In the summer of 1847, the Prussian King Frederick William IV granted an audience to his general music director. Gaspare Spontini, for whom this title had been created, had returned to Berlin after a five-year absence. The king had granted him leave in 1842 – and at the same time pardoned him, after his complaints in the decades-long dispute over competence with the director of the court theatre had earned him a sentence of nine months in prison for lèse majesty. Now Spontini, born in 1774, was to resume his conducting according to the will of the king. With a cabinet order of 11 October 1847, Frederick William IV set the programme himself: Spontini was to perform three of his own works, the operas "Nurmahal", "Cortez" and "The Vestal Virgin".
Patrick Bahners
Feuilleton correspondent in Cologne and responsible for "Humanities".
- Follow I follow
The three-act opera "Fernand Cortez or The Conquest of Mexico", the first version premiered in Paris in 1809, had registered Spontini's appointment to Berlin. Frederick William III, the father of Frederick William IV, experienced several Spontini operas in Paris in 1814, had "Cortez" performed in Berlin and attended four performances of the second "Cortez" version in Paris in the summer of 1817. As Klaus Pietschmann explained a year ago at the third symposium of the "Wagner Cosmos" series at the Dortmund Opera, this version inserted the figure of the Aztec ruler Montezuma as an opponent of Charles V. Napoleon, the original client, had not been expected to face the coexistence of two emperors. Nevertheless, the premiere of 1809 had not been a propaganda success: in order to celebrate the French defeat of Spain, the Parisian audience had to identify with the Spanish occupiers of Mexico. It was overwhelmed by this, or rather underchallenged.
A third version premiered in Berlin in 1824, the fourth there in 1832. Richard Wagner saw this when he visited Berlin in 1836. In "My Life", he reports so enthusiastically about the effect that "the extraordinarily precise, fiery and richly organized ensemble of the whole" made on him, probably because reviewers of his "Rienzi" had critically pointed out "reminiscences" from Spontini. Anno Mungen, who had already revealed the fictitious elements in Wagner's "Memories of Spontini", published separately in 1995, in an essay in the journal "Die Musikforschung" in 1872, spoke in Dortmund about Spontini and Wagner.
The Bellum Iustum of Hernán Cortés in Berlin
As part of the Dortmund project to combine Wagner's music dramas with works of the Grand Opéra, the last performance of Eva-Maria Höckmayr's production of "Cortez" took place two days before the premiere of Peter Konwitschny's "Valkyrie". This Saturday, "Siegfried" will be the second part of Konwitschny's "Ring", followed by Fromental Halévy's "La Juive" and the fourth act of the "Wagner Cosmos".
In the 1847/48 season, the Spontini Days on Unter den Linden were cancelled because the master never returned to the Berlin podium for health reasons. Could a "Cortez" premiere have prevented the outbreak of the revolution? Spontini's last adaptation of the work culminates in the erection of the cross, to which victorious Spaniards and defeated Aztecs submit together. As Norbert Miller writes in the second volume of his complete account of "European Romanticism in Music", written with Carl Dahlhaus, Spontini saw "the inner conclusion of his work resolved in a manner reminiscent of Frederick William IV and his religious enthusiasm".
In the latest issue of the "Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte", which leafs through views of the Wannsee, Hedwig Richter writes about the Church of the Redeemer in Sacrow, which was consecrated in 1844 in the presence of the king. For the enthusiastic historian of democracy, the building, designed by Frederick William IV according to his scholarly ideas of early Christian community life, is a curiosity. Where, in the eyes of Theodor Fontane, the church was "a call to the highest for the passing boatman", Richter suggests that the whole of society necessarily sailed past this monument to royal sentiment without stopping: "The stupendous failure of Frederick William IV can be explained not least by his romantic, backward-looking attitude."
According to Pietschmann, Frederick William III was able to see the "Cortez" imported from Paris with the final prospect of a transcontinental religious peace strengthened his confessional policy of an intra-Protestant ecumenism, which also revived interest in the early church liturgy. Spontini's adaptations of his mission play are a sign that the church policy of the Romantic, who had reigned on the throne since 1840, was probably not quite as out of touch with the times and the world as Richter would have us believe. The final tableau of the Mexico Opera is a counterpart to the cross on the palace dome.
According to Wagner's testimony, Spontini spoke to him in Dresden in 1844 about the time when he was "empereur de la musique à Berlin". The rivalry between Wagner and Spontini also presents itself as a problem of the two emperors: Wagner's suspiciously varied lectures of Spontini's words agree that the elder had prophesied to him that he would not get beyond him. In his memoirs, Wagner stylizes himself as a conqueror who, even as a beginner, was allowed to take such an instruction as an insult to majesty.