ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 19 March 2006

During recent years audiences have become familiar with the music of those composers, such as Viktor Ullman and Hans Krása, who passed through Terezín before meeting their deaths at Auschwitz . Less well known is the subsequent chapter in the history of the camp: in the eighteen months or so after May 1945 almost all ethnic Germans (Sudetens), three million people, were expelled from Czechoslovakia , and Theresienstadt, as they would have known it, was again used as a transit camp. Theodor Veidl, composer, conductor and teacher born in 1885 in Vysočany, died there of malnutrition in February 1946. What irony, that Hans Krása, for example, also German-speaking, and Veidl, both active in the fertile Germanic artistic culture in 1920s Prague (which co-existed and often happily co-operated with the Czech, with figures such as Max Brod actively engaged in both), one Jewish and one not, should lose their lives within such a short space of time, either side of the end of the War. What significance for them the ‘cessation of hostilities’?

Veidl completed four operas, the first two of which are early works – Ländliches Liebesorakel, a ‘Village Tale’, and Die Geschwister, based on Goethe’s one-act play of the same name, premiered in Teplice in 1913 and 1916 respectively. The third, Kranwit, a fairy-tale opera to a text by Hans Watzlik, was first performed at the New German Theatre in Prague in 1929, and won the Czechoslovak State Prize (as did, four years later, Krása’s Verlobung in Traum, at the same theatre under Georg Szell) but the fourth and most successful, Die Kleinstädter, which had its first performance at the New German Theatre, also with Szell conducting, on 17 April 1935, is the first to be revived. There is also an early Symphony in E Major, some piano and organ music, and at least one set of orchestral songs.

Die Kleinstädter is based on the light, satirical comedy by August von Kotzebue, Die deutschen Kleinstädter, first performed in Mannheim in 1802. Sabine, the daughter of the Mayor of Krähwinkel, a small, petty and self-important provincial town, has fallen in love with Herr Olmers while on a visit to the capital city. In a case of mistaken identity, when Olmers arrives in Krähwinkel he is taken for the Crown Prince but when he admits to being simply Herr Olmers, he is ignored and the Mayor’s wife promises Sabine to Sperling, who is the town’s Deputy Inspector of Buildings and Roads. After various farcical adventures, Olmers realises that it is his lack of a title which stands in his way, and that actually being a Privy Councillor, a position which had hitherto been of little importance to him, immediately makes him a most eligible suitor. Olmers gets his girl and all live happily ever after!

The first post-War performance was at the Theater am Bismarkplatz, Regensburg , on 11 November, in a joint venture with the Estates Theatre in Prague . The work has been re-orchestrated (only a piano score survived) by Widmar Hader of the Sudeten German Music Institute and Hamburg-based composer Andreas Willscher for a ‘classical’ orchestra with piano and a small percussion section. Veidl’s music is nothing if not inventive: melodies tumble over each other with such fecundity that few have time to register, but those that do have a pleasing shape and characterisation. There is, for example, a simple strophic ballad in which the Mayor (a good young bass, Jóhann Smári Sævarsson) relates the trials and tribulations of his office, and some witty writing for a pair of interfering aunts. All in all, the music seems closer to Vienna than Prague , but there is a Hindemithian/Stravinskian edge, and more than a hint of the sparseness of the Zemlinsky of Der Kreidekreis (which Szell conducted to acclaim during the same Prague 1934–35 season).

The production was by Ernö Weill, Regensburg’s Intendant, in designs and costumes by Daniel Dvořák of Prague, between them conjuring up a ‘toytown’ world of crazy gabled houses, its perspective continually changing with effective use of the stage revolve, and whose inhabitants all sported Noddy’s huge shiny shoes, and outsized spectacles. Olmers, suavely dressed (and suavely sung, too, by baritone Jin-Ho Yoo) was thus very much out of place. Sabine was sung by Silvia Fichtl, star of the show with a crystal-bright soprano voice, and Raoul Grüneis in the pit kept things fizzing along nicely.

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