A Broken Jug and a Dwarf: A Comedy and a Tragedy
A Note from James Conlon, Music Director

"Life is a tragedy for those who feel, but a comedy to those who think."
Horace Walpole (1717-1797)

Fiat justitia: Let there be justice
Nosce te ipsum: Know thyself

The music of Alexander Zemlinsky and Viktor Ullmann remained buried for decades in the wake of the destruction caused by the totalitarian Nazi regime. Dozens of composers and thousands of compositions are still largely unknown to lovers of classical music and opera. One of the glories of western civilization, the German classical music tradition, experienced the most terrible upheaval in its history by the genocide of the Nazi regime. In an ironic paradox of history, by proclaiming themselves as a master race and attempting to impose this on the rest of the world, they marched to folly and dealt the most self-destructive blow possible to their own proud culture. In trying to "purify" their society, they tore at its heart and soul. They murdered some of their greatest talent, forced others to flee, and scorched the earth of the precious milieu that had nurtured this great culture.

The composers whose music was banned were a diverse group: some were celebrated in their own time, alongside others who struggled for recognition and livelihood. They were the avant-garde, the conservatives, the serial composers and those who rejected them. There were those who flirted with jazz, cabaret and popular music and those who were musical elitists. Many were closely acquainted and were lifelong friends. Others competed and disliked each other; still others were completely isolated from the main stream. What unites them under the heading of "Recovered Voices" is the fate of their music. Most of it died with them and remained buried in neglect, some for half a century.

By creating a double bill of The Broken Jug (Der zerbrochene Krug, a literal condensation of a German classic written by Heinrich von Kleist in 1808) and The Dwarf (Der Zwerg, loosely based on a short story by Oscar Wilde entitled The Birthday of the Infanta, finalized in 1891), we bring together the music of two generations, the master and the assistant.

Ullmann served as Kapellmeister (the "house" conductor who usually is the principal assistant to the music director) under Zemlinsky in Prague in the 1920s. He also studied for eight months with Arnold Schoenberg, whose only teacher had been Zemlinsky. Thus he was deeply influenced by both men. He, like Zemlinsky, was constantly in search of a "new music" while rejecting the twelve-tone system.

Ullmann wrote three operas: The Destruction of the Antichrist (1936), The Broken Jug (1941/42) and The Kaiser from Atlantis (1943/44), written while interned in the concentration camp at Terezín. He was never to see any of them produced but they were respectively premiered in 1995, 1996 and 1975. He used the final months of a reprieve to finish The Broken Jug before entering Terezín on September 8, 1942. He would compose over 20 works in his two years of internment there.

A model of wit, concision and life affirmation, The Broken Jug moves at breathless pace in its comical depiction of a judge in a small Dutch town. The protagonist, Judge Adam, must adjudicate a civil case demanding recompense for a jug, a precious family heirloom that has mysteriously been broken during the preceding night. As the humorous dialogue soon reveals, the judge himself is the perpetrator, having broken it while trying to seduce Eve, the daughter of the plaintiff. In Kleist, the jug metaphorically represents the virtue of the daughter and the honor of the family, as the names of their Biblical counterparts represents the continuous fall of mankind. In Ullmann, it can be understood as a wry and witty commentary on the corruption of the Nazi judicial system.

"Had Eve once upon a time not picked the apple, then Adam today would not have told untruths. Fiat justitia, then as now… No one should be a judge, if his heart is not pure." These final words of this 40-minute comedy are the admonition of the composer: Let there be justice! But there was none. In the ultimate injustice, his life was to end in Auschwitz in October of 1944.

"Write for me a text on the tragedy of the ugly man." With these words, spoken in 1909 by Zemlinsky to his colleague, composer Franz Schreker, the seeds were planted that would eventually cause The Dwarf to spring forth. Schreker accepted the commission to write the libretto, but liked it so much he asked Zemlinsky (who was to write a total of eight operas) to release him from the contract in order to write his own opera. This he did, and it was to be known as The Marked Ones (Die Gezeichneten). Zemlinsky was surely familiar with Schreker's ballet The Birthday of the Infanta as well as Richard Strauss' Salome, whose Viennese premiere he had conducted. Both works were based on Oscar Wilde, and Zemlinsky's fascination with the Irish author would first produce A Florentine Tragedy (1917). But the ugly man persisted to haunt him. He would find his subject also in Wilde and now, it would emerge as The Dwarf and come to life at the Cologne Opera in 1922, conducted by Otto Klemperer.

