The American premiere of the critical edition of Kurt Weill's "Zaubernacht" ("Magical Night") Thursday evening at Ravinia came freighted with such noble intentions and high expectations that one regretted all the more the presentation's failure to live up to them more fully.
This, after all, promised to be one of the most historically important exhumations of music director James Conlon's "Breaking the Silence" series of festival performances of works banned – and in the case of Weill's early children's pantomime, forgotten – following the Third Reich's clamp-down on so-called "degenerate art" during the 1930s and '40s. But the pleasures of discovering the long-lost music were undercut by the ho-hum stage action that had been newly grafted onto it.
The Ravinia performance marked the 90th anniversary of "Zaubernacht's" first performance in Berlin in 1922, when the 22-year-old Weill was a composition student of Ferruccio Busoni's. The original orchestral parts to this, Weill's first stage work, were lost following performances of a loose adaptation in New York in 1925, only to be recovered in 2006 from the Yale University Library, where they had been misfiled in a basement safe.
Although the libretto remains lost, the discovery of the instrumentation allowed scholars of the indefatigable Kurt Weill Foundation for Music to reconstruct the full score for the now-official critical edition. This had its world premiere as a children's ballet last December at London's Covent Garden.
Ravinia is to be commended for returning to Weill's original vision of "Zaubernacht," as a pantomime with music and song. The festival commissioned a new libretto from the mime artists T. Daniel and Laurie Willets, who performed it along with members of their troupe, T. Daniel Productions. They were backed by a crack instrumental ensemble drawn from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and conducted by Conlon.
One wouldn't expect the score to a children's pantomime – about toys brought to life in the course of a magical night in a children's bedroom – to have much edginess or bite, and Weill's music does not. One or two numbers, notably a grotesque, Prokofiev-like waltz at the climax, foreshadow the tougher, more acerbic Weill of his mature Berlin masterpieces "The Threepenny Opera" and "Mahagonny." What's more, none of the two dozen or so dances, marches and songs lasts much longer than five minutes, and all of them are beholden to the action they illustrate. Charming and attractive as they are, they lack independent musical interest.
By far the strongest aspect of Thursday's premiere was the musical performance. Conlon and his nonet of CSO string, wind, brass and percussion players threw themselves into the score with great relish and vitality, clarifying the chugging counterpoint while investing Weill's jaunty dance-rhythms with proper zing. Soprano Janai Brugger, who was involved in Ravinia's Steans Music Institute last year, sang the Toy Fairy's two songs beautifully.
You had to feel for Daniel and Willets, forced to devise a new action scheme to flesh out a storyline uncomfortably close to that of the beloved "Nutcracker" ballet. And the tiny Martin Theatre stage they shared with the musicians limited the performers' movements and, despite a few props and dry-ice fog, lent little theatrical ambience.
The new plot had the boy and girl (Omar Robles and Lori Finkel) awakened at midnight to find their toys brought to life, tottering on rubbery legs. Two toys – Rag Doll, a Raggedy Ann type with strips of fabric for hair (Noel Williams); and Doofus, a gangly doll who's smitten with her (Alex Suha) – are menaced by a sinister magician (Daniel). The conjurer is finally shrunk back to miniature size in a box where he can do no more harm.
All this busy nonsense the five mime artists and one dancer (Naomi Danielle Itzkoff) realized with abundant energy, but the action grew tedious in the course of the hour-long piece, and none of it drew more than a few chuckles from the audience.
Perhaps the original libretto will one day resurface, just as the orchestration did. Maybe then the full merits of "Zaubernacht" can be properly assessed.
Much more interesting was the Ravinia premiere of "Der Wind" ("