Le vin herbé
| Work data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | The magic potion |
| Original title: | Le vin herbé |
Tristan and Iseut on their way to Cornwall |
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| Shape: | “Oratorio profane” in three parts (18 images) with prologue and epilogue |
| Original language: | French |
| Music: | Frank Martin |
| Libretto : | Excerpts from Joseph Bédier's Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut |
| Literary source: | Tristan and Isolde |
| Premiere: | March 26, 1942 (concert) August 15, 1948 (scenic) |
| Place of premiere: |
Tonhalle Zürich (concert version) Salzburg State Theater (scenic) |
| Playing time: | approx. 1 ½ hours |
| Place and time of the action: | Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany, mythical time |
| people | |
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The vocal ensemble consists of six women and six men, including:
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Le vin herbé is a secular oratorio (original name: "Oratorio profane") in three parts (18 images) with prologue and epilogue by Frank Martin . It is based on the medieval story of Tristan and Isolde . The libretto consists of excerpts from Joseph Bédier's French translation and reconstruction Le Roman de Tristan et Iseut from 1900. The work was premiered on March 26, 1942 in concert at the Tonhalle Zurich . The first scenic performance took place on August 15, 1948 in German in the Salzburg State Theater.
action
prolog
The choir engages the audience in the story of the love between Tristan and Iseut, who died on the same day by each other.
First part. "Le philtre" - The love potion
1st picture. Iseut la Blonde (Isolde the Blonde) is to be married to King Marc (Marke) of Cornwall. His nephew Tristan has come to Ireland to pick her up and accompany her to his uncle. Her mother gives her companion Branghien (Brangäne) a magic potion, which she is supposed to give the couple secretly before their wedding night. He is supposed to make sure that Iseut and Marc fall madly in love with each other.
2nd picture. During the voyage to Cornwall, Iseut laments her fate. She detests Tristan, who once killed her brother Morholt, and would rather die at home than live in Marc's realm.
3rd picture. During a lull, Tristan goes to an island. His knights and the sailors leave the ship. Iseut is left with a young servant. Tristan tries to appease her. When the two get thirsty under the blazing sun, the servant looks for a drink, but only finds the magic drink, which she takes to be wine. One after the other, Iseut and Tristan drink from it. At that moment, Branghien appears. She recognizes the situation immediately and curses her birth and the day she boarded the ship: "It is your death that you drank."
4th picture. Tristan already feels the effects of the magic potion while driving on. He can't get Iseut out of his head. He feels guilty about his uncle who raised him after his parents died.
5th picture. Iseut also suffers from her burgeoning love for Tristan, whom she should really hate. Branghien watches sadly as the two fight in vain against their passion and refuse food and amenities.
6th picture. Tristan approaches Iseut only on the third day. She pains to remember how she once nursed Tristan back to health, unaware that he was her brother's murderer. Yet she confesses her love to him. There is a first kiss. Branghien tries to separate the two. She explains to them the cause of their feelings, but cannot do anything about it. In the evening the ship arrives in Cornwall.
Second part. “Le forêt du Morois” - The Morois forest
1st picture. After marrying King Marc, Iseut seems to live happily as a queen for a while. But her relationship with Tristan is exposed. The king demands her death. Tristan escapes from the chapel by jumping and then frees Iseut as well. They flee to the Morois forest with the faithful Gorvenal. Her love life only begins here in the wilderness.
2nd picture. One day a forester leads King Marc to their hiding place. Obsessed with the desire to kill her, he sneaks into her hut. But then he notices that the two sleep next to each other, but have put a sword between them to maintain their chastity. He decides to forego his vengeance, but leaves his own sword behind so they will know that he has found them and spared them.
3rd picture. Three days later, Tristan is alone on a lengthy deer hunt in the forest. At nightfall he ponders the king's behavior. He interprets it as a sign that Marc wants to forgive them. At the same time, he has a guilty conscience that he has to face Iseut with this poor life in the wilderness. He asks God for the strength to bring her back to her husband.
