After the Munich premiere of Richard Strauss’s first opera, “Guntram,” in 1895, the orchestra went on strike, the two lead singers refused to reprise their roles and another cast member demanded the promise of a better pension before considering any further performances. Add in derisive reviews, and the opera, which had gotten a lukewarm reception in Weimar a year before, was dead in the water. In his garden, Richard Strauss put up a grave marker to “venerable, virtuous young Guntram” who had been “gruesomely slain by the symphony orchestra of his own father.”
On Friday, the American Symphony Orchestra under the sure-handed direction of Leon Botstein resurrected “Guntram” in a concert performance at Carnegie Hall that unearthed stretches of ravishing music but also confirmed the structural weaknesses of a work that sags under the weight of its Wagner worship. For the lead tenor, the title role is a tour de force requiring the kind of unflagging power Strauss would later demand of his “Salome.” John Matthew Myers delivered a bravura performance of astonishing resourcefulness and tonal beauty in the role.
I did not come away convinced, as Botstein argued in the printed program, that the work deserves a place on the opera stage. But the performance offered a tantalizing glimpse of a musical storyteller who had yet to find a worthy subject for his dramatic instincts, but was already looking to pour his melodic gifts into the service of psychological insights.
Here, Strauss wrote his own libretto, thick with Wagnerian alliterations and clichés. It tells the story of Guntram, a medieval minnesinger on a mission to spread the gospel of peace in a realm gripped by war and social repression. He saves Freihild, the unhappily married daughter of a duke, from suicide. At a banquet, her warmongering husband, Robert, threatens Guntram, who kills him in self-defense and is then thrown into the dungeon. Freihild frees him and declares her love. But after Friedhold, a member of Guntram’s brotherhood, intervenes, he resolves to atone in monastic solitude and directs Freihild to sublimate her passion into charitable works.
For an opera centered on renunciation, the music is headily sensuous. The score weaves in quotations from Strauss’s own “Death and Transfiguration” as well as the late operas by Wagner. (When Strauss berated a musician in rehearsal for flubbing one tricky spot, he is reported to have said, “But Maestro, we never get this passage right in ‘Tristan,’ either.”)
Long monologues dominate each of the three acts. (Botstein presented the composer’s edited version from 1940.) While dramatically stifling, these are some of the most musically convincing passages, especially in Myers’s rendition, which brought a wealth of tone colors and emotional nuance to his narrations. These monologues, in addition to the gorgeous instrumental preludes, fully deserve to be programmed in concerts.
The part of Freihild is also big on expository narration and cruelly besieged by heavy orchestration. The soprano Angela Meade sang it with clarion tone and piercing intensity. Frustratingly, the interactions between the two main characters never yield a real duet, so that Guntram’s sacrifice of their potential life together ultimately feels bloodless. You sense that they are both so virtuous and self-absorbed that they’re better off on their own.
In a score heavy on men’s voices, the mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner brought poignancy to the part of An Old Woman who alerts Guntram to the social iniquities oppressing the population. But in most crowd scenes, Strauss struggled with pacing. The second act’s banquet scene, with minstrelsy and a court jester (sung with cartoonish sharpness by the tenor Rodell Rosel) was overstuffed with effects.
Standouts among the strong cast included the tenor Bernard Holcomb, radiant as An Old Man, and the baritone Alexander Birch Elliott, magnetically villainous as the saber-rattling Robert. The men of the Bard Festival Chorale contributed one of the most atmospheric touches in the opera as the monks praying over Robert’s body. Strauss had a clear idea of the ingredients that make a good opera. It would take a few more attempts, and a partnership with a great librettist, for him to get the recipe right.
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