Musical America, April 24, 1930.
Stage Schönberg Opera and Stravinsky Ballet
Philadelphia Orchestra and League of Composers Sponsor American Premiere of "Die
glückliche Hand" and First Complete Theatrical Performance of "Le Sacre du
Printemps"
By Oscar Thompson
(Editor's Note: The New York premiere of the Schönberg and Stravinsky works will be
reviewed in the next issue of Musical America.)
Philadelphia, April 15. - Anticipating two New York performances under the same auspices,
Arnold Schönberg's music drama, "Die glückliche Hand," achieved its American premiere in
conjunction with the first complete stage performance of Igor Stravinsky's ballet, "Le Sacre
du Printemps," at the Metropolitan Opera House here, the afternoon of April 11, with
repetitions April 12 and 14.
Pre-war modernity, as epitomized by the contrary styles of the Schönberg and the Stravinsky
of about 1913-styles which in each instance have been superseded with these composers by
others of even more conflicting trend-still smacks strange in the mouth of American
audiences, as was amply evident at these representations, which were sponsored by the
Philadelphia orchestra in conjunction with the League of Composers, under whose joint aegis
the New York performances were scheduled for April 22 and 23. Perhaps nothing of the
operatic or concert year had awakened livelier expectations or a larger measure of curiosity.
Aside from being a first experience for almost everyone present, "Die Glückliche Hand"
proved by far the more difficult work to digest. Stage performance of "Le Sacre" tended to
clarify the Stravinsky score. Much that by reason of its bludgeoning sonorities and its uncouth
rhythms had been perplexing to those who could fell its power but not grasp its scheme, was
unriddled. Perhaps certain extravagant and rapturous comments on this work never would
have been written if familiarity with the music in its stage form had preceded experience with
it in the concert halls. Certain primordial terrors resolve themselves rather benignly into
primitive games; the convulsions of calisthenics of vigorous dancers.
The tread of unseen monsters is disclosed as the stamping of celebrants who attack their
Spring ceremonial with a will. one of this serves to belittle the work as an art product; but it
does rob it of some of its hairy-ape characteristics. Back it comes from a domain of ferocious
fantasy into its proper - one might even say, its decorous-frame, as a colorful, virile,
aggressive spectacle but by no means one horrendous or appalling. Primitive Russia was no
such terrifying place, after all.
But "Die glückliche Hand" is less easily reconciled with stage orthodoxy. It is something to
fascinate utterly or to bore to extinction; a tragedy to crush the spirit or a grotesquerie to
evoke titters. Whether it does one or the other, may depend quite as much upon the
professionalism with which it achieves its illusion, as on the openmindedness of the audience
toward what may be regarded in some quarters as no music at all. As Leopold Stokowski
succinctly pointed out, in advance, there are three scores in this strange Schönberg opus - one
orchestral and vocal, one pantomime and dramatic action, one a sequence of color-light - all
parallel and synchronizing.
Importance of the Lighting
The lighting score, is for instance, quite as important as the musical one. In the printed score,
it is as painstakingly specified, and with as precise detail, as the dynamic and time directions
of the music. What if no such play of changing light is feasible? If the apparatus is not at
hand? "Unfortunately" apologized Mr. Stokowski, "no theatre in Philadelphia and none at our
disposal in New York has the modern technical equipment necessary to do it full justice." A
serious handicap at the outset.
The second point - that of the necessity of an open mind for what may seem no music at all.
"Die glückliche Hand" must make its effect, if it makes it, as a synthesis; as a fantastic drama
heightened by music; a motion picture or a pantomime in which the music is a power but not
a power to stand alone. Perhaps many hearings of this score would give it independent life,
even a measure of independent beauty. But this reviewer, who had heard a rehearsal and two
performances at the Duisburg Festival in Germany last summer, and who had attempted in the
interval to reconstruct what he had heard, by perusing an utterly baffling four-hand piano
score, still found on rehearing that the music spoke far less for itself than as a mode of
projection for the spectacle; the tonal equivalent of the lighting scheme which in the
Philadelphia performances had to be quite generally ignored.
There were mistakes in these performances that conspired to lessen materially the effect of the
drama, even aside from the lighting deficiencies. Two of these were encountered at the outset.
The work begins with Ein Mann, presumably any man or every man, in the grip of some
strange monster - jealousy, despair, misfortune - what you will. Faces peer at him out of the
darkness; voices whisper pitiful things. Altogether too conspicuous were the men and women
who voiced these whisperings from the dark - whispering too substantial and too vocal. The
spectral, macabre suggestion of this music would have been far more impressive, as it was at
Duisburg, if the chorus had been placed back stage or otherwise concealed. Instead, it sat
directly in front of the conductor in the orchestra pit, in full view of everyone. Considering the
very different results at Duisburg, it was a mistake also to treat the Chimera as a personage or
a character. His bodily movements were more than superfluous. However well carried out,
they tended to make the figure of the monster amusing. Better a grim stage property figure,
than a player suggesting some musical comedy devil.
Performance is Creditable
These particulars aside, the performance as staged by Reuben Mamonlian [sic] had its merits.
