White Rose (Zimmermann, 1986)

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Opera dates
Title: White Rose
Shape: Scenes for two singers and 15 instrumentalists
Original language: German
Music: Udo Zimmermann
Libretto : Wolfgang Willaschek
Literary source: Letter and diary entries by the Scholl siblings, prose and poetry by Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Franz Fühmann , Reinhold Schneider and Tadeusz Różewicz as well as psalm words from the Old Testament
Premiere: February 27, 1986
Place of premiere: Hamburg State Opera , Opera stable
Playing time: approx. 1 ¼ hours
Place and time of the action: Munich-Stadelheim prison , February 22, 1943
people

White Rose is a chamber opera (original name: "Scenes for two singers and 15 instrumentalists") in 16 scenes by Udo Zimmermann (music) with a libretto by Wolfgang Willaschek . The world premiere took place on February 27, 1986 in the Hamburg State Opera .

Zimmermann created an opera of the same name on the same theme as early as 1967/68 (→ White Rose (Zimmermann, 1967/68) ).

action

The following table of contents is based on the libretto of the opera and the descriptions in the opera guides by Sigrid Neef , Wulf Konold , Harenberg and Piper.

The action on stage completely dispenses with any external action. The historical background is formed by the feelings and thoughts of Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie Scholl in the hour before their execution on February 22, 1943. The two members of the White Rose resistance group had been sentenced to death by the Supreme Court for their leaflet campaigns against fascist rule . They had not revealed the names of the other group members. The opera's scenes consist of visions, conversations with oneself and reflective monologues. The two process their fear of death until they finally accept their fate.

Scene 1. "Give light to my eyes, or I will fall asleep to death." The two condemned people are afraid of falling asleep.

Scene 2. “My heart is awake.” Sophie Scholl feels every fiber of her existence.

Scene 3. “Don't shoot.” Hans Scholl remembers a horrific experience: a hungry girl was shot.

Scene 4. “That there is.” While Sophie contemplates the miracle of life, Hans is tormented by terrible dreams.

Scene 5. "You drive to your death and still sing and sing, sing, sing ..." Disabled children are transported away for euthanasia . Your nursery rhyme becomes a death song.

Scene 6. “We built a wall.” Fascism begins with silence and ignorance.

Scene 7. “The door, the door slams.” Sophie thinks she can already hear the hangman's footsteps in front of the cell door. She panics.

Scene 8. “You shaved her hair.” Hans is plagued by terrible memories. He feels helpless.

Scene 9. “I want to walk through our woods with you one more time.” Sophie wants to keep her memories of a happier life.

Scene 10. "A man lies frozen to death." Memories of the organized murder of the National Socialists haunt Hans. Sophie longs for a better life with her friends.

Scene 11. Instrumental interlude. Despair - one last rebellion - falling silent - crying - silence.

Scene 12. "My God, I can't help but stammer." Sophie and Hans long for inner peace.

Scene 13. “Don't stand apart because there is no happiness outside.” Sophie calls for her mother and Jesus, while Hans thinks of his father.

Scene 14. “The vision of the end.” Sophie has a vision of a child being saved while she herself finds death. Hans hears a drumming that nobody reacts to.

Scene 15. “And my enemy could say I was master of him.” Sophie and Hans continue their pleading from the first scene (“Give light to my eyes”). The regime should not win over their souls too.

Scene 16. “Don't be silent, don't be silent any more.” Hans and Sophie demand loudly to defend themselves against tyranny and war. The final thoughts are on her impending death.

layout

There are hardly any causal connections between the texts selected by Wolfgang Willaschek . The combinations follow other different rules. What they have in common is the basic attitude of "absolute truthfulness". Zimmermann himself wrote about his opera:

“Two people actually have to play all opponents, all actions in themselves and for the audience to see. The two should constantly bring associations to mind in us: oppression, the totalitarian system, the search for truth. Everything about the 'environment' is omitted, all 'opponents'. Of course, one can say that the 'environment' is reflected by the seventeen instrumentalists: here screams, dreams, malice and fear are given a tonal shape. "

- Udo Zimmermann, 1988

The text of the 14th scene (“The vision of the end”) is based on Franz Fühmann's series of poems To three pictures by Carl Hofer . Hofer originally painted The Black Room in 1928 and recreated it in 1943 after the original was destroyed in a bombing raid. It depicts naked men walking through dark rooms and in the middle another man beating a drum. According to Sigrid Neef , Fühmans' picture descriptions contain the “key to the essence of opera, as the basic ethical principles of the Scholl siblings are expressed in an exemplary way”.

