Weber's 'Euryanthe': Romantic beginnings

Without him, there could have been no Wagner, yet most of Weber's operas still languish in the shadows. On the eve of Richard Jones's new production of 'Euryanthe' for Glyndebourne, Roderic Dunnett talks to the cast about why the work deserves a better fate

If Wagner was the epitome of 19th -century German opera, and Mozart's The Magic Flute its precursor, then it was Carl Maria von Weber who fanned the flames into life. Der Freischütz, the grim story of the Devil's Marksman, his seven accursed bullets and the terrifying Wolfschlucht (Wolf's Glen), gripped the German Romantic imagination in the early 1800s. Yet one of the greatest operatic talents of all time has still languished in the shadows. Preciosa, Silvana, Peter Schmoll, Abu Hassan, Die Drei Pintos... Weber's operas scarcely ring a loud bell. His last, Oberon, to a fey-cum-heroic libretto by JR Planche, is a tangled medley of stunning arias and ensembles. So where lay Weber's greatness?

This week, at Glyndebourne, the conductor Mark Elder and the producer Richard Jones stake a claim for Euryanthe, Weber's through-composed, chivalric-heroic opera, which was written between 1821 and 1823 for the Vienna Kärtnertor Theatre, where it was premiered under the composer's baton in October 1823. Too often dismissed for a ropy (yet arguably workable) libretto by the fashion-chasing poetess Helmina von Chezy, Euryanthe, from its opening bars, contains some of the most sublime music – arias, ariosi, cavatinas, character duets and ensembles – that Weber ever composed. Its great cruxes – the four-part soliloquy of Lysiart, the blackguard of the piece (sung at Glyndebourne by Pavlo Hunka), the dark pair's plotting, or the bewitching Act III opening between Euryanthe (Anne Schwanewilms) and Adolar (John Daszak) – presage the onset of Wagner more than any other in Weber.

It was Wagner who, following Weber's premature death from tuberculosis and its complications in London on 5 June 1826, engineered the fetching back of his predecessor's ashes to Dresden late in 1844, just before Europe exploded in social and nationalistic revolutions. A few bars of Lohengrin, Tannhäuser or Fafner's music in The Ring confirm how much Wagner, like Marschner, Spohr and Lortzing, was a Weber devotee. Weber was the catalyst for what followed.

With other new productions due soon in Amsterdam, Berlin and Weber's own city of Dresden, Euryanthe looks set for something of a reassessment. Is it justified?

The Bonn-based German soprano Anne Schwanewilms (recently Simon Rattle's Leonora in Glyndebourne's Fidelio in Paris), who sings the title role here, has no doubts: "The German is bad, really bad. Weber's feeble woman librettist risks losing the tension, internal alliteration, grammar even. But Euryanthe is riddled with wonderful, dramatic ideas, and a lot of vivid fantasy, clear expression and strong characterisation. Der Freischütz and Euryanthe both have their weaknesses, but for me there's no reason why Euryanthe should be so much less known. Actually, the role of Euryanthe herself seems to me far more fully explored and sensitively composed than that of Agathe."

Schwanewilms went into one of the best-known German music shops, in Cologne, to ask for the score. "They thought I was crazy. 'Euryanthe?' they said. 'Who on earth would want to perform that?'" A little later, Schwanewilms's car, with the score in it, was stolen, and she had to order another. A discerning car-thief, indeed.

"The only major dramatic weakness in Euryanthe", Schwanewilms points out, "arises from the work's subtitle, Emma's Death. It's a slightly tangled, hushed-up background tale, and it forms the basis for the opera's unconvincing mix-up. Adolar suspects Euryanthe, his fiancée, (wrongly) of unfaithfulnness because she has divulged the story of a fatal ring, possessed by Adolar's sister, who has committed suicide. It's problematic, though not significantly more than some of Shakespeare's plots – Othello or Cymbeline, say. What we badly needed was a different explanation of the crisis, and I think Richard Jones has found this in this production.

"As with Wagner, you have to take on board the different set of values in Weber's day. Euryanthe is the forerunner of both Wagner's heroines Senta and Elsa, as surely as her superbly written jealous rival, Eglantine, is the dark precursor of Ortrud and, in a sense, Telramund. Another Euryanthe offshoot is Genoveva [a role Schwanewilms has sung in Vienna]. You can just hear how Schumann stole from Weber."

Like Elsa, Euryanthe is profoundly unhappy, Schwanewilms explains, "because she has to take responsibility at too early an age. She's very, very young – about 16 or 17, I think. She has this profound sense of guilt, yet she's a total innocent – pure, unsullied and alone with her dreams – which is why in the end she survives the crisis," she says.

"The writing echoes some of the problems of early Wagner, especially in the soprano tessitura, around F sharp, G and G sharp, and the way Weber expects the singer to mix high and low phrases – in the finale of Act I, for instance. You really need three different singers for the role of Euryanthe: one for the coloratura, another for lower phrases, and a third for the lyrical bits.

"But Weber is a wonderfully intelligent composer: you can just feel how his musical developments build logically to a middle point. These are genuine, not cardboard, characters. Take Lysiart (the rotten egg): you can see how he yearns at the outset to take on board Euryanthe's values. She is his ideal, and he feels this need inside himself. The music is so gentle, so soft. But suddenly all his black fears take over, and he goes in the opposite direction. You hear Lysiart reach this crunch point: the music changes, the language changes, and from that point on you know how it will all end. It's human nature: you can opt to be bad or good, but it's your decision."

The bass-baritone Pavlo Hunka, who sings the villain, agrees: "Lysiart is bereft at the end of Act I. Amid all this flowery dance music, he feels taunted, spurned, suffocated, sexually frustrated and empty, as well as betrayed by the King [Clive Bayley], to the point that, part way through his Act II soliloquy, he seriously asks himself whether he's prepared to commit suicide rather than lose his bet with Adolar and die in shame.

"At that point, in Richard's staging, I actually draw a dagger. But just as he's ready to stab himself, he alters direction, and makes his own black pact with the Devil: hence his aria, "So weih' ich mich den Rechgewalten" ("I dedicate myself to the gods of vengeance"). It's like Iago's credo in Othello. And then the violent "Zertrümm're", as Lysiart's perfect image of Euryanthe finally shatters. And just as he finishes, in comes Eglantine, who supplies him with the perfect means for wreaking his revenge."

'Euryanthe' opens at the Glyndebourne Festival (01273 813813) on Sunday at 4pm