P. 4
SYNOPSIS
P. 6
PALESTRINA HANS PFITZNER
P. 9
BUBBLE BATH IN A MINOR KEY CHRISTIAN THIELEMANN IN AN INTERVIEW
P. 14
HAPLESSLY GUARDED FRITZ TRÜMPI
P. 20
PFITZNER ALL’ITALIANA SABINE BUSCH
P. 24 A PINNACLE IN MUSIC CREATIVITY BRUNO WALTER
P. 28
PALESTRINA’S POETRY DIETRICH FISCHER-DIESKAU
P. 30
“WHAT STANDS BETWEEN US... BRINGS US BACK TOGETHER.” JOACHIM REIBER
P. 38 IMPRINT
Libretto HANS PITZNER
ORCHESTRA 4 flutes (3rd and 4th doubling piccolo)
1 alto flute
3 oboes (3rd doubling cor anglais)
3 clarinets / 1 bass clarinet
3 bassoons / 1 contrabassoon
6 horns / 4 trumpets / 4 trombones
1 tuba / timpani / percussion
organ / celesta / 2 harps / 2 mandolins
string quintet with viola d’amore violin I / violin II / viola violoncello / double bass
STAGE MUSIC 2 piccolo flutes
2 clarinets / 2 mandolins
4 guitars / bells / tam-tam
AUTOGRAPH Historical Archive of the Wiener Philharmoniker
WORLD PREMIÈRE 12 JUNE 1917 Prinzregententheater, München
PREMIÈRE AT THE HOUSE ON THE RING 1 MAR 1919
Vienna State Opera
DURATION 4 H 15 MIN INCL. 2 INTERMISSIONS
Silla, Palestrina’s young student, has been experimenting with the new style of music from Florence and intends to leave the maestro. Palestrina’s son, Ighino, is in no mood for singing. He is worried about his father, who has not written any music since the death of his wife Lukrezia, and is growing increasingly melancholy as he faces old age. Cardinal Borromeo arrives to deliver a commission for a mass to his friend Palestrina. This composition must convince the pope that God’s word can be as eloquently expressed with polyphony as in chant. Otherwise, the Council will ban polyphonic music from the church. Palestrina does not feel he can comply with this request: Borromeo storms out of the room. Great composers from the past appear to Palestrina, urging him to write the mass. He is left alone in deep despair. Then he hears angels’ voices, amongst them the voice of his wife Lukrezia. As if compelled by the voices, he writes the music they dictate to him. In the morning, Ighino and Silla find the maestro asleep. Ighino gathers together the pages of the manuscript; it is the completed mass, written by Palestrina in a single night.
The final assembly of the Council is not proceeding as papal legates Morone and Novagerio would wish. On orders from Rome, they are to bring the conference to a close, but due to a clash of the political interests of church dignitaries, princes and nations, general agreement cannot be reached.
Borromeo has had Palestrina thrown in jail. He reassures the Council that the mass will be written. When a dispute arises between the Cardinal of Lorraine and Count Luna, Luna is provoked into making an inflammatory remark. Chaos erupts in the Council, and the meeting is adjourned. The servants, stirred up by the mood of their masters, start to fight amongst themselves. Cardinal Madruscht orders his soldiers to open fire and take any survivors to the torture chambers.
Palestrina returns home from prison a broken man. He is no longer aware of what is happening around him. Ighino explains what has transpired: in order to save his father, Ighino has given the loose pages of the manuscript to the committee. The mass is now being sung in the papal chapel. Singers from the chapel bring the happy news that the pope and the cardinals have been deeply impressed by the mass. The pope comes to visit Palestrina in person to pay his respects. Consumed by guilt, Borromeo begs Palestrina to forgive him. The maestro is left alone, deep in thought. Ighino’s happiness, the news that Silla has finally left him, all this barely moves him. Palestrina has accomplished his life’s work.
There is a man in Rome who has been there through most of the 16th century, in one and the same place; all his life, he never leaves the place where he works. Treated sometimes kindly, sometimes harshly, depending on the mood and predisposition of the current pope, this great genius lives quietly and without ceremony, in the shadows, with no compensation but a sense of his own worth. Suddenly a blinding light is directed onto him, he finds himself so to speak in the spotlight of world history. He is faced with the following situation: an entire art movement, polyphonic music, is at risk of being obliterated. The inartistic world, those who engage in the hustle and bustle of the human interests and passions of the outside world, is bent on stamping out countless masterworks, born in the course of time as if from a single spirit, and banishing them to eternal obscurity. The call goes out to him, Palestrina: save the music! It seems to him as if his predecessors who lived, created, struggled and worked like him, stretch their hands out to him, from the grave, and call to him: “you, you are one spirit with us, save our work!” All of a sudden, his life, his constant work in silence, seem to have a purpose: he is ready. In the hour of need, the great man proves his greatness, he composes the work that saves the music. A Herculean intellectual task is accomplished, the most difficult of all tasks performed: creating beauty on command.
lt was clear to me from the outset that two conflicting worlds had to be incorporated into the action; the outward world with its loud and impetuous goings-on, that is simply called “the world”, and the other, the internal, serene world that seeks eternity in the heart of the creative individual. In this world, spiritual works are not created together with the other world, at its command, but also not against it, against its will, but without it, in compliance with quite different laws from those that govern the outward world.
These two worlds also had to be expressed in the form of the work. They are therefore the true subject of the action. And so I foresaw this work as a kind of triptych, before I knew exactly what was going to happen in each act: a first and a third act for Palestrina’s world, and in the middle the image of the commotion of the outside world that is always at odds with the quiet creativity of the genius. This could only be the Council, which initiated the decisions that would have been so detrimental to the arts.
