Don Giovanni König Kandaules Die Zauberflöte Turandot Die Liebe der Danae Roméo et Juliette La Donna del Lago Helmut Lachenmann Jedermann Daponte in Santa Fe Das weite Land Young Directors Joachim Schlömer Concerts 2002 The Unfinished

UNVEILED ARTEFACT
Alexander Zemlinsky's late opera Der König Kandaules

The Salzburg Festival has a role to play in keeping "Europe's memory" alive, in particular by commemorating those composers who during their lifetime were forced into silence by a cruel regime - people like Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Egon Wellesz. In their time these composers felt called to interpret anew the great tradition of Austrian music but they were stigmatized as 'perverted' and driven into exile by the Nazis. Even after 1945 their works were not performed for a long time and many excellent compositions lay mouldering in the archives, forgotten and abandoned.
The Salzburg Festival would now like to contribute to the rehabilitation of such composers and therefore has chosen composers in exile as one of its main focal points. It begins with Zemlinsky's opera Der König Kandaules which was first performed only in 1996, more than 50 years after it was composed. It will be followed in the coming Summer Festivals by Wellesz' Bakchantinnen, Korngold's Die tote Stadt and Schreker's Die Gezeichneten. Kent Nagano is the conductor.

A nude scene prevented the work from being completed in 1939

The far-reaching consequences of a rent veil! Fleeing from the Nazis, Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) arrived as an exile in America. Hoping to establish himself at the Met, he showed the libretto of his last stage work to conductor Arthur Bodanzky in 1939. But contrary to his expectations, his former pupil strongly advised him not to go ahead with it, saying that the nude scene at a dramatic high point in the second act was something prude New York audiences would not accept. Zemlinsky was disappointed. Used as he was to encountering trouble with his operas, he thereupon broke off the orchestration, though he had completed the outline of the work. Like Mahler's Tenth Symphony, his three-act adaptation of a drama by André Gide was now doomed to a shadowy existence as an arcane and mysterious fragment.

Der König Kandaules was Not Premiered until 1996

In 1990 Zemlinsky researcher Antony Beaumont discovered that it was possible to finish the orchestration without additional composition and in 1991 he was officially commissioned by the Hamburg State Opera to do just that. Five years later, on 6 October 1996, Der König Kandaules was given its first performance in the north German city. The premiere was a great success, the veritable culmination point of a Zemlinsky renaissance that had started in the seventies. The world of opera was unexpectedly enriched with a masterpiece which, after performances in Vienna and Cologne, has finally established itself in the repertoire through its staging at the Salzburg Festival. The work, furthermore, bridges a gap that had existed between the late Romantic successors of Wagner and the stage works of early modern composers.

Mediator between tradition and avant-garde

Kandaules is pre-eminently suited to play the role of mediator between tradition and avant-garde. The work has a kind of summing-up quality which by means of self-quotation looks back, as it were, over Zemlinsky's own oeuvre while at the same time reviewing developments in general between 1900 and 1930. This retrospective characteristic - a positive form of productive eclecticism - provides not only a re-encoounter with typical musical themes from Zemlinsky's work - for example, his key work entitled Der Traumgörge,1906, or the Lyrische Symphonie, 1923 - but also recounts central themes of life itself which are the focus of attention in Gide's drama Le Roi Candaule, 1899. Presented as exemplification by Herodotus and Hebbel, the saga of Gyges and his ring is re-interpreted by Gide as a drama about the artist himself.

Der König Kandaules is autobiographical and confessional

Zemlinsky used this material for an autobiographical and confessional work which once more raises the question of the relationship between art and life, of the identity and moral responsibility of the artist. By publicly unveiling Queen Nyssia in order to share his feelings with others, Kandaules, the prototype of the aesthetic man, destroys his happiness in the quagmire of possessiveness and jealousy. Nyssia, an agreeable object now turned femme fatale, revenges herself for her exposure and forces Gyges to kill his friend Kandaules. Disavowed art requites immorality with immorality, for the artist has robbed it of its secret forever.

Christian Wildhagen

Alexander Zemlinsky
Der König Kandaules
Sung in German
with English supertitles

Kleines Festspielhaus

New production: 28 July 2002,
(7 p.m.), 31 July (7 p.m.),
3 (3 p.m.), 6 and 8 August
(6.30 p.m.)

Tickets available from the ticket office: