ICSM Online Journal > Reviews

Zemlinsky Der Traumgörge
Deutsche Oper Berlin, 27 May 2007 and in repertoire

Reviewed by Michael Eagleton
posted 23 July 2007

Der Traumgörge (‘George the Dreamer’), Zemlinsky’s third opera, has not had the best of fortune in this age of political machination. Following the success of its predecessor, Es war Einmal, Gustav Mahler, in his capacity as Director of the Vienna Hofoper, was quite happy to add another Zemlinsky work to the repertoire. By the summer of 1907 rehearsals had started and the scenery was built, with a first night scheduled for October, but by then Mahler had resigned. His successor, Weingartner, aware that in the current hot bed of intrigue he would be dammed it if succeeded and dammed if it didn’t, cancelled the production. The material languished in storage until research by Zemlinsky’s first biographer, Horst Weber, coincided with a clearout in the Vienna archives, and Traumgörge came to light. It was given its belated first performance at the Nürnberg Opera in 1980. Since then there have been a couple of concert performances, both resulting in CD issues – the first, conducted by Gerd Albrecht in Frankfurt, containing the revisions (and cuts) made by Mahler, but the second, conducted by James Conlon, reverting to Zemlinsky’s original intentions. There have been just two staged productions, one in Bremen, and a second in Palermo in 1995, which continued the work’s saga of ill luck. The orchestra was involved in a dispute with the management, and selectively withdrew its services. At the performance I attended the cello section had the evening off, which gave a curiously lop-sided feel to the music. At the Deutsche Oper there were a handful of minor cuts, but none to cause great disfigurement to the piece. At least the orchestra was complete, and in fine form under the baton of the young Canadian, Jacques Lacombe. Perhaps some of the score’s finer subtleties were missed, but tempi were well judged and a good dramatic shape was maintained.

Unfortunately there was little subtlety on the stage, as directed by Joachim Schloemer with his designer Jens Killian. Görge is a bookish dreamer, who is about to become engaged to Grete, the mill-owner’s daughter – an arranged marriage which will ensure that the mill remains in the family. In a vision he is enticed by a Fairy Princess to follow her to a world of make-believe, but in the second act finds himself in another village where revolution is in the air and the Princess, Gertrud, is considered a witch. He rescues her, and in an Epilogue Görge is back in his home village, married to Gertrud, while Grete has married Hans, her childhood sweetheart.

Not much of this was evident from what unfolded when the curtain went up. In no colour other than a uniform battleship grey, the setting was an office basement – or a department store – or maybe the entrance to an underground station – with a pair of escalators (out of order) and staircases centre stage leading to an upper gallery with a gate which presumably led to the outside world. Görge was a geekish stereotype in a pullover and thick glasses, while the villagers were in grey suits, and Grete a pert pig-tailed secretary, flirting with all and sundry. Fairy-tale figures were superimposed – Hans, Grete’s childhood sweetheart and popular with all the girls, returns from military service quite literally as the knight in shining armour, while the Princess of Görge’s dream was the ubiquitous wicked witch, dressed in black with a pointed hat, wheeled in on horseback by three dwarves.

Zemlinsky and his librettist, Leo Feld, had completed the First Act without any idea as to how the story would unfold. They met in the summer of 1904 to decide Görge’s future, and resolved to contrast the orderliness of his home village, with its routine of the seasons’ passage, of harvest, and honest labour, with the territory of the Princess / Gertrud as evil, where revolution and distrust is in the air. Schloemer, seemingly in the same quandary, decided on skateboards. (There must be a professional group of skateboarders in Berlin – Bacchus and his entourage arrived on skateboards in Ariadne auf Naxos at the Staatsoper a few years ago.) We were among the underbelly of society – not so much hippy-land as the underneath of the Queen Elizabeth Hall – with Kaspar the revolutionary dressed in pink and with a pair of Rottweilers in tow.

Perhaps there was the germ of a concept hiding among all this – certainly the final image, which needs to convey the idea of Görge as content in earthly terms yet still unfulfilled – here with the villagers all lying dead after some sort of community picnic, was a moving one. But the overriding grey, dullness of the whole evening mitigated against its success.

Görge was sung by the Australian-born tenor Steve Davislim, making his debut at the Deutsche Oper, and was a disappointment, his heroic tenor (maybe failing to come to terms with the size of the house) just could not be heard. No such problems for the Grete, Fionnuala McCarthy, whose spirited soprano has had considerable success already in this house, or for Manuela Uhl, singing the Princess and Gertrud. The early brief scene between the Miller and the Pastor, which serves to inform the audience of the terms Görge’s inheritance of the mill, was an embarrassing episode for a decent pair of basses, Tiziano Bracci and Hyung-Wook Lee, trying to be drunk.

So Der Traumgörge’s ill luck continues. But it is too good a piece to be ignored for long. Sometime, somewhere, it will have the production it deserves.

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