4th picture. In her refuge, Iseut is also plagued by remorse. Marc had always treated her well, and his nephew Tristan was supposed to lead a chivalrous life at his court instead of living in exile because of her.
5th picture. Tristan returns to Iseut and informs her of his decision. He wants to negotiate with Marc and, if he agrees, serve him at court. If not, he wants to move to Friesland or Brittany with Gorvenal as the only companion and remember them there until his end. Iseut agrees. They leave the forest in silence.
Third part. "La mort" - Death
1st picture. Tristan fled to Brittany. But the two lovers can neither live nor die without the other. After three years with no news from Cornwall, Tristan decides to change his situation. When Duke Hoël, the father of his friend Kaherdin, offers him the hand of his daughter Iseut aux Blanches Mains (Isolde the White-Handed), he agrees.
2nd picture. Tristan supports Kaherdin in the war against Baron Bedalis. He falls into an ambush by the enemy. He can kill Bedalis and his six brothers, but is wounded by a poisoned lance. All efforts to heal him fail. With his impending death, he longs only to see Iseut la Blonde again. But in his condition a trip is impossible.
3rd picture. In desperation, Tristan asks Kaherdin to travel to Cornwall to fetch Iseut la Blonde. Although he made sure to be alone with Kaherdin before the conversation, his wife overhears them. Kaherdin promises to get Iseut. Tristan gives him a ring as a greeting and asks him to tell Iseut that he has never stopped loving her. On his return he should hoist a white sail when Iseut is with him. If the mission should fail, a black one. The listening wife is shocked by Tristan’s confession of love.
4th picture. Iseut la Blonde makes her way to Tristan. But the ship first encountered a storm that lasted five days and then fell into a lull. Although the coast of Brittany is already in sight, Iseut cannot get to her lover because the storm has washed the boat away. Three days later, Iseut dreams of holding the head of a wild boar that has stained her dress with blood. Then she knows that she will not see Tristan again alive.
5th picture. All the while, Tristan is fighting death. He's too weak to look for the ship himself. When this with the white sail finally comes into view, his wife takes revenge for her humiliation. She tells Tristan that the ship is close, but claims that it has a black sail. Tristan declares that he can no longer save life and dies with Iseut's name repeated three times on his lips.
6th picture. When Iseut la Blonde finally comes ashore, the death bells are already ringing. The oncoming report to her of the death of Tristan. Iseut rushes to the palace, where she asks Iseut aux Blanches Mains to enter Tristan's body with the words “I loved him more”. She kisses him one last time and dies "next to him out of pain for her boyfriend".
7th picture. When King Marc hears of the death of the two lovers, he personally travels to Brittany to pick up the corpses and bring them back to his home in Tintagel. There he has her buried on either side of a chapel. The next night a blackberry bush grows from Tristan's grave across the chapel to Iseut's grave. The residents remove it, but the next day it grew again. After three unsuccessful attempts to remove the bush, Marc forbids further attempts.
epilogue
The chorus explains the purpose of the narrative, which is intended exclusively for the lovers: it should serve as a greeting to the happy among them and as consolation for the unfortunate.
layout
orchestra
The chamber music instrumentation of the work consists of two violins , two violas , two cellos , double bass and piano .
libretto
The text literally set to music by Frank Martin is taken from Joseph Bédier's New French translation and reconstruction of the Tristan and Isolde material . Bédier mainly used the verse epic Tristrant and Isolde by Eilhart von Oberg, written around 1170, and a fragmentary poem by the old French poet Béroul . He only used the larger courtly versions of Thomas d'Angleterre or Gottfried von Straßburg for details.
