Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. – Reviving an important but neglected opera is one of the ways the Bard SummerScape festival paints a faithfully nuanced portrait of each past age, and this year’s exploration of “Berg and His World” is no exception. To enrich its evocation of Viennese modernism, Bard presents the first fully-staged U.S. production of The Distant Sound (Der ferne Klang, 1910), by Berg’s compatriot Franz Schreker, in its centenary year. Returning to oversee the landmark production is the visionary Thaddeus Strassberger, who also directed last season’s resounding success at Bard, Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots. The opera’s four performances (July 30, August 1, 4, & 6) feature the festival’s resident American Symphony Orchestra under music director Leon Botstein, who gives a free Opera Talk before the August 1 performance. This summer, Bard also offsets the gravitas with an authentic taste of Vienna’s lighter side, offering nine performances of Oscar Straus’s charming operetta The Chocolate Soldier (1908), directed by Will Pomerantz and conducted by James Bagwell (August 5–15).

There is a tendency today to identify musical modernism primarily with the Second Viennese School, and particularly with Schoenberg.  Yet consideration of the period’s operas suggests that the reality was more complicated. “To tell the story of Viennese modernism through its operas would necessitate redrawing the city’s artistic faultlines,” writes Christopher Hailey, editor of the forthcoming volume, Alban Berg and His World. Two of the genre’s leading lights were Franz Schreker and Alexander von Zemlinsky, both of whom, Hailey explains, “had a profound influence upon Alban Berg, who prepared the piano vocal score of Der ferne Klang. Wozzeck and Lulu are unthinkable without their example. Indeed, Zemlinsky, Schreker, and Berg represent an aesthetic and musical triumvirate at least as compelling as the more familiar constellation of Berg, Schoenberg, and Webern.” 

From 1901–03, the young Schoenberg was based in Berlin, where, like fellow Viennese composer Oscar Straus, he conducted Germany’s first cabaret, known as the “Überbrettl” (or “super music hall”). Co-founded by playwright Frank Wedekind, whose two “Lulu” plays would form the basis of Berg’s seminal opera of that name, Überbrettl was intended to raise the standard of variety theater, and Schoenberg and Straus – like Zemlinsky – were among those who made musical contributions. Schoenberg’s expressionist masterpiece Pierrot lunaire (1912) reveals cabaret’s enduring influence on his work, and cabaret songs predominate in the oeuvre of operettist Oscar Straus, who wrote more than 500. The story of musical modernism, then, rather than tracing a linear path, must embrace the complex web of relationships and ideas that flourished within the burgeoning artistic community of the time. Bard’s Schreker and Straus revivals play a pivotal part in representing Berg’s world in all its heterogeneous richness.

This year’s opera presentation, Franz Schreker’s The Distant Sound, though familiar in Europe, has never yet – in the century since its composition – been fully staged in North America. Hailed early in his career as the most significant musical dramatist since Wagner, Schreker (1878–1934) studied composition with legendary pedagogue Robert Fuchs, whose students included Mahler, Zemlinsky, Korngold, and Sibelius. Schreker’s music came to be characterized by aesthetic plurality, blending elements of Romanticism, naturalism, expressionism, and Neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity”), perhaps reflecting his sense of being something of a mixture himself, as the offspring of a controversial marriage between a Catholic aristocrat and a Jew.  According to Hailey, who is also founder and director of the Franz Schreker Foundation, “Der ferne Klang – the distant sound – is a fitting metaphor for Schreker’s own struggle to find his voice because it captures something essential about the nature of his search, the quality of his aural experience.”

It was Botstein who gave The Distant Sound its long-overdue U.S. premiere in concert form, during the American Symphony Orchestra’s 2006–07 season, prompting Musical America critic Peter G. Davis to write: “Botstein’s sympathy for the score was apparent everywhere. … The spirit and sweep of the music could scarcely have been more fully captured.” Anthony Tommasini called the work an “arresting masterpiece,” noting in his New York Times review, “Below its melodramatic surface the opera teems with sensuality. Mr. Botstein brought sure dramatic pacing and fiery commitment to his account of this thick and complex score.”

“The premise of Der ferne Klang is simply told,” Hailey explains. “A composer forsakes a woman’s love for a chimeric sound that is but the distant echo of her presence.  It is a tidy plot for an opera, a love story of tragic deferral and a paradoxical meditation upon the vanities of ‘l’art pour l’art’.”  Besides telling the story of the composer and the elusive ideal shimmering beyond his grasp, the opera addresses the plight of his loved one, a woman exploited by the society she lives in, who survives by retreating into her dreams. Like Wagner, Schreker wrote his own libretto, and his masterful melding of disparate dramatic devices and psychological and cultural forces, along with the beauty and brilliance of his score, makes The Distant Sound one of the most moving and groundbreaking works of 20^th-century opera.

Thaddeus Strassberger, director of last season’s lavishly praised Huguenots presentation and winner of the 2005 European Opera Directing Prize, returns to direct, with set designs by Narelle Sissons, whose credits include Babes in Toyland at Lincoln Center (2008), and costume design by Mattie Ullrich, who created the costumes for SummerScape’s productions of The Sorcerer (2007) and Les Huguenots (2009).  Tenor Mathias Schulz stars as Fritz, and soprano Yamina Maamar plays Grete, in which role the New York Times described her performance as a “triumph.” The Distant Sound’s four performances (July 30, August 1, 4, & 6) will be sung in Schreker’s original German with English supertitles, and conducted by music director Leon Botstein.

