EA communist composer from the Czech Republic who loves jazz is writing an opera about the noble libertine Don Juan and his eternal myth. Which, of course, is pretty fluffed here according to all the rules of surrealism and psychoanalysis.
The fires of lust flicker in Erwin Schulhoff’s “Flammen” as a kind of constantly shaking sound orgasm. The flutes seduce, Faust and Donna Anna dance the tango, while the eternal #MeTooler, bored with so much constant ecstasy, wriggles in his sequined dress.
After its premiere in Brno in 1922, “Flammen” had to wait a hundred years before the two-act opera was heard in Czech for the first time at the Prague State Opera as part of the multi-year project series “musica non grata”, which was also funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Directed by Calixto Bieito in a drastic, rambling, restrained direction, it was probably the company’s most important premiere to date, which deserves credit for the memory of the multicultural, strongly Jewish-influenced musical life in Prague in the 1920s and 1930s.
It really is one of the weirdest, craziest operas that Schulhoff has devised, and one of the most fascinating in its consistent defiance of conventions. Another Czech, Karel Josef Beneš, provided the template for the composer, who was meandering in the 1920s between wasting Impressionism, muscle-pumping Expressionism, noisy Bruitism, jazz, hit films, swing and the dawn of experimental soundscapes.
“Flammen”, this opus between Freud and Schopenhauer, was recorded in Berlin in the early 1990s as part of the important Decca CD series “Degenerate Music”. It was released at the Leipzig Opera under Udo Zimmermann’s directorship, and in Vienna in 2006; whereby a second recording (Capriccio) was made, then in Los Angeles and Kaiserslautern. Each time in German, because Kafka’s friend Max Brod had translated the piece for a possible premiere in Germany, which did not take place because the composer was Jewish.
Erwin Schulhoff (1894 to 1942) and the dancer Mila Mayerová (1901 to 1977)
Source: public domain
After a commuted death sentence, the resistant lyricist Beneš migrated to various camps, which he survived. Schulhoff, meanwhile a Soviet citizen, died of starvation and tuberculosis in a Bavarian internment camp for Russians in 1942 with the exit papers for Moscow in his pocket.
Today Schulhoff, who was born in 1894, is often performed with his colleagues Hans Krasá, Pavel Haas and Viktor Ullmann, who were almost the same age and also murdered by the Nazis, as well as Gideon Klein, who is 20 years his junior, under the label “Composers from Theresienstadt”. And yet he had not been deported to this “artists’ concentration camp”. The German Bohemian Schulhoff, who was only 48 years old and usually looks seriously or skeptically into the lens of the photos, also lived several lives as a composer stylistically between Prague and Berlin.
He has long since been rescued from oblivion, but the music business is still struggling with his complex work. Unfortunately, there is only this one, extraordinary opera by him, but instead the Hot Sonata for piano or the shrill jazz oratorio “HMS Royal Oak”, in which a warship’s crew in the South Seas helps jazz to victory.
Schulhoff came from a Jewish, upper-class, music-loving milieu. Dvořák recommended piano lessons for the seven-year-old. In Vienna, Leipzig and Cologne, the youth, who was precocious in composition in addition to his piano excellence, perfected himself with Max Reger. He had to spend the First World War with the Austrian army, resulting in hand injuries and frostbite in eastern Galicia and northern Italy. He came to Berlin via Saarbrücken, then to Dresden, where he became acquainted with George Grosz and the Dada movement.
Scores by Erwin Schulhoff with the stamp of the Theresienstadt ghetto
Source: Jens Büttner/ZB/picture alliance
The piano cycle “Fünf Pittoresken”, including – long before John Cage – the “In Futurum”, consisting only of pauses, negated convention as well as various grotesques, burlesques, humoresques, arabesques, ironies. “Bassnachtigall” is the name of three performance pieces for contrabassoon solo, “Die Wolkenpumpe” – serious songs for a baritone voice with four wind instruments and percussion based on the words of the Holy Spirit, to a text by Hans Arp. The “Hot Sonata” for alto saxophone and piano follows later, as well as the pretty foxtrot “Susi”.
From 1924 Erwin Schulhoff lived again with his wife Alice and son Petr in Prague, paid homage to the Viennese School of the Atonal, and traveled restlessly in Europe as an avant-garde pianist and improviser. The more radical the better. At the same time, fascinated by jazz, he played in the orchestra of the Prague Theater under the pseudonym Petr Hanus. He championed Alois Hába’s quarter-tone music, learned to play the water piano, taught at the conservatory, wrote for newspapers, but was also interested in neoclassicism.
From the 1930s, this led to rather simple works of socialist realism, such as the “Manifesto of the Communist Party” as a cantata and seven symphonies. The radical Saul had become Paul, composing for the better Russian man. It goes without saying that the Nazis banned such a doubly “degenerate” artist. The first performance of “Flamen” planned for Berlin was prevented, and the performance of his works was forbidden.
Schulhoff now confined himself to Prague, worked for radio under adverse circumstances, played in theater orchestras and on Radio Ostrava until the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. There he was able to survive under a pseudonym as a jazz pianist until 1941. As a Soviet citizen, he was admittedly interned in Prague on June 24, 1941, two days after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and deported to the camp for citizens of other countries at Wülzburg near Weißenburg.
Fashionable dances, bright colors, blatant contrasts and permanently expressive vocalises (especially for the never-tiring Don Juan tenor, for whom the young Denys Pivnickij stentorlautly recommends himself with rampant enthusiasm for show) characterize “Flammen”. Here Schulhoff again proves to be at a crossroads of styles, which he seems to be running in both directions at the peak of his innovative courage and wealth of ideas.
There is the strict, critical, quasi-moral element, such as the paroxysm of rebellion as limitless as possible. The self-sacrificing Jiří Rožeň leads and whips the choir and orchestra of the Prague State Opera through this wild-sounding labyrinth, where a new sound surprise between refined motor skills and unleashed harmony lurks at every turn.
The once so virile macho man Juan is, of course, only a burned-out, weary shadow of his past glory in a sinister comedy theatre. As a modern Faust he may conjure up Margarethe (Tamara Morozová) or Donna Anna as a nun or Ur-Frau (everyone sings great Viktoria Korosunova), he has long since unsubscribed. So after sex comes morality, flames of love become flames of death. Without any redemption. Thanks to the ingenious eclectic Schulhoff.