeper motives of her actions, her striving for emancipation, the unstoppable course of events leading to her deed and her failure afterwards - therein I found the reason for such an old story today to introduce again. "
Judith's hope that her deed will be justified by the consequences does not come true. Despite their urgent prayer for peace for their people, in the end the Hebrews prove as cruel as the Babylonian conquerors. The work also contains feminist traits. For example, it is described how a man abuses women to demonstrate power, and the widow Judith describes her experiences at the beginning of the opera as follows: "A woman is nothing, only through the man can she become something."
The technique of the simultaneous scenes makes it possible for Matthus to detach the musical connections from the respective locations. For example, Judith and Holofernes can already sing in a duet (or at the same time in two related monologues) before they have physically met - Holofernes with the text "Weib ist Weib" (Hebbel), Judith with a prayer-like excerpt from the Song of Songs (“I looked in my bed at night”). Typical of the opera is an ambiguity of music and words, as exemplified at the end of the first act, when at the same time the Bethulians cheer Judith as a divine “miracle” and the Bethulians the “miracle” of wine. Matthus creates the simultaneous scenes with almost cinematic means. Sigrid Neef described it as follows: “As if in a long shot, he brings the besieged Bethulians and the besieging Babylonians into the audio image at the same time; he confronts the long shot (the choirs) with close-ups of the protagonists represented in short scenes and monologues. "
The opera is very symmetrical. In the first act, this concerns the sequence of choir and solo scenes as well as Judith's four duet scenes with Holofernes and Ephraim. The inserted instrumental pieces in the second act correspond to this.
The great musical contrasts are striking. The large-scale vocal line of Judith's dream tale follows on from the first Holofernes monologue with a strong motor. The lamentations of the besieged suddenly turn into the aggressive cries of stoning. The ariosen passages contain expressive declamatory elements, just as, conversely, the recitatives always have melodic sections. The instrumental colors and the vocal means used are just as strongly differentiated.
Eberhard Schmidt named the "unreal sound" of celesta, cymbals, glockenspiel, vibraphone, piano and harp after the murder of Holofernes as an example of Matthus's art of instrumentation - "it seems as if Judith's quiet singing is already blowing from beyond the grave" . At the end of this scene the instruments are silent. Judith's closing words are only spoken, even if they are rhythmically noted. The opera closes with the great Passacaglia - another simultaneous scene in which Matthus depicts the “connection between glorification and abuse, between glorification and profanation”. It ends with 38 tutticluster strokes in fortissimo assai . The critic Hans Josef Herbot described the Passacaglia as follows:
"[...] the double basses [begin] to chant a line in the dotted rhythm of the French overture - the BACH motif is added three times at different levels to a twelve-tone line: The basic structure of a Passacaglia was created in this way, that musical structure and development chain, which - linear, wavy or ring-shaped - is guided over the constantly constant, persistent or even unstoppable, i.e. fateful, progressive bass figure. 'Lord save me! Hear my prayer and let my screams come to you ', the choir reflects, psalmodizing, the escalating thoughts of a tormented soul. "
In terms of harmony and instrumentation, Matthus is based on the style of Richard Strauss and especially on his early operas Salome and Elektra , which are thematically related to Judith . Matthus himself uses so-called "scales" of seven to nine tones to build up the melodic and harmonic basic structure. The sound language is expressive. Matthus himself declared in 1988 that in Judith there is “no scale structure and harmonic formations derived from it that are binding for the entire opera”. "However, each scene is based on a harmony that is specific to this section and contains certain structural deviations from the other scenes."
The two main characters only meet in person in the second act. Here dialogues and monologues alternate with a total of seven instrumental preludes and interludes, the fourth of which forms the dramaturgical climax of the entire opera. Christiane Theobald wrote about this sentence:
“Here the music for the fulfillment of sexual liberation is both composed and interpreted in a purely formal manner. [...] Just the fact that 16 bars of music are assigned to the act of sexual liberation, while the act of political liberation, the beheading of Holofernes, only takes three bars (death is practically not composed, it 'happens') only that Matthew prefers the Hebbelian view of Judith to the Old Testament. "
orchestra
The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:
- Woodwinds : three flutes (including piccolo and alto flute), two oboes , English horn , two clarinets , bass clarinet , two bassoons , contrabassoon
- Brass : four horns , three trumpets , three trombones , double bass trombone (also 4th trombone), tuba
- five timpani , percussion (four players): three bongos , three tom-toms , landsknecht drum or large tom-tom, snare drum , large drum , cymbal , hanging cymbal, three gongs , two tam-tams , two small cow bells, large cow bells, anvil or steel plate, Auto brake drums, glockenspiel , cymbals , xylophone , vibraphone , tubular bells , castanets , tambourine , two wooden block drums , large ratchet
- harp
- Piano (also celesta )
- Electric bass guitar
- Strings
Work history
The composer Siegfried Matthus dealt with Friedrich Hebbel's tragedy Judith of 1840 from 1979 onwards . In it he followed a suggestion by the director Harry Kupfer . Matthus himself put together the libretto for the opera. In addition to Hebbel, he used some texts from the Old Testament , namely Psalms 115 , 135 , 72 and 104 and the Song of Solomon . Hebbel's tragedy is based on the book of Judith from the Apocrypha of the Old Testament. His Holofernes portrait for baritone and orchestra was also created during this time. It was premiered in 1981 during the opening week of the new Leipzig Gewandhaus (baritone: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau , conductor: Kurt Masur ). Matthus took over large parts of it, slightly revised, in his opera, which he composed between 1980 and 1984.