THIELEMANN
ll Initially, people criticised the composer Hans Pfitzner for being “modernist”, later he was frequently labelled conservative. What was he in fact? How would you describe Pfitzner in a few sentences for an opera newbie?
ct I find him harmonically far superior to Richard Strauss – with the exception of works such as Elektra or some passages in Die Frau ohne Schatten. In general, Pfitzner’s entire musical language is much more austere, less facile. This is also due to his choice of subjects: he never set a Rosenkavalier to music; he never went in that direction. What both Pfitzner and Strauss have in common is an incredible feeling for the theatre.
ll And how would you summarise Palestrina? The work has many facets, from an artist’s struggle all the way to comedy, as seen in some passages in act 2.
ct Palestrina is a drama about an artist. And it is a piece brimming with
contrasts. In act 1 we experience Palestrina’s self-doubt, the apparitions of the old music masters, this tremendous scene where Mass is sung – almost Wagnerian in proportions! In act 2 there is also, as you say, caricature; it is at times almost preposterous, slapstick! Then it becomes violent, there is shooting, there is torture... welcome to real life! Act 3 tries to create a synthesis from all this, the mood is again closer to act 1, and the opera ends on a very melancholy note. Palestrina was ultimately forced to find inspiration – and here I see something timeless and relevant. After all, how often do politicians try to co-opt artists! Palestrina is always a warning to me: do not do that, stay independent!
ll The caricature nature of act 2 also gives us precise portraits of the characters...
ct Like Wagner and Richard Strauss, Pfitzner also had an incredible gift for characterising people –
which he dressed up with a dose of caustic humour. The way he handles the transformation of the influential Cardinal Carlo Borromeo, for example – from purring petitioner determined to win Palestrina over as composer of a decisive Mass to absolute monster who exerts his power –it is simply brilliant! The same applies to the portrayal of the Cardinal Legate Novagerio as an influential bully spitting vicious remarks or the Bishop of Budoja, who sees the Council as a welcome opportunity to indulge in life’s pleasures at someone else’s expense, or the young theologian who is only worried about his daily diet. Even the passion for grandeur of Hapsburg Emperor Ferdinand I, although he is not actually present, is caricatured by a deliberately simple and pompous leitmotif. Pfitzner assigns each person in the orbit of the Council of Trent a very specific, unmistakable personality and at the same time gives them what is coming to them; everything is subjected to ruthless critique dripping with irony.
ll The three acts are also very different in length. The last one is surprisingly short compared to the previous acts.
ct The first act is very extensive, but the story has to be unfolded, almost Parsifal-like, because ultimately the audience needs to understand who they are dealing with. The second act is shorter. It also seems more compact due to the drastic nature of the events. Really entertaining! Act 3 is very short, but incredibly beautiful! I have christened it “Bubble Bath in a Minor Key”. It is one of the greatest pieces ever written. The ending with Palestrina sitting at the organ and the sound dying away... it really touches
your heart! I think this lengthy dramaturgy succeeds, because after the initial introduction, the audience is treated to entertaining and brief representation in the following acts.
ll Palestrina was first performed at the Vienna State Opera in 1919 – in the staging of the composer. A number of productions followed, but none of them were performed very often. His other operas were also performed at the house on the Ring, but gradually disappeared from the repertoire. Why is that? Why is Palestrina so rarely performed?
ct One factor is the structure of the music. If you know the work well and follow it attentively, you will find it very melodic. But if you don’t have this detailed knowledge, and that is often the case with Pfitzner’s works, the music is difficult for some people. But this is also the case with the later works of Strauss –for example Capriccio. A lot of the music is very catchy; the opening with Ighino almost makes you want to sing along! And Borromeo’s entrance is incredibly exciting! The visionary scene with the music masters is unbelievably good! But the audience has to stay focused. Palestrina is not a piece that you can listen to with half an ear. It is not Carmen or La bohème or even Lohengrin...
ll Pfitzner’s composer colleague Arthur Honegger spoke of the “musical superiority” of Palestrina. Is that what makes the work challenging?
ct There is a wonderful story about a meeting between Pfitzner and Strauss. Pfitzner was complaining about the problems he was experiencing composing act 2 of Palestrina, and Strauss answered laconically: “why are you com-
posing it then if it’s so difficult for you?” This very neatly illustrates Pfitzner’s approach. In his pondering and wrangling, he felt very important and significant. But Strauss, with his strong theatrical instinct and subjects, gained something that ultimately eluded Pfitzner: great popularity. Pfitzner also clung to a concept of genius that was already somewhat tarnished at the time, namely that inspiration and genius must come as it were from heaven. Just think of what Strauss said in 1915 – he was already over 50 years old! – at the première of his Alpensinfonie: “I’ve finally learned how to orchestrate a piece!” Pfitzner would never have said something like that!
ll That’s what Strauss meant when he once described Pfitzner in a trenchantly critical way as “so ideal.”
ct Yes exactly, Pfitzner wanted to present himself as an ideal. I admire his music, but I would say that at times he seemed rigid and strained. He could have been more generous. It is said that those who conducted his works dreaded him. He would sit in the audience during rehearsals and constantly make comments: it’s all too slow, too fast, there’s no ritardando, this won’t work and that won’t work either. Here again I would compare him with Strauss, who was more relaxed in such cases. So to speak: “oh, if the singer can’t sing that, we’ll just cut ten bars...”
ll John Steinbeck is said to have commented that everyone is lonely at the moment of creativity. In act 1, Palestrina goes even further than this with his comment that “at its core, the world is loneliness.” Not a very optimistic view of the world, is it?
ct Of course, everyone knows from their own experience that you are completely alone with certain major questions. It doesn’t help having company and getting on well with a lot of people. Friends and relatives can at best give advice, but the final decision must be made by the individual him or herself. That’s what Palestrina, or rather Pfitzner, means here. I once did this piece with Peter Schreier, who at the time emphatically confirmed that he could understand this comment by Palestrina very well and that he had also experienced similar depression –as he called it. To which I replied that I did not want to conduct the work out of a sense of depression, but wanted to preserve the complexity of this opera. How wonderful the remark is “in you, Pierluigi, the brightest light still shines” in the scene where the old masters appear and Lucrezia’s “I am near you in the light of peace” or the magnificent Rome-theme at the end: Pfitzner clearly gave into his weakness here! What a contrast to act 1 this Meistersinger -like, lively, comedic act 2 and the final conciliatory act 3 are. To be sure, at the end, sitting at the organ Palestrina, asks himself, as mentioned pensively and justifiably, whether he was intimidated and forced to compose the Mass or whether it was the product of artistic inspiration. From the musical standpoint, Pfitzner leaves the question unanswered; finally, here he takes up motifs from the first prelude again. However, Palestrina’s answer to his son Ighino’s question as to whether he is happy is interesting. What he says is: “but, my child, you see I’m no longer young, I take delight in life less boisterously.” Even if less boisterously, Palestrina is clearly pleased, so he is somehow
happy. And that really doesn’t convey anything pessimistic.
ll In the scene mentioned above where the masters appear, the remark is made that “one last note is still missing from the sonorous chord”, letting Palestrina know that his “earthly work is not yet done”, in other words, he still has a work to do. But doesn’t that mean, if you pursue that thought, that at some point an artist has said everything he had to say?
