Flying Back from Obscurity: Walter Braunfels and Die Vögel
By Gavin Plumley

Before the advent of cinema, the opera house was considered one of the main barometers of artistic Europe. Without the mass marketing and distribution of the age of the film, what happened in these public cathedrals of art, with so many of them made to resemble classical temples, indicated innumerable cross-cultural trends and fashions. There was a free-flow of ideas between literature and music, and around the monolithic talents of people such as Baudelaire, Wagner, Mahler and Nietzsche existed a group of disciples, desperate to emulate their ideas. One such follower was Walter Braunfels. Having set out on a typically middle-class career in law, his mind was turned after seeing a performance of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. It would, perhaps, be an exaggeration to state that the rest of his composing career was based around that one experience, yet, like so many of his contemporaries, Braunfels worked very much in Wagner's shadow. Composers such as Franz Schreker, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alexander Zemlinsky and Braunfels (all of whose work has been or will be featured in the Recovered Voices series) wrestled with the precepts of Wagner's musical and theatrical ideology throughout the first three decades of the 20th century. And while they were bold, experimental and pushed Wagner's ideas to their limit, the rising Nazi forces in 1930s Germany and Austria thought that anyone of part or wholly Jewish origin should be suppressed. Their work was branded as entartete (degenerate) and systematically removed from the repertoire. Although the Nazis only controlled a small part of the world, this cultural prohibition had a larger impact, and it is only now that audiences are beginning to hear these works again. Projects such as the Entartete Musik recordings on Decca/London Records during the 1990s or LA Opera's ongoing Recovered Voices mission seek to bring these works out of their enforced exile and back into the repertoire, where they belong.

Born into a Jewish middle class family in Frankfurt in 1882, Walter Braunfels enjoyed a good musical education. He was taught the piano to the highest standard while growing up and music was an intrinsic part of Braunfels' family life. However that childhood fascination with music (even to the extent of being sent to the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt for lessons) was not intended as a career and Walter went to the University of Munich to study law and economics. Having been the place where Tristan, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were premiered, Munich was just as much Wagner's home as the composer's own Bayreuth. The city continued to be one of the principal centers for the performance of his music dramas.

Richard Wagner was no ordinary composer. When evaluating the repertoire of the early part of the 20th century it is important to realise the significance of his achievement and influence. As well as writing some of the greatest works of the latter part of the 19th century, he was intent on revolutionising modes of theatrical presentation. He placed the orchestra out of sight, in a pit, and reverently darkened the auditorium before a performance. More importantly, he resurrected an Ancient Greek idea of homogeneity for the lyric stage: a total work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk. Looking at the principles of early theater, Wagner suggested that the Greeks had combined dance, music and poetry and that only in the linking of these separate disciplines could "art" achieve its full expressive purpose and dignity. Furthermore, a new work of art should be brought into being not by a single creative artist but by a fellowship of practitioners. Therefore, the Gesamtkunstwerk was simultaneously an artistic and a sociological aim, later echoed in the Viennese artistic Secession maxim "to every age its art and to art its freedom." The power of Wagner's music and its ideals created a bevy of devout followers; after witnessing a single performance of Tristan und Isolde, one such committed pilgrim was Walter Braunfels.

The story of Tristan, taken from medieval legend about a pair of adulterous lovers, is conventional enough. However Wagner's score, moving away from traditional harmony towards a freer idea of tonality, was groundbreaking. Braunfels was transfixed. His life as a lawyer and economist was over and he left Munich for Vienna, which at the time was the musical center of Europe. Gustav Mahler dominated the opera scene, with his radical directorship of the Wiener Hofoper. Complementing a standard repertoire of Verdi, Mozart and Wagner, Mahler systematically introduced Vienna to composers from far across the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In other disciplines, Freud was disseminating his findings about the modern mind, Klimt and Schiele were exposing the beauty of human sexuality across their canvases and Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner were divesting architecture of any meretricious decoration. Braunfels couldn't have been thrown into a better melting pot than that of Viennese modernism at the turn of the century. In Vienna he returned to his piano studies, becoming a virtuoso of great note, but on later coming back to Munich he followed his instincts and began composing. It was the mixture of virtuosic musical language and his love of Wagner's ideals that resulted in the quixotic and brilliant operas he wrote throughout his life. His first forays into the genre were unsuccessful, and Fallada (1905) and Der golden Topf (1906) remain unperformed. His next attempt, however, a fairy tale called Prinzessin Brambilla (1909), struck on his hoped-for combination of high-Wagnerian ideals and the cheeky virtuosity of his piano studies. Taken from an E.T.A Hoffmann story and replete with commedia dell'arte characters, Prinzessin Brambilla was a bold and (not quite) first step out into the repertoire. Braunfels himself said "for the first time, the attempt was made to withdraw from the coercive power of Wagner's overwhelming genius, by thumbing its nose, in grotesque tone, against anything that smacks of pathos or tragedy." It is that infectious joie de vivre that runs throughout Braunfels' next two operas. Ulenspiegel (1913), based on the Middle Low German tale Till Eulenspiegel (famously captured by Strauss in his 1895 tone poem) was a consciously Wagnerian look back at German mythic tradition, however prankish its eponymous hero.

Braunfels position in contemporary opera was confirmed, though for his next opera he looked even further back into literary history. Turning to Aristophanes' anthropomorphic comedy (and perhaps hoping to find the Greek roots of that "total work of art"), Braunfels wrote his own libretto. The opera follows the journey of two humans, Good Hope and Loyal Friend, who have set off in search of their Elysium, the realm of the Birds. Once they arrive at this abounding world, they discover the Birds lamenting the loss of their Kingdom and their subservience to the Gods. Loyal Friend is entirely bemused and suggests that they should rebuild their citadel, while his companion Good Hope falls in love with the ululating song of the Nightingale. Zeus quashes Loyal Friend's arrogant ambition in a terrible storm. While the Birds are full of repentance, the Humans slink away, chastened. Despite the air of contrition, Good Hope feels his life has been changed irrevocably by the Nightingale's sweet kiss, ending the opera with a sense of hope.