But the story really begins in 1900. Zemlinsky meets and takes on a beautiful and fascinating young music student, Alma Schindler. They fall in love. She mocks his ugliness although she is madly attracted to him and his charismatic personality. She abandons him for Gustav Mahler in 1901. He will spend decades exorcising the ghost of this passionate love. He suffers from complexes about his own ugliness and small stature. Alma remarks how strange it was to walk with him, for he only came up to her shoulders. He will treat this subject finally after 20 years. The Dwarf, together with A Florentine Tragedy, will plumb these psychological depths. Together with Strauss' Salome, they produce, in my opinion, a trilogy of three one-act masterpieces based on Wilde.

This is not the Wilde of the comedy of manners, but the dark penetrating author of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The themes are vintage Wilde: beauty and ugliness, desire and disillusionment, the paradox of the human soul, the hypocrisy of society. Outward beauty and inner corruption and…the mirror!

Wilde's idea for this story owed its genesis to Diego Velazquez's 1656 masterpiece of Spanish painting, "Las Meniñas" (the ladies in waiting). King Philip IV's court painter portrays a female dwarf in this painting, and he depicts the court dwarf Sebastian de Morra in another. Like Verdi's Duke of Mantua (really King Francois I of France in Victor Hugo's drama), many members of the royalty retained dwarfs for their personal amusement. Eduardo Zamacois' "Court Jesters in the Antechamber of the Louvre" depicts another example.

The Dwarf is physically ugly and misshapen, but possesses a generous, loving and artistic soul. The Infanta, daughter of King Philip II of Spain (the father of Don Carlos), is outwardly gracious, but inwardly shallow, the child of privilege. She is fascinated, even attracted to him at first, because he speaks with a voice, a depth that she has never heard at the court. The parallels with Salome are several. The daughter of Herodias is enthralled with Jokanaan (John the Baptist) for similar reasons. Salome and the Infanta are outwardly beautiful and inwardly corrupt. The Dwarf and Jokanaan are outwardly grotesque and inwardly inspired and inspiring. The Dwarf (Zemlinsky) loves the unattainable Infanta (Alma). Salome desires the inaccessible prophet, and destroys him through her cruelty to satisfy those desires. The Infanta plays with the Dwarf, as a young girl with a toy, and destroys him by her incomprehension. Only the empathic "meniña" Ghita (an invention of the composer) feels his pain, realizes the danger for him and warns him not to approach the throne, where the mirror is to be found.

The tragedy of the Dwarf is that of lost innocence. Having been brought up in the wild, he has never seen a mirror. He does not know he is misshapen. He knows only, that wherever he goes, people gather and laugh and are joyful when they see him. With his poetic and humane soul, he naively believes himself as beautiful physically as his intentions. He does not realize that those that see him are mocking him. His enemy is the mirror because it will reveal the harsh truth. From their pre- and post-Freudian perspectives, author and composer are peering into the unconscious. The answer is chilling. "Dwarf, o Dwarf…God has created all of us blind about ourselves," Ghita cries out. Is it not perhaps better that we remain so? Contrary to the ancient Greek admonition, is it perhaps better not to know thyself?

Zemlinsky knew himself, and had the strength to remain true to himself. He followed his isolated path, stubbornly refusing the least artistic compromise. Considered too modern by the conservatives, too resistant to serialism by the avant-garde, he walked alone, assuming all of the consequences. His was a life of consistent disappointment and ill fortune. He was to flee the Nazis twice, from Berlin in 1934 and Vienna in 1938. He was to live out his last years alone and virtually forgotten in Manhattan until shortly before his death in 1942. His friend, brother-in-law and one time student Arnold Schoenberg penned these words from his home in Hollywood in 1949. "I have always firmly believed that he was a great composer and I am still convinced of this today…I know of no other post-Wagnerian composer who was able to fill the requirements of the theater with a nobler musical substance… Perhaps his time will come sooner than one expects." Zemlinsky and Ullmann have had to wait a long time. Their lives were tragic, for those of us who feel...and think.