ct Bruckner was certainly so tired at the end of his life that he would not have succeeded in writing the finale of his ninth symphony, where he had set himself the task of combining all the themes. But leaving aside physical ailments or death: who knows what else Mozart would have come up with, for example. Or Schubert, or Wagner, etc. No, I think that Pfitzner simply identified to a certain extent with Palestrina, the artist struggling to create a great work, and put an ideal image of himself on stage. As a young man, Pfitzner was considered a high-flyer, similar to Korngold. At first, Pfitzner was even more respected than Richard Strauss, who was five years older; his great first opera, Der arme Heinrich, which premièred in Mainz, reveals the work of a truly outstanding composer. But by the time he wrote Salome and Rosenkavalier, the race had been decided in Strauss’s favour. In addition, Pfitzner was not a sympathetic figure in principle – you only have to look at the photos of him sitting deep in thought at the piano. He was stubborn about his views and ideals, and, as I said, unlike Strauss, he never wanted to let things slide, and his writing often comes across as almost dictatorial. He was also
a poor networker and was unable to gain a foothold anywhere in later years. I also believe that his antisemitic attacks on Schoenberg and those against twelvetone music, for example, were probably fed by this frustration.
ll One of Pfitzner’s posits was: “an artist should only be entitled to recognition if he also had a forward-looking perspective.” Does Palestrina fulfil this requirement in the opera with his Mass, his last great work? In act 1, Palestrina’s writing style is dismissed as outdated by his student Silla. So what is this Mass? Something new or the last pinnacle of an old world?
ct Both – and that is what is wonderful about it. Renewal comes from returning to the good things. So a conservative with a view of the future, if you like. This also applies to Pfitzner himself: I have conducted some of Pfitzner’s works and have often been amazed at how incredibly forward-looking his orchestrations were, for example. As I said – Pfitzner saw his alter ego in the opera Palestrina.
ll Is there an artistic truth? Should the Mass in this opera be a symbol of an artistic truth of a certain time?
ct No, no, I don’t see that at all, especially since I myself don’t believe in truth in art. When I stand on the podium to conduct Palestrina , you expect a personally coloured interpretation from me – and that’s what you’ll get. But truth? I listened to my own Palestrina recording from 1997 and now find it too slow in parts, so I’ve moved on and am no longer convinced by my previous interpretation. A work of art can never claim to be true.
HANS PFITZNER AND NATIONAL SOCIALISM
Hans Pfitzner’s (1869–1949) political affiliations with National Socialism remain a topic of public interest today, sometimes even beyond those interested in music. In the course of discussions about renaming street names, Pfitzner’s name has surfaced quite regularly over recent years – whether here in Austria, such as in Linz or Salzburg, or in German cities like Wiesbaden. The inclusion of Pfitzner’s pieces in concert programmes can also occasionally provoke controversy. Ingo Metzmacher found himself at the centre of a genuine scandal when he marked the “Day of German Unity” on October 3, 2007, with a concert he titled Von deutscher Seele (Of German Soul) – during which he conducted, besides other pieces, Pfitzner’s 1921 cantata of the same name. Metzmacher faced heavy criticism at the time for allegedly paying tribute to a known anti-Semite and Nazi sympathiser. The conductor remarked that he had wanted to safeguard Pfitzner’s music from its composer, adding that he was situating it in a broader context by featuring it alongside works of Beethoven and Weill. Indeed, Pfitzner had written the aforementioned cantata back in 1921, which was “well before the advent of German National Socialism,” as Metzmacher pointed out in a 2007 interview
with Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Putting this into context, however, the National Socialist Party, NSDAP, was actually founded in 1920 and was taken over by Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) in 1921. While it was only a small party at the time, there is evidence of a personal meeting between Hitler and Pfitzner, although it was the first and—according to Pfizner’s biograph – the only such encounter. The meeting occurred in 1923-24, when the far-right politician paid the composer a visit whilst he was in hospital in Munich. Pfitzner is said to have expressed his gratitude by gifting Hitler a book during his incarceration at Landsberg Castle following the failed coup of November 1923 (according to an entry on Pfitzner in the web portal “Music and the Holocaust”). From that time onwards, various expressions of loyalty from Pfitzner to Hitler and the Nazi movement have been chronicled, especially during the period around the transfer of power to the National Socialists in January 1933.
Pfitzner’s proverbial aesthetic conservatism is something that could be easily integrated into Nazi art ideology – something well-documented by Sabine Busch in her biographies of Pfitzner since 2001. As early as the 1910s, Pfitzner penned pamphlets on
music aesthetics, taking a firm stand against the trends of modernism. The sensationalist pamphlet Futuristengefahr (Futurist Danger) published in 1917 caused early controversy, with roughly 50 pages attacking Ferruccio Busoni’s 1907/1916 Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Draft of a New Aesthetic of Music). The text reads, for instance: “For those who place their hopes solely on radical upheaval in reconstruction and embrace bold beginnings as creative art, must, to put it bluntly, come to glorify the most dreadful kitsch. There’s invariably always a type of kitsch at the forefront. We have always had the foreign, the trivial, the glittering orchestral kitsch, the salon and other forms of kitsch; it falls to our generation to have integrated the futuristic kitsch into our environment.”
In 1919, Pfitzner gave an even more striking title to an attack spanning over 150 pages against musical modernism, aimed primarily at the music critic Paul Bekker (1882–1937), who was known to be open to new developments in music. In Die neue Ästhetik der musikalischen Impotenz. Ein Verwesungssymptom? (The New Aesthetics of Musical Impotence. A Symptom of Decay?), Pfitzner writes, among other things: “yet now, at this juncture of world affairs, with things being turned on their head, with matters that had once never been imaginable now becoming reality, something unthinkable is occurring in our sacred art-musical impotence is being declared permanent, underpinned by theory. Music no longer needs to be beautiful. The composer no longer needs to have his own ideas.” Towards the end of the pamphlet, Pfitzner enlightens his readers about the origin of this “impotence”, describing how the
“intellectual struggle against musical creativity” is led “by the Jewish-international spirit, which instils in the German the completely alien madness of destruction and fragmentation. The whole thing is a symptom of decay.” According to Sabine Busch, the composer provided an early, preparatory contribution to the “tools for the consideration of Nazi culture”, which would be widely applied a decade later. Meanwhile, Pfitzner tempered his antisemitic rants of 1919, at least on the surface, by asserting that a “difference between Jew and Judaism” should be recognised, since the “line of separation in Germany” was “not between Jew and non-Jew, but between those who felt German-national and those who felt international.” Some consider this as evidence that Pfitzner was not an advocate of radical racial antisemitism. Indeed, he published an article in 1930 in which he explicitly rejected hateful antisemitism, but not without adding that Judaism certainly posed a threat to “German intellectual life” and “German culture,” even though “such dangers [...] are inherent to every race, in certain forms, with respect to any culture.” In musicological studies, Pfitzner’s antisemitism is generally portrayed as more culturally grounded than biologicallyracially oriented.
