Two New Operas

A Report on "Jonny Spielt Auf" and "The Egyptian Helen" Soon to Be Presented in America

ERNEST NEWMAN

I UNDERSTAND that Jonny spielt auf and Die ägy ptische Helena will both figure in the Metropolitan Opera bill this season. It will be interesting to see what kind of reception they get from the Press and the public.

I am particularly curious about Jonny spielt auf. I have tried for some time to get the people who run opera for us in London to produce this work,—not because I think very much of it musically, but because it is very "contemporary," and it is always advisable to see and hear the thing of the moment before it becomes a thing of the past. Whatever else we may find to say against Jonny spielt auf, no one can deny that it is up-to-date. But my advocacy in London has been so far in vain.

I have been told, by people in authority, that the opera is, if not actually immoral, decidedly objectionable,—which perhaps it is if you turn upon art the same pair of eyes that you turn upon life. New York, I suppose, has not yet forgotten the outcry over the "immorality" of Strauss's Salome. The mistake the moralists made on that occasion was in assuming that life and art are the same, and that by being interested in a certain character in art we are expressing our preference for the same sort of character in life. Which is quite a mistake. I may admire the Creator's marvellous craftsmanship in the putting together of the python, the superb mechanism by which those coils of his get a grip on you from which there is no escaping, without my having the least desire to take the fascinating brute home with me and keep him as a hearthrug pet. And each of us would give a Salome a wide berth in real life—for what is she, when all is said, but an unscrupulous and dangerous young woman who gets foolish promises out of elderly men while they are under the influence of drink? But that does not make the psychology of Salome any less fascinating, at the safe distance imposed on her by art, than the physiology of the python is at the safe distance imposed on it by the Zoo authorities.

MY argument about Jonny spielt auf in London was that precisely because it was held to be objectionable in a peculiar way—as one of the heads of operatic affairs put it to me, "I don't like to see a negro chasing white women"—it would be a sure success for at least half a dozen performances, and with the money thus raked in something of finer quality and more permanent value, such as Berlioz's Les Troyens, could be given. Perhaps Jonny spielt auf will serve a similarly useful purpose in New York.

Krenek's opera has been an enormous success in Germany. It is one of the first articles of my critical philosophy that no work, in any department of art or literature, sweeps the field without deserving to do so. It may belong to a bad genre, but it is certain to be the best in that genre. Any housemaid, you would think, could write as good a novel as any of Marie Corelli's; but if the housemaids tried it on they would soon find that to do that sort of thing is not so easy as it looks —that to do it really well you require the mentality of a super-housemaid. It is too soon yet to speculate what Krenek may do when he is twenty or thirty years older, but he certainly deserves the success he has made with Jonny spielt auf, in the sense that, granted this sort of thing was worthy doing at all, he has done it remarkably well.

Krenek is a young man of thirty who studied under Schreker, married Mahler's daughter, and, five years ago, went as adviser to the Cassel theatre, of which Paul Bekker, (now famous for his Beethoven and other books) was then Intendant. He has written a large quantity of music in all genres, none of which, —not even an attempt to complete Schubert's unfinished C major piano sonata—made much impression on the general public until Jonny spielt auf came along. He is evidently an exceptionally clever young fellow: I have read some articles of his which, though I cannot agree with their main conclusions, show a fresh, lively, questing mind, and the man who could write the text as well as the music for the opera Der Sprung über den Schatten at the age of twenty-two (or earlier: the score was published in 1923) has more than common quickness of wit. Jonny spielt auf is an affair of the last couple of years: it is so recent that I cannot discover the precise date of the first production from even the latest of the German dictionaries of music. The libretto as well as the music of Jonny spielt auf is Křenek's own words.

