I was rather taken by Max von Schillings’s opera Mona Lisa when it was resurrected and recorded a few years ago (CPO, 8/95): the plot is sensational hokum but the opulently post-Wagnerian music at times transcends it. Everything in this collection is a good deal earlier than Mona Lisa, but the opera’s admirers will recognize Schillings’s sumptuously rich colours and big, bold gestures. It seems, though, that the melodic language of Mona Lisa developed rather more slowly: the melodies here often meander somewhat or are based on repetitions of rather banal brief cells. And, if the plots of his earlier operas, Ingwelde (abduction, revenge and doomed love among the Vikings) and Moloch (‘culture’ and barbarism in conflict; the manuscript was a treasured possession of Adolf Hitler) are anything to go by, his dramatic gift took a while to mature as well. The Glockenlieder may be relevant here: written in 1908 (seven years before Mona Lisa: Schillings was 40) they contain striking, indeed operatic declamation, bold images and some charming melodic invention, but they are settings of truly dreadful poems, gloomy mysticism alongside cringe-making whimsy – Friedrich Nietzsche meets Mabel Lucie Attwell – by the once fashionable Swiss poet (unbelievably, he won the Nobel Prize) Carl Spitteler. I am lost in admiration that Robert Worle manages to sing them not only with a straight face but rather beautifully.
The Ingwelde Prelude is voluptuously passionate, filled with beautiful sounds, and has at its centre one of the young Schillings’s better tunes. The ‘harvest festival’ Prelude to the last act of Moloch begins with jovial barbarity but soon lapses into rather limp Landler rhythm, like Mahler on an off-day (with castanets). Both the early Symphonic Fantasies contain richly worked textures and moments of both beautiful chamber scoring and Straussian, even Elgarian high colour, but Schillings’s melodic language lags behind his orchestral expertise. “Seemorgen” has a good lyrical central section, but its outer panels are based not so much on a tune as an industriously worked ‘pom-pom-pom-tiddle-pom’ motif. If you can stomach the texts the Glockenlieder are the nearest here to what we may perhaps regard as the mature Schillings of Mona Lisa. Everything, however, is decently performed and cleanly recorded.'