Still, as Sabine Busch asserts, Pfitzner’s ideological nationalism and aesthetic conservatism provided a favourable basis for fitting into the Nazis’ cultural-political perspectives and intentions – at least in theory. At first, Pfitzner believed he had good prospects of playing a significant role as a composer in Nazi Germany. He put himself forward in 1933 as the successor to Düsseldorf’s General Music Director,
Jascha Horenstein (1898–1973), who had been dismissed because of his Jewish origin. Yet despite the support from the chief ideologist of the NSDAP, Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), Pfitzner failed and came away empty-handed. Not long after, he was also in talks to lead the Berlin City Opera, yet Pfitzner was unsuccessful again. It was evident in the early years following the Nazis’ rise to power that Pfitzner, aged 64 in 1933, was unlikely to secure any prominent role in the Nazi cultural establishment. As noted by Sabine Busch, this was primarily influenced by underhanded actions taken against Pfitzner, which he further exacerbated through his infamous complaining and rough, unfriendly demeanour. Above all, he could not count on support from either Hitler or Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945), probably because he did not possess the remarkable popularity of Richard Strauss (1864–1949), nor was he among the younger musical talents expected to embody a supposedly dynamic new Germany. Evidently, even his public endorsements of the NSDAP during the 1930s did little to change this. Although Pfitzner never joined the party, a political assessment obtained in 1938, when the composer was offered a professorship in Vienna (which he ultimately did not take up), expressly noted that he held an “affirmative stance” towards National Socialism. However, as little as this helped Pfitzner in obtaining any significant status in the realm of cultural politics, it also did nothing to raise the visibility of his works in the opera programmes. On the contrary, during the time of National Socialism, this presence gradually waned, with the exception of the seasons 1933/34 and 1938/39, which experienced some up -
swing on account of the composer’s 65 th and 70th birthdays, as detailed by Sabine Busch in her study of the performance records of his works.
Remarkably, Pfitzner’s somewhat illustrious circle of friends, despite reaching the upper ranks of the Nazi leadership, was relatively ineffective in securing broader recognition for him in Nazi Germany. The most politically significant and influential friend of Pfitzner was undoubtedly Hans Frank (1900–1946). Frank had worked as a lawyer for Hitler and other Nazi officials during the Weimar Republic, and in 1933 he played a leading role in the “alignment” of the justice system. From 1939, he served as the “Governor-General” in the militarily occupied territories of Poland, exercising a brutal tyranny that earned him the moniker “Butcher of Poland” and for which he was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. And it was to this same Hans Frank that Pfitzner dedicated his orchestral work Krakauer Begrüßung at the end of 1944 – thereby actively participating in the violent occupation policy of the Nazis by legitimising it musically. For this work commissioned by the Governor-General, Pfitzner was also rewarded handsomely. Frank frequently acted as a patron and supporter of Pfitzner (as well as other artists and writers) and often invited him to celebratory events in Krakow. On the composer’s 75 th birthday, Frank himself also even penned two pieces that were released as part of the birthday celebrations. Most of Pfitzner’s stays with Frank were marked by extravagant luxury – something that clearly left a profound impression on Pfitzner in light of the mounting hardships in the final years of the war.
In 1944, Pfitzner made his final trip to Krakow from Vienna, where Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter and Reich Governor (1907–1974), offered him some recognition, awarding him the highlyvaluable Beethoven Prize and providing him with a house in Rodaun after the bombing of Pfitzner’s own home in Munich in October 1943. Goebbels, who was admittedly not a supporter of Pfitzner, eventually followed suit, so that in 1944, the composer received a substantial (tax-free) “honorary gift” from Berlin as well as a place on the “God-Gifted List.”
After the end of the war, Pfitzner showed no regret for the atrocities of
the Nazi regime. Like countless others, he took to denying, relativising, and downplaying his associations with the regime during the denazification period. At the same time, he remained peculiarly stubborn, insisting on the correctness of his earlier ideological and political views while simultaneously adapting them. Indeed, Sabine Busch notes that after the downfall of the Nazi regime, Pfitzner underwent a renewed “shift to the right,” notably reflected in his overt antisemitic attitudes. Nevertheless, this would not alter the fact that Pfitzner was to be exonerated in a superficial denazification trial in 1948, before his death in Salzburg in 1949.
Pfitzner the German, if not the “most German of living composers”, was how the composer of Palestrina liked to see himself, and this is how he described his self-image in all seriousness and without the slightest idea that this might be challenged. He could justifiably have possessed many of the qualifications for seeing himself as a cosmopolitan, as he was born to German parents in Moscow and had spent many years in Strasbourg, Alsace, where French and German influence abounded in equal measure.
But to a greater degree even than Richard Wagner, his creative father figure, who over the years became less and less willing to tolerate “foreign airs and foreign glitter”, Pfitzner also lacked the attributes of a man of the world; his language skills were limited, his trips abroad were primarily for guest performances or concerts and scarcely seem to have kindled any deeper interest in other lifestyles in him. His taste in literature and music was also almost exclusively restricted to his native fare, to
German intellectual culture and “German characteristics.” It was therefore only natural that in the 1930s some National Socialist groups tried to portray Pfitzner as a pioneer and mastermind of their movement – the conservative, even almost regressive artist had already laid solid foundations for this in his writings in the 1920s. Influenced by the experience of losing the First World War, which he personally felt to be devastating, in papers critical of the German-Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni and the music writer Paul Bekker Pfitzner had abandoned discussion and launched a wild, injurious, chauvinistic and antisemitic polemic against all those who “defiled” tradition and Germanness.
