Rapunzel (opera)

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Opera dates
Title: Rapunzel
Otto Ubbelohde: Illustration of the fairy tale

Otto Ubbelohde : Illustration of the fairy tale

Shape: Opera in six acts
Original language: English
Music: Lou Harrison
Libretto : William Morris
Literary source: Brothers Grimm : Rapunzel
Premiere: May 14, 1959
Place of premiere: Kaufmann Auditorium,
New York
Playing time: approx. 53 minutes
Place and time of the action: Fairytale time
people

Rapunzel is a six- act chamber opera by Lou Harrison (music) with a libretto by William Morris . The premiere took place on May 14, 1959 in the Kaufmann Auditorium in New York.

action

First act: In the forest, by the tower, in the evening

The prince and Rapunzel think about their lives independently. It is time for the dreamy prince to find a bride. Rapunzel, locked in the tower, longs for love. In her loneliness she has nothing to do but play with her hair. Meanwhile, a witch repeats the words several times: “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let your hair down! "

Second act: in the morning

The prince remembers stories in which people walk up a star road to heaven, but do not dare to enter through the diamond gate, but strive all their lives to free themselves from their sins. He has just awakened from a dream in which he had left the worries and taunts of court life behind to look for love in the great outdoors. In this dream he had come across a tower which, despite its good condition, made him feel lonely. While he was pondering it, he saw a tall, fat woman with black hair walking towards the tower and calling out in a shrill voice: “Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let your hair down! ”He noticed a girl with long golden hair at the top of the tower, who was desperately calling for help and letting her hair flow over the parapet. The witch asked if there was anyone who dared to climb this golden ladder. For the prince, dream and reality merge. The tower is real and it is no longer able to move away from it. For days he has been waiting for the golden ladder to lower.

Third act: on the tower

Rapunzel says various prayers - one she learned from her mother and a few others she wrote herself. She longs for a knight with a strong, shining sword.

Fourth act: in the evening in the tower

Rapunzel and the prince were able to spend six hours together. Rapunzel fears the witch will reappear soon. Then they would be lost. When the prince asks her whether she has ever seen a dead man or a seriously wounded man, she remembers a sword duel with a fatal outcome that she once saw. The dying knight lay in the grass for days until other knights impaled him with their lances and took him away. Rapunzel begs the prince to go away with her. He tells her his name, Sebald, and remembers a song by an old singer in which Rapunzel had another name.

Fifth act: in the morning in the forest

The two fled from the tower. Rapunzel informs the prince that "Rapunzel" is actually the name of the witch. The prince sings her the old harpist's song in which she is called "Gwendolin".

Sixth Act: Later, in the palace

The prince is now wearing a royal cloak. While he and Gwendolin remember their arrival in town together, the witch calls out from Hell: “Gwendolin! Gwendolin! Give me your hair! ”. But Gwendolin doesn't want to hear any more about her old misery.

layout

Harrison had suffered a severe nervous breakdown a few years before composing, as a result of which he had to be hospitalized for almost nine months. He viewed his opera as "self-analysis". In it he examined the various feelings and insights that he had experienced in the course of his treatment. The dream-like plot of Morris' text therefore has clear autobiographical references for Harrison. During his illness he too had difficulty telling the difference between reality and delusions. Although he did not change his name to a new name like the people in the opera after his health recovery, he changed his handwriting fundamentally. His musical style also changed, and he banned the performance of many of his earlier works. Rapunzel is his last great work in a serial style. Later he used twelve-tone music mainly to portray the impersonality of Western society. His music from 1950 onwards is much more lyrical than the compositions before his collapse. In this respect, Rapunzel, composed in twelve-tone technique , represents the turning point between the composer's two creative phases.

The dramaturgy of the opera is strongly controlled by the text. There are longer recitative passages and little stage action. Despite the twelve-tone composition, the musical style is essentially lyrical. More abrupt turns in the recitatives are balanced out in the arias by reminiscences of folk music or chorales. The lower strings dominate the instrumental ensemble. Four cellos and two double basses face only a single violin and a viola. Harrison contrasts the gloomy string atmosphere with lighter instruments like celesta, two different pianos and harp. Harrison described his opera as "a fascinating adventure". In it he tried to reconcile opposing ideas such as serialism and tonality, harshness and poetry, hope and fear, or madness and method.

Although the opera requires three singers, it is essentially a large duet scene as the role of the witch is limited to brief heckling.

