Many of Erwin Schulhoff’s concert works suggests a dramatic gift, but this is the only opera that he completed. Flammen was premiered in Brno (in Czech, as “Plameny”) in 1932, but the rise of Hitler dashed plans for a Berlin production under Erich Kleiber and turned Schulhoff from a musical dramatist into a political composer (he wrote an oratorio-sized setting of the Communist Manifesto). As a Jew, a Communist and an ‘enemy alien’ (he had taken Soviet citizenship) he was not likely to live long once the Nazis moved into Czechoslovakia; he died in internment in 1942.
The plot is a phantasmagoria woven around the mythic figure of Don Juan. The ‘flames’ of the title are those of passion, but also of death, for which Juan longs, but in this version of the story he is condemned to eternal life, not everlasting perdition. All the characters are emblematic, all the women in Juan’s life save one represented by a single singer, the exception being La Morte, Death herself, who loves him but cannot claim him. Despite the presence of these figures, plus the Commendatore, Harlequin and a chorus (six women’s voices) of Shadows, lengthy sections of the opera take place without any singing: in a staged version there would be much mime and dance, elaborate lighting and scenic transformation.
Flammen is an attempt at a new and original sort of opera, in short, one that relies on fantasy rather than logic or realism. It took Schulhoff, normally a fluent composer, five years to write, and in the earlier scenes he seems content to establish an enigmatic, dream-like atmosphere. Highly chromatic and very dense polyphonic textures abound, sometimes clearing to reveal that they are made from quite simple melodic motives, closely woven together. The music is impressively shadowy, but without much sense of direction. Mahler stands some distance behind it; later on, as the music comes into focus and the sense of a mysterious, malign ceremonial intensifies, Busoni is a rather closer presence. At last in a love scene between Juan and Marguerite (yes, he is Faust as well), Schulhoff seems to realize the full potential of what he is doing, and the music gains real drama and urgency. Juan’s love of death, in the shape of La Morte, is gravely earnest. Donna Anna’s rejection of him (“You are the very image of death”) and La Morte’s sentence of life have a sober eloquence; the very end of the opera, Juan’s unwilling return to a life of pleasure, is voluptuous but chilling.
Not a wholly successful opera, but a haunting one. The performance is excellent, with Westi as a clear, penetrating Juan, Eaglen effective in her four roles and Vermillion soberly earnest in her single one. The recording is good, too, though in some passages the singers seem recessed, as though they were upstage during a live performance.
'