explaining to the us what evil is all about
Esa-Pekka
Salonen (conductor) The Weimar Republic: Germany 1918-1933 Weimar
Nightfall / Los Angeles Philharmonic / the concert I attended was on
Sunday, February 16, 2020.
The great Bauhaus architect/designer Oskar
Schlemmer did the original costumes, choreography, and sets for the Hindemith
performance, which was so controversial that it was removed from the State
Theater in Stuttgart in 1921, after only its second performance. This work
might be one of the most often performed work of an absolute flop of first
performances that ever existed.
Despite its terribly dark tones, however,
Hindemith’s 1919 work is not only highly lyrical, but filled with beautiful
romantic flourishes, with 3 flutes, an English horn, rumbling brass, clarinets,
drums, tam-tam, cymbals, strings, and 2 harps—along with a full chorus (in this
case the talented Los Angeles Master Chorale, headed by Grant Gershom), and
eight singers led by Madeleine Bradbury Rance (as the woman) and Christopher
Purves (as the Man). In the Sunday production I saw Alaysha Fox replaced Anna
Schubert as the First Maiden, and there are 2 others who observe the horrors of
the woman and man in their sexual mis-match, ending in love and murder.
The LAPhil performed this work with their
usual professional polish, soaring along with the composer’s score in its often
lush rises and flourishes; yet I felt it seemed somehow a bit toned down,
particularly after hearing, a couple of weeks ago, the absolutely thrilling
renditions by Gustavo Dudamel of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky (a concert that I
will never be able to remove from my head thank heaven). It may have been that
the seemingly heavy metal cut-out shards created by director Simon McBurney and
production designer Anna Fleischle to suggest the breakup of the Weimar world,
may have slightly muted the normally glorious sounds of the Walt Disney Concert
Hall.
As a short prologue to this piece reminds
us, all of the composers and writers involved in this project, having to escape
Nazi Germany for their religious convictions and being classified by Hitler and
others as “degenerate” artists, eventually made their way to the US, and
ultimately arrived in Los Angeles, helping to create the long literary and
musical legacy that survives still today.
Escaping to Los Angeles, German authors
along with Weill and Brecht attempted to bring their somewhat formulized notion
of world-wide evil to the US, in the central piece of the evening, the
delightfully evil Seven Deadly Sins, with two versions of a character
named Anna (Nora Fischer, dressed in a slinky blue gown) and her theatrical
other, in this case a dancer (Gabriella Schmidt).
Together the two figures travel from their
Louisiana home to visit the major cities of the US, including Los Angeles and
San Francisco, seven cities of course, discovering their personal attachments
to Sloth, Pride, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Greed, and Envy, yet gradually
overcoming each before returning to their Louisiana home and, presumably,
redemption.
Here, with somewhat Brechtian staging, the
singer and dancer do not remain on stage but move through the orchestral seats
in order to engage the audience with their sins.
I can just say that when Fischer sings
that state’s name in German, it sent shivers down my spine, the same way Weill’s
and Brecht’s great Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny made me
feel about a state I could not even imagine living in, Alabama. In their works,
in which the whole of the American continent was made to feel the same sins of
the world they had had to abandon, they helped the culture to perceive they
were not to be isolated from what was happening in the whole world, and, even
more importantly, that they were not innocent from its sins. The Seven
Deadly Sins were not “over there,” but scratching the backs of everyone in
LOUisIANA, Al-abMAMA” and everywhere else where we might have lived.
For the world in which we today live,
there can be no better lessons than these and other European émigrés taught us
through their arts. O please, send us your…tired, poor, and even your rich. We
need them, as this LAPhil concert clearly reveals to us.
Los
Angeles, February 20, 2020
Reprinted
from World Arts Review (February 2020).
Weimar culture has come down to us edged with such moral force. They addressed their audiences not as consumers, but as participants in society. Thanks for getting this.
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