Murderer, hope of women

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Opera dates
Title: Murderer, hope of women
Shape: Opera in one act
Original language: German
Music: Paul Hindemith
Libretto : Oskar Kokoschka
Premiere: June 4, 1921
Place of premiere: Württemberg State Theater Stuttgart
Playing time: approx. 24 minutes
Place and time of the action: antiquity
people
  • The man ( baritone )
  • The woman ( soprano )
  • First Warrior ( tenor )
  • Second warrior ( bass )
  • Third warrior (tenor)
  • First girl (soprano)
  • Second girl ( old )
  • Third girl (soprano)
  • Warrior, girl ( choir )

Murderer, Hope of Women is an opera in one act by Paul Hindemith (music) with a libretto by Oskar Kokoschka . The premiere took place on June 4, 1921 in the Württemberg State Theater in Stuttgart .

action

The action takes place in ancient times. The content of the event can only be roughly grasped from the text. Wild warriors lay siege to a castle inhabited by women: “Night sky. Tower with a large iron door. Torch light. Floor rising to the tower. "

A man ("white face, blue armored, forehead covering a wound") breaks away from the group of warriors ("gray and red headscarves, white, black and brown clothes, signs on the clothes, bare legs, high torch poles, bells, Roar "). They try "tired and unwilling" to stop him and tear his horse down. On the right-hand side, girls and their leader (“red clothes, open yellow hair, tall”) climb down a staircase from the castle wall. The girls and warriors watch the encounter between the two with curiosity and excitement. Some believe they notice an erotic attraction between them. Others are afraid. The warriors scoff and cheer the man on to rape the woman. When the woman starts the conversation, the man starts up angrily and orders his people to burn his mark on her skin. The command is executed. The woman cries out in pain, but jumps at the man with a knife and wounds him. The warriors now renounce him and invite the willing girls to make love. Then the warrior and the girl put the man on a stretcher together and lock him in the tower. The woman rattles the bars. She demands to be admitted to the man - but warriors and girls claim to have lost the key. At daybreak the woman speaks to the man. He gets up slowly, but initially only answers confused. The woman, trembling, climbs the stairs, then laughs loudly. In the meantime the man has got up and is leaning against the grille. A rooster screams. The man can now speak powerfully again. The woman approaches him. She “lies entirely on him; separated by the bars ”, slowly opens the gate and addresses him tenderly:“ It's your wife! ”Then she cries out violently:“ I don't want to let you live. You! You're weakening me! ”She lets go of the bars and collapses on the stairs. The man pulls open the gate and touches the woman “with the fingers of his outstretched hand”. As she dies, she grabs a torch that shrouds everything in a shower of sparks. Warriors and girls flee from the man they now believe to be the devil. He kills them "like mosquitoes". The tower catches fire and rips open "from bottom to top". The man hurries through the resulting fire alley. In the distance a rooster is screaming.

layout

Instrumentation

The orchestral line-up for the opera includes the following instruments:

music

Hindemith's Murderer, Hope of Women , like Arnold's Schönberg's Happy Hand and Ernst Krenek's Orpheus and Eurydice, is a prototype of Expressionist opera. For Kurt Pahlen , this opera was a “milestone of a barely manageable, disintegrating epoch of end of war, collapse, decline, fanaticism.” It is characterized by large-scale increases and dramatic outbreaks. Formally, the structure of the score corresponds to the classic model of the four-movement symphony or the sonata form . After a first movement without a recapitulation, two calm middle movements follow, which also stand out due to the lighter instrumentation. The conclusion is an extensive rondo finale. Hindemith was possibly inspired by Friedrich Klose's dramatic symphony Ilsebill , which was performed in 1918 as part of a “Friedrich Klose Week” in Munich.

The music is well composed and has many late romantic features as well as echoes of Richard Wagner, some of which serve to characterize the - according to Kokoschka - old matriarchal world. As a result, the work appears stylistically disoriented.

libretto

The drama Murderer Hope of Women is an early work by Oskar Kokoschka . He wrote it in 1907 for the garden theater of the Vienna Art Show . He then revised it several times. Hindemith used the fourth and final version, which appeared in 1917 together with Kokoschka's play The Burning Bush in Volume 41 of the booklet series The Youngest Day . He set it verbatim with a few omissions.