The work was originally intended for the reopening of the Dresden Semperoper, which was destroyed in World War II . However, since the initiator Harry Kupfer had left Dresden and had been artistic director of the Komische Oper in (East) Berlin since 1981 , the premiere took place there on September 28, 1985 in Kupfer's production. Rolf Reuter was the musical director . Eva-Maria Bundschuh (Judith) and Werner Haseleu (Holofernes) sang the two main roles . The performance was a huge success, which was also due to Bundschuh's outstanding singing and acting achievements. This was followed by a video recording on GDR television and a publication on record.
In West Germany, the opera was first performed in Krefeld in 1986 (conductor: Reinhard Schwarz, director: Eike Gramss ; Judith: Christa Ranacher, Holofernes: Monte Jaffe). There were further performances in 1989 on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution at the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin (conductor: Heinz Fricke , director: Erhard Fischer ), in Karlsruhe (conductor: Peter Sommer, director: Eike Gramss), Essen and Nuremberg. In 1990 there was a production in Santa Fe. Gramss also performed the work in 1992 with the same main actors as in Krefeld in Bern.
In 2014 there were concert performances of the opera at the Rheinsberg Castle Chamber Opera and in the Stadthalle Braunschweig (there only the second act) under the musical direction of Georg Menskes (Rheinsberg) and Judith Kubitz (Braunschweig) with Rena Harms as Judith and Jared Ice as Holofernes.
Recordings
- 1986 - Rolf Reuter (conductor), Harry Kupfer (staging), orchestra, choir, soloists, choir soloists and small actors at the Komische Oper Berlin .
Werner Haseleu (Holofernes), Horst-Dieter Kaschel (Captain Holofernes'), Wolfgang Hellmich (Chamberlain), George Ionescu (Achior), Alfred Wroblewski (High Priest), Joachim Vogt (Messenger), Wilfried Schaal (Soldier), Hans-Otto Rogge (Ephraim), Hans-Martin Nau (Osias), Manfred Hopp (Daniel), Vladimir Bauer (Ammon), Klement Slowioczek (Hosea), Eva-Maria Bundschuh (Judith), Kristine Röhr-Bach / Christiane Röhr (Mirza), Peter Seufert (envoy from Edom), Helmut Völker (envoy from Moab).
Studio recording in cooperation with the radio of the GDR .
Eterna 7 25 136-137; Berlin Classic CD: BC 9339-2. - 1987 - occupation as before; TV director: Annelies Thomas.
Video; live from the Komische Oper Berlin; First broadcast September 27, 1987.
Web links
- Work data on Judith based on MGG with discography at Operone
- Work information from Breitkopf & Härtel
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Judith. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , pp. 513-514.
- ↑ Heinz Wagner: The great manual of the opera. 4th edition. Nikol, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-937872-38-4 , p. 795.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Sigrid Neef : Judith. In: German Opera in the 20th Century - GDR 1949–1989. Lang, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-86032-011-4 , pp. 350-359.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Eberhard Schmidt: Judith. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 4: Works. Massine - Piccinni. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1991, ISBN 3-492-02414-9 , pp. 9-12.
- ↑ a b c Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced learners. 20th Century II. German and Italian Opera after 1945, France, Great Britain. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2005, ISBN 3-7618-1437-2 , pp. 141-143.
- ^ Siegfried Matthus: Conversation with Gerhard Müller. In: Mathias Hansen (Ed.): Composing at the time. Conversations with composers from the GDR. Leipzig 1988.
- ↑ Press release on the 24th summer festival of the Rheinsberg Castle Chamber Opera ( Memento from August 9, 2014 in the Internet Archive ).
- ↑ Performances in 2014 on Siegfried Matthus' website, accessed on December 4, 2017.
- ↑ a b Siegfried Matthus. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005.
- ↑ Information in the credits of the video recording.