In the period between the two world wars, Walter Braunfels (1882-1954) was among the most widely performed of all living opera composers. He fell foul of the Nazis, and little was heard of him again until after their fall from power. Verkundigung (''Annunciation'') was written between 1934 and 1937, presumably in full knowledge that it had no foreseeable prospect of performance, and it was not staged until 1948. It is not an opera, but a mystery play, the action proceeding in almost free-standing emblematic tableaux, with few narrative links between them, all the characters being more symbolic than three-dimensional. The libretto is based on a German translation of Paul Claudel's L'Annonce faite a Marie, and tells the story of a woman, Violaine, who is moved by pity to kiss a leper. She contracts leprosy herself, heals the leper she had embraced, brings the child born to her cross-grained sister and her own former fiance back from the dead, and dies forgiving the ex-fiance who could never quite bring himself to believe that her kiss to the leper was no more than an act of saintly compassion.
The music is as remote as can be from any idea of what a German 'opera' of the 1930s might sound like. Its stylistic affinities are all in the past, with Pfitzner (but a simpler, a pietistic Pfitzner), with Reger (though much less chromatic) and with Strauss (though much less voluptuous). There seems also to be a level at which the music is rooted, though so deep that the roots can hardly be discerned, in German chorale, and in a counterpoint that has more affinities with Bach than with Hindemith (though there is a hint of a kinship there, too). Most difficult of all, for some listeners (though I must stress that Braunfels's language is amply melodious and harmonically straightforward), is the fact that the drama proceeds on an almost exclusively spiritual level. Moments of insight and mystical vision are dramatized, more everyday events, such as there are, are not. It places something of a premium on the listener's response to the story.
A note by Frithjof Haas (translated in the booklet, though the libretto is not) explains that all the characters represent earthly reactions to heavenly forces. Thus the evil sister Mara (whose reaction to the resurrection of her child is jealously to fling her by now blind sister into a pit) ''lives in a world that excludes God'', while her and Violaine's mother, who cannot understand her husband's decision ''to overcome mortal needs and failings'' by going on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, ''is not part of the mystery''. An unsympathetic listener may find Mara's 'wickedness' bafflingly unmotivated, her father's action selfish and may side with the downtrodden and unconsidered mother, may even find the incessant sweetness and light of Violaine cloying. When her jealous fiance curses her for her apparent infidelity she exclaims, radiantly, ''I am not accursed, I am the gentle, the gentle Violaine''; when he discovers she has given her engagement ring to the leper as well, to help pay for the cathedral he is building, her response is ''I am more than a ring; I am a great treasure''.
The music is often radiant, often touching in the sincerity of its belief in tonality and the workings of the Holy Ghost; I can readily imagine it becoming a sort of cult piece among some listeners, while others are bound to find it, like some really virtuous and spiritual people, a touch boring. A third group, those who simply cannot accept a eulogy of redemptive suffering, may even find it repulsive. What no one can deny is a curious and individual voice, individual even in its Catholic reliance on the sanctified authority of tradition. Nor could anyone claim that this fine performance sells the work short in any way: the singing is admirable throughout, Andrea Trauboth in especially beautiful voice (how I would love to hear her in Strauss!), and Davies conducts with real conviction. The recording, made at a live concert performance, has only a few minor fluffs and some noisy page-turns to mar it.'