music
The singers of the ensemble act both as soloists and in different combinations. Narrative, commentary and dialogical sections alternate. The individual dramatic roles are released from the group for the duration of the dialogue. The reciting passages are sometimes sung as a soloist and sometimes as a chorus with several voices or in unison. These procedures point to older musical forms such as the madrigal comedies of the Renaissance or the early oratorios and passion music. Günther Massenkeil stated that in this way Martin achieved "a tonally extremely differentiated presentation of the text [...] of great linguistic subtlety and immediacy of sensations". The dialogical parts are similarly varied. The singing style is recitative with arioso elements and is reminiscent of the cantar recitando of the early Italian baroque, but also of Debussy's tonal language in Pelléas et Mélisande . Massenkeil wrote that it seemed more important to the composer "to express the words in their meaning and weight than to mark the individual persons in their actions dramatically". This undramatic trait is also noticeable in the instrumental accompaniment. Even the instrumentation, which has been reduced to solo strings and piano, does not allow for different orchestral colors. Here, too, Martin largely concentrates on reinforcing the textual statement, occasionally using rhythmic or tone-painting effects. Le vin herbé thus achieves an “unmistakable new sound form” which is clearly different from Richard Wagner's well-known opera on the same subject.
The two melismatic “Chétive!” Calls (“I poorest!”) Iseut (I.2 and III.4) and the report of Tristan’s death (“Tristan est mort”, III.6) stand out from the otherwise almost consistently syllabic Sound image out. Iseut's calls also have a formative function. They make a connection between her complaint about the undesired connection with Marc and her realization that she will not see Tristan again alive. Both scenes take place on a ship, with the undulations of the sea being audible in the instrumental accompaniment.
For Le vin herbé , Frank Martin developed his own tonal language, which he called "style chromatique", and which he also used in his later works. Although this style has a tonal basis, it does not use any “tonic” cadenza harmony . Martin dispensed with leitmotifs . The music is based on three twelve-tone rows , which the musicologist Bernhard Billeter examined more closely: The so-called "fate row " appears in almost all pictures. Another row symbolizes the love between Tristan and Iseut. It can be heard for the first time after taking the magic potion in the solo violin and appears a total of four times. The third row of only eleven notes is used by Martin in Tristan's death scene. The series contain elements of the major-minor scale and also triads. They therefore do not work atonal. Even more complex polyphonic structures sound tonal here. Martin commented on his way of using Arnold Schönberg's twelve-tone series as follows: “They taught me to find richer and more dynamic melody lines, constantly renewing chord connections, expressive and surprising chord movements; after all, they taught me to lead every musical line independently of the music around it, which in this way gives it a great deal of independence. ”The rows usually appear in just a single voice, with the individual notes often bearing the same note values . Occasionally they are used as ostinato . Billeter noted that Martin developed dissonant chords from steady voice leading, often over a static bass as a temporary tonal center. Due to the "sliding tonality", the sentences rarely end in the initial key. During Iseut's love death , the complex tonal language is transformed into pure C major.
Comparison with Wagner's opera
In his opera lexicon, Kurt Pahlen highlighted the essential differences between Le vin herbé and Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde . Wagner greatly simplified the plot and also reduced the number of people. Tristan's wife Iseut the white-handed does not appear with him. König Marke is more involved in the action with Martin than with Wagner. With Wagner, taking the love potion (which she considers poison) is a conscious act of Isolde, which Tristan has loved for a long time, and not an accident of the servant. Musically and in their dramatic structure, the two works differ even more. Martin's work is no longer a conventional opera, but rather, as an “epic” opera, resembles Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex or Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher .
Work history
Frank Martin dealt with the material of Tristan and Isolde from the spring of 1938. He was presented with the New French translation and reconstruction by Joseph Bédier , published in 1900, and Charles Morgan's novel Sparkenbroke from 1936, in which elements from the myth were processed. The specific reason for his “Oratorio profane” was a request from the Swiss composer and conductor Robert Blum , who was looking for a chamber music work of around half an hour in length for the Zurich Madrigal Choir, which he directed. Martin decided to set the original text of the fourth chapter of Bédier's version to music. Blum performed the resulting first part of the work on April 16, 1940 in Zurich.
