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SYNOPSIS The German Count Wallstein had a mountain accident in Switzerland. He therefore invited his rescuer, the poor farmer Richard Boll from Griswald with his wife Gertrude and their daughter Emmeline to his estate in Germany, where he wanted to provide a life without worries for them. Whilst the parents initially feel happy there, Emmeline subsides into melancholy and lives in her own world of imagination, but tries to pretend to her parents that she is fine. The Count and his steward Durmann, however, have more far-reaching plans. They believe they can bind the Swiss to them, by building an artificial Switzerland on the estate with some authentic pieces of scenery from Griswald and by reconstructing the landscape. They have even found out the reason for Emmeline’s melancholy and plan to bring her lover Jacob Fribourg to his estate. Jacob had already set out in search of Emmeline, but when he arrives, they delay the meeting of the lovers for a while on the pretext that it could harm the girl. Paul, Durmann’s clumsy cousin, had imagined he could have a chance of marrying the girl, but finally, to the sounds of a “Kuhreigen”, Emmeline and Jacob come together again. Contents:
DDD 2:10;57 Recorded: Herbert von Karajan Saal, Universität der Künste Berlin, September & November 2004 TL The Swiss Family was one of the most popular German-language Singspiels in the first half of the 19th century, and in the beginning far more successful than Beethoven’s Fidelio or some of the nowadays famous Mozart operas. Followingits première on 14 March 1809 at the Vienna Kärntnertor Theatre, it was performed on stage not only in the German language areas, but almost everywhere between Paris and St. Petersburg as well as Stockholm and Milan. After the apparently last production in Munich in 1918 it was not performed again until 2004. The composer Joseph Weigl (1766-1846) can be seen as a link between Mozart and Schubert. He came from a family of musicians at the court of Prince Esterházy in Eisenstadt and was a godchild of Joseph Haydn. In Vienna he was trained by Antonio Salieri from 1785 on, and played a leading role in rehearsing the premières of Mozart’s Da Ponte operas from 1786-1790. As the conductor of the Vienna Court Opera, Weigl worked from 1791, only interrupted by some tours, e.g. to Italy. After his debut as an opera composer in 1783, he composed numerous works for the music theatre in all the then normal genres, among them many in the Italian language, before he composed the Swiss Family. By 1823 he had published a further dozen partly quite successful operas, among them in 1812 Bergsturz zu Goldau (Rock fall at Goldau), an authentic Swiss subject, which recalled a catastrophe in 1806, but which, despite its spectacular effects, did not become as popular as the Swiss Family. The wide spectrum of Weigl’s oeuvre, who worked at the Hofburgkapelle from 1827 on, is also demonstrated by the 18 ballets, 11 masses, two oratorios, 22 cantatas and chamber music. The librettist Ignaz Franz Castelli (1781-1862) was one of the most sought-after theatre authors and translators in Vienna. As a journalist he contributed to the reputation of the town throughout the entire German language area with his press reports on Vienna’s cultural life, and later he became a characteristic representative of culture and communication in Vienna’s Vormärz. Castelli’s libretto Die Verschwornen (The Conspirators) met with great approval in Schubert’s setting (1823, UA 1861). Among intellectuals in Europe there had been a passion for Switzerland since the 17th century, which in around 1800 subsequently even led to a surge in holiday traffic to this tranquil country, and was also reflected in a literary sense, for instance in Goethe’s libretto Jery and Bätely (1779). In 1822 Castelli also travelled to Switzerland and on his return went into raptures about the liberal political conditions among the Swiss. Similar to Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell (1804) the Swiss Family played a leading role in the 19th century in characterising the image of Switzerland throughout the world. However, this is due to a misunderstanding: because of the title, the contemporaries assumed that they were dealing with a portrayal of Switzerland itself. The Swiss composer Schnyder von Wartensee described that he was irritated by the lack of authenticity in the décor and costumes of the Vienna staged performance in 1811; he noticed the lack of genuine Swiss tone colour in the opera:” In the […] hope of being transported as if by magic, quite alive, to his far away fatherland, Schnyder went to the theatre expecting to see a realistic portrayal of people from Urn, Lucerne, Bern or Appenzell. What a serious deception! The artificiality of the mad Emmeline, her affected sentimentality, the artificial, doll-like clothes of the Swiss farmers, which all boys would chase if they were to walk through a Swiss village dressed like that, were embarrassing for the all too strict Schnyder […].” “Much to his annoyance” Schnyder was not able to “identify a single Swiss melody in the music, and even the long “Kuhreigen” (cow tune), which heals Emmeline’s madness in a psychiatric sense, had, to his mind, “more of a Savoy than a Swiss character.” However, accusing Castelli and Weigl of a lack in authenticity was unfounded: it is just this that made this subject interesting, i.e. that a German Count wants to restore the well-being of a family in a strange land, uprooted and moved from Switzerland to Germany, by means of an environment only suggested. This explains the artificially imitated Switzerland, comparable to the fashionable trend to integrate “Swiss houses” in landscape