Of course, Ferdinand Schubert and Schober were attached to the future of Alfonso und Estrella in quite different ways. Ferdinand saw himself as the responsible custodian of his brother’s works in a manner that looked to the future and the eventuality of other performances as a result of publication with Breitkopf. Schober, on the other hand, had his mind set on this specific performance of a piece that he helped create and worked tirelessly to hear performed. “For eight years, in alliance with your dear brother, I strove to bring it to the stage under such auspicious conditions as would never again return, applying in vain to theaters in Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Prag, Pest, Graz, etc,” wrote Schober in a blistering letter to Ferdinand, in response to the latter’s unwillingness to act quickly to send the score of the opera to Liszt.8 Schober saw the whole affair as an issue of ownership: “Does some kind of pronouncement, purchase, exchange, or contract give you the right to call the text of Alfonso und Estrella, which belongs to me, your own property and thereby dispose of it high-handedly, and without asking me?”9 Liszt’s interest in producing the opera had by then become something of an obsession with Schober—the answer to his prayers—and he tried to convince Ferdinand to cooperate. By the end of Schober’s appeal, there was understandably more than a hint of desperation: “There is still time. Send the opera at once or I will hereby prohibit every one of your provisions concerning this work and will accordingly inform Breitkopf & Härtel and will publicly explain both of our courses of actions…. I will wait no longer than ten days for an answer.”10
Ferdinand, perhaps out of pique, did not reply, but six months later he was ready to launch an agreement between Breitkopf & Härtel and the Weimar Hoftheater. A performance of the opera in Weimar under Liszt now seemed assured. But there was a hitch: Liszt had not yet seen the libretto or the score. Once he did it would be six years full of disappointments, aborted attempts at producing the opera, and even plans for a revision of the libretto, before the opera was finally staged.
The first such attempt occurred early in 1849. We learn the details from Eduard Genast, the Regisseur of the Hofoper, with whom Liszt had clearly discussed the viability of performing the opera. “Liszt had proposed Franz Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella for February 16. As Regisseur I was opposed to this, for as much as I admire and love Schubert as a Lieder composer, this work cannot be called an opera, for it offers nothing more than a sequence of beautiful melodies and Lieder, for which reason a monotony arises that cannot but become painful. Liszt has stood by his choice. A number of piano rehearsals have already taken place and as a result he himself has come to the fortunate idea to set the opera aside and to choose instead Tannhäuser.”11
Liszt’s next attempt to perform the opera came in the early months of 1850. We learn that again Liszt has held piano rehearsals for the opera, intending to begin full rehearsals at the end of February and perform the opera sometime during the beginning of April. But again the whole affair was aborted, this time because Liszt was now at least open about his dislike of the libretto. He wrote to Breitkopf in February: “As for the Schubert opera, a recent experience has confirmed me entirely in the view that I had already taken at the time of the first piano rehearsals we held last spring: the view that the delicate and interesting score of Schubert ends up as if crushed under the weight of the libretto! However, I do not give up hope to be able to present this work successfully—but this success appears to me possible under only one condition: that of adapting another libretto to Schubert’s music.”12 From the end of the year until the first weeks of 1854, Liszt busied himself with what he considered a viable solution, one that was directed exclusively at the libretto. His idea was to have a new libretto prepared, this time in French, and have the opera given at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. With this scheme in mind he entered into negotiations not only with Breitkopf to obtain permission for this new arrangement but with music publisher Léon Escudier in Paris as well.
