WEILL: Der Kuhhandel.
Ursula Pfitzner (Juanita Sanchez); Dietmar Kerschbaum (Juan Santos); Michael
Kraus (Mr. Jones); Carlo Hartmann (President Mendez); Wolfgang Gratschmaier
(Ximenez); Rolf Haunstein (General Gardia Conchas), et al.; Chorus and
Orchestra of the Vienna Volksoper/Christoph Eberle.
Phoenix Edition 803 DVD TT: 138:00
BUY NOW FROM AMAZON
Weill à l'anglaise et française. In the early Thirties, Kurt
Weill, on the run from the Nazis, found himself in Paris. A fellow refugee,
Robert Vambery, proposed a theater project -- a political fable about arms
dealing and the political corruption that it engenders. The result was
the opera Der Kuhhandel, a title with multiple definitions. Literally, "cattle
trading," it also meant the shady deals of politicians in the Berliner
slang of the Thirties -- sort of equivalent to the American "horse
trading." Weill, one of the great innovators of theater music, decided
to invoke the spirit of Offenbach, since he was in Paris anyway. However,
the project failed to interest theaters in either Paris or Zurich, and
Weill and Vambery more or less put it aside. In 1935, they tried for
a London West End production, now called A Kingdom for a Cow, with the
libretto
revamped into English by British pop writers Reginald Arkell and Desmond
Carter, with both Weill's and Vambery's blessing. I've actually come
across some of the lyrics, and predictably they soften considerably the
biting
German original.
Despite a sparkling score, the production flopped, and Weill, considerably
annoyed, shelved the project for good, recycling a couple of themes for
later work. A beguine, for example, became the basis for Knickerbocker
Holiday's "September Song." In 1978, Weill's assistant, Lys
Symonette, created a performing version. This seems to have been the
basis of the
version on this DVD. There are, of course, little topical updates here
and there -- sometimes annoying, sometimes merely superfluous -- but
one expects that, especially today when directors and actors see themselves
less as servants of the material and more as artistic forces in their
own
right. Often, they're wrong.
I've seldom understand the purpose of a classical DVD, mainly because
I hear, rather than look at music. You'd think opera DVD would be a natural,
but usually it provides an opportunity to see bad acting up close, as
is
the case here. The voices are, at best, so-so. Indeed, because I don't
really look at the credits before I listen, I thought this group resided
in some German operatic backwater -- Dusseldorf, for example. Imagine
my surprise when I learned it was Vienna. Even the Lake Erie Opera in
my hometown
of Cleveland, Ohio, did better than this.
The direction has its bad and good points. The visual satire is much
too heavy-handed for the material. Soldiers carry AK-47s (or clones thereof).
Tactical missiles dot the stage. There's the inevitable lame Nazi reference
-- in this case, half a swastika (you'd think even directors would recognize
this as a cliché). For some reason, the national dress of the
peasants in an obviously South American country is Lederhosen and Dirndls.
On the
other hand, it's wonderfully seedy. The fictional setting is a poor,
tropical country, so the look of the production is appropriate. There's
a by-now
obligatory note of decadence in productions of Weill's European work.
Some ladies of the chorus dress butch, while some men dress as female
whores.
Also, the director has recognized that traditional opera acting styles
won't do and aims at something more knockabout. Unfortunately, the performers
have no training in this manner and little familiarity with, say, Broadway
style, but this isn't really the director's fault. The show could have
used a Howard da Silva, a Kaye Ballard, a Phil Silvers, and a Sam Levine.
Nevertheless, the disc has its uses. This is the only recording of anything
near the score that Weill wrote. People think they know Weill's music,
but when they think of him, they usually think of two scores: Der
Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Dreigroschenoper. Weill's range is a
lot bigger than that. The standard rap against Weill is that he sold
out his
European soul for Broadway gold. Although I fail to see why the composer
of Lady in the Dark, "September Song," Street
Scene, and Lost
in the Stars has to apologize, I must say that Weill constantly expanded
his idiom, even before the American exile. Indeed, Die Dreigroschenoper itself represents an expansion of Weill's earlier idiom, grafting Twenties
cabaret music onto a Busonian, Schoenbergian base. Here, the music has
been leavened by Offenbach and, because of the South American setting,
by Latin rhythms. It's a wonderful score. The CD (on Capriccio) isn't complete
and leaves out my favorite number, the "Pharaoh Song," Offenbach's "Kleinsach" turned
to bitterness. This DVD uses much more, if not all, of the score.
The English subtitles are embarrassingly careless, littered by typos,
bad grammar, translatorese, and euphemism. Nevertheless, because this
is the
most complete recording of the score. I recommend it to Weill fanatics,
like me.
S.G.S. (March 2009)