WEBER : OBERON

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 16th of November 2008 at 3 pm

COMPOSER
INTRODUCTION
SYNOPSIS
REVIEW (Michael Cookson)
LIBRETTO (Deutsch)
LIBRETTO (English)

Carl Maria von WEBER:
Oberon, or The Elf King's Oath
an opera in three acts
Oberon......................... Steve Davislim
Reiza............................. Hillevi Martinpelto
Fatima........................... Marina Comparato
Sir Huon....................... Jonas Kaufmann
Sherasmin..................... William Dazeley
First Mermaid............... Katharine Fuge
Second Mermaid/Elf...... Charlotte Mobbs
Puck............................. Frances Bourne
Narrator........................ Roger Allam
Elves............................. Lindsay Wagstaff, Mark Dobell

Monteverdi Choir, Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique
John Eliot Gardiner (Philips 475 6563)

The recording I own is conducted by Rafael Kubelik (in German), with Placido Domingo, Hermann Prey, and Birgit Nilsson; I am playing it here with a diamond needle in its vinyl groove, but you can buy it on compact discs (DG). The one by Gardiner (in English) is equally good, with Jonas taking Placido's place as Huon. Surprisingly, the version with Ben Heppner and Deborah Voigt is not so good, I am told.

The work is a Singspiel, in that the gaps between the arias and choruses are filled with spoken dialogue; in the Gardiner version there is a narrator describing the course of the action.

The pieces you hear separately on the radio are:
* the overture (which influenced young Mendelssohn for his MSN's Dream);
* Hüon's 'Mein Kampf' aria about his training as a fight-knight from boyhood up (Von Jugend auf in dem Kampfgefild' ), intent only on victory (Sieg! Sieg! Sieg!), but now love has stirred in his heart;
* Reiza's recitative and aria, Ocean you monster (Ozean, du Ungeheur!), sung when she and Hüon are lost on an inhospitable coast; a ship is sighted, and she is excited, but it is full of pirates, who take her away to sell her into slavery.

Stories about fairies can be slightly on the fantastic side, meaning the fantasy is over the top. This one takes us round the world, but this is understandable when Puck is involved (I could have quoted aptly from Shakespeare here if my memory had not deserted me). Puck has to find a loving couple to prove that neither men nor women are characteristically inconstant (unbeständig). The Elf King's oath (in the subtitle) is that he will not be reconciled with Tatiana, after their quarrel over the relative inconstancy of men and women, until such fidelity is proven to exist. The test pair are Sir Hüon of Bordeaux at the court of King Charles the Great (Charlemagne), and Princess Rezia, daughter of Caliph Harun ar Rashid.

All's well that ends well (I can remember that line from the Bard).

The seductive mermaids come with Neptune when he appears.

This opera could have been titled "The Magic Horn" (a counterpart to Mozart's "Magic Flute"), as Oberon gives Hüon such an instrument to call him for assistance.

This is a fairly (or unfairly) rarely heard opera of one of the first great romantic composers, Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber, 1786-1826. A fairly (or unfairly) short life (it was the consumption that tubercled him), but he had escaped death earlier in his life, when he poured himself a drink out of a wine bottle, and quaffed it, not realizing that it was nitric acid, used for lithography.

Weber died in London, when Oberon was first performed. It has a story reminiscent of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with the Fairy King quarreling with Queen Titania again. You probably know the overture, and the big soprano aria (yes, Deborah Voigt does it, too), which is usually translated as "Ocean thou mighty monster".