The first task in this new scheme was to have a piano-vocal score prepared to send to Escudier. Liszt appealed first to his colleague Joachim Raff as early as December 1850: “As soon as everything is in order concerning your Alfred, do not entirely forget Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella. Escudier is waiting for it. The piano arrangement must be comfortable and easy to play.”13 By March of the following year there seemed to be no progress, and Raff was urged again to prepare a version of the score, “to take up and bring to a conclusion the piano arrangement of the Schubert opera. If the arrangement bores you, entrust it to Reissmann or someone else.”14 In April Liszt told Sayn-Wittgenstein that he was still intending to have the piano score completed. A month later he told her merely that “I will still deliver to them [Escudier] Schubert’s opera.”15 In June, the score was not yet complete, as we learn in a letter to Raff: “Reissmann should send me here as quickly as possible the other acts of the Schubert opera.”16 Several years went by. We hear nothing until the beginning of 1854, when Liszt informs Escudier that he is still thinking of adapting the opera, with a new libretto in French, for performance in Paris. It was never to be, and no trace of Raff’s or Reissmann’s endeavors has survived.
It seems that Liszt, in spite of his interest in an eventual performance of the work in Paris, was also still planning to perform the work in Weimar later that year. We know this from a letter to Louis Köhler: “I believe that for the last theater performance of this season (the end of June) we will still perform Franz Schubert’s opera Alfonso und Estrella,” a work he found “altogether interesting, fully endowed with inner, natural charm.”17 At the end of March, in a letter to Breitkopf, Liszt makes clear more of what he has been up to: “So far, we have held a half-dozen rehearsals, which have clearly resulted in a sufficiently large number of cuts, and which I have not hesitated to carry out, and if you should later have the intention to publish the piano reduction, I myself would see to it that you arrange your edition so that it corresponds to our performance—with the reservation that the deleted passages be added at the end as an appendix.”18
On the evening of 24 June 1854, the Hoftheater was brilliantly lit to celebrate the birthday of the new Grand Duke Karl Alexander, whose father Karl Friedrich had died the previous July. Karl Friedrich had been a cautious administrator, inevitably more concerned with bolstering the city’s flagging economy than in reviving Weimar’s artistic past. “It was left to … Karl Alexander,” as Alan Walker has written, “to dream of reawakening Weimar’s past glories, and it was to his everlasting credit that when the twenty-three-year-old duke first set eyes on Liszt, he recognized a man of genius around whom Weimar’s artistic regeneration might be accomplished.”19 This was to be the first of such birthday celebrations, which Liszt continued each year for the remainder of his tenure as Kapellmeister. The work Liszt chose for the occasion was Alfonso und Estrella, the culmination of his years of hopeful but troubled planning. To mark the musical occasion even more auspiciously, Liszt conducted before the opera a Festival Overture of Anton Rubinstein, and at the end of the opera, a Festival March on melodies by Eschinbach and Ofterdingen orchestrated by one von W. Stade. The cast of the opera could not have been more brilliant. Froila and Estrella were sung by Herr and Frau von Milde, the two most celebrated and beloved singers of the Hoftheater ensemble.
Liszt’s letter to Breitkopf makes it clear that what the audience heard in the Weimar Hoftheater the evening of 24 June was not, strictly speaking, Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella but Liszt’s revised version of the opera. The performance of the opera, given the program as a whole, could not have lasted for much longer than two hours—somewhere between thirty and forty minutes were thus cut from the score. A small number of arias or ensembles were removed entirely. Of Froila’s two arias, each one placed at the beginning of the first two acts as part of the parallel dramatic whole of the first six numbers of the first two acts, Liszt cut entirely the second aria. In the second act, Liszt made cuts in all but one of the eleven numbers. What Liszt was after, apparently, was to create grea
ter dramatic and musical concision and continuity. In the opening Introduction of the first act, with both choral and soloistic sections, Liszt cut the solo portions. In the fourth and fifth numbers—a duet for Alfonso and Froila, and a recitative and aria for Froila—he cut introductory passages. In the second of these two, he also cut the recitative material. Often his cuts included additional strophes or some identical recapitulatory passages. In keeping with the strict use of accompanied recitatives in the opera and the many long through-composed sections, he seized on these, sometimes eliminating recitative or closing and opening material and adding newly composed transitional material for the purpose. The result of these many cuts and revisions must be considered a new, rather radical performing edition of Schubert’s opera.20
