"Recovered Voices," Los Angeles Opera's effort to restore to the repertory German opera suppressed by the Nazis, has a shaky premise but not shaky music. Sunday afternoon at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the company presented works by Viktor Ullmann and Alexander Zemlinsky never before staged in America.
The Nazi attitude toward these composers was clear. They were Jewish. They were persecuted, their music forbidden. Ullmann perished in Auschwitz. Zemlinsky, a celebrated composer and conductor in the German-speaking world, emigrated from Vienna to New York in 1938 a broken man, his career pretty much destroyed.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, February 23, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 89 words Type of Material: Correction
'Recovered Voices': The headline on a review of "Recovered Voices" in Tuesday's Calendar section said the two works performed by Los Angeles Opera were written by German composers. Although "The Broken Jug" and "The Dwarf" were written in German, neither of their composers -- Viktor Ullmann and Alexander Zemlinsky, respectively -- was German. Zemlinsky was Austrian; Ullmann was born in Teschen, a city claimed by both Poles and Czechs and which at the time of his birth was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Teschen is now Cieszyn, in Poland.
But why it now takes a special effort to revive the works of Ullmann and Zemlinsky may have less to do with the Nazis than with issues of musical taste and originality.
Other composers were suppressed for racial and/or musical reasons, yet they continued to thrive. Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, both of whom emigrated to the U.S., come immediately to mind. Anton Webern's music, unheard during the Nazi regime, changed the course of music immediately after the war ended.
Why, moreover, present Ullmann's "The Broken Jug" and Zemlinsky's "The Dwarf" when L.A. Opera has yet to stage Berg's "Lulu" or Schoenberg's "Moses and Aron"? There are two reasons more compelling than historical imperative. These obscure operas are in a Romantically accessible style and, I think most important of all, L.A. Opera music director James Conlon has a passion for them. His enthusiasm Sunday was infectious.
Of the two one-act operas, "The Dwarf" is by far the most important. Premiered in Cologne in 1922, it is the sixth of the composer's eight operas. (Conlon presented Zemlinsky's earlier "A Florentine Tragedy" last season in a concert performance with the company.) The score, especially in the orchestral writing, is ravishing.
Based on Oscar Wilde's story "The Birthday of the Infanta," this is "Beauty and the Beast" without redemption. A princess in the Spanish Court of Philip II receives a dwarf as a present for her 18th birthday. She toys with him, and he falls in love with her. He has never seen himself in the mirror. When he does, he dies of grief.
Wilde's story has a light touch, which makes it all the more devastating. Zemlinsky's opera is heavier-handed melodrama. What saves it is Zemlinsky's ability to handle complex emotion, his feel for mood and the dripping vibrancy of his orchestral palette.
