Clothes make the man (Zemlinsky)
| Opera dates | |
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| Title: | Clothes make the man |
Title page of the piano reduction, Berlin 1911 |
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| Shape: | Musical comedy in a prelude and three or two acts |
| Original language: | German |
| Music: | Alexander von Zemlinsky |
| Libretto : | Leo field |
| Literary source: | Gottfried Keller : The people of Seldwyla |
| Premiere: | 1) October 2, 1910 2) April 20, 1922 |
| Place of premiere: | 1) Volksoper Vienna 2) New German Theater Prague |
| Playing time: | about 2 hours |
| Place and time of the action: | Goldach in Switzerland, 19th century |
| people | |
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Clothes make the man is an opera (original name: "Musical Comedy") in a prelude and three acts by Alexander von Zemlinsky (music). The libretto by Leo Feld is based on the novel of the same name from the second volume of Gottfried Keller's cycle of novels The People of Seldwyla (1874). The premiere of the first version took place on October 2, 1910 in the Volksoper Vienna . A two-act new version was first played on April 20, 1922 in the New German Theater in Prague.
Action from the 1910 version
The following table of contents of the first version follows the information in Antony Beaumont's Zemlinsky biography, in the Harenberg opera guide , in Heinz Wagner's large handbook of opera and in the handbook of opera by Kloiber / Kunold / Maschka.
foreplay
On the country road
Dissatisfied with his business in Seldwyla, the tailor Wenzel Strapinski has given up his job there in order to seek his fortune elsewhere. After saying goodbye to his two fellow journeymen on the outskirts of the city, he sits in his journeyman's pieces - an elegant travel coat and a sable hat - on a milestone by the roadside. Fortunately, an empty equipage drives up. The coachman asks him for directions to Goldach and is ready to take him there.
first act
In front of the “Zur Waage” inn in Goldach
The authorized signatory Melchior Böhni woos Nettchen, the daughter of the district council. She rejects him because on the one hand she rejects his self-satisfied manner and on the other hand she hopes for a great love with a nobleman. Her father would not object to a connection between the two, however. Strapinski drives up in the stately coach. In his elegant clothes everyone thinks he is a nobleman, especially since the coachman calls him “Count Strapinski from Poland” before continuing his journey. Everyone cuddles Strapinski and you set the table for your meal. When eating, Strapinski initially rejects the soup, but accepts the champagne. Finally he eats a large pie, hungry. When the village honors - the notary Adam Litumlei, the town clerk Polykarpus Federspiel, the furniture dealer Häberlein and the tile dealer Pütschli-Nievergelt - show up for a game of cards, Strapinski continues his charade and joins them for a cigar. Böhni, Nettchen and their father join them. Strapinski is delighted with the girl's beauty. The jealous Böhni becomes suspicious. He noticed the strapinski fingers pricked by the tailor shop. He decides to inquire about the stranger in Seldwyla. Since the coachman apparently took his strap-skis luggage with him on his departure, the others hurriedly bring over sleeping clothes, toothbrushes and other things as replacements. Strapinski thinks about whether he should flee - but he wants to see Nettchen again.
Second act
On the good of the council
The district council has invited Strapinski and the dignitaries with their families to his estate. There the men play cards while the women talk about recipes over coffee. Böhni still doubts the identity of the "Count". Strapinski almost gives himself away with his views on clothing in Goldach. Federspiel and Litumlei's daughter Lieselein try to get him to intercede for their marriage. Häberlein and Pütschli-Nievergelt are looking for his support in the upcoming elections. Finally, everyone goes to the dining room to eat. Nettchen sings the Heine song “Lehn 'your Wang' to my Wang”, in which she accompanies herself on the piano. Strapinski goes into the garden because he wants to run away. However, he still wants to say goodbye to Nettchen. The two get closer and they both admit their love. Böhni catches her hugging and calls the councilor. Nettchen briefly explains Strapinski to her fiancé. The other guests join in with their congratulations, and the delighted councilor invites everyone to the evening celebration in the “Waldhaus”. Böhni, who has meanwhile found out the true identity of Strapinski in Seldwyla, but is still silent for the time being, calls everyone to waltz. In order to publicly unmask the "Count", he invites all of Seldwyla to an engagement party.
