Die Harmonie der Welt
At the Landestheater Linz, Austria
Content of the opera
The opera is set in a variety of locations between the years 1608 and 1630 and throws a spotlight on individual scenes, sometimes presented simultaneously, from the life of the astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630); the opera takes its name from Kepler’s theoretical work “Harmonices mundi”. Hindemith utilises substantial historical studies as the basis for his sketches of individuals within Kepler’s circle who each accompany the astronomer’s scientific endeavours with a variety of personal ambitions. The military commander Wallenstein attempts to utilise Kepler’s astrological abilities to realise his own pretensions to power while Kepler’s assistant Ulrich aspires to scientific fame and recognition. Kepler’s mother urges her son to apply his scientific abilities to the services of her black magic and the Lutheran minister Hizler forbids the astronomer to receive communion because Kepler questions the doctrine of Holy Communion in the Lutheran Church and expresses sympathy for Calvinist doctrine. The few figures shed in a positive light include Kepler’s wife Susanna who supports her husband’s pursuit of truth and knowledge and the child Susanna who listens to the voices of nature and the moon in her childish naivety, thereby gaining revelatory knowledge. At the end of his life, Kepler takes stock of his situation, succumbs to a state of resignation and considers death as the greatest harmony of all. In his state of agony, music of the spheres can be heard; the constellations appear as allegorical figures in the opera and contradict Kepler’s negative concepts: lying beyond all that can be researched by mankind is a final majestic with the powers to “permit us to be amalgamated into a gigantic harmony of the spheres.”
Heinz-Jürgen Winkler
Die Harmonie der Welt – a Masterpiece
The opera Die Harmonie der Welt is without any doubt one of Hindemith’s major works. The choice of the subject of Kepler (a choice whose ambition can scarcely be adequately appreciated), the breadth and depth of the conception of the musical drama, the expressive force of the tonal language, and the mastery of form all sum up Hindemith’s oeuvre in some way. Admittedly, in this respect the opera shares the fate of several other “major works” in twentieth-century music – for example, Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Schönberg’s Moses und Aron, Krenek’s Karl V., Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, or Stockhausen’s unfinished seven-part opera Licht – which seem to fly in the face of their age, because their radical individualism estranged them from any conventional yard-sticks, which has perhaps prevented them from finding the place in the broader repertoire that their singular importance would, however, seem to justify. As a rule, it is said that these works are “ahead of their time”, but this alleged foreignness to their time, which is the thorn of their unrequited ambition, also proves to be the very epitome of their continued relevance and authenticity. Such works may be repressed, escaped, or avoided, but they cannot be superseded. This is especially true of the opera Die Harmonie der Welt, whose standing can only now – with the passing of half a century and all sorts of modern, avant-garde, and postmodern revolutions and demolitions – be clearly recognized and begin to assert itself. […]
In January 1940, Hindemith wrote to a friend on the subject of his opera: “The spiritual content of the piece […] should revolve around the search for harmony in all aspects of the world an of life and in the isolation of the person who finds such harmony. The inharmoniousness of historical events and of our fellow humans will serve to demonstrate how artistic and scientific thoughts and deeds are like seeds; despite comets, wars, religious strife, change of emperors, and disease, a great idea will flower and outgrow all raucous and wild life. […]”
Although his work on the opera lasted nearly twenty years, with interruptions, and the libretto was revised repeated in light of unusually thorough and intensive studies in history, philosophy, mathematics, and the history of science, Hindemith never lost sight of the basic idea behind the opera as conceived in 1940: the confrontation of knowledge of a “harmony of the world” with the everyday suffering, misery, barbarism, and fundamental “disharmony” of human life. In the turbulent sequence of scenes, sometimes compressed into simultaneous scenes, which directly reflect the multiplicity and relentless fragmentation of human behavior, Hindemith’s techniques unfold the social and political actions that prevent or hinder insight into this harmony. […]
Even the final scene, in which the dissonant, worldly drives resolve into the ordered but entirely unemotional and thus inhumanly “ice clear” and “glass cold” infinity of the rule-based cosmos, offers no solution to the earthly contradictions: “Nothing could have saved from error those who were human.” Kepler’s final insight – “Futile – the most important word in the end, which one recognizes at heart as the truth” - is thus less a documentation of blackest resignation in the face of final failure than it is of the inevitable antagonism between possibility and reality in all human action and of the obligation to make responsible decisions even in a situation that seems hopeless.
(Excerpts from the essay “Die Oper Die Harmonie der Welt” by Giselher Schubert, published in the booklet accompanying the recording of the opera (WERGO CD WER 6652-2 [2002].)
Listening Recommendation
Paul Hindemith: Die Harmonie der Welt.
Opera in Five Acts; Text by Paul Hindemith (1956/57)
Arutjun Kotchinian, bass (Emperor Rudolf II, Emperor Ferdinand II)
François Le Roux, baritone (Johannes Kepler)
Robert Wörle, tenor (Wallenstein)
Christian Elsner, tenor (Ulrich Grüßer)
Michael Burt, bass baritone (Daniel Hizler)
Reinhard Hagen, bass (Tansur)
Michael Kraus, baritone (Baron Starhemberg)
Daniel Kirch, tenor (Christoph)
Sophia Larson, soprano (Susanna)
Michelle Breedt, mezzo soprano (Katharina)
Tatjana Korovina, soprano (Young Susanna)
Egbert Junghanns, baritone (Protector)
Andreas Kohn, bass baritone (Lawyer)
Berlin Radio Choir (rehearsal: Gerd Müller-Lorenz),
Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, cond. Marek Janowski
WERGO CD WER 6652-2 [2002]