Opera of the week tonight – The most German of German operas

vito piscitelli says:

Serrebrenikov…and his idiocy should be banned from opera. We have enough fools directing operas.

Robert Eshbach says:

Such adapatations, knock-off productions, and outright thefts of Der Freischütz began immediately and have an exactly 200-year history.

Der Freischütz was a historic “hit.” It premiered on June18, 1821— the first opera in Berlin’s brand-new Schauspielhaus on the Gendarmenmarkt. By December, 1822, it had been performed in at least thirty German cities, as well as Budapest, Strasburg, Amsterdam and Riga. In Berlin, the hundredth performance was reached on Christmas, 1826, by contemporary standards an unheard-of number. As of 1830, the opera had been produced in Danish, Swedish, Czech, Russian, English, French, Hungarian, Polish and Dutch. The first American performance was in Philadelphia, March, 1840, followed by a performance in New York in January of 1842. By 1836, it was reported: “There is hardly an individual in Germany, who does not know by heart the Hunters Chorus, from Weber’s Freyschütz; and we learned as a fact, a year or two after the appearance of this opera, that the negro slaves of the West Indies were accustomed to sing the wedding song, and to draw up vessels to the shore after the tact of ‘Schöner, grüner Jungfernkranz.’”

The success of Weber’s opera was based upon many factors, artistic and political. Most of all, however, people loved it for the attractiveness of its tunes, which became the equivalent of top-40 hits. The bridesmaid’s chorus was such an immediate hit with the public that it became ubiquitous and unavoidable. In his Letters from Berlin, Heinrich Heine wrote:

Have you never heard Maria von Weber’s Freischütz? No? Unfortunate man! But at least you must have heard the ‘Song of the bridal wreath’ from this opera? No? Lucky man!

These tunes were arranged for every possible instrumental and vocal combination, and the opera itself was cut, altered and parodied. Wagner defended the opera in its original form, pointing out that “the score of the Freischütz is a perfect whole, in idea and form alike complete in all its members. To omit the tiniest portion, would it not be to maim or mutilate the master’s work?”

The French seem to have had some difficulty deciding how to classify Der Freischütz, performing it first as comic and then as serious opera. Der Freischütz was taken up by the Académie royale de Musique in 1841 and produced as grand opera. For this production, Hector Berlioz was commissioned to transform Kind’s dialogue into recitative. Ballet was an obligatory part of grand opera, so Weber’s Invitation to the Dance was added, as well as dances from Oberon and Preciosa. Wagner wrote several articles at the time, criticizing the effort as ridiculous, with its golden-yellow satin costumes and women in short petticoats.
The first Parisian performance of Freischütz as opera comique, in 1824, was a botch — a theft, really, called Robin des Bois, ou Les Trois Balles, produced without Weber’s consent by the writer, composer and theatrical entrepreneur Castil-Blaze (François Henri Joseph Blaze (1784-1857)). Robin des Bois (Robin Hood in English) takes place in the woods of Yorkshire, with Dunstan Abbey substituting for the Wolf’s Glen. The plot was altered, with three bullets — gold, silver, and lead — substituted for the original seven. The characters were changed (to Tony, Dick, Annette and Nancy!), or left out altogether. The music was cut, rearranged, and supplemented. Weber protested vigorously, to no avail:

…you do not consider it incumbent upon you to consult the composer, or to tell him of the modifications which may indeed be inevitable for your public. You obtain a score by a means which are in fact — whatever you may think — quite illegal, since my opera has been neither engraved nor published, and no theatre or music-dealer has any right of sale. Finally, the opera is staged and you continue to remain unaware of my existence, to the point of claiming the composer’s rights yourself.

And several weeks later:

You have no right to mutilate my music by introducing numbers with your own personal accompaniments. It was quite enough including in Der Freischütz a duet from Euryanthe, with an accompaniment which was not mine.
You force me, Monsieur, to appeal to public opinion and to state publicly in the French press that I am being robbed, not only of music which belongs exclusively to me, but of my reputation, when mutilated works are performed with my name attached to them….

Though Castil-Blaze’s was one of the most egregious thefts of this work, Der Freischütz was to endure many other shameless adaptations and parodies in the decades after its creation.

Anyway, perhaps too much information — but just to say Freischütz has survived for 200 years, almost despite its performance history, and this production will simply add to that. The work’s attractiveness is pretty indestructible.