Third act
A dance hall in the "Waldhaus" between Goldach and Seldwyla, with a glass wall behind, through which you can see the snow-covered courtyard
To publicly expose the alleged count, Böhni plans to perform a pantomime in which Strapinski's former masters and his colleagues have assured him that they will be involved. Böhni tells them that he and Strapinski are rivals in love. The company from both places arrives. Strapinski and Nettchen drive up in a sleigh. Böhni invites everyone to a swank, a “tailor's custom”. A prologue explains the plot of the pantomime piece, which is entitled “Clothes make the man”. The master plays the "wolf in sheep's clothing" and he wears the same hat as Strapinski. The so exposed flees under the ridicule of the citizens.
On the country road
Bells can be heard from Seldwyla. It's snowing. Strapinski went to sleep in the ditch where Nettchen found him. He tells her the cause of all the mix-up and is ready to give it up. But when Böhni and the councilor arrive and Böhni assures him that he still wants to marry Nettchen, she continues to stand by Strapinski. She takes him out of his hiding place and explains that even if he is only a tailor and not a count, he still has a good heart. Everyone cheers.
Action taken from the 1922 version
The following table of contents of the second version follows the piano reduction as well as the information in Antony Beaumont's Zemlinsky biography, in Piper's Encyclopedia of Music Theater , in Reclam's Opernlexikon , in the Viking Opera Guide and on Grove Music Online .
foreplay
On the country road
Dissatisfied with his business in Seldwyla, the tailor Wenzel Strapinski has given up his job there in order to seek his fortune elsewhere. After saying goodbye to his two fellow journeymen on the outskirts of the city, he sits in his journeyman's pieces - an elegant travel coat and a sable hat - on a milestone by the roadside. Fortunately, an empty equipage drives up. The coachman asks him for directions to Goldach and is ready to take him there.
Interlude
first act
In Goldach
The authorized signatory Melchior Böhni woos Nettchen, the daughter of the district council. However, she feels repulsed by his complacent manner and hopes for another happiness. Strapinski drives up in the stately coach. In his elegant clothes everyone thinks he is a nobleman, especially since the coachman calls him “Count Strapinski from Poland” before continuing his journey. Everyone cuddles Strapinski and you set the table for your meal. Strapinski hesitates at first when eating. But then he eats a large pie hungry. When the village honors - the notary Adam Litumlei, the town clerk Polykarpus Federspiel, the furniture dealer Häberlein and the tile dealer Pütschli-Nievergelt - show up for a game of cards, Strapinski continues his charade and joins them for a cigar. Böhni, Nettchen and their father join them. Strapinski is delighted with the girl's beauty. The jealous Böhni becomes suspicious. He noticed the strapinski fingers pricked by the tailor shop. He decides to inquire about the stranger in Seldwyla. Since the coachman apparently took his strap-skis luggage with him on his departure, the others hurriedly bring over sleeping clothes, toothbrushes and other things as replacements. Strapinski thinks about whether he should flee - but he wants to see Nettchen again.
Second act
On the good of the council
The district council has invited Strapinski and the dignitaries with their families to his estate. Nettchen sings the Heine song “Lehn 'your Wang' to my Wang”, in which she accompanies herself on the piano. Finally, everyone goes to the dining room to eat. Strapinski goes into the garden because he wants to run away. However, he still wants to say goodbye to Nettchen. The two get closer and they both admit their love. Böhni catches her hugging and calls the councilor. Nettchen briefly explains Strapinski to her fiancé. The other guests join in with their congratulations, and the delighted councilor invites everyone to the evening celebration in the “Waldhaus”. Böhni is seething with jealousy. Nevertheless, he calls everyone to waltz.