“I want to see German culture treated positively, loved and preferred in Germany,” the composer had demanded – certainly without suspecting that, for similar reasons, after 1933 Adolf Hitler would launch a brutal and inhumane fight to eradicate everything “un-German.” Pfitzner’s self-definition
as “most German” and his nationalism naturally went hand in hand; when it came to protecting the German intellectual world, he was primarily thinking of his own imaginary home altar (where Schumann, Weber, Eichendorff and G. A. Bürger had their devotional prayer corner) and of the cultivation and appreciation of his own musical work. Ultimately, on the one hand he lacked the political foresight and historical overview to be able to give more than just his personal conviction to the principles he so zealously advocated, and on the other hand he simply lacked the interest and enthusiasm for such an activity – he was after all primarily a composer, conductor and artist. He was happy to leave to those more qualified the establishment of an ideology or even the pseudo-scientific justification of the theory that it was precisely “German nature that the world needed to heal from”, just like the political realisation of a new, “third German Reich”.
But when this became reality after Hitler came to power, Pfitzner was disappointed to find that the new government did not place any greater value on guiding its cultural policy based on his ideas. He continued to lag behind his colleague Richard Strauss, who was as pampered as ever by the powerful; his interventions against the exclusion of Jewish friends and performers were unsuccessful; the rebellious little Don Quixote of the opera world was treated outwardly with respect in the Nazi dictatorship, but he remained without any influence, and the number of performances of his works even decreased. The offended maestro, blessed with healthy self-confidence, took up the fight against the windmills, intervened indiscriminately with the
var ious powerful people of the Nazi dictatorship, complained to the press and friends, and set his lobby of loyal Pfitznerians in motion –but the success of his efforts fell far short of his expectations.
He remained recognised and valued as the master of Palestrina, as a singer of the “German soul,” but the fact that he was still very much alive and ready for greater tasks despite his advanced age went largely unnoticed. It was probably simply too difficult for the leading brown-shirts to exploit the composer for their politics, given his unpredictable grumpiness and lack of loyalty to the party line, in which he kept in constant contact with Jewish émigrés or told jokes about Hitler and Eva Braun at large parties.
Pfitzner was certainly a kind of living “national cultural shrine” in the Nazi dictatorship and would probably have had a good chance of a state funeral – but no one knew what to do with the very much alive artist who felt called to higher honours. Pfitzner was the very building block of his self-created monument, “Germanness”. Hitler could not do without Richard Strauss, who was also not exactly streamlined, as a cultural ambassador because, for example, Der Rosenkavalier had now found an audience far beyond German-speaking lands, while Pfitzner, who was accused of dark-grey late romanticism, remained an unchallenged matter for the German-speaking world; the geographic triangle of Vienna, Munich and Berlin was also an approximate boundary for the reception of his works. The foreign policy of the Hitler empire was so complicated, the definition of the terms allied and enemy nation were subject to such rapid fluctuation that the musical
giants had to be quick to adapt: Harvest Bride had to be quickly patched together from Polish Blood, Russian music was judged to be of brotherly familiarity or infested with Bolshevism, depending on the current state of politics, and every application by an artist for a visa for international guest tours was subject to the current foreign policy.
Relations with fascist Italy were generally amicable, the Führer and the Duce presented harmony and unity, and since both countries saw themselves as cultured people and homelands of music, cultural exchange was also desired in the spirit of the Axis policy. Pfitzner saw himself as the right man here, as he had made Palestrina , one of the Italian Duce’s declared favourite composers, the title character of an opera and was, as he once said in 1936, extremely proud that “in my greatest stage work, one of the noblest Italian masters – Palestrina –undergoes transfiguration.”
The Italian masters otherwise had a difficult time with Pfitzner, who would have preferred to see the “horrible Traviatas and Manons and Butterflys ” banned from the German repertoire and was outraged that “a disgusting and repulsive opera like Tosca by Puccini is at home on every stage in Germany, [and that it] is treated like a German national opera.” He also wanted to see Verdi’s considerable operatic oeuvre put into perspective, and stressed: “the successful Italian opera composer Verdi lived in the same century as certain other people: Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and others.”
Nevertheless, he hoped for a positive reception to performance of his works abroad, especially of Palestrina in Italy, which he assumed would make
the “most outstanding impression” in a “very good performance.” He made a first attempt to compel such a performance in 1934 with the help of the Frankfurt theatres, which had been invited on a guest tour to Italy. Pfitzner gave the Frankfurt director Meissner a piano score of Palestrina for Mussolini, in which he had even written a personal dedication; he hoped that this would inspire the Italian dictator to love his work. But the piano score never reached the dictator’s hands, and Pfitzner had to do without this high-profile potential patron.
However, admirers of Pfitzner’s work continued to campaign for the cultivation of his works in Italy. One such was Clemens Krauss, who informed Pfitzner in 1939: “During my last stay in Italy, I contacted one of the senior gentlemen at Sonzogno publishing house and strongly urged him to help get your masterpiece Palestrina performed in Italy. My suggestion was received with great interest and the publishing house management has now informed me that a translation of Palestrina into Italian has been commissioned and will be submitted to the relevant cultural policy authorities once it is completed. This therefore seems to me to be a promising start and I did not want to miss the opportunity to let you know about it. For my part, I will do everything possible with great persistence to bring the matter to a positive outcome.”
But this attempt also seems to have fallen on barren ground after the outbreak of the Second World War; and so, Palestrina only saw the light of day on an Italian stage after Pfitzner’s death – without, however, becoming a permanent fixture in the repertoire there, as Pfitzner had probably dreamed. In
Paris, Palestrina had already seen a supposedly acclaimed première years earlier, in 1942 under German occupation. London did not follow suit until 1997, 80 years after the première; a difficult, sluggish history of international reception that does not seem to fit in with the opera’s roaring success at that legendary première in Munich’s Prinzregenten Theatre under Bruno Walter in 1917.
Pfitzner, who so often viewed foreign countries and their art with mistrust and contempt, was unable to gain a solid audience outside his own cultural circle, quite unlike Richard Wagner, for whom the nations of the world continue to make pilgrimages to Bayreuth to this day, despite his harsh statements against Italy, France and even Judaism in general.
Palestrina remains of interest to the German-speaking world. Pfitzner
cannot and must not be ignored here, even though he is undeniably a difficult composer and one that is difficult to categorise in human terms. His Palestrina is guaranteed a side chapel in the cathedral of music theatre, as it is an important link between Tannhäuser and Mathis der Maler and a full-fledged link in a true chain of artist operas, as well as one of the few serious answers to the Richard Wagner phenomenon from the era that began after the Bayreuth master’s death. Pfitzner had prophesied: “it will always be difficult for me, but I will always be there.” Perhaps today a wise, moderate Pfitzner, freed from all superfluous bile, sits in opera heaven between Wagner and Hindemith and is not at all dissatisfied that his masterpiece has not become a “hit” on the opera stage...