Martin then set two more chapters of the novel to music and added a prologue and an epilogue. The now full-length “Oratorio profane” with the subtitle “D'après trois chapitres du Roman de Tristan et Iseut” (“After three chapters of the novel by Tristan and Isolde”) was completed in 1941. Despite the designation as an oratorio, Martin also thought of a scenic performance. The first performance of this version by the same performers as in the first part took place in concert on March 28, 1942 in the Tonhalle Zurich .
It was not until August 15, 1948, during the Salzburg Festival in the Salzburg State Theater that the first staged performance took place in a production by Oscar Fritz Schuh with equipment by Caspar Neher . Ferenc Fricsay was the musical director . Julius Patzak (Tristan), Maria Cebotari (Isolde), Endré Koréh (König Marke) and Hilde Zadek (Brangäne) played the leading roles . It was a German version with the title Der Zaubertrank. Martin produced the translation himself, using part of the translation by Rudolf G. Binding published in 1911 .
Since then the work has been staged many times. The following productions are specially mentioned in the specialist literature:
- 1953 Essen
- 1959 Oldenburg. Director: Joachim Klaiber
- 1959 Deutsche Oper Berlin
- 1962 Munich Opera Festival . Ingrid Bjoner (Isolde) and Richard Holm (Tristan), conductor: Joseph Keilberth , director: Rudolf Hartmann
- 1968 Apollo Hall of the State Opera Unter den Linden , East Berlin. Conductor: Frank Martin
- 1968 Gobelinsaal Dresden. Conductor: Frank Martin
- 1968 Schwetzingen Festival . Conductor: Frank Martin
- 1970 Crissier . Conductor: Victor Desarzens , piano: Frank Martin
- 1982 Geneva (in the French original)
- 1982 Jeannetta Cochrane Theater, London
- 2007 Blower hall of the Duisburg industrial park as part of the Ruhrtriennale . Conductor: Friedemann Layer , production: Willy Decker . The production was shown as a guest performance at the Opéra National de Lyon in January 2009 .
- 2013 State Opera Berlin . Conductor: Frank Ollu , Director: Katie Mitchell
- 2017 Millennium Center, Cardiff. Production of the Welsh National Opera in English. Conductor: James Southall, Director: Polly Graham
Among the many concert performances, the following are particularly noteworthy:
- 1946 Amsterdam. Conductor: Felix de Nobel
- 1948 Westminster Central Hall London. Conductor: Walter Goehr
- 1968 New York (on the occasion of Martin's 70th birthday). Conductor: Hugh Ross
- 1961 Town Hall New York. Maria Stader (Iseut), Ernst Haefliger (Tristan), conductor: Hugh Ross
- 1966 Rome. Conductor: Mario Rossi
- 1969 Budapest
Recordings
- August 24, 1948 - Ferenc Fricsay (conductor), members of the Budapest Philharmonic, choir of the Vienna State Opera .
Maria Cebotari (Iseut la Blonde), Hilde Zadek (Branghien), Dagmar Hermann (Iseut aux Blanches Mains), Maria von Ilosvay (La mère d'Iseut la Blonde), Julius Patzak (Tristan), Wilhelm Friedrich (Kaherdin), Endré Koréh (Le roi Marc), Karl Dönch (Le duc Hoël), Alfred Poell (speaker).
Live from the Salzburg Festival from the Salzburg State Theater .
Orfeo 5982293. - September 1961 - Victor Desarzens (conductor), Frank Martin (piano), Winterthur City Orchestra .
Nata Tuscher (Iseut la Blonde), Adrienne Comte (Branghien), Hélène Morath (Iseut aux Blanches Mains), Marie Lise de Montmollin (La mère d'Iseut la Blonde), Eric Tappy (Tristan), Hans Jonelli (Kaherdin), Heinz Rehfuss (Le roi Marc), André Vessières (Le duc Hoël).
Studio recording.
Jecklin CD: JD 581 / 2-2. - March 18, 1994 - Godfried Ritter (conductor), Mutara-Ensemble, choir of the WDR Cologne.