Interlude: "The malicious Böhni"
The forest house
The company from both places gathers for the celebration in the inn. To publicly expose the alleged count, Böhni plans to perform a pantomime in which Strapinski's former masters and his colleagues have assured him that they will be involved. Strapinski and Nettchen drive up in a sleigh. Böhni invites everyone to a swank, a “tailor's custom”. A prologue explains the plot of the pantomime piece, which is entitled “Clothes make the man”. The master plays the "wolf in sheep's clothing" and he wears the same hat as Strapinski. The citizens scoff at the man who was exposed in this way, but who is not intimidated. He replies that those present made a fool of themselves. You yourself would have been in awe of him. He only feels guilty of Nettchen. The crowd moves away, shaking their heads until Strapinski and Nettchen are alone. He tells her the cause of all the mix-up and is ready to give it up. But Nettchen continues to adhere to him: "If I can't be a Countess, I will become a Mistress!"
layout
Instrumentation
The orchestral line-up of the opera (version from 1922) contains the following instruments:
- Woodwinds : three flutes (3rd also piccolo ), three oboes (3rd also English horn ), three clarinets (3rd also bass clarinet ), three bassoons (3rd also contrabassoon)
- Brass : four horns , three trumpets , four trombones , tuba
- Timpani , percussion : cymbals , snare drum , bass drum , triangle , tambourine , rod , bells, xylophone , glockenspiel , bells
- harp
- Celesta
- Strings
- Incidental music: two clarinets, two horns, trumpet, bass trombone, piano, violin
libretto
After the premiere of the second version, Max Brod wrote of the libretto: “The text [is] preserved in good dramatic tension, pretty verses and pointed nudes make it effective.” However, the rhymes sometimes seem trivial, the “fine figure drawing and lifelike psychology of Kellers Narrative coarsened ”. Important elements of characterization are missing, such as the original reason for Strapinski's hike - the allegedly fraudulent bankruptcy of the master tailor, who in the end is responsible for the unmasking of the alleged count in the name of morality. The pointed end of the novella with Strapinski's willingness to commit suicide is missing, as is a reference to the close ties to his mother and her upbringing with the aim of social advancement.
music
Zemlinsky's opera Clothes Make People follows the tradition of the romantic comedy by Herrmann Goetz ( The Taming of the Shrew ) or Hugo Wolf ( The Corregidor ). It is a comedy of "soft tones". The tonal language stands between Richard Strauss and Arnold Schönberg , but is also reminiscent of the Viennese operetta . The ensemble tour reminds of the art of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart .
The opera begins with a parody of the fourth chord from Arnold Schönberg's 1st Chamber Symphony . These measures already determine the further motifs of the opera, which are also composed of fourths and fifths, the transparent type of orchestration and the main key of D minor. The latter is at the same time the key of Strapinski, which is contrasted with the A flat major Nettchen , which is as far away as possible in the circle of fifths.
Strapinski's farewell song from his fellow journeymen has a melancholy tone. The melody consists of the ascending fifth of the opening bar and the “world” motif. The harmonization of this motif is wandering without ever reaching a basic key.
The main musical theme is the “Little Tailor Song”. It is a symbol for Strapinski's question of identity and recurs over and over again in the course of the opera in the most varied of forms, similar to a leitmotif .
The strength of the opera is particularly evident in the larger musical numbers and tableaus. In the first act, this includes the “cigar quintet”, Strapinski's monologue in which he thinks about an escape, and the orchestral nocturnal at the end. In the second act it is the Heine song and the engagement dance (an arrangement of Zemlinsky's song Kirchweih from op. 10).
