THE year 1952, already notable for the first stageproduction in
this country of Wozzeck, has now brought us for the first time, at the Edinburgh Festival last Friday, another of the landmarks in the history of post-Strauss opera, Hindemith's Mathis der Maier. As- far as the music is concerned, most of us were more familiar with Mathis, for three of the finest instrumental interludes in the work (" The Angels' Concert," which is the overture ' • the interlude between the last two scenes, representing the burial of Regina, the secondary heroine ; and Mathis's vision of the " Temptation of St. Anthony," which forms a substantial part of Scene VI) are embodied in the splendid and relatively well-known symphony of the same title.
Unlike the three concert excerpts from Wozzeck, the Mathis symphony gives an intelligible idea of the characteristic musical style, used fairly consistently throughout the opera,' and contains some of the most important thematic material.
But if the music of Mathis is more familiar, this is not true of its subject and dramatic form. It deals with an episode in the life of the early sixteenth-century painter Matthias thlinewald, whose social conscience first compelled him to take part in the German peasants' rising, but then gave way before his sense of artistic mission, his conviction that his duty to himself and his fellows was to return to painting. It is a moral tale, and though the moral does not emerge very clearly, it has to serve as the point, since there is no other. For Hindemith, who wrote the libretto himself, has failed to create or develop any dramatic or human interest in the surface plot. The long and laborious but not unpromising exposition in Act I is succeeded by no development, but leads straight to a denouement which is no such thing because no dramatic knot has ever been tied. The story is finished with its exposition. The Archbishop retires froin the plot, and no other character has any part to play. Mathis has a vision, and finally we see him in old age, his work done.
So much the greater credit to Hindemith the composer, who still succeeds in making an impressive, and sometimes moving work, especially in the second act, whose very weakness is its strength. Nothing happens, and Hindemith for the first time gives us the reflective music that is so much needed. The last two scenes, sepa- rated by the poignant Grablegung, are deeply moving, dramatically valueless though they are, merely for the tranquil beauty of their music. Preceding them is Mathis's vision of the Temptation of St. Anthony, almost another Wolf's Glen scene, but again one in which the music is able to develop more satisfyingly than at any earlier point in the opera. In the first act, unfortunately, the librettist is so busy getting the exposition done that he rarely gives the composer even half a chance. Such as he does are eagerly seized, and yield one or two brief passages of fine music, such as the final scene between Mathis and the Archbishop in Scene II, and the duet with Ursula in Scene HI, from the point where the people begin to congregate for the burning of the books. Elsewhere in this act the music is strong and purposeful, suggesting, as it mostly has to do, activity, argument and anger.
What it never convincingly suggests, and here is the composer's failure, are the doubts, anguish, sorrow or love which at one time or other assail all the main characters. The result is a lack of variety in the music which is one of the chief defects of this act, all the more curious because Hindemith shows that he can write lyrically, in a quiet, uneffusive way, in the Engelkonzert, which is in fact so serene and meditative that it does not make a good operatic overture. Least successful of all is the love music, such as there is. There is no attempt at this with Mathis and Regina, but at the meeting of Ursula and Mathis the music reaches a great climax, and Ursula lets out what should be a spontaneous cry of joy. But such passion seems beyond Hindemith's range, and the love music is as feeble and horribly embarrassing as the dialogue of a love scene in a third- rate English film. The radiant cry was a piercing squawk, and the fault was mainly Hindemith's. The singing, it is true, was not good. As often happens with modern operas, the singers were apparently chosen for intelligence rather than for beauty of voice, and it was no more than adequate singing that we got. The acting too was generally poor, and Gtinther Rennert's production was more fidgety, and less successful than his others. Helmuth Jiirgens' designs, on the other hand, and most of Alfred Siercke's costumes were up to the high expectations aroused by the operas already seen, and the orchestra, under Leopold Ludwig, played the score, which they knew thoroughly, in a satisfying, workmanlike fashion. It does not draw attention to itself, nor did they to it. It is undoubtedly the best part of the opera, and since its best is in the Mathis Symphony, while we have that we need not much lament the rest. COLIN MASON.
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