This season, Bard SummerScape also presents Oscar Straus’s operetta The Chocolate Soldier (1908). Straus studied composition with Max Bruch while working in Berlin at the Überbrettl cabaret. After emigrating when Austria came under Nazi rule in 1938, he composed for both Broadway and Hollywood, but it is for his operettas that he is best remembered. The Chocolate Soldier is an amalgam of Viennese chamber opera and British wit, being based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. When Shaw gave librettist Leopold Jacobson the rights to adapt the work, it was on three conditions: none of Shaw’s original dialogue or the characters’ original names could be used; it would have to be advertised clearly as a parody of his play; and he would not accept monetary compensation. Shaw lived to regret this last condition, as the operetta became an international success: the first English-language version of The Chocolate Soldier premiered in New York in 1909, and was the hit of the Broadway season, while its London premiere the following year ran for 500 performances. Despite the playwright’s embargoes, the adaptation retains Shaw’s original comic plot and the play’s central message – that military rank is no guarantee of heroism – with the welcome addition of Straus’s sumptuous music.

Directing the new production is award-winning director and choreographer Will Pomerantz, with sets and costumes by internationally-acclaimed designer Carol Bailey, who previously collaborated with Pomerantz on Of Thee I Sing at SummerScape 2008.  Leading a first-rate cast, Lynne Abeles, praised by the New York Times for her “standout” performance in DiCapo Opera Theatre’s Emmeline, will star opposite baritone Andrew Wilkowske, whose recent Papageno for Virginia Opera “stole the show” (Washington Post).  The Chocolate Soldier will be conducted by James Bagwell, Bard Music Festival’s Director of Choruses since 2003, who inspired glowing praise when he led SummerScape 2005’s production of The Tender Land. Opening on August 5 (the first of nine performances, Aug 5–15), the new production will be sung in English. Before the performance on August 8, Bagwell, who also serves as Music Director of the Collegiate Chorale, will give an Opera Talk.

Since the opening of the Fisher Center at Bard, Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra have been responsible for championing and restoring to the stage a growing number of important but long-neglected operas. All of these presentations and their remarkable stagings have been warmly received by audiences, not least 2009’s production of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s grand opera Les Huguenots. Producing this supposedly unstageable opera was clearly a risk; despite once having been enormously popular, Les Huguenots fell into obscurity, last being performed at the Met in 1915. And yet, as the Wall Street Journal reported, “Bard’s gamble paid off. … The production was…a triumph for conductor Leon Botstein, …[who] balanced the grandeur and the intimacy of the score and fused its varied musical styles into a grand, architectural sweep.”

Other critics agreed.  A five-star review in the Financial Times reported, “Les Huguenots in Bard’s staging is a thriller from beginning to end. ... Leon Botstein made the right preliminary decision by settling on an ample performing text ... and, leading the American Symphony Orchestra and an excellent chorus, holds it all together with complete assurance.”  According to the New York Post, “The large cast of young American singers, although lacking superstar vocal glamour, rose to the virtuoso vocal moments. ... Les Huguenots may not be a masterpiece, but Botstein conducts it with the fire and precision befitting one.”  Musical America noted, “Let’s not forget Meyerbeer’s imaginative and colorful orchestration, which Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra showed to full advantage in their wholly persuasive performance.”  Praising the “sweep, style, and energy” of the performance,” the New York Times concluded, “This production was a chance to enter into the cultural mind-set of a rich era in opera history. … Mr. Botstein once again deserves credit for an overdue rescue job.”

Opera and operetta at SummerScape 2010

Franz Schreker (1878–1934)

The Distant Sound (Der ferne Klang, 1910)

Libretto: Franz Schreker

American Symphony Orchestra

Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Directed by Thaddeus Strassberger

Grete: Yamina Maamar

Fritz: Mathias Schulz

Old Grauman: Peter Van Derick

Grauman’s wife: Susan Marie Pierson

Innkeeper: Matthew Burns

Actor: Jeff Mattsey

Dr. Vigelius: Marc Embree

The Count: Corey McKern

The Chevalier: Jud Perry

Sosnoff Theater

July 30 and August 6 at 7 pm

August 1 and 4 at 3 pm

Tickets: $25, $55, $75

Opera Talk with Leon Botstein
August 1 at 1 pm
Free and open to the public

Oscar Straus (1870–1954)

The Chocolate Soldier (1908)

Libretto: R. Bernauer and L. Jacobson; English libretto: Stanislaus Stange

Conducted by James Bagwell

Directed by Will Pomerantz

Nadina: Lynne Abeles

Bummerli: Andrew Wilkowske

Alexis: Glenn Seven Allen

Masha: Camille Zamora

Aurelia: Madeleine Gray

Massakroff: Jason Switzer

LUMA Theater

August 5–7 and 12,13 at 8 pm

August 8, 11, and 14,15 at 3 pm

Tickets: $45

Opera Talk with James Bagwell

August 8 at 1 pm
Free and open to the public

Bard SummerScape ticket information

For tickets and further information on all SummerScape events, call the Fisher Center box office at 845-758-7900 or visit www.fishercenter.bard.edu.

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