Ivan Ivantzoff, as the Man, Olin Howland as the Chimera, Doris Humphrey as the Woman,
Charles Wiedman as the Stranger, and John Glenn and Charles Lasky as two workmen,
composed the cast - all confined to voiceless pantomime save Ivantzoff, who sang well, rather
too well, the lines of the Man. Though too vocal, the chorus of seventeen voices from the
Curtis Institute had been carefully prepared by Sylvan Levin. The setting, by Robert Edmond
Jones, met the requirements of a production which could not make use of a revolving stage for
quick changes of scene.
The story, if such it can be called, of "Die glückliche Hand" was told some weeks ago in these
columns, and need not be repeated here. To take this story literally as the devotion of a man
for a woman who finally spurns him for another, is to solve the riddle of Schönberg altogether
too easily. Even the title remains a perplexing one. To translate it as "The Hand of Fate" is to
court the obvious. To call it "The Happy Hand" is to belie its character. True, there is a
moment when a hand - the hand of the Man - strikes with one fortunate blow a diadem from a
lump of metal, as if a great work were thus achieved. But have seen this miracle wrought, the
man throws the diadem away. Is that happiness or is it fate? At Duisburg - where he heard his
work for only the second time, after waiting sixteen years - Schönberg was asked what the
allegory meant. His response was another enigma. "You should have asked me that sixteen
years ago." There was a shrug as it to add, "How can I tell, now?" The woman of the brief
pantomime may be an ideal, a dream, a great desire, a spiritual or even some grossly material
goal - anything a man might set his heart upon and consecrate his whole life to, only to see
vanish from his hands - a delusion, a phantom hope, a mirage of beauty, a false gleam that
never was what it seemed. "You are mine - you were mine - she was mine!" the man cries in
the despair of his fading dream! When he is once more prostrate in the grip of the nameless
monster, the same voices in the dark whisper: "Must you suffer again what so often you have
suffered?" and "Still, you suffer, and still you seek, ever without peace, O pitiful one."
Those who demand some measure of realism will not find it here. Others who would welcome
pure phantasy may protest that this one is two-tenths German metaphysics and the other eight
decadent sentimentality. The point of view of any individual need not concern us here. After
all, the question with any such work is its effect in the theatre, and Schönberg's music, lacking
as it is in independent life, invests this allegory with something harrowing, something in the
music that corresponds to the word painting of a tale by Poe, to the "Horla" of de Maupassant.
Though it does not invoke any horror of the supernatural, it penetrates to the marrow of
despair. Its appeal is one of disillusionment and shattered dreams. Its solace is that of
hopelessness in defeat. If Schönberg by this synthesis can create the inner stir this reviewer
experienced in the more intimate performances at Duisburg, his music has achieved its end.
That stir was measurably less in the Philadelphia performances, in spite of the very fine
realization of the score by Mr. Stokowski's orchestra.
Bafflements of the Music
This music looks crabbed and meaningless on the printed page. That it is thoroughly atonal is
to be taken for granted: sharps and flats in myriads, everywhere. That it is a little too early to
represent the full development "if develoment [sic] it is) of Schönberg's twelve-tone scale
principle may be of precious little concern to those who listen with their ears in the
auditorium and not their eyes in the library. There are bite and acidity in those score. Concise,
direct, laconic, hard edged as it is, it yet possesses something more of juice - if a puckery,
acrid juice - than the essentially cerebral later works. It is "ungrateful" in any meaning of the
word easily applicable, but it is not dry. In the arts, there is no morbidity, no decadance, no
perversity without something akin to emotion. That most unpitying of current music-dramas
in Central Europe, Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" is clearly derived from "Die glückliche Hand."
Remorseless, it yet evokes compassion. The harshness of these intricately small disharmonies
is not the bludgeoning harshness of the climactic upbuildings of "Le Sacre." It irritates, but,
like it or not, this fretting produces an effect on the emotions that is not to be derived from the
mathematical mosaics of the later Schönberg. It is a drama, and human drama, not as a praxis
in the science of music or no-music, that "Die glückliche Hand" produces its disquieting and
quite possibly its morbid reaction, for those who can accept it at all.
"Le Sacre" a Colorful Ballet
The friendlier atmosphere of "Le Sacre du Printemps," as danced, in comparison with the
implied savagery of some fairly well established orchestral conceptions, has already been
spoken of. Part I, "the Adoratin if the Earth," with its dances of the adolescents, its mock
abduction, its spring rounds, and its games of rival tribes, is primarily athletic. After the
procession of the Sage, "the Dance of the Earth" is mildly orgiastic, but it is still a dance;
these are human rites; the preternatural and the bloodchilling have to be read into them. Part II
is the Sacrifice - still a human sacrifice, and a dance one. There is Debussy in this sacrifice as
there is "Petruschka" in the adoration. "The Pagan Night" remains scene painting of a high
order. Thereafter, the mystical circles of the adolescents, the glorification of the maiden
chosen for the sacrifice, and the concluding sacrificial dance transcend ordinary stage
processionals in the power and vividness of Stravinsky's music, but it is pretty much
conventional mimeodram at that.
The representation seemed to this writer a superior one, profiting not only by the exceedingly
deft choreographic directing of Leonoide Massine, but the richly imaginative stage setting by
Nicholas Roerich. Martha Graham brought to the dancing of the chosen one a suggestion of
rapturous trance. Among the forty mimes may be mentioned also Gould Stevens and Anita
Bay, the former impersonating the Sage and the latter a Witch.