gardens, as in Versailles for instance. The idea of an artificial Switzerland, so that the protagonists are reminded of their life in the homeland and their youth, was probably inspired by a French model, namely the re-created Provençal landscape in the Indian kingdom of Golconda in the opera Aline (Paris 1803) by Henry Montan Berton, which again can be traced back to older models. These moments were then taken up again by the team of authors of the immediate model of Weigl’s and Castelli’s Singspiel, in the Vaudeville (Liederspiel) Pauvre Jacques (Paris 1807) by Sewrin and Alissan de Chazet (Charles-Augustin de Basson-Pierre and René André Polydore Chazet). Although Castelli claimed to have adapted and ennobled the draft, his book is based to a large extent on that of the Vaudeville, and – e.g. in the melodramatic scene – is even a literal translation. It gave the subject an additional piquant touch that the Pauvre Jacques ultimately goes back to an episode, which Marie-Antoinette arranged in the dairy of her re-created Swiss village at the Trianon of Versailles for the edification of her fawning courtiers. The idea to lessen the homesickness of the Swiss peasants in Germany with surrogate fragments and symbols of their homeland is also taken into account in musical allusions, mainly because of the quotation of a – contrary to Schnyder’s expertise – genuine “Kuhreigen”. In 1768 Rousseau introduced the entry “Kühereihen” (cows’round dance) or “Ranz des Vaches” into music ethnological literature, he mentions it in his Dictionaire de musique, referring to the “Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia oder Heimwehe” (1688), which described the following phenomenon: in the 17th century officers in the Swiss mercenary army had observed that a ringing out or striking up of the “Kuhreigen” triggered off serious homesickness among the Swiss soldiers in foreign service, undermining their military strength. A ban had to be declared outside of Switzerland to play any such tunes (the subject of Wilhelm Kienzl’s opera Der Kuhreigen of 1911 is based on this story). Later, homesickness was also colloquially called “Swiss disease”. Weigl took over this melody almost unchanged in the opera – the significant deviation developed through a confusion of the original clef: in 1788 the melody originally (characteristically Swiss) written down in a major key and moved to a minor key was published in a specialist medical journal, and this print was probably the source of Weigl’s composition, which subsequently popularised the melody in half of Europe. Those who regularly frequented the theatre in the 19th century or made music themselves, knew Weigl’s opera half by heart, the same was true for Franz Schubert. He had been attending performances of the Swiss Family since the age of 15, and this music inspired him in his early and late works. In some of Schubert’s works the motifs are related, as e.g. Jacob’s song “Vom weit entfernten Schweizerland” (“From far-away Switzerland”), which was sung during the première of the opera by the well-known Schubert interpreter Johann Michael Vogl. Jacob’s song describes his travel experiences to Germany and his longing for Emmeline. In 1814 it became Schubert’s model for “Schäfers Klagelied” D 121 (“Shepherd’s lament”), his first song to be performed in public, and which he published in 1821 as op. 3. Schubert was also enthusiastic about the first Viennese artist to play Emmeline (1805-1814 also Beethoven’s first Leonore in Fidelio), Anna Milder-Hauptmann. In order to assert himself as an opera composer, it was advisable to compose something for her, some songs in 1825 and one of his last compositions altogether, the “Hirt auf dem Felsen” D 965 (“Shepherd on the Rock”) in November 1828. This scena for soprano, clarinet and piano, which was to remind the public of her most famous role as Emmeline, is one of those commissioned compositions that Milder had already had written for her. It can be seen as a tribute to Weigl’s opera and its first protagonist. Wagner also knew the Swiss Family well. In 1837, during his time as a conductor in Riga, he composed a (lost) aria for insertion in Weigl’s opera, a “prayer” for Richard Boll. Although his comments on the “old-fashioned” work were rather derogatory, the “Kuhreigen” inspired him to write the partly a cappella shepherds’ tunes in Tannhäuser and Tristan, and you can also hear associations in the prelude to Lohengrin act III. Decades later Wagner still remembered and was “deeply moved” by the “truly captivating greatness” of the soprano Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient as Emmeline in 1835 and regretted that at that time “the performance of this Swiss girl could not be held and passed on as a monument for all times”. Like its French Vaudeville model, the Swiss Family also almost has the character of a play with music, something also clearly demonstrated on this recording by the proportions of complete music with slightly shortened dialogues. But Weigl hardly composed the ensemble numbers in a different way than was usual in German or Italian operas of his time. Only the four solos, especially the songs by Jacob and Paul, are quite simple in their structures, and even those of the Count and Emmeline are no multi-movement arias. The most remarkable is without doubt the scene where Emmeline and Jacob meet, starting with a melodrama for the girl, which lets numerous motifs of memory be touched on, but then ends in a duo with the shawm (clarinet) – the “Kuhreigen” ringing out behind the scene – and her lover. This scene may be called the most famous, even forward-looking climax of the work. Till Gerrit Waidelich Page created 23.12.05 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