The text at the beginning of the opera "Give light to my eyes so that I do not fall asleep of death" (from an entry in Sophie Scholl's diary of December 12, 1941) does not end until the 15th scene.

The text deals with questions of humanism and Protestant faith, which were formative for the Scholl siblings. Accordingly, Zimmermann's music contains echoes of the tradition of Protestant church music by Heinrich Schütz and Johann Sebastian Bach and the German song by Franz Schubert or Robert Schumann .

Despite all the differences, the two siblings are connected to one another by a "leading melody". Their parts have a similar “vowel gesture”, but which is characterized differently. While Hans tries in vain to forget the horror of what he experienced, Sophie's music is characterized by song-like swaying, often dance-like turns ( Siciliano ) and “natural metaphors”.

The fifth scene with Sophie's vision of the removal of the children is entitled “Leiderkasten-Rondo” and is supposed to be performed as a distorted dance “quasi tempo di valse”. According to Zimmermann, it symbolizes “increasingly the grotesque masquerade of a terrifyingly indifferent world”.

The seventh scene “The door, the door slams.” Is characterized by the tension between “concrete picture elements”, spoken text and the quotation-like accompanying music, which is reminiscent of a Bach prelude and has the effect of a “perpetual motion machine of fear and panic”.

According to Zimmermann, the climax of the opera is the twelfth scene "My God, I can only stammer". It contains a canonical duet of the siblings, which he expressly created as a kind of "Schütz adaptation" in which, under the cantus firmus, "strange steps [...] come and go".

There are occasional aleatoric passages in the orchestra . “Martial secco chord strokes” represent the brutality of the regime. In contrast, the vocal parts are more “lyrical and melismatic”. The two singers also have melodramatically spoken lyrics in some places .

The first sound of the instruments becomes the incisive whirring of the falling guillotine and already tells the actual story, ie the execution of the Scholls precedes the dramaturgy. In the seventy minutes of the work there is by no means a depiction of the ordeal in the sense of a passion, since Zimmermann did not want to stylize the Scholls as martyrs. Rather, the gaze should be directed to the situation itself, which avoids a sentimental, kitschy exaggeration and demands a deeper form of reflection from the audience.

The Stretta at the end quoted from the National Socialist battle song When we march, we pull out the German gate . At the same time, increasingly louder chants from a fanatical crowd can be heard from the tape. "The outside world breaks in as a deadly reality." The rhythmic military motif is contrapuntally interlocking "fugue" and this interlacing of rhythms creates an undifferentiated sound. The individual parts do not begin in the regular canon, as this type of heroic marching music suggests, but rather on the penultimate thirty-second note. Each voice first plays the melody, but at different intervals from the previous voice. Afterwards, the melody is played around in a modular way in small parcels of motif, the linear military march acoustically and symbolically tripped.

Instrumentation

The chamber music ensemble of the opera includes the following instruments:

Work history

As early as the 1960s, Udo Zimmermann had composed an opera of the same name on the same theme, which had some success (→ White Rose (Zimmermann, 1967/68) ). Twenty years later, the Hamburg State Opera commissioned him with a new version of this work, which was created between 1984 and 1985. However, the premiere had to be postponed several times because Zimmermann decided to compose a completely new opera instead of a revision. For this purpose, Wolfgang Willaschek , the then head dramaturge of the State Opera, put together a libretto from letters and diaries of the Scholl siblings, prose and poetry by Dietrich Bonhoeffer , Franz Fühmann , Reinhold Schneider and Tadeusz Różewicz as well as psalm words from the Old Testament , which in contrast to the the previous opera completely dispensed with a documentary-narrative plot and instead relocated to a "dramaturgy of the inner theater". This new opera no longer tells the story of the resistance group, but of "two great people in borderline situations in their lives, one hour before their death, in existential need".

