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Transfigured and Titanesque Dresden
Semperoper
08/31/2024 - & September 1, 2* (München), 7 (Grafenegg), 10 (Torre del Lago Puccini), 13 (Verona), 14 (Frankfurt) 2024
Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht, opus 4
Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D major
Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden, Daniele Gatti (conductor)
D. Gatti (© Markenfotografie)
For a great orchestra, the first concert of the season is inevitably a huge event. It was especially so this year for Staatskapelle Dresden, as it marks a new beginning with incoming principal conductor Daniele Gatti, following twelve years under the direction of Christian Thielemann. Gatti had previously conducted here in 2000, at age thirty‑nine, at the invitation of the late Giuseppe Sinopoli, then principal conductor.
Heinrich Schütz (1585‑1672) was associated with the orchestra, founded in 548 by the Elector of Saxony, one of the many fiefdoms constituting the Holy Roman Empire. Carl Maria von Weber (1786‑1726) and Richard Wagner (1813‑1883) served as the orchestra’s Hofkapellmeister. Richard Strauss (1864‑1949), Fritz Reiner (1888‑1963), Fritz Busch (1890‑1953), Joseph Keilberth (1908‑1968), Rudolf Kempe (1910‑1976), Karl Böhm (1894‑1981), Hans Vonk (1942‑2004), Herbert Blomstedt (b.1927), Sinopoli (1946‑2001), Bernard Haitink (1929‑2021), Fabio Luisi (b.1959) and Thielemann (b.1959) were among the orchestra’s principal conductors.
Combining works by Mahler and Schönberg for this memorable concert worked nicely. Both were written a decade apart; both were closely associated with Vienna, and both left an indelible mark on classical music.
Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht was composed in 1899 as a string sextet during a vacation with Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871‑1942) and his sister Mathilde, whom Schönberg was then courting (they would eventually marry). Mathilde would go on to have an affair with painter Richard Grestl (1883‑1908), and Schönberg caught them in flagrante and was deeply hurt. The young painter then committed suicide, possibly related to the shame of the affair. Though composed as a chamber piece in happier days, Schönberg wrote the arrangement for string orchestra in 1917, using as its subject a poem by Richard Dehmel (1863‑1920), describing a couple walking through a bare grove in the moonlight. The woman confesses she is pregnant with the child of a previous lover. After silent reflection, the man forgives her and vows to accept the child as his own. The subject of Dehmel’s poem and the chromatic style of the work are evocative of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in which illicit love and infidelity are a central theme. Some view Schönberg’s orchestral arrangement as his own forgiveness of Mathilde, or more likely his own reconciliation with the event. In 1943, Schönberg further modified this arrangement, giving the cellos and double basses more prominence.
Conductor Gatti took a sober approach to a piece which can easily be intoxicating when the tempi are exaggerated and the lush sound is amplified. Far from spartan, this balanced approach is more seductive, and gave the work an atmospheric reading. By opting for sober precision, the piece, which can easily be too sentimental or dense, had an ethereal yet harmonious feel. The anxiety in the woman’s confession was not frantic, and the man’s forgiveness unsentimental. In brief, this was an exercise in sobriety, aided by the precisely elegant Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden.
The second half of the concert was Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, often titled the “Titan” after the eponymous novel by Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763‑1825). Initially presented as a symphonic poem, it was only later that Mahler called it a symphony. It was written in 1887‑1888, when Mahler was frustrated as second conductor at the Leipzig Opera, working under conductor Arthur Nikisch (1855‑1922). Yet Mahler was so invigorated by attempts to complete Weber’s unfinished opera Die drei Pintos that his creative instincts kicked in, spurring him to compose his first large scale work. Premiered in 1893 in Budapest, the work was not well‑received.
Gatti adopted what seemed as brusques tempi. The bucolic first movement was more a sprint than a stroll in a field. Likewise, the lively second movement, with its folkloric Ländler was almost too ballabile that several elderly ladies seated nearby seemed about to get up and dance. The funeral march ought to have felt more stately. Are these idiosyncrasies Gatti’s way of showing his style from the very beginning? In any case, the orchestra played with seamless elegance, with its distinct Dresden sound. It was an unforgettable experience in a divine setting.
Though the applause at the concert’s conclusion was enthusiastic and prolonged, a gentleman with whom I chatted at the intermission didn’t agree. For him, this was tepid appreciation compared to the usual first concert of the season, and especially so considering its new conductor. The man had been a subscriber since the nineties and had witnessed some of the orchestra’s legendary conductors. It’s not easy to replace a conductor as appreciated as Thielemann, but perhaps I’m more generous than my fellow concert‑goer.
In the mid-size city of Dresden, music is in the blood of its 600,000 inhabitants. This season opener was given three times, and I assume the previous two performances were as full as this one, with its 1300‑seat capacity. This amounts to about one percent of the population, as tourists mercifully do not make up a significant portion of Staatskapelle audiences. If we were to extrapolate this percentage to a metropolis such as Paris, London or Los Angeles, these would be truly extraordinary figures. Vive la musique!
Ossama el Naggar
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