Communicating with Pfitzner in person was always edifying. He typically had a great deal to contribute to any conversation. He knew no banality, became animated as things appealed to his sense of humour, sparkled with quick wit, and always responded from the depths of his being; he drew his true charm and intellectual wealth from his exceptionally intense relationships with kindred spirits, poets, thinkers and musicians. His investment in all human interaction was equally fervent. And so my personal relationship to the essential and original individuality of Hans Pfitzner grew into a constantly regenerating contact for my life output.
Our bond was at its strongest around the time of the première of Palestrina in Munich, which I consider to be the most important event in my ten years as director of the Munich Opera. I will never forget the exhilarating rehearsal period for the project. The harrowing and overwhelming impact the work had on participants and audience alike is memorable, an impact that was renewed with each subsequent performance; it continued during our guest performances in Swiss theatres at the time. This was around the time of the First World War; travelling abroad with the Palestrina production was intended to demonstrate the level of German artistic achievement in the most difficult of times. A work such as Palestrina and certainly also that performance were ideal for this purpose. In Hans
Pfitzner’s creative work, which also includes many songs, chamber music, orchestral and choral works, Palestrina most assuredly represented a pinnacle. And the Munich presentation, which set out to faithfully execute the concept developed by the poet/composer, helped the audience to understand this great work. Today, so many years after that significant artistic event with its lasting impact, I would say that I feel very strongly that Palestrina must be regarded as a pinnacle in the musical creativity of our era. In this work, Pfitzner’s poetic and musical creative powers rise above the realm of the romantic, which he really was by nature, to a uniquely elevated dimension of art that cannot be expressed by any limiting terms such as romanticism or classicism, drama or lyricism; a dimension where noble and pure humanity has found its eloquent artistic expression, where a genius has enhanced his rich contribution to a masterful and stylistically unique artistic style of a moving human event.
Pfitzner’s legend in music Palestrina has often been placed in the context of the history of the German artist drama. The justification for this for a stage work that by genre is actually an opera, or more accurately music drama, which only comes to life with music on the stage, stems from the august literary status that elevates this “opera text” above the usual form of libretto. This is not the only case of librettist-cum-composer since Richard Wagner. Pfitzner’s intellectual rival and adversary whom he once severely harassed, Ferruccio Busoni and his Doktor Faust, also belong in this category, as do Paul Hindemith and his Mathis der Maler. In all three works, which I had the honour of performing, the creative talent of the musician takes precedence, and they therefore have more in common than is initially stylistically apparent.
Pfitzner’s musical legend, however, is potentiated into an independent poetic conduit, and so we can rightly ask of its composer, “how it is that the greatest work by a composer is a poem which, because it also represents one of his highest musical achievements, must be called his real life’s work.”
We, the later generations, can claim that such a pinnacle can be explained by the character of the work as an aggregate of suffering, experience, creation and thought. Pfitzner’s magnum opus diagnoses the loneliness of the creative individual and therefore deals with a fundamental experience of the composer. Today we know that the self-image of the artist had plunged into a crisis, which the outstanding minds of that time also sought to illuminate in
musical stage works. When I first studied Morone and later Borromeo, I felt the same as I did with Wagner: when I first read the libretto, I saw the other, complementary part, the music, which then of course far exceeded my expectations. The spiritualization of opera seemed to me to have progressed so far in Palestrina that purely intellectual elements inevitably had to be presented on the stage. Pfitzner accomplished this in such a vivid way that the scene was not made desolate and what he wanted to say was communicated in an entirely clear manner. The proportions of the three acts of Palestrina , which have been criticised and even vilified many times, are and remain an example of spiritually guided dramaturgy. As the 16th century subject demanded, an element of music came to the rescue that could satisfy the romantic preference for the past and at the same time – at the time of its composition around the First World War – aimed at future possibilities for describing the archaic that had not yet been even imagined at that time. The miracle remains that Pfitzner created archaic elements with little effort, without repeating historical forms. Pfitzner realised a vision of Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann, whom he so highly admired: that the composer should be his own lyricist. It is a pity that Pfitzner did not assume the functions of both composer and lyricist beyond Palestrina because he achieved a spiritualization of the opera text, a libretto without mannerisms, a poem that, with thanks to its standing, could be set to music that was no longer quite autonomous.
“The last friend to still wish me well, now he too departs…” In Pfitzner’s Palestrina, one learns that friendships are a precarious asset: wavering, unstable, and forever teetering on the edge of collapse. When they fall apart, it should come as no surprise to those who truly understand. “Sorrowful” yet “composed”, Palestrina resigns himself to Borromeo’s furious and wrathful departure, which he must regard as the final farewell of his last friend, sustained by the understanding that “The innermost nature of the world is loneliness.” He remains alone at the end. Borromeo has indeed found his way back to him, and Palestrina tenderly embraces the penitent in his arms, only for Borromeo to swiftly break away and exit the stage, his face turned from view.
The fickleness of friendship is portrayed in another drama, closely linked
with the opera Palestrina – that of the relationship between Thomas Mann and Hans Pfitzner. This two-person piece concludes, unlike the story of Palestrina and Borromeo, in striking dissonance. without any human reconciliation. In Pfitzner’s opera, the hero can still console his counterpart: “you and I are vessels; broken here, but the breath of love rises from the shards”, yet for the composer himself and Thomas Mann, there remain only fragments, a relationship fractured without any “breath of love.” The curtain comes down over a dialogue of acrid bitterness. In 1947, two years before Pfitzner’s death, Thomas Mann took on the composer publicly. He refers to a “celebrated old composer in Munich, staunchly German and bitterly spiteful”, pointing to indications of “obstinacy” and “unredeemable haughtiness” before quickly dismiss-
“ WHAT STANDS BETWEEN US... BRINGS US BACK TOGETHER.”
ing the matter: “well, the man has long spouted contentious gibberish, and so it’s just another thing to add to the pile.” In anger, Pfitzner picks up his pen and writes a “Reply to Thomas Mann’s Provocation.”
It had all started quite differently –thirty years earlier, in the spirit of Palestrina and bursting with fervent enthusiasm. “I cannot express how much this Palestrina means to me!” wrote Thomas Mann to Bruno Walter, the conductor of the premiere, a few days after the debut performance. The work satisfies the “deepest, most intrinsic need, and its emergence now is nothing short of a great fortune for me. It brings me positivity, liberates me from controversy, and offers my emotions a noble subject with which to connect...” In 1918, the year after, the sentence re-emerged in Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man: a beacon of enthusiasm, to which the author devoted around twenty wide-ranging pages.