Liszt’s efforts to bring Alfonso und Estrella to the stage of the Weimar Hoftheater were long and sustained. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this journey is the psychological strain those efforts must have caused him. This was not simply a case of pure selfless musical admiration of an unknown or unpublished work that concerned Liszt deeply, in one way or another, during most of his active musical life. He made the decision to perform Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella without any foreknowledge of it musically or dramatically. Schober had of course played a decisive role in convincing Liszt to perform a work in which he himself had been so deeply engaged. The decision, through the agency of one of Schubert’s closest associates and friends, created a musical link for Liszt to the actual figure of Schubert, for whose talents Liszt had unbounded admiration. Having made the decision to do honor to Schubert in this way—“an act of reverence” as he says in the essay that follows—he had to live with the consequences once the work came into his hands. Surely Liszt came to the same musical conclusions as Genast had in early 1849. But he had made a vow or promise to himself (and as he must have felt, to Schubert), and would not be deterred. The reader will notice that although Liszt was willing to criticize openly the libretto, even planning to replace it with a French text, he must have admitted the dramatic weaknesses of the work to himself, found excuses for them, and convinced himself one way or another that they could somehow be overcome in actual performance. Only after the act of performance was Liszt able to set aside these psychological maneuvers and detach himself enough from the opera to judge it according to his true musical convictions. And these are what we find in the essay that follows.
Schober’s struggle during the years that led to the first performance of Alfonso und Estrella was more removed and private than Liszt’s, one that no doubt included its share of resistance to criticism and eventually estrangement. In the end he himself confirmed what Liszt had written in his essay. In 1876, more than twenty years after the premiere of Alfonso und Estrella, Schober wrote these touchingly self-critical words to a friend: “Such a miserable, stillborn concoction of a libretto that even such a genius as Franz Schubert could not bring it to life.”21
Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella Franz Liszt
This work was written in 1818, ten years before the death of the composer, and given its first performance in 1854, that is, thirty-six years later.
We are well aware of the great mission Schubert fulfilled in the service of the art of music, of how he devoted virtually his entire life to the poetry of tones. Whereas the act of creation is for many artists no more than an episodic occupation of a life engrossed in every possible storm and stress and in personal distractions, and others ruminate tirelessly over works they have completed—the former devoting only a few hours a day to the act of creation, the latter only a few years—Schubert removed himself from the real world, from the urges of his private feelings, from his personal life, so to speak, so that he might aspire only to poetry, to breathe music. He breathed out his very soul in its fragrance; his vitality seemed to gush forth in the full torrent of his pen. In this way, time rushed forward for him, years crowded together into months, and although snatched from art while still young, he lived long enough to experience the maturity of his artistic genius, for in the last ten years of his life he exceeded three times over in the number and significance of his creations what someone else might accomplish in a lifetime. This last period of his life was for him the richest in the experiences that taught him to understand the nature and range of his genius.
We must, therefore, look upon the work before us as a product of his youth. Moreover, its weaknesses are understandable given the rapidity with which he went about his work, which did not give him enough time to think through the layout of his works, about how to refine them carefully as he was working or once they were completed, or to judge for himself how his creations would stand in relationship to the art of his time and to the past. Quickly following his inspiration, he gave immediate expression to the feelings ablaze in his soul. As if enflamed by the noblest of wines, he gave life to his enthusiasm for great poetry, finding pleasure only when he could pour forth in divine song the overabundance of his spiritual and poetic life.
One finds it difficult to accept the premise that a soul like Schubert, accustomed to substantial, refined, and poetic fare, should not have noticed the inadequacy of the libretto he had chosen. However, accustomed as he was to conveying impressions conjured ardently and vividly out of lyric poetry without examining the literary design of his subject beyond the feelings expressed in the verses, so too did he proceed with the composition of his opera without, in this case, subjecting the verses to criticism. Furthermore, seeing that Italian operas based on the most mediocre texts enjoyed great success day in and day out, he fell easily into the error of believing that the literary insignificance of an operatic text might be an unavoidable misfortune, and not rack his brains for long over the reasons for it. Because he did not live in close contact with the literary heroes of his time, he could not possibly expect any libretto from them; besides, it is doubtful whether even in the most fortunate instance they would have furnished him with a libretto that would have easily revealed to him its shortcomings in regard to a musical setting.