The world premiere took place on February 27, 1986 in the Opera stable of the Hamburg State Opera and was enthusiastically received by the audience. There was also a lot of and mostly positive reports about it in the press. The musical director was Stefan Soltesz , the direction came from Stephan Mettin and the equipment from Waltraut Engelberg . Gabriele Fontana (Sophie) and Lutz-Michael Harder (Hans) sang . The following day, the opera was also played as a ring performance in Eisenach and Schwerin. Zimmermann himself directed it in the same year in the world premiere production at the Munich Opera Festival . Due to the theme, the small cast, simple furnishings and easily understandable musical language, it developed into one of the most frequently performed German operas of the post-war period. Within one year there were already 30 productions, after three years, according to a report by ADN , there were already 70 and at the turn of the millennium 100. Performances in Germany (Nuremberg, Munich, Recklinghausen, Osnabrück, Bonn, Münster, Saarbrücken) in the Switzerland (on November 30, 1986 in the Zurich Opera House ), in Austria (on January 27, 1987 in the Künstlerhaus Wien , 1989 at the Salzburg State Theater ), in the Soviet Union (May 1988 in the Leningrad Chamber Music Theater ) and in the USA (on September 14, 1988 in English at the Omaha Opera Festival and shortly thereafter at the Long Beach Opera in Los Angeles and the Bel Canto Opera New York). A Leipzig production from 1988 was performed as a guest performance at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem in 1992. In 2013 the opera had already been staged more than 200 times.

In the year of its premiere, Zimmermann processed the opera into two further works. The 20-minute “Reflections for Orchestra” with the title Mein Gott, who is drumming there? refer to the 14th scene of the opera. For Give Light to My Eyes, or I Asleep in Death (soprano, baritone and large orchestra) he concentrated the text in about 45 minutes. This piece was performed for the first time under his direction in February at a concert by the Berliner Philharmoniker .

Arno Waschk created a condensed version for the two singers and an instrumental ensemble of six or seven players on the occasion of a production by the Koblenz Theater .

Recordings

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ A scene in Zimmermann's predecessor opera White Rose from 1967/68 tells of an event at a Polish train station. During a transport of Jews, Hans wanted to feed one of the girls. But this insulted him: “You are all murderers, murderers!” It was then shot by an SS guard.
  2. ↑ In the previous opera, Sophie remembers her time in a clinic. There the senior doctor, who felt complicit, joined the children. Sophie decided to resist.
  3. ↑ In the previous opera, Sophie dreams of climbing up to a church with a child. Suddenly a crack opens up in the earth, but the child does not fall into it. The dream gives her hope that her death will not be in vain and that life will ultimately triumph over the tyrannical regime.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q White Rose. In: Sigrid Neef : German Opera in the 20th Century - GDR 1949–1989. Lang, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-86032-011-4 , pp. 574-582.
  2. ↑ a b c Wulf Konold : The white rose. In: Rudolf Kloiber , Wulf Konold, Robert Maschka: Handbuch der Oper. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag / Bärenreiter, 9th, expanded, revised edition 2002, ISBN 3-423-32526-7 , pp. 890–891.
  3. ↑ a b c White Rose. In: Harenberg opera guide. 4th edition. Meyers Lexikonverlag, 2003, ISBN 3-411-76107-5 , pp. 1093-1094.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f g Thomas Gartmann: White Rose. In: Piper's Encyclopedia of Musical Theater . Volume 6: Works. Spontini - Zumsteeg. Piper, Munich / Zurich 1997, ISBN 3-492-02421-1 , pp. 811-812.
  5. ↑ Udo Zimmermann 1986. Quoted from Sigrid Neef: Deutsche Oper im 20. Jahrhundert - DDR 1949–1989. P. 578.
  6. ↑ The Neue Nationalgalerie has a new temporary home. Article of the Tagesspiegel from November 21, 2016 with Karl Hofer's picture “The Black Rooms”, accessed on March 7, 2017.
  7. ↑ 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. 172-175.
  8. ↑ a b Attila Kornel: "Deep below us only silence." - The aesthetics of silence in Udo Zimmermann's chamber opera "White Rose". In: DIE TONKUNST, magazine for classical music and musicology. Vol. 11, No. 3, July 2017, pp. 368–377.
  9. ↑ Udo Zimmermann 1986. Quoted from Sigrid Neef: Deutsche Oper im 20. Jahrhundert - DDR 1949–1989. P. 577.
  10. ↑ Michael Ernst: Loud admonisher, difficult friend: Udo Zimmermann on his 70th birthday. In: Neue Musikzeitung from October 6, 2013, accessed on March 6, 2017.
  11. ↑ Information on the work and performance material of the version by Arno Waschk from Breitkopf & Härtel, accessed on March 6, 2017.
  12. ↑ a b Udo Zimmermann. In: Andreas Ommer: Directory of all opera complete recordings. Zeno.org , volume 20.
  13. ↑ Zimmermann - The White Rose. Review of the 2013 Nantes production in OperaJournal, accessed March 4, 2017.
  14. ^ "White Rose" by Udo Zimmermann @ Armel Opera Festival ( Memento from July 1, 2017 in the Internet Archive ).