Never before has Schönberg received such an ovation in Zagreb

By Jagoda Martinčević

Saturday was one of unfortunately only two scheduled performances. More than 300 musicians performed in front of a full hall.

The Zagreb concert season has just begun, and the event of the season has already happened.

In the Vatroslav Lisinski Hall, Arnold Schönberg’s composition “Gurre-Lieder” was performed for the first time in Croatia, 103 years after its premiere in Vienna. The first of only, unfortunately, two scheduled performances filled the Lisinski to the last seat with numerous curious people eager for the sensation, which in the original included about five hundred performers, in our case reduced to about three hundred players and singers, making Schönberg’s work one of the most crowded scores in the history of music.

But can music be appreciated by the number of those who perform it? Of course it can’t, because quantity is certainly not a measure of quality, and this youthful Schönberg is by no means the one who will only become the most important but also the most contested composer of the 20th century in the period after the “Gurre-songs”, whose music will even be the subject of court proceedings , and psychiatrists declare that the audience listening to the works of the father of modern music and the dodecaphonic method shows “symptoms of severe nervous depression”.

Danish legend

The cantata “Gurre-Lieder” cannot cause any depression, but also because it keeps the listener’s and the viewer’s attention riveted throughout its two-hour duration to an entire army of performers, including several choirs (126 voices) and five vocal soloists, and in the orchestra, in addition to eighty string players and all the brass and woodwinds (ten horns, seven clarinets, six trumpets…), four harps, numerous percussion instruments, peculiar cellos and who knows what else, all in the function of an old Danish legend that tells the story of a medieval forbidden and endless love with a tragic end.

Any similarity with Wagner’s opera “Tristan and Isolde” can, of course, be coincidental, just like the comparison with Debussy’s work “Pelléas and Mélisande”, but the fact remains that all three authors reached for the legend of the impossible, and the one at the end of the chain, Schönberg, he skilfully used the poetic and musical tools of his predecessors. The elements of the late, already overripe, hypertrophied romanticism had to lead to some kind of natural ending, and it was Schönberg, before he turned traditional music upside down, that made it his “Gurre-Lieder”.

A huge device

Listening to this almost oversaturated music punctuated by fine layers of Debussy’s poetics, it is actually difficult to understand what was going on in the head of the author who would gradually reach tonal asceticism. Perhaps it is best explained by the sentence “I am a conservative who was forced to become a radical”, but even that will not change the thinking about two completely different Schönbergs and an authorial transformation the likes of which had not been recorded in the history of music.

It is questionable why he needed a huge performing apparatus to tell the simple legend of Jens Peter Jacobsen, because love, even the endless one, can be thought of more quietly musically, but predecessors like Berlioz and Wagner were still an obvious lure for the young Schönberg. and Gustav Mahler with his 8th symphony “Thousand”, not to mention Piotr Tchaikovsky who overture “1812” was right in front of him. in addition to two orchestras for outdoor performances, he also added real straight cannons.

But with all that said, “Gurre-Lieder” is an extremely impressive work. In every sense of expressive expression, tonal beauty connected by a system of characteristic motifs, deep emotional reach and, above all, the compositional skills of a self-taught author who showed with this work that he knows and can do everything in order to undo “everything” with the next steps, closing the traditionally attuned ears of musical Europe . However, there was something almost Mephistopheles diabolical in Schönberg’s behavior at the premiere. Chronicles record standing ovations and applause for half an hour, and he bowed indignantly only to the artists while turning his back to the audience. “I stood alone in front of a crowd of enemies”, he wrote, anticipating that it was the “Gurre-Lieder” that would give way to the music that was yet to come.

Musical hand

Who knows what Schönberg would think about “enemies” today after the ovation for the Zagreb performance, which none of his other works have ever received? Above all, the initiator and conductor of the project, maestro Nikša Bareza, deserved the standing ovations, ruling with inspiration and precision a huge ensemble in which there was no weak point. Bareza’s musical hand with fine, soft strokes is a pleasure to watch, and what reaches the listeners is almost the pinnacle of the limit of the conductor’s skill. He chose the ideal soloists: the strong, emotionally charged tenor Michael Robert Hendrick as the only guest and two of our champions; the poignantly gentle Adela Golac Rilović and the ominously staring into the prophecy of symbolism, the great interpreter Dubravka Šeparović Mušović. In addition to very good interpreters of minor characters, Stjepan Franetović and Siniša Štorko, Ozren Bilušić impressed as a narrator in a particularly sensitive part for the era of specific spoken singing (Sprechgesang.)

The carriers of the sound horizon were the musicians of the HRT Symphony Orchestra and Choir, the HNK Orchestra and Choir in Zagreb, and the Music Academy Choir. By teaming up organizationally with the Lisinski Hall, which is an undertaking in itself, they realized a project that the audience as well as the listeners of the live broadcast on Croatian Radio’s Third Program will truly remember as a great event.

http://www.jutarnji.hr/kultura/glazba/koncertni-dogadaj-sezone-nikada-do-sada-sch%C3%B6nberg-u-zagrebu-nije-dobio-takve-ovacije/4723709/