SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Mahler’s Die drei Pintos Returns to the Stage: James L. Zychowicz discusses his part in producing a performing version of the Weber/Mahler score and reports on Bronx Opera’s performance. (JLZ)

Weber and Mahler

The new production by the Bronx Opera (US) of Gustav Mahler’s score for Die drei Pintos, a comic opera that Carl Maria von left unfinished, brings to the stage a work which was tied closely to Mahler’s reputation. My own interest in it stems from the time I was working for my Ph.D. dissertation on Mahler’s sketches, particularly those for the Fourth Symphony. The Fourth was performed relatively frequently in Mahler’s lifetime, and was reminiscent of the appeal of another of the composer’s scores, the one for Die drei Pintos. This connection with the Fourth Symphony ignited my interest, and as I found vague, conflicting, and erroneous information about Die drei Pintos, I became more intrigued about the opera over time.

The details of Weber’s work on Die drei Pintos are covered well in John Warrack’s study of that composer’s life and works (Cambridge University Press, 1976), and the various attempts made to finish the opera. Those efforts all hinged on the assumption by Weber’s heirs that the sketches could eventually be brought to completion and towards that end the family wanted to have a composer find a way to bring make the sketches into an opera. One of the composers they contacted was Giacomo Meyerbeer, who was particularly suited to the task because both he and Weber were students of Abbé Vogler, and their similar training seemed a good basis for completing the work. Yet Meyerbeer held onto the score for decades without working on the sketches, claiming thatb the problem with completing the opera was its libretto.

That stated, the problem of arriving at a performing score for Die drei Pintos was compounded by the paucity of the material left in the sketches. The original documents are relatively sparse: Weber left only an outline and sketches for the six numbers in the first act, along with a fragmentary draft score for the opening of the second. Seven numbers of a projected total of sixteen is just a fraction of the musical ideas needed for a full-length opera, and it is surprising that Meyerbeer failed to have made a note of that. So the challenge for any composer who wanted to work on Die drei Pintos is in completing musical content that Weber had not prepared sufficiently and to proceed, any posthumous collaborator would also need to write in Weber’s style of, so that added music sounded similar enough to be convincing. Such posthumous completions can occur in music, but their success varies depending on the nature of the content and the perception by the public of the amount of intervention required: when the latter becomes significant, the role of the second composer can easily obscure that of the primary one.

Another tactic was possible of course: one way to arrive at a new score is to use music from the original composer’s other operas. Rossini for example often reworked pieces from one opera to fashion a second, as is the case with the score for Il viaggio a Reims, which became the basis for the substantial portion of the later opera Le comte d’Ory. The difficulty with doing that though is that the associations with an already popular work shift into the new score, and it becomes difficult to hear the music in the new context without recalling the other. While this kind of approach was a regular part of opera practice in the nineteenth century, it is by no means the best way to arrive at completing a score intended to bring an unfinished work to performance, since the original and, perhaps, stronger associations persist.

Rather than pursue these kind of strategies however, Mahler chose a wholly original approach which steered a clear path through to completion of Die drei Pintos. Instead of raiding the scores of Weber’s other operas for music to rework , Mahler found unfamiliar music by Weber to shape into the new score. By doing this, Mahler gave his performing version a sense of authenticity and prevented any associations with already well known music from blurring into the experience of Die drei Pintos. The situation with Rossini’s opera Elisabetta comes to mind here, since Rossini subsequently used / reused its overture in Il barbiere di Siviglia and modern audiences who hear Elisabetta now may find it very odd that the overture for Rossini’s comic opera was originally part of serious opera on an historic topic.

This problem aside, Mahler still needed to give his entire reconstruction of Die drei Pintos some shape as a whole when he worked the musical content of the earlier Weber pieces into the libretto. To proceed, he reconsidered the structure of the materials Weber left and rather than complete the sketches that Weber finished for the first act, Mahler revised the whole organization of the opera to include numbers based on sketches in each of the three acts, along with reworked pieces to fill out the content. Effectively, this would prevent anyone from differentiating between the ‘Weber’ act and the ‘Mahler’ acts and while the strategy was counter to Weber’s plan, the solution addressed the dilemma that any composer would face whenever insufficient sketches fail to produce a convincing whole.