An artistic alliance appeared to be secured. Pfitzner, more the courted than the courting, was also well-disposed towards the poet. He spoke, as Thomas Mann gratefully confided to his diary, “with love about the Reflections.” Thomas Mann, in turn, did not tire of publicly expressing his affection for Palestrina and its composer. In 1918, he assumed – with a nationalistic tone –leadership of the newly established “Hans Pfitzner Society for German Music.”
But what was it that brought about this unity? Where precisely did the author of Buddenbrooks meet the creator of Palestrina? Thomas Mann, first and foremost – and this was a very significant point – had the correct perspective
on the fundamental dramatic concept of Palestrina. He understood the tripartite structure as the central concept of the work, defending the second act, the theatrically vivid portrayal of the Council of Trent, as a necessary counterpart to the dramatic interiors of the two Palestrina acts. Any critique applied here, noted Thomas Mann to his readers, targets “the entirety, the conception. One might believe that this compositional thought – Art, Life, and Art once more –was the primordial mist, the first thing the poet truly perceived...” That spoke directly to Pfitzner’s soul; more than that, it reflected almost verbatim the emphatically expressed statements of the poet-composer.
This antagonism is what captivated Thomas Mann. The dichotomy of art and life – an idea that had thematically shaped his early novellas and the Buddenbrooks, was now consuming Thomas Mann with unyielding intensity as he faced a “crisis-laden, disturbed condition of his artistry.” Against the backdrop of the First World War, which Mann, like many others, saw as a “groundbreaking event”, even as a “turning point of the world”, he sought to retain his stability by undertaking a “complete re-evaluation of his own foundations.” Rhetorically, he found this stability in contradiction, in clear-cut contrast. His work, spanning approximately 600 printed pages, is filled with antitheses from start to finish. Not only is there the divergence between art and life, but also the “difference between intellect and politics... between culture and civilisation, between soul and society, between freedom and the right to vote, between art and literature.” The citizen stands
against the bourgeois, the German spirit against civilisation, romance against enlightenment, music against democracy.
In this opulent play of oppositions, Pfitzner’s opus serves as a perfect exemplar. Thomas Mann understands Palestrina through the very contrast that establishes his perspective – art as a counterpoint to virtue. “One should not delude oneself for the sake of a system”, it is written in the chapter Von der Tugend (On Virtue), in which Mann includes his Palestrina reflections that “Art does not stand on good terms with virtue, it seldom or never did, namely if virtue means democratic progress...”
Similarly, he interprets in Palestrina “the opposite of a politically virtuous disposition and temperament” and delightedly referenced that newly printed pamphlet – Pfitzner’s Futuristengefahr (Futurist Danger) – that waged war on the belief in musical advancement and the determined nature of any art.
The rejection of progressive thinking met with Mann’s full approval, but the turn towards the transitory, which he found in Palestrina , made the encounter for him a “comfort and blessing.” Encountering those “atmospherics of the bygone era” in a contemporary work resonated with him, himself a child of the 19th century, and is what prompted him to speak of deliverance. And similarly, just as he had regarded Death in Venice as “in its way something ultimate, the late work of an era”, he also recognised in Pfitzner’s work “something ultimate and consciously final from the Schopenhauer-Wagnerian, the romantic sphere, with its Dürer-like Faustian characteristics, its metaphysical mood, its ethos from “cross, death and tomb”, its mixture of music, pes-
simism, and humour.” Pfitzner found himself surrounded by the illustrious “triumvirate” of Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche (to which Thomas Mann referred with the phrase “cross, death, and tomb”). For the composer of Palestrina, this was a company of considerable honour.
Thomas Mann’s statements otherwise offered him no cause for discomfort. What proved problematic was, in fact, defining “Romanticism”, which Mann attributed to Pfitzner’s opera. “Sympathy with death” was the phrase he used to describe the romantic essence of Palestrina – a conclusion he coherently developed from the interpretation of the work, presented with rhetorical brilliance, and corroborated by an original quotation from the poet-composer. Pfitzner himself, according to Thomas Mann, spoke of the “sympathy with death” in reference to his opera. And with blatant enthusiasm, Mann declares that this specific wording –unbeknownst to both parties – found its way into the manuscript of Zauberberg. “How much brotherhood”, he exclaims, “can be implied by contemporaneity alone!”
With that, he proclaimed Hans Pfitzner a kindred spirit of decadence. Thomas Mann was closely aligned with Romanticism, as he also acknowledged in his Reflections. But was this truly the “Romanticism” to which Pfitzner subscribed? In 1934 – admittedly not a time when decadent moods could serve as a foundation for much – he downplayed his statement as “a remark thrown out on a specific occasion” and resisted being labelled as a “romantic candidate for death.” But what did that prove against Thomas Mann’s interpretation of Palestrina?
“ WHAT STANDS BETWEEN US... BRINGS US BACK TOGETHER.”
Nevertheless, Pfitzner was able to agree with the passage of Palestrina that equated the “Romantic” with the “National.” And he must have listened with great approval to what Thomas Mann had to say about Pfitzner in a dinner speech on his 50th birthday in 1919: “Gentlemen”, the poet began, “I believe that in Germany’s current historical situation, the deep and true Romanticism of the art we celebrate today, its dreamy backwardness which is, in truth, an inward turning towards the depth of the national soul, holds more future-shaping power within this musical-romantic art than many seemingly more contemporary forms.”
But after the meal, it was read differently. Three years later, Thomas Mann again took the stage as a ceremonial speaker and delivered a speech, Von deutscher Republik (On the German Republic), for Gerhart Hauptmann’s 60th birthday. The change of opinion that the author of Reflections expressed here with a commitment to the republic and democracy caused a considerable sensation. Right-wing conservative papers mockingly cried, “Man overboard!” and coined the phrase “Saulus Mann.”
