Review: "Die Gezeichneten" - DVD

"After the Deluge
As the First World War raged around him, the Viennese composer Franz Schreker was writing an opera that would use a lush and decadent setting as a platform for a pitiless examination of personal morality. "Die Gezeichneten" ("The Branded") thrived in European opera houses during the twenties, only to be suppressed by the Nazis because Schreker was Jewish. The long-delayed Schreker revival, which began in the late nineteen-seventies, reached a climax last summer with a production at the Salzburg Festival, which is now available on DVD from EuroArts, confirming Schreker's turbulent genius.

Set in Renaissance Genoa, the plot concerns the attempt by Alviano Salvago, a hunchbacked nobleman, to give Elysium, his island pleasure palace, to the city, a move opposed by a group of aristocrats who surreptitiously use the island's grotto for orgies with kidnapped young women. Nikolaus Lehnhoff's forceful, if extreme, staging updates the scenario to suit present gender obsessions: Salvago (Robert Brubaker, in an eloquent, if unsubtle performance) loses his hump but likes to cross-dress, and the unfortunate girls are literally children, of both sexes.

The piece lacks the optimistic tunefulness of Strauss's contemporaneous "Ariadne auf Naxos," but it has enormous strengths. No composer since Mozart moves his action along with such assurance, and the orchestration has a bewitching and seductive complexity. The production is crowned by a magnificent performance from the soprano Anne Schwanewilms as Salvago's doomed bride; Kent Nagano and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin provide fine support from the pit."

Russell Platt, The New Yorker, September 25, 2006, Classical Notes, p. 50