The drama was considered a "prototype of expressionist stage art". Due to the unity of time, space and action , the structure corresponds to that of a classic drama. However, no causal connection between the scenes can be recognized. The action is "illusionized" by gestures, light and color effects.

From a male point of view, the content represents a violent archaic battle between the sexes, which culminates in the woman's death, which is viewed as liberation. In this way he illustrates Friedrich Nietzsche's statement in his work Ecce homo that love is "war in its means, and in its bottom the deadly hatred of the sexes". The music critic Ulrich Schreiber described the text as a "ritual suggestion theater interspersed with anti-emancipatory features". The killing of the woman by the outstretched finger is an allusion to Michelangelo Buonarroti's fresco The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. The design of the man is inspired by Otto Weininger's main work Gender and Character . Even Johann Jakob Bachofen font Matriarchy is one of the models.

Work history

Murderer, Hope of Women is Hindemith's first stage work. He completed the composition on August 9, 1919. Together with his works Das Nusch-Nuschi (1921) and Sancta Susanna (1922), it forms a triptych of one-act operas of different characters, each of which deals with one of the three types of love (archaic-brutal, happily playful or Christian-repressive) .

Erna Ellmenreich (wife) and Theodor Scheidl (husband) sang at the premiere on June 4, 1921 in the Württemberg State Theater in Stuttgart . Fritz Busch was the musical director, Otto Erhardt was responsible for the production , and Oskar Schlemmer was responsible for the costumes, sets and choreography . On the same day, Hindemith's second one-act play Das Nusch-Nuschi was performed there for the first time. The premiere was enthusiastically acclaimed. At the second performance, on the other hand, there were deliberate, politically motivated riots under moral pretexts.

The following year all three one-act plays were performed in Frankfurt. The scandal was repeated there. The reviewer of the Zeitschrift für Musik wrote in July 1922:

“The books of the three one-act plays (Kokoschka's murderer a completely incomprehensible drivel [...]) should actually be perceived by everyone as absolutely worthless. Hindemith's music revolves around restless expressionism; without any melodic feeling [...] monstrous chords are piled up by the overloaded orchestra, then again there is a yawning emptiness. "

- magazine for music

After the premiere, there were performances in Frankfurt am Main, Dresden, Prague, Lübeck and Essen until 1923. Since the accompanying circumstances did not improve, Hindemith blocked the triptych in 1934 and banned it completely in 1958. After the death of Hindemith and his wife, Murderer, Hope of Women was not played again until 1969 in Darmstadt together with Das Nusch-Nuschi . In 1988 the entire triptych was given in concert in Frankfurt am Main. It was not until 1993 that the three works were staged together again. A list of the performances can be found on the Schott Music website :

Recordings

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Annegrit Laubenthal: Murderer, hope of women. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 3: Works. Henze - Massine. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1989, ISBN 3-492-02413-0 , pp. 60-61.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g Murderer, Hope of Women at Schott Music , accessed on February 1, 2017.
  3. ↑ Reclam's Opernlexikon. Philipp Reclam jun., 2001. Digital Library, Volume 52, p. 1718.
  4. ^ Kurt Pahlen : The new opera lexicon. Seehamer, Weyarn 2000, ISBN 3-934058-58-2 , pp. 280-281.
  5. ↑ a b c 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 .
  6. ↑ a b Geoffrey Skelton:  Murderer, Hope of Women. In: Grove Music Online (English; subscription required).
  7. ↑ a b c Murderer, Hope of Women. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , p. 380.
  8. ^ Poster for the performance in 1909 , at Austria Forum. Observe copyrights
  9. ^ A b Hanns-Werner Heister : late and post-expressionism. In: Silke Leopold (Ed.): Music theater in the 20th century (= history of the opera. Volume 4). Laaber, 2006, ISBN 3-89007-661-0 .
  10. ↑ Sointu Scharnberg: The Unknown as a mask - with Burmese puppets against Teutonic sanctuaries? In: Jens Knigge, Hendrikje Mautner-Obst (Ed.): Responses to Diversity. State University for Music and Performing Arts Stuttgart, 2013, pp. 103–122 ( online at Pedocs ).
  11. ↑ June 4, 1921: "Hope of Women". In: L'Almanacco di Gherardo Casaglia ..
  12. ↑ a b Paul Hindemith. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all opera complete recordings. Zeno.org , volume 20.