If one considers the poetic material that even a Goethe chose as the basis for operas or cantatas, one is easily persuaded how hastily highly gifted poets of this time dealt with material intended for music. Schubert lived in too modest and humble seclusion to reach the envied regions of composers whose music was regularly performed. Alfonso und Estrella was never performed nor published. If the opera had been performed, it could most likely have given pleasure and would probably have allowed him to achieve fame more quickly than his songs which, although more a token of his genius, were slow to be recognized. The demands placed on drama by the previous generation had not yet reached that stage of development where the poetic text would necessarily have appeared as inexcusably insipid as it does to our generation.
The literature of the French Empire had propagated a taste for idyllic situations, unexpected scenes of recognition, gradual achievement of universal happiness, for a mixture of military peripeteia and pastoral scenes. Overthrown kingdoms and tender love exercised a daily influence on their mutual fates, and the events portrayed blended with reality. Paris greatly admired Les Battuécas of Mademoiselle de Genlis and its portrayal of the native folk hidden away in the Spanish Sierras, very much like the native folk raised in pastoral happiness by the dethroned King Froila in Schubert’s opera. In melodic quality, the opera outweighs those of Gyrowetz, Winter, or Weigl that were so popular at the time. But just as those operas have today nearly disappeared from the stage, so a performance of Alfonso und Estrella can only be seen as an act of reverence: the settlement of a debt of honor owed by unrelated heirs that could not be settled with the creditor during his lifetime. Had the work been performed successfully when it was written, it would have enjoyed a revival only with difficulty. Since it was made to suffer unjustly, however, it is the task of the artist to present it as an accepted fact of history, one that could lead to interesting observations.
In the first act we see Froila, the King of Léon, who, overthro
wn by a rival king, has taken refuge in a valley, where he brings happiness to its small number of isolated inhabitants. His son (Alfonso) has just carried off the prize in games and exercises that turns the victor into the leader of the valley’s youth for one year. But this renown does not satisfy his burning desire for action. He would like to break through the boundaries set by his father’s strict rules, which have held back his subjects for many years. He expresses to his father his distress over such a frustrating obstacle, though he keeps his impulsive drives at a distance. In turn his father makes him a promise that, as a sign of good will, the prohibition will be removed one day, and gives him a golden chain as a pledge in fulfillment of his promise. The scene changes to the palace of the usurper (Mauregato), whose Commanding General, returning victoriously from battle, asks for the hand of the King’s daughter, Estrella, since the King promised to grant him any reward he might choose for his heroic deeds. Estrella, however, dislikes the General. Her father, though condemned for being a notorious tyrant, is unwilling to break her heart and explains that, by virtue of a holy dictum, the only one who will possess the hand of Estrella is he who wins back for him the holy chain of St. Eurich, missing from the treasure house since the overthrow of the previous King.
In the second act we see Estrella lose her way in Froila’s hills during a hunt and come upon Alfonso by chance. Their young hearts become aflame with love as they stare at each other, captivated with each other’s charms, and when they part Alfonso gives her, as a token of this moment, the golden chain his father had given him. Meanwhile the love-lorn General, having ravaged and plundered every nearby Moorish and Christian castle yet failing to discover the fateful chain anywhere, finds it easier to remove his King from the throne. He conspires toward this end with the leaders of the army, which happens at just the right moment, for his resolution gives rise to two of the best numbers in the opera: the chorus of conspirators, who have gathered together at night among the ruins; and the chorus of nobles, who remain loyal to Mauregato and promise to defend him. The latter receives news of the insurrection at the moment his daughter, having returned from the hunt, tells him about the charming stranger who had presented her with the chain—at once revealed as the treasure of St. Eurich, for which our Orlando furioso ed innamorato had been searching in vain.
Franz Schubert and His World Page 25