Since Mahler had been introduced to the Weber family in Leipzig, he had access to a fair stock of unpublished materials, which they presumably left at his disposal- a rare situation, since few composers have such an opportunity. Unfortunately, Mahler’s affection for Captain Karl von Weber’s wife Marion eventually became too obvious and reportedly culminated in a violent scene with her husband. More fortunately , the situation seems to have emerged only after Mahler had found the musical materials he needed.

When the opera was staged, the score for Die drei Pintos was received warmly and brought Mahler international acclaim. Most famously though, the conductor Hans von Bülow made a punning criticism of the effort, “Wo Weberei, wo Mahlerei, einerlei, das Ganze ist per Bacco ein infamer, antiquierter Schmarren….”

……. “Where Weber-like [a pun, since Weberei also means woven], where Mahler-like [continuing the pun with the German word Mahlerei which means painted] offers unity: the entire thing is, by god, an infamous, old-fashioned mess.” It’s a a back-handed compliment about the way the two composers’ styles blurred but as to being an old-fashioned mess, the plot is as timeless and dated as a the Nestroy farce, “Einen Jux will er sich machen,” a play which resurfaced first as Thornton Wilder’s Merchant of Yonkers, became the musical Hello Dolly!” and later still received fine treatment by Tom Stoppard as On the Razzle. Die drei Pintos explores no new ground dramatically, but it remains valuable for other reasons.

Those reasons remain strong today, and offer points of focus for modern audiences. For one, Mahler completed the score for Die drei Pintos during the same period in which he was finishing his own First Symphony, and as a result of this dual gestation, some stylistic affinities between the two works exist. Details like a horn figure from the opera’s opening number may be found in the Scherzo of the First Symphony and the rhythmic gesture with which the Finale of the First Symphony ends, is the same one that occurs with the word “Pinto” in the opera’s penultimate number. Other gestures exist, and the resemblances may well be evidence for the dual gestation of the two works.

At another level, Mahler’s completed score for Pintos represents the way a nineteenth-century conductor would hear Weber. The orchestra Weber used was noticeably smaller than the one that Mahler uses. Yet the doublings and other timbral reinforcements suggest the kind of revisions that putatively modernized older music for audiences at the end of the nineteenth century. It is difficult to hear some of the sonorities in Pintos as authentically Weberian when they involve three trombones and tuba or, while more subtle but still anachronistic, the divisi cello writing found often in Mahler’s score. These aspects show Mahler within the context of the period in which he worked, and as much as he eventually shifted the sound world of his own music to thinner and more refined timbres, the score for Die drei Pintos still exists in this more romantic milieu. It may be useful then to treat the famous “Entr’act” (intended to be performed between the first and second acts) as Mahler’s first expression of the sound world he would explore in his Wunderhorn symphonies. Based on the music from the Finale of the first act, and the culmination of the second, the “Entr’act” functions within Die drei Pintos as a way to remind the audience of what had already transpired but also looks forward to a crucial moment about to occur in his own development. He anticipates the ways in which he will rework his own vocal music into a symphonic milieu.

Mahler’s reworking neatly prevented any kind of artificial division between the first act and the two that follow. The resulting score consists of twenty-one numbers and an Entr’act, and while the last two numbers are labeled Finale A and Finale B, they are not, as the commentator Egon Gartenberg once postulated, alternative endings; rather the two pieces indicate two phases of the opera’s conclusion, one in which the three men masquerading as Don Pinto appear, and the other in which the action resolves after the revelation of those characters true identities. This resembles the juxtaposition of text and music in the first-act number, the ‘Romance of Kater Mansor’ in which the various strophes of the piece are intersected by the dialogue between Gaston and Inez.

As intriguing as the process of completion is, the contents remain musically appealing. Die drei Pintos was known throughout Mahler’s lifetime, and the opera was included with the works of Weber. Yet with the revival of interest in Mahler’s music in the early 1960s, this early score by Mahler was neglected in deference to the songs and symphonies the composer completed on his own. In this sense it resembles some of the revisions Mahler undertook as a conductor, efforts which include retouchings of Smetana’s opera Dalibor, Weber’s Oberon, Mozart’s Die Hochzeit des Figaros, and other operas, as well as revised scores for Schumann’s symphonies and selected symphonies by Beethoven. These scores are part of Mahler’s legacy as a conductor, and merit study for various reasons. Yet the substantial intervention of Mahler in realising the score for Die drei Pintos stands apart as a kind of posthumous collaboration with Weber.