THE story of the opera is nothing if not contemporary. We begin with a young German composer, Max, whose Weltschmerz takes the form of flying to the glaciers for consolation. It is on a glacier in the Alps that we make his acquaintance in the first scene: there he meets a singer, Anita, who, by a curious coincidence, has sung in one of his operas. She recognizes him by his photographs. Anita, who is of exceedingly inflammable temperament, takes the young idealist under her wing, and Max soon learns more about calorics than any glacier could teach him. In a few days she has to leave him to sing the leading part in his new opera in Paris. There the scene is laid in a hotel corridor. From the lounge below come the strains of a "blues," played by the jazz band of the famous negro Jonny. This gentleman is already loved passionately by the chambermaid, Yvonne; but Jonny soon forgets Yvonne after he has caught sight of the appetising Anita, who is not merely sex but luxury and elegance. Anita's room on the corridor is near that of Daniello, a vain, woman-pursued violin virtuoso who is having his usual success in the town. Jonny has conceived a romantic passion for Daniello's Amati, which in the long run he contrives to steal. Anita has a banjo that she uses in one of her songs in Max's opera. Jonny manages to hide the stolen violin in the banjo case, using his comical jazz hat to give this the semblance of the bulge of the banjo. Daniello, who has passed the night with the incandescent Anita, discovers his loss, and his frantic denunciations of everybody and everything turn the hotel upside down. Yvonne being falsely accused of the theft, Anita generously takes her into her own service. Jonny gloats over the thought of his revenge on Daniello, who has hurt his vanity by kicking him for paying his dusky attentions to Anita; while Daniello in turn plans a subtle revenge on the man of the glacier, who, Anita has assured him, is the sole occupant of her heart. She has given Daniello a ring in memory of a pleasant time, short as it may have been. This ring he now gives secretly to Yvonne, telling her to hand it at the first opportunity to one Max, a composer, with the greetings of Daniello.

Max has been impatiently awaiting the return of Anita. When, in the course of events, Yvonne innocently hands him the familiar ring and gives him Daniello's message, he realises why Anita is a day or so late for their rendez-vous, and off he goes to his glaciers again for comfort. Jonny turns up and makes away with the coveted violin; and then there follows a stream of exciting incidents. Jonny, pursued by detectives, makes his way to the railway station from which Anita, with a good contract in her pocket, is off to America. The ins-and-outs of the always changing action are too many to recount in detail here. In the end Anita just catches her train, Daniello falls in front of the engine and is killed, Max, who, through a stratagem of Jonny's, has been arrested for the theft of the violin, gets back to the station in time to jump into the last coach, and Jonny, bestriding the station clock, strikes up on the violin and has the whole company dancing to the strains that have come from the New World and laid their conquering hand on the Old.

THE story is a good one, and the action always lively; but I am doubtful about the length of life that Jonny spielt auf is likely to have. Highly "contemporary" musical works are generally the first to become passe, if their strongest card is their contemporaneity rather than their music. One of the secrets of Meyerbeer's astounding vogue in his own day was the feeling his audiences had that opera was here being brought up to date; but Meyerbeer's music has not proved good enough to maintain his operas in the general repertory, while extremely old-fashioned subjects like those of Gluck's Orfeo and Alceste still keep the stage. When the novelty of Jonny spielt auf has worn off,—and a very amusing novelty it is for those of us who are always in search of new sensations—I doubt whether it will have a long life. There are no signs at present so far as I can see, that Krenek has the making of a first-rate composer in him. His own style, as shown in the more serious music of Jonny spielt auf, lacks both individuality and beauty. He indulges in a sort of atonal polytonality that consists mostly in doggedly making two or more disparate lines of tone go in harness together whether they want to or not. What may be the future of this rather easy kind of writing none of us can tell. Some day a real master may impress his own personality on it; at present it is for the most part merely a sort of vague musical esperanto in which the generality of composers find it easier to talk than to think. The best parts of Jonny spielt auf are the jazz parts. American experts in jazz may find them a little old-fashioned, perhaps, but they still have gusto and sparkle. As so often happens with your would-be revolutionary, Krenek does his best work when he is working comfortably in an accepted formula, exploiting accepted devices.

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The other work we are considering, Strauss's Egyptian Helen, is virtually all formula, and formula of the very worst kind,—the formula that takes possession of a once-great artist when his inspiration has petered out and only the mechanics of his technique remain. To mo the work is the saddest in the long sad catalogue of Strauss's failures,—for a failure it is and will soon be recognised to be, when once the novelty of it has worn off and the splendour of the inscenation has palled.