Antony Beaumont remarked that the second version had at least the advantages that the music was “stylistically more uniform” and the characters were “better worked out”. He especially mentions the greatly shortened part of Nettchen and the more understandable motivation of Böhni's “contempt for small-town mentality”, who even seems “a bit likeable” in the first version. The advantages of the second version, on the other hand, are “in its conciseness”.
Work history
The libretto of Zemlinsky's opera Dresses make people comes from Leo Feld . It is based on the novel of the same name from the second volume of Gottfried Keller's series of novels, Die Menschen von Seldwyla , published in 1874 . Zemlinsky composed the work between April 1907 and August 1909 while he was Kapellmeister at the Vienna Volksoper .
The first performance of the three-act first version took place under the direction of the composer on October 2, 1910 in the Kaiser-Jubiläums-Stadttheater (Vienna Volksoper). Josefine Ritzinger (Nettchen) and Karl Ziegler (Wenzel Strapinski) sang. The performance was not very successful. Above all, the critics criticized the music and - possibly due to lack of space - hardly went into the libretto.
A second production in Mannheim, originally planned for 1914, did not materialize. From 1913 onwards, Zemlinsky had thought of a revision, in which he was encouraged by Universal Edition and Julius Korngold . He began doing this in the spring of 1921 for a performance planned in Munich and continued work when it was canceled. By the end of 1921 he had created seven deposits. He also deleted Nettchen's dream ballad from the Count in the first act and the subplot with the love story between Litumlei's daughter Lieselein and the town clerk Federspiel and made further cuts and rearrangements, combining the second and third acts into a single one. Zemlinsky removed the description of the interior of the dance hall with the view of nature in the last picture - a typical element of the “aesthetic mood opera”. The new interlude "The malicious Böhni" replaced a monologue of the same. Due to the new position at the beginning of the scene, Nettchen's Heine song loses its reflective character. The necessary adjustments to the libretto were at least partially made by Leo Feld. The piano reduction of this version contains sixty pages less than that of the first version.
The second version was first played on April 20, 1922 in the New German Theater in Prague. Zemlinsky himself directed this too. Maria Müller (Nettchen) and Richard Kubla (Wenzel Strapinski) sang.
In the new version, the work was a great success. Before Zemlinsky's music was defamed and banned by the National Socialists as "decomposition romanticism", there were several other performances: 1924 in Düsseldorf (German premiere; conductor: Erich Orthmann , staging: Willy Becker , set design: Theo Schlonski, singers: Josef Kalenberg and Gertrud Meiling ), 1927 in Dortmund, 1928 in Altenburg, Aachen, Osnabrück and Görlitz, 1932 in Bremen, 1934 in Cologne (conductor: Meinhard von Zallinger , director: Erich Bormann, stage: Otto Reigbert , singer: Peter Anders and Käthe Russart) and 1935 in Zurich.
After the war, the plant was not rediscovered until 1982. There were productions in Oberhausen in 1982 ( Dietfried Bernet , Fritzdieter Gerhards , Jorge Villareal; Steven Gifford, Judith Wilkinson), in 1985 at the Staatstheater am Gärtnerplatz in Munich (Wolfgang Bothe, Hellmuth Matiasek, Monika von Zallinger; Fred Silla, Eva-Christine Reimer) and an Volksoper Vienna (Peter Gülke, Robert Herzl, Pantelis Dessyllas; Kurt Schreibmayer, Gertrud Ottenthal), 1987 in St. Gallen, 1990 concert in Zurich (conductors: Ralf Weikert ; Hermann Winkler , Edith Mathis ) and in Osnabrück and Eisenach, 2005 in Hagen, 2012 in Görlitz and 2013 in the Theater Vorpommern .
A total of three different piano reductions were published. The first version was published in 1910/1911 with the subtitle "Komische Oper" by Bote & Bock, which in 1913 also brought out an abridged version with the subtitle "Musical Comedy". Universal Edition published the piano reduction of the second version in 1922. The author of the piano reductions is unknown. All we know is that Felix Greissle , Arnold Schönberg's son-in-law , made the parts that were changed in the new version. The performance material of the first version is missing.