The Bronx Opera Performing Version

In pursuing my own studies of Mahler’s music, I found the score of Die drei Pintos of great interest, since the details in it lay to rest some of the existing misunderstandings about the work. It clearly was not just an orchestration of an opera that Weber had finished in outline, but something much more substantial. At the same time, when my own interest in the work took me to Weber’s original materials, I found that Mahler had been acutely sensitive to them. The source for “Ein Mädchen verloren” contains the very text found in Mahler’s score for Die drei Pintos – Mahler brought the work into his score by retaining Weber’s text and and in respecting the source in this way, Mahler displays a sensitivity which is not always accorded to nineteenth-century composers, many of whom popular taste would have as revising and reworking willfully.

As my interest in Die drei Pintos continued, I found it useful to propose an edition of the score so that others could have access to the work. The existing score is a lithograph that Mahler’s publisher C. F. Kahnt issued and circulated with the performance materials. Copies of the lithograph exist in various libraries in Europe even thiough as James Deaville pointed out in an article about the Kahnt archive, any existing manuscript materials for this work and other music published by Kahnt was destroyed during World War II. However, Kahnt also issued a piano-vocal score (Klavierauszug), which had a wider circulation and can also be found in North America, as well as the opera’s Textbuch – the libretto. Like other piano-vocal scores of the period, the one for Die drei Pintos has its problems, including text underlay, key, and content since some of the music found in the full score is missing from the piano reduction. Similarly, text cues are part of the full score, something which is often not the case with piano-vocal scores of stage works in the twentieth century, which often include spoken lines that introduce numbers. Details differ too with tempo markings and other designations missing in the piano-vocal score. Nevertheless, the piano-vocal score had its uses later in the process of making a performing version.

In preparing a critical edition, I used all three sources, which included an introduction, full text and translation (with the assistance of Salvatore Calomino and Charlotte Brancaforte). The score itself required editing to modernize some of the musical elements, to clarify others, and to regularize the notation. Text underlay in the full score and piano-vocal score did not always include hyphenation by modern standards, and this became part of the new edition. When it came to regularizing the notation, I tried to distinguish my intervention by putting editorial elements in brackets, using broken slurs or ties to set them apart from the continuous arcs found in the full score, and setting editorial dynamics in bold face, so that they stood apart from the conventional bold-italic usage found in the sources. A critical report includes details on these and other elements. In addition, the stage directions and musical directions included in the lithography are handwritten, and this necessitated transcribing the script into modern German.

The critical edition appeared in 2000, and in Fall 2002 it was performed in concert at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, under the direction of Leon Botstein. For that single performance I worked with the production team to arrive at a narration in English in which only the dialogue was summarized in English. The musical numbers were performed in German, with the text and translation reprinted in the program so that the audience could follow. While this allowed for a modern performance of this rarely heard score, it was still not rendered in the way that Mahler’s audiences would have known the work as a fully staged opera.

Thus, when Ben Spierman contacted me in Summer 2009 about staging the work during the 2009-2010 season of the Bronx Opera, I was surprised and delighted. Yet the critical edition existed in score only; parts needed to be created, and I found it necessary to share my annotated copy of the piano-vocal score for rehearsal purposes. Moreover, the Bronx Opera performs works in English, and Ben undertook a singing version of the libretto based on the translation in the critical edition. To this Ben added a paraphrase of the dialogue so that modern audiences could clearly understand the drama. Ben paid respect to the original text with admirable faithfulness and, at the same time, managed to render the meaning in modern English so that the audience could follow the story without having to resort to printed texts or projected titles.

Ben Spierman and I were in touch throughout the summer by phone and e-mail, and when I visited New York in Fall 2009 to present a doctoral forum at the Juilliard it was possible to work with Ben in person. At this point rehearsals were beginning, and the performers were about to become immersed in Die drei Pintos. Their enthusiasm for the opera as something modern performers could take to the stage was clear to me, and I looked forward to the result, as the weeks and months of rehearsal allowed Pintos to take shape in the theater.

Various other details took shape in the following weeks and months. The orchestral parts were newly created by the publisher expressly for the new production, and element which set the performance by the Bronx Opera apart from the concert version several years before. While the score benefited from the revisions Mahler left, the set of parts now matches the critical edition, so that it may not remain an object to be admired on the shelf, but something which is now possible to bring efficiently to performance. Kramer’s overture opens with tremolo in the strings, reminiscent of the gesture Mahler used at the opening of the first movement of his Second Symphony, and the work contains several musical themes found throughout the opera. This helped the company to set the stage aurally for what would come, and demonstrated the enthusiasm this group had in creating this production.