Hofmannsthal's libretto has more than a touch of naivete about it, and rather too much of the facile pseudophilosophising in which the German mind delights—the would-be profound distinction between a Lebendig-Tote and a Tot-Lcbendige, for instance. It deals with the legendary adventures of Helen in Egypt. Returning with her to Greece after the ten years' war, Menelaus is about to slay her on the ship as a sacrifice to outraged virtue, when a storm, sent by the sympathetic sorceress Aithra, wrecks the vessel and throws the pair on the shore of a rocky island. They find themselves in Aithra's palace. There the brooding Menelaus again raises against her the sword that has slain Paris. Aithra, however, sets her elves to counterfeit a war alarm outside, and Menelaus, under the delusion that he is back again at Troy, rushes out to attack Paris once more. He comes back believing that his sword is dripping with the blood of Paris and Helen, but allows himself to be persuaded by Aithra that he and the rest of the Greeks have been the victims of an hallucination for the last ten years,—that the Helen whom Paris thought he had carried away was only a phantom, the real Helen having been conveyed to the court of Aitfira's father in the Atlas mountains. A curtain being drawn aside, Helen is revealed to him in all her old beauty.

The pair are transported through the air to the Atlas mountains. Menelaus is still not quite himself; he believes, in spite of the seeming evidence of his eyes, that he has killed the real Helen, and that the lovely creature who is with him is only the creation of the sorceress. As of old, the kings come to pay their homage to the peerless Helen, and two of them, the wild Altair and his romantically-minded young son Da-ud, are particularly pressing in their attentions, so that before long Menelaus has to deal out to the boy the fate of Paris. Helen has resolved to win back Menelaus by restoring him to full consciousness of himself and the past and risking the consequences. The usual operatic antipotion sweeps away his hallucination; once more he is about to sacrifice the fair sinner when she smiles radiantly on him, and by some psychology process that is clearer to Hofmannsthal than it is to me he believes wholly in her again; and the happy pair return to Sparta as King and Queen.

The score of Die cigyptische Helena I hold to be the most deplorable piece of make-believe ever produced by a one-time genius in degeneration. Strauss's fluency of musical speech has outlasted his fund of ideas. There are a few charming or brilliant pages in the score, but only where minor incidents and characters are being described. Strauss has all his life had a waltz complex; all his life, as I could show were I allowed a page or two of musical quotations, he has been writing waltzes without knowing it; and one of the reasons why the Rosenkavalier is so splendid is that here he could indulge his waltz complex consciously and to the full. In some of the music associated with Aithra we are in the waltz atmosphere once more, even though the time-signature may not be that of the waltz; and when he is indulging his fancy on its more superficial side Strauss can still write music of a certain charm. But for most of the serious music in the work there is only one adjective. It is deplorable; it is an endless stream of bogus passion, bogus heroics, bogus profundity. The imposing old machine still works at something like the old pace, but the factory now turns out little but yard after yard of the wretchedest shoddy. Strauss's idiom has degenerated into a bundle of tricks and formulae that are now so completely standardised and mechanised that any one who has long been a student of him can deduce a whole page from the first bar. Technically the score is often very interesting; Strauss does some fascinating things, for instance, in the way of that sudden slipping out of a key and as suddenly slipping back into it again that has always been characteristic of him. But the brains, the vision, the heart have almost all gone out of the technique now.

One would be inclined to regard it all as just cynical bluff but for the clear evidence every now and then that Strauss really believes in it. Only two explanations are possible for the bad music of the later Strauss: either he is now a mere charlatan deliberately reeling off the easy superficial things and trusting to his technique to impose them on us, or he is sincere in what he does, but completely, hopelessly, pathetically destitute of selfcriticism. I take the question to be settled in favour of the latter hypothesis by such passages as those descriptive of Da-ud (p. 204 etc. of the score). Had Strauss been a charlatan he would surely have tried to put up a better bluff than this. It is the quite lamentable inanity of the music that convinces us that Strauss is completely sincere in it but completely self-deluded; it is so long since he has had any ideas of any value that he has ceased to be able to distinguish between even his bad ideas and his worst ones.