Recordings
- June 29, 1990 - Ralf Weikert (conductor), orchestra and choir of the Zurich Opera House .
Hermann Winkler (Wenzel Strapinski), Ueli Hunziker (master tailor), Björn Jensson (house servant / tailor journeyman 1), Ulrich Simon Eggimann (tailor journeyman 2), Rudolf A. Hartmann (councilor), Edith Mathis (Nettchen), Wicus Slabbert (Melchior Böhni) , Hans Franzen (Adam Litumlei), Stefania Kaluza (Mrs. Litumlei), Volker Vogel (Polycarpus Federspiel), Peter Keller (Häberlein), Ruth Rohner (Mrs. Häberlein), Claudio Otelli (coachman), Rainer Scholze (landlord), Renate Lenhart ( Landlady ), Sarianna Salminen (waiter boy), Kimberly Justus (cook), Ulrich Peter (Prologus).
Live, in concert from Zurich.
Schwann CD: 314 069.
literature
- Antony Beaumont: Alexander Zemlinsky (eng .: Zemlinsky. Faber and Faber, London 2000). Translated from the English by Dorothea Brinkmann. Zsolnay, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-552-05353-0 , pp. 250-269.
Web links
- Clothes make the man, Op.12 : Sheet music and audio files in the International Music Score Library Project
- Action of dresses make people (Zemlinsky) on Opera-Guide landing page currently unavailable due to URL change
- Summary at Musirony
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k Antony Beaumont: Alexander Zemlinsky (eng .: Zemlinsky. Faber and Faber, London 2000). Translated from the English by Dorothea Brinkmann. Zsolnay, Vienna 2005, ISBN 3-552-05353-0 .
- ↑ a b c d e Clothes make the man. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , pp. 1075-1077.
- ↑ Clothes make the man. Heinz Wagner: The great manual of the opera. 4th edition. Nikol, Hamburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-937872-38-4 , p. 1408.
- ↑ a b c d e Wulf Konold : Clothes make the man. 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. 878–880.
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Susanne Rode-Breymann: Clothes make the man. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 6: Works. Spontini - Zumsteeg. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-492-02421-1 , pp. 790-792.
- ↑ a b c Clothes make the man. In: Reclams Opernlexikon (= digital library . Volume 52). Philipp Reclam jun. at Directmedia, Berlin 2001, p. 1386.
- ^ Alfred Clayton: Clothes make the man. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
- ^ Ulrich Schreiber : Opera guide for advanced learners. The 20th Century I. From Verdi and Wagner to Fascism. Bärenreiter, Kassel 2000, ISBN 3-7618-1436-4 , pp. 428-429.
- ↑ Clothes make the man. In: Amanda Holden (Ed.): The Viking Opera Guide. Viking, London / New York 1993, ISBN 0-670-81292-7 , p. 1251.
- ↑ October 2, 1910: “Clothes make the man”. In: L'Almanacco di Gherardo Casaglia ..
- ↑ April 20, 1922: “Clothes make the man”. In: L'Almanacco di Gherardo Casaglia ..
- ↑ Clothes make the man. In: Kurt Pahlen : The new opera lexicon. Seehamer, Weyarn 2000, ISBN 3-934058-58-2 , pp. 905-906.
- ↑ Stefan Schmöe: It depends on the right brand. Review of the Hagen production from 2005 in the Online Musik Magazin, accessed on April 24, 2017.
- ↑ Peter P. Pachl : Borderline, but hardly borderline. Review of the Görlitz performance from 2012 in the Neue Musikzeitung , accessed on April 24, 2017.
- ↑ Udo Pacolt: Greifswald: Clothes make the man by Alexander Zemlinsky. Review of the 2013 Greifswald performance in Online Merker, accessed on April 24, 2017.
- ↑ Alexander von Zemlinsky. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005, p. 24319.