Instrumental line-up

The chamber music instrumentation of the opera requires the following instruments:

Work history

Rapunzel is the first of Lou Harrison's two operas , a student of Arnold Schönberg and Henry Cowell . It is dedicated to his "friend and mentor" Virgil Thomson , for whom he worked as a music critic at the Herald Tribune . As a libretto he used William Morris 'poetic and psychologically reinterpreted adaptation of the Grimm brothers' fairy tale Rapunzel, written in 1856 . He began composing in August 1952 and completed the piano short score within two months. He completed the orchestration in the spring of 1953. He soon had an opportunity to present the work to the public when he and Ben Weber were chosen to represent America in a competition in the spring of 1954 as part of the International Conference on Contemporary Music in Rome. He chose Rapunzel's prayer scene in the third act, which he had to re-orchestrate for a chamber ensemble. The competition entries were presented to the public without naming the respective composers. Harrison's contribution was sung by the young Leontyne Price , who at the time had never worked with a major opera company. The aria from Rapunzel was awarded a "Twentieth Century Masterpiece Award for the best composition for voice and chamber ensemble". Harrison had to share the price of 2500 Swiss Francs with Jean-Louis Martinet - apparently for political reasons - although critics and the majority of the conference participants considered the Rapunzel scene to be far more successful. Michael Steinberg, the New York Times reviewer , noted that "every twist of the vocal melody, rhythm, or timbre of the accompaniment was motivated by something in the text."

The opera's full staged premiere did not take place until a few years later on May 14, 1959 in the New York Kaufmann Auditorium. It was combined with the opera The Glittering Gate by the Australian composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks . Harrison came up with the idea of ​​singing the singers from the orchestra pit and having the action performed by dancers at the same time. But that didn't happen in New York. When it was resumed at the Cabrillo Music Festival in California in 1966, however, masked actors, pantomimes and dancers were used. The opera was largely received with cautious praise. Howard Taubman of the New York Times found Harrison's atonal music "not a bit off-putting." On the contrary, it is “consistently lyrical, if never passionate”. Francis Perkins of the Herald Tribune also noted lyrical continuity and compelling sensibility, but lacked a sense of dramatic tension. The latter also found some other reviewers. Others overlooked this supposed deficiency and instead raved about the "timelessness of the quasi-religious allegory turned into a fairy tale".

The German premiere took place on June 22, 1993 in the forum of the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany Bonn by the "New Theater for Music", a joint establishment of the Bonn Opera , the European Mozart Foundation and the Art and Exhibition Hall. There were four more performances there and in the same month a guest performance in Gelsenkirchen as part of the 3rd days of the New Music Theater in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1993. The production was by Peter Oskarson, set design and costumes by Birgit Angele. The musical direction of the instrumental ensemble was Shuja Okatsu. The actors were Malin Liljefors and Sabine Sommerfeld (Rapunzel), Ann Hallenberg and Vyatcheslav Kagan-Paley (witch) and John Sax and Mark Synek (Prince). Here, too, the reviewers admired the dream quality of the retold fairy tale and the connection between music and text. The reviewer of the Ruhr Nachrichten wrote: “In general, the fairy tale (under the verses of William Morris) is transformed into a plea for peace and harmony of love, which even the witch cannot escape. The Schönberg pupil Harrison has definitely found his own tonal language for this. "

In 1997 a CD recording of the opera was released on the New Albion label. In 2001 it was played again at the Cabrillo Music Festival.

Recordings

  • 1996 - Nicole Paiement (conductor), Ensemble Parallèle.
    Patrice Maggins (Rapunzel), Lynne McMurtry (Witch), John Duykers (Prince).
    New Albion # 93.

literature

  • Leta E. Miller: Method and Madness in Lou Harrison's "Rapunzel". In: The Journal of Musicology. Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 85-124 ( online, PDF ).

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ "Every turn of vocal melody, every rhythm or color in accompaniment was motivated by something in the text."
  2. ^ "[Harrison's] atonalism is not in the least forbidding. On the contrary, it is consistently lyrical, if never passionate. "
  3. ↑ "timelessness of the fairy-tale turned quasi-religious allegory"

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Joseph Stevenson: Lou Harrison - Rapunzel, opera in 6 acts. Description of the work from Allmusic , accessed on February 6, 2018.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Leta E. Miller: Method and Madness in Lou Harrison's "Rapunzel". In: The Journal of Musicology. Vol. 19, No. 1 (Winter 2002), pp. 85-124 ( online, PDF ). (The number after the colon after the itemized reference in the article text indicates the respective page number in the document.)
  3. ↑ Rapunzel (1952) at IRCAM , accessed on February 5, 2018.
  4. ↑ a b Program booklet for the production of the “New Theater for Music”, Bonn 1993.
  5. ↑ Jörg Loskill: The third and last chapter “Days of the New Music Theater” in NRW. In: Opernwelt from September 1993, p. 5.
  6. ^ Lou Harrison: Rapunzel to Opera in Six Acts - Nicole Paiement, William Winant. CD information from Allmusic , accessed on February 6, 2018.