Andrea Weigt (Iseut la Blonde), Maria Zedelius (Branghien), Regine Röttger (Iseut aux Blanches Mains), Angelika Mettner (La mère d'Iseut la Blonde), Thomas Dewalt (Tristan), Sun Wan Chung (Kaherdin), Gerhard Peters (Le roi Marc), Rolf Schmitz-Mahlburg (Le duc Hoël), Michaela Jürgens and Dirk Schortemeier (speakers).
Live, in concert from Cologne.
With German intermediate texts from the German version of the original text. - 2006 - Daniel Reuss (conductor), Scharoun Ensemble, RIAS Kammerchor Berlin.
Sandrine Piau (Iseut la Blonde), Jutta Böhnert (Branghien), Hildegard Wiedemann (Iseut aux Blanches Mains), Ulrike Bartsch (La mère d'Iseut la Blonde), Steve Davislim (Tristan), Jonathan E. de la Páz Zaens (Le roi Marc), Roland Hermann (Le duc Hoël).
Studio recording.
Harmonia Mundi HMC901935.36 (2 CDs). - February 26, 2006 - Daniel Reuss (conductor), Scharoun Ensemble, RIAS Kammerchor Berlin.
Sandrine Piau (Iseut la Blonde), Jutta Böhnert (Branghien), Steve Davislim (Tristan).
Live, in concert from the Philharmonie Essen . - 2017 - James Southall (conductor), Polly Graham (director), April Dalton (stage design and costumes), Tim Mitchell (lighting), Jo Fong (choreography), orchestra and choir of the Welsh National Opera .
Caitlin Hulcup (Iseut la Blonde), Rosie Hay (Branghien), Sian Meinir (Iseut aux Blanches Mains), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (La mère d'Iseut la Blonde), Tom Randle (Tristan), Gareth Dafydd Morris (Kaherdin), Howard Kirk (Le roi Marc), Stephen Wells (Le duc Hoël).
Video; live.
English version translated by Hugh Macdonald. Video
stream on The Opera Platform / Operavision.
Web links
- Libretto (French, PDF) at the Opéra de Lyon
- Work information and view score in the Universal Edition
- HG: Le vin herbé by Frank Martin. Review of the premiere of the first part (PDF). In: Du: cultural monthly . Volume 1 (1941), Issue 2
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i Günther Massenkeil : Le Vin herbé. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 3: Works. Henze - Massine. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-492-02413-0 , 686-688.
- ↑ a b c d e f 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. 179-182.
- ^ Bernhard Billeter : Martin, Frank. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
- ^ A b Kurt Pahlen : The new opera lexicon. Seehamer, Weyarn 2000, ISBN 3-934058-58-2 , pp. 366-369.
- ^ Willem Pieter Gerritsen, Anthony G. Van Melle: A Dictionary of Medieval Heroes. Boydell & Brewer, 2000, p. 282 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ a b Amanda Holden (Ed.): The Viking Opera Guide. Viking, London / New York 1993, ISBN 0-670-81292-7 , pp. 611-612.
- ↑ Uwe Schweikert, Michael Struck-Schloen: Desires. In: Opernwelt from November 2007, p. 21.
- ↑ Le Vin herbé in Lyon in the archive of the Ruhrtriennale, accessed on October 7, 2017.
- ↑ Boris Kehrmann: Short Cuts. In: Opernwelt from July 2013.
- ^ Wiebke Roloff: Celtic, angular. In: Opernwelt from April 2017, p. 39.
- ↑ Information on Ferenc Fricsay's CD at JPC, accessed on October 7, 2017.
- ↑ a b c d Frank Martin. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all complete opera recordings (= Zeno.org . Volume 20). Directmedia, Berlin 2005.
- ↑ Martin - Le vin herbé at The Opera Platform / Opera Vision ( Memento of 27 October 2017 Internet Archive ). Video no longer available.