If Stravinsky and Brecht had collaborated, it’s likely that they would have devised something like this little suite of five short operas. Each opera is intentionally single-minded, acting as a daguerreotype of a character or situation with deep psychological (and often ironic) implications. The mad murderous monk Rasputin is hailed as something of a religious figure; a father and son, drunk as usual, debate over which is married to the mother; Charlie Chaplin and Henry Ford speak of their success in America; a public hanging goes awry; a wealthy man listening to the radio believes he hears the coming of the revolution, but in fact he has been fooled–he’s really listening to an opera but has confused it for reality (and this predates Orson Welles’ similar stunt by 10 years). These pieces are hilarious, frightening, dramatically fascinating little snapshots of their epoch.
Only a small portion of Waxworks ever was performed, and it remained incomplete until friends of Hartmann–Günter Bialas, Wilfred Hiller, and Hans Werner Henze–finished the job from existing sketches, ingeniously approximating what the composer himself might have done. This makes for a slightly uneven presentation–some pieces are orchestrated, others are performed with piano accompaniment–but this does not diminish the recording’s overall effect. This is powerful, quirky, radiant stuff.
Hartmann’s musical language owes much to Kurt Weill’s jazzy infusion but is even more beholden to Stravinsky, particularly L’Histoire du Soldat, a piece to which he comes uncomfortably close–trumpet motif and all–in The Life and Death of the Holy Devil. But this is the only obvious steal; the rest is pure invention. Hartmann’s orchestration (in the portions he actually completed) is stark and sparing to great effect, in the manner of Weill’s Threepenny Opera or Berlin Requiem.
Baritones Michael Kraus and Egbert Junghanns are hilariously drunken as the father and son in Indeed…?!, and Kraus also is cloyingly reverent as Rasputin. The rangy and over-the-top soprano Claudia Barainsky sings her multiple roles with fearless abandon–especially Miss Vera Bancoft in Chaplin-Ford Trot–and her 30-second arias of her love for Rasputin (in The Life and Death of the Holy Devil) are genuinely heartbreaking. Roger Epple leads the members of the Deutches Symphonie-Orchester into these uncharted waters with the appropriate reverence for Hartmann’s satire, offering a clean and honest representation of these undeservedly little-known pieces.