This strangely allegorical tale was perfect for Braunfels' musical language. The Birds are characterised by his or her individual call and their collective music is underpinned by the sweep of the through-composed orchestral accompaniment. Braunfels instills his opera with a romantic aroma coupled with aching harmonies. The ebb and flow of the orchestra, replete with a web of recurring motifs, creates a great sense of architecture to the whole. While Good Hope and the Nightingale's love scene has its amusing moments, it is suffused with a deeply erotic music (itself harking back to the warmth of Act Two of Wagner's Tristan). Good Hope lives up to his name perfectly, as he sings: "In me I feel something sweet yet painful that still vibrates like an echo. It wants to take on more definite form, and yet it cannot… but it is not a mere dream, it is a poem that sounds within me, although I have no words."

More than anywhere else in contemporary operatic literature, Braunfels' Die Vögel expressed the hopes and desires of an artistic generation facing the challenge of composing for a post-war world. The parallels between the havoc that Zeus wreaks upon the Birds' city and the recent devastating conflict could not have been clearer. Although begun in 1913, Braunfels worked on the opera until 1919; it is therefore directly contemporaneous with the fighting. Europe was exhausted, having witnessed the first of two cataclysmic world wars, which brought about the death of over 15 million people and changed the face of modern history. Centuries of Imperial rule dissolved with the Peace Treaties, and the Empires of Germany and Austro-Hungary in which Braunfels and his composing contemporaries had grown up and worked disappeared. While the 1920s saw a huge cultural renaissance, Germany and Austria were considerably weakened and became open targets to Adolf Hitler's burgeoning National Socialism. Works such as Die Vögel, Strauss and Hofmannsthal's epic fairytale Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919) and Janácek's The Cunning Little Vixen (1924) took relatively simplistic (almost folkloric) tales and converted them into broader visions of humanity; they were optimistic works in otherwise darkening times. Although outwardly Die Vögel appears to be no more than a fantasy, it brilliantly tapped into the contemporary psyche and its hope for a better world. It was therefore hugely successful with audiences and became a staple of the post-war repertoire. Along with his contemporaries Strauss and Schreker, Braunfels became one of the most-widely performed composers in 1920s Europe, with productions of Die Vögel appearing in all the major opera capitals.

What is so brutal about the Nazis' rise to power and its subsequent cultural prohibition is the ignorance of many works' intended meaning. There is nothing "degenerate" or harmful in Die Vögel or in any of Braunfels' works; his operas were entirely intended to divert his audiences or to be optimistic. But style and skill were irrelevant and as Braunfels came from partly Jewish stock he was branded by the authorities, whose hatred of the Jewish people was well known. The Nazis gave the following reasons: "Braunfels - half Jewish and supported by a whole network of Jewish upstarts - is said to have waged a bitter war against all those whom he discovered to be members of Adolf Hitler's movement."

Braunfels had become the co-director of the Hochschule für Musik in Cologne in 1925. He became a determined opponent of the Nazis and, in line with their Reich-wide policy, Braunfels was removed from his post in 1933 because he was half-Jewish. The composer's persecution was part of the systematic removal of the Jewish race from Nazi Germany. In a moment of truly horrific "cleverness" Joseph Goebbels - Hitler's Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda - dressed their loathing up as a cultural policy. In a 1937 exhibition entitled Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art), the previously rich seam of artistic creativity that had marked the Weimar Republic as a hub of innovation and experiment was shamefully put on display for the entire nation to understand exactly where Germany had gone "wrong." Works by contemporary German artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann were paraded and ridiculed alongside works by Alexander Archipenko, Marc Chagall, James Ensor, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. The art show was followed in 1938 by an Entartete Musik exhibition in which the large majority of the great composers of the first half of the 20th century were lampooned with absurd displays, next to Jazz and Black musicians. Berg, Schoenberg, Schreker, Krenek, Mahler, Weill, Mendelssohn and Webern all featured in the exhibition, their music already banned in the Third Reich.

In one fell swoop, Braunfels was removed from German musical history. Although he had been brought up on a strict Wagnerian diet (something of which the Nazis customarily approved), because of his racial background, the powers-that-be perceived that such a heritage had become "polluted." There was no true value judgment in the Nazis' cultural policy, it was merely intended to diminish the role of the Jewish people in Austro-Germanic culture and to eradicate anything that could be seen to detract from their brutal far-reaching ambitions for the Third Reich. Fascism, as Thomas Mann indicated, is ephemeral. Sadly, due to the sheer unprecedented nature of the Nazis force and control, it has taken a great deal longer to recover culturally after World War II. Coupled with the coruscating experimentation of Boulez and Stockhausen, this entartete repertoire has taken a lot longer to recover. Although Braunfels survived the war - living in self-enforced exile on Lake Constance - he was unable to recapture his pre-war position and influence. Equally powerless to match the innovations of the new vanguard of composers, Braunfels died in relative obscurity. After so many years in the recesses of operatic repertoire, we can at last begin to hear Die Vögel again and appreciate how beautiful a talent was nearly wiped entirely from operatic history. The citadel of the Birds can be rebuilt and Good Hope's message can be heard in all its post-Romantic glory.

© Gavin Plumley, 2009 Gavin has written, lectured and broadcast widely on Austro-German opera from the beginning of the 20th century through to the rise of the Nazis.