Disappointed, Pfitzner also distanced himself from Thomas Mann. In 1925, on the occasion of Thomas Mann’s 50th birthday, he broke his silence, confessing to the poet that he had been intentionally avoiding him. “Not with a light heart”, he writes, “For the true friends of my art and those individuals who stand as closely to me in their lives and their work as you do are not so abundant that I would take pleasure in foregoing their occasional company. But precisely because of these feelings, it goes against my character to be de -
ceitful. Thus, I wish to express what you have likely felt for some time, that your latest public ‘political’... declarations have regrettably distanced me from you.” Thomas Mann responded warmly, grateful for Pfitzner’s “manly confessions” and pleased to be able to present his perspective to the “dear master.” “Naturally, I was aware that my recent intellectual choices must have been objectionable to you. Do you at least suppose they arise from good intentions – and from a sense of responsibility possibly more stringent than that required of a musician?” He touched upon the same idea again, the same differentiation, now linked with the familiar dichotomy of life and death. As for “the romantic licenses of the musician”, Mann remarked, “any literary artist who, in a European moment like this one, does not support life and the future against the fascination of death would indeed be a futile servant.”
The “Licenses of the Musician” undoubtedly carried traces of Schopenhauer, yet Wagner and Nietzsche, too, were called to testify. “Our piece, dear master, played out long ago in intellectual history, in grand and exemplary fashion; we people of today are merely a journalistic and contemporary execution of the case Nietzsche versus Wagner.” With this, Thomas Mann explained that both were late sons of Romanticism. By summoning the strength of self-conquest and by disentangling himself from Wagner (Pfitzner), Nietzsche (Mann) emerged as a “visionary and pioneer towards a new human future”, while Wagner (Pfitzner) “remained only the last celebrant and infinitely captivating finisher of a period.” Even just the word “only”,
used in this context, must have made it difficult enough for Pfitzner to agree to the poet’s audacious self-portrayal. Thomas Mann’s personal admission would surely have touched him more profoundly, admitting that he, too, like Pfitzner, had “not many true, higher friends to lose.” In pursuit of this greater friendship, Mann sought once more to bridge the gap, declaring “What stands between us, what floats between us, also brings us back together, at least as much as it separates us.” And again, he puts forward “We have the freedom to become adversaries, yet we won’t be able to stop those in the future from frequently mentioning our names in the same breath. We might, therefore, consider our relationship sub specie aeterni and, setting aside all disputes, embrace a brotherhood that generations to come will likely hold us to.”
Thomas Mann’s commitment to “life” led him to a revised understanding of the familiar “romantic sphere” of death, to which he had previously yielded in Palestrina. Feeling destined to be a “visionary and pioneer towards a new human future”, he could not continue to surrender to the “metaphysical mood” of Palestrina, and the “dreamy backwardness” he had referenced in his dinner speech on Pfitzner had become untenable as a vision for the future. Thus, the man once again proceeded to a general revision of his foundations, and romanticism, the legacy he had cited so consistently, now needed to be discussed with heightened critical scrutiny.
It feels peculiar how, within this state of existential threat, the world of Palestrina resurfaces: “the melancholy and resignation of ageing mastery, uncertainly questioning, ‘whether the
world now takes unforeseen paths and whether what seemed to us to be eternal doesn’t just vanish like the wind’…” The world took unforeseen paths. And the terrifying vision of exile became a bitter reality for Thomas Mann – a direct consequence of the protest in Munich, the city of Richard Wagner.
Hans Pfitzner remained in Germany, holding onto the belief in the “future-shaping power” of “musical-romantic art”, as once declared by Thomas Mann in his banquet speech on Pfitzner. Faith was misguided. Pfitzner had to discover that the future of his own works was not particularly promising, even under the Nazi regime. Thus, he shifted between embittered withdrawal and stubborn posturing, nurtured grievances, became mired in polemics, formed dubious alliances, and succumbed to disastrous delusions. Even after the war, he was not free from terrible indiscretions. In 1946, he sent Hans Frank, the General Governor of Poland sentenced to death in the Nuremberg Trials, a “warm greeting as a sign of solidarity even in difficult times” to his cell. Pfitzner appeared to acknowledge the Nazi minister, notorious as the “Polish butcher”, simply as an admirer of his art.
Thomas Mann observed all this from afar. In his diary, he noted with annoyance the telegram to Frank, while a letter Pfitzner addressed to Bruno Walter in 1946 sparked his final –previously mentioned – public confrontation with him. Pfitzner’s letter stated that it was “intellectually just as shallow and false as it is morally infamous” to associate Germany with Hitler “as even some Germans, like Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, are not ashamed to do.” Pfitzner con-
“ WHAT STANDS BETWEEN US... BRINGS US BACK TOGETHER.”
trasted the crude reality of the Hitler regime and the brutal reality of the concentration camps – which he tried not to deny but to relativise – with Germany’s “platonic idea”; the country of “Luther, home to the B-Minor Mass and Faust, which produced the Freischütz and Eichendorff, the Pastoral and the Mastersingers, where the critiques of reason and The World as Will and Representation were conceived –I remain faithful to this country until my dying breath.”
Within these lines, the complete dilemma of German nationalism once again came to light – a dilemma that carried far into the 19th century. Thomas Mann understood this problem clearly through his own experience. However, he had discovered that the oft-praised German profundity could veer into abysmal barbarism if not balanced by a sharp intellect and a sense for “life.”
Thomas Mann and Hans Pfitzner. They were indeed, as Thomas Mann suggested in 1925, two brothers “sub specie aeterni” – two sons of the 19 th century, striving to preserve the legacy of their age for the next, two artists with a shared vision, both the poet and the composer wishing for nothing more than the merging of art and life. Thomas Mann travelled the arduous, often winding path from art to life, while Hans Pfitzner hoped that life would come to embrace art. It was a utopia; of this, he was aware. It could not be realised, not without mystery, not without wonder. This is precisely what Palestrina , the opera which he rightly refers to as a “legend”, is all about. As a story of redemption, it manages at times what he, akin to Thomas Mann, aspired to – the unity of art and life.
SEASON 2024/25
PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 23 MAY 1999 (REVIVAL: 5 DECEMBER 2024)
Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH , Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ
Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV
General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG AND OLIVER LÁNG based on the programme of the prèmiere 1999.
Design & concept EXEX
Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER
Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU
TEXT & IMAGE REFERENCES All texts, except for the interview with Christian Thielemann and the text by Fritz Trümpi, were taken from the première programme. IMAGE REFERENCES Cover image: Tilman Wendland, Schaumkopf, 2001 © Bildrecht, Wien 2024. Cover image concept: Martin Conrads, Berlin. Performance photos: Axel Zeininger / Wiener Staatsoper GmbH, Matthias Creutziger (p 8). The English translation is by Andrew Smith, except for the texts by Fritz Trümpi and Joachim Reiber, which were translated by Paul Talbot.
Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Holders of rights who were unavailable regarding retrospect compensation are requested to make contact.