The Performance

Die drei Pintos at the Bronx Opera: Soloists, Chorus and Orchestra of the Bronx Opera, Michael Spierman (conductor) Kaye Playhouse, New York, 16.1.2010 and 17.1.2010 (JLZ).

Production:

Set Designer: Meganne George
Stage Director: Benjamin Spierman
Costume Designer: Meg Zeder

Lighting: Joshua Rose
Chorus Master: Michael Haigler
Conductor: Michael Spierman (Jan. 10, Jan. 16, and Jan. 17) /

Eric Kramer (Jan. 9)

Cast:

Don Gaston de Viratos: Eapen Leubner (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Luke Grooms (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16))

Ambrosio, his servant: Jeremy Moore (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) / J

ason Plourde (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

[Gustavo] the Inkeeper: Jonathan Harris

Inez, his daughter: Hannah Rosenbaum (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Samantha Guevrekian (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

Don Pinto de Fonseca: Michael O’Hearn (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Jack Anderson White (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

Don Pantaleone de Pacheco: Brace Negron (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Richard Bozic (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

Clarissa, his daughter: Catherine Meyers (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Caprice Corona (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

Laura, her friend and maid: Patrice Eaton (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Julie DeVaere (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

Don Gomez de Freieros: Kirk Dougherty (Jan. 9 and Jan. 17) /

Neal Harrelson (Jan. 10 and Jan. 16)

[Carlos, Pantaleone’s

Steward]: Michael Sarnoff-Wood

For the Bronx Opera production the three acts were performed with a single intermission between the first and second acts, which makes sense dramatically. Instead of performing the Entr’act before the second act, the piece occurred before the third act which allowed the singers to have a bit of respite before the final portion of the drama. If Mahler’s Entr’act recapped the Finale of the first act and anticipated the Finale of the second, this placement served as a dual recapitulation of those two crucial scenes, and prepared the audience for the ultimate conclusion of the work, which was brought about with a fine balance of musical style and dramatic panache.

The work was sung and acted in English, which made use of the vernacular, a decision which enhanced the comedy and avoided the need for a printed translation in the libretto or the use of projected titles above the stage. Instead, the audience could follow the action easily, and their warm response on both of the final two performances was notable. The use of contemporary expressions made the situations presented in the opera relevant and also helped the audience to understand the humor and pathos of the situation at the core of the plot: an arranged marriage for a woman who already knows whom she loves. Ben Spierman’s text also gave the principals an opportunity to respond to the work dramatically, an aspect of opera production which does not always come off as well as it did here. As to the music, the entire cast performed the work with huge enthusiasm and addressed the sometimes challenging music admirably. The double cast indicated above also split the performances on the previous weekend, when the Bronx Opera gave the work at Lehman College, a further challenge for the production team which required them to find two singers for each principal role. The chorus offered a rich sound, and their presence was equally effective either as students and their girlfriends or servants in Pantaleone’s house : the sense of ensemble characterized their fine performance. Toward this end Chorus Master Michael Haigler deserves congratulations for his fine work.

Michael Spierman captured the spirit of the work nicely, with a fine ear for the style of the score and a keen sense of pacing the music to fit the drama. This allowed for an exemplary sense of the whole, which emerged easily in the fine staging. The audiences were attentive and lavish in their response to the work. At the talks given by myself for the two performances at Hunter College, the audience was also enthusiastic about the production, which made for a good experience all around. Conductor Michael Spierman’s presence at both pre-performance talks reinforced the collaborative spirit behind the production, which was not an exercise in musicological archaeology, but a concerted effort to bring to life a score which clearly resonated with the company. The spirit and enthusiasm of the principals and the chorus clearly conveyed their engagement in this neglected work, and the sheer power of the piece on stage overcame the limitations which always exist when the score is experienced through recordings only.

At the two performances at Hunter College in Manhattan, members of the audience hummed some of the tunes at the intermission and also after the final curtain and one couple mused along that it was worth traveling to New York just to hear the performance. This was an auspicious beginning of the two Mahler years ahead – the sesquicentennial of the composer’s birth in 2010 and the centenary of his death in 2011. The Bronx Opera deserves credit for its fine efforts at bringing this crucial score from Mahler’s early years to light in a vivid and memorable production. It was an excellent effort all around, and offered several entertaining performances during the two weekends it ran in the Bronx and in Manhattan.

James L. Zychowicz