Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

The Belated Triumph of a Proto-Feminist Opera

“That was simply amazing!” a normally jaded music executive exclaimed to me after the second act of Franz Schreker’s provocative “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”). Hounded to death as a “degenerate” composer by the rising Nazis, Schreker’s defiantly louche, wildly successful 1909 opera disappeared and had to wait a century for its first American production at the Bard Summerscape Festival. Though belated, it was an exhilarating performance and a brilliant production of a thrilling, involving, distinctive genius of a work.

I don’t often rave, but this was a superlative event in every way possible. Whatever small reservations I had after hearing “The Distant Sound” in concert in 2007 disappeared upon seeing it staged. Leon Botstein conducted the opera’s astonishingly complex score for huge (and multiple) orchestras with passion and clarity, revealing the sudden depths and multilevel range of the music.

The musicians, for their part, responded in kind. Thaddeus Strassberger’s innovative production pushed the plot forward a few decades in order to map the opera onto the composer’s own life, making the deluded trajectory of the male lead Fritz, a spiritual-seeking composer sung with appropriately obtuse conviction by Mathias Schulz, all the more affecting.

As Grete, the meatiest role of the opera, Yamina Maamar reveled in her abrupt transformations in each of the three acts — first as an abused and naive young girl, then as the most celebrated courtesan in Venice, and then as a broken-down whore. Schreker designed this late-Romantic proto-feminist opera to attack some of the most cherished tenets of German Romanticism. “Grete” is the diminutive of “Marguerite,” the heroine of Goethe’s “Faust,” and challenges Goethe’s notion of the “Eternal Feminine” as the sacrificial engine for (male) achievement. Richard Wagner’s son was reported to exclaim after a performance, “It’s as if my father never existed!”

This year’s Bard Festival’s focus is on Alban Berg, a most appropriate forum for “Der Ferne Klang.” Berg was hired to reduce Schreker’s complex score down to a study version for voices and piano — and what he learned from Schreker in doing that job is manifest in every scene of his own “Wozzeck.” Engrossing and exhilarating, “Der Ferne Klang” is as vital a work of musical theater as any in the operatic canon, and should be imported, as is, to New York.

Previously in the Forward:

A Distant Sound Now Nearer

A ‘Degenerate’ Composer at Bard

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.