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"Flames"
Flames that cast a cold light of contemporaneity. It is simply a masterpiece, this work by Erwin Schulhoff. A "tragicomedy" — as the libretto states — that throbs with life, love, and death. Flames that blaze through the ten scenes of the opera, casting sinister glows in a constantly hybrid musical language, suspended between neoclassicism and splashes of jazz sounds. Flames in which the contemporary man burns without ever conquering his inner darkness. Shadows that dance around the fire of life, taking shape like ghosts until they become voice.
Premiered in 1932 in Brno, "Flammen" is a contemporary and strongly "cursed" reinterpretation of the legend of Don Giovanni. A Don Giovanni (here splendidly interpreted by Kurt Westi) perpetually "burned" by an erotic desire that seems never satisfied. A desire for carnality that becomes obsession, loading from the very first scenes of the opera with a strong self-destructive foreboding. It is the perennial theme of Love and Death that once again intertwine like two bodies in the spasm of an orgasm, which soon, however, retreats like a wave in an ocean of abysmal solitude. It is the terrible and agonizing scene "Wie Regenbogen am Horizont" of the first act. Faced with his own solitude, Don Giovanni intones his emptiness and desire for death to a mute interlocutor — the ocean. But there are many memorable moments in this "Flammen". Such as the wonderful and symbolist "Mitternachtsmesse" — Midnight Mass — where the three "Shadows" chant a song rooted in the sacredness of Gregorian. Or where a liturgical organ rises solitary from the orchestra to intone a "Gloria" that soon drowns in the light rhythms of a jazz orchestra playing the fox-trot. Or in the sumptuous and powerful "Karnevalsnacht", where strings and brass paint a fresco of titanic and anxious majesty, in the chorus that explodes with its neoclassical "Vivat Don Juan, Donna Anna". Or again the dramatic final dialogue "Tod sitzt in meinem Gesicht", where Don Giovanni converses with the only woman he truly loves, The Fairy of Death (wonderfully embodied by Iris Vermillion), without ever being able to truly reach her, as in a condemnation to eternal life.
An incredibly complex and "Freudian" work, powerfully erotic, undoubtedly one of the crown jewels of twentieth-century opera.
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