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of about 1913-styles which in each instance have been superseded with these composers by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.