Heinrich August Marschner (1795-1861)
Overtures and Stage Music – Volume 1
Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice/Dario Salvi
rec. 2022, The House of Music, Pardubice, Czech Republic
Naxos 8.574449 [71]
With this new release, conductor Dario Salvi continues his exploration of largely forgotten works by 19th century composers. His recordings on the Naxos label have so far included, among others, overtures and other music by Auber (review, review, review, review), scores written for the stage by Humperdinck, overtures and stage music by Meyerbeer and theatre music by Suppé (review, review). Mr Salvi now turns his attention to Heinrich Marschner.
Readers in the UK may recall that, 30 years ago, in an attempt to popularise opera for a contemporary audience, the BBC brought Marschner’s supernatural tale Der Vampyr to the nation’s TV screens. To make the production less intimidating and more palatable, it was broken down into a mini-series, updated to the 1990s and its characters reinvented as a villainous – and vampiric – businessman, a chauffeur, a model, an executive secretary and the receptionist of a car-wash. Moreover, in an attempt to attract a mass audience, the producers included plenty of nudity and sex scenes (not, I hope, set in that car-wash) as well as foul language and violence. Entirely in the interest of research, you understand, I attempted to watch a recording on YouTube. Sadly, however, that required me to “sign in to confirm your age” and that proved to be a process entirely beyond me. Such a shame.
All the works on this new CD were composed when Marschner was in his 20s and all pre-date Der Vampyr (1828) by some years. Given that only one has previously been recorded, they have presumably been considered long-forgotten juvenilia and hardly worthy of revival. Robert Ignatius Letellier’s typically erudite yet accessible booklet notes take, however, an alternative view, claiming that they “give an insight into the theatre of the time in Germany and Austria, while Marschner’s music indicates his skill and mastery of form and melody even before his first great operatic success”.
All too often, CDs made up of previously unfamiliar and often short tracks taken out of their original context don’t allow us to form much of an idea of the composer’s style. It’s good to see, therefore, that the nine minutes long overture to the supernatural fantasy Der Kyffhäuser Berg kicks off the disc, for it allows listeners to settle down comfortably and accustom themselves to the composer’s characteristic idiom – which, in this case, turns out to be one with which Beethoven and, especially, Weber would have felt entirely at home. Once our ears and brains have thereby been tuned in to Marschner’s musical language, the following far shorter tracks can be appreciated much more easily. It is also worth mentioning that the pieces on this disc are handily presented in chronological order, rather than, as so often the case, randomly, so allowing us to discern the way in which Marschner’s output developed over time.
Der Kyffhäuser Berg’s supernatural world reappears in Schön Ella, a “folk tragedy” by Friedrich Kind for which Marschner wrote an overture, several orchestral entr’actes, a ballet and a – surprisingly unthreatening – March of the warriors and maidens. The often rather jaunty but simultaneously dark-hued overture is, at 6:21, once again quite a substantial piece that successfully establishes the overall mood for the following six associated ones. All the same, the succeeding four entr’actes, taken out of their theatrical context, are left, as it were, dangling in the air, and it is a shame that Mr Letellier’s notes, while understandably focusing on the technical ways in which they demonstrate Marschner’s skill, don’t explain their dramatic context. Even listened to in the abstract, however, it’s clear that they are the work of a confident and accomplished composer. That impression is confirmed by Schön Ella’s Act 2 ballet which, at more than 12 minutes in length, presents a sequence of short, attractive and highly danceable melodies – though, once again, it would have been good to know who was actually dancing at that point in the story and why. In spite of that reservation, the ballet is, I think, the most successful component of Marschner’s score.
We move away from the world of the supernatural and into that of 1001 Nights with Marschner’s music for the play Ali Baba, oder Die vierzig Räuber. I had anticipated yet another example of an early 19th century composition influenced by so-called “janissary music” but, somewhat surprisingly, the overture eschews anything in the way of clichéd Turkish orchestration – somewhat to my regret as I’m rather fond of the evocative sound of a well-brandished jingling johnny. If Haydn (the Military symphony), Mozart (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), Beethoven (the Choral symphony) and Weber (Abu Hassan) all considered pastiche Ottoman music effective, wasn’t Marschner missing a useful trick by not incorporating it himself into Ali Baba? Three much shorter excerpts from the score may well, as the disc’s rear cover synopsis claims, “reveal [Marschner’s] flair for theatrical concision”, but when they each come in at around a couple of minutes or less it’s inevitable that they will struggle to make much of a rounded impression. Once again, a well-conceived and relatively substantial (6:16) ballet sequence impresses most.
Two overtures complete this well filled disc. Der Holzdieb is a comic Singspiel telling of a temporarily thwarted rustic romance. Its overture establishes exactly the right atmosphere, with nothing too dark or threatening on the horizon. We then hear the overture to Die Wiener in Berlin, an outright farce that contrasts the culture and manners of the inhabitants of Vienna and Berlin. Once again, Marschner adeptly establishes an appropriate mood and the end result is an altogether enjoyable musical romp.
Looking at this disc as a whole, it must be said that the focus on works written to accompany plays inevitably means that there will be short tracks that, while no doubt effective in a real theatrical context, are somewhat diminished when heard blind in a domestic environment. Nevertheless, the longer overtures and ballet sequences provide excellent demonstrations of Marschner’s melodic gifts and technical skill, even in the earliest phase of his career. As MusicWeb readers will be well aware, conductor Dario Salvi is a dab hand at this sort of repertoire and he and his Czech musicians deliver their performances as if they had been performing Marschner’s music all their lives. Their overall achievement is enhanced by the clear and detailed recording.
It goes without saying that I am looking forward to hearing the second instalment in this projected series and, with Mr Salvi’s expert guidance, exploring more of Marschner’s considerable but largely neglected output – without, albeit, the nudity and sex.
Rob Maynard
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Contents
Der Kyffhäuser Berg (1816) – overture*
Schön Ella (1823) – overture*
Schön Ella (1823) – Act 2: entr’acte*
Schön Ella (1823) – Act 2: ballet*
Schön Ella (1823) – Act 3: entr’acte*Schön Ella (1823) – Act 4: entr’acte*
Schön Ella (1823) – Act 4: Marsch der Krieger und Mädchen*
Schön Ella (1823) – Act 5: entr’acte*
Ali Baba, oder Die vierzig Räuber (1823) – overture*
Ali Baba, oder Die vierzig Räuber (1823) – Act 2: melodrama*
Ali Baba, oder Die vierzig Räuber (1823) – Act 2: ending*
Ali Baba, oder Die vierzig Räuber (1823) – Act 3: ballet*
Ali Baba, oder Die vierzig Räuber (1823) – Act 3: ending*
Der Holzdieb (1823) – overture
Die Wiener in Berlin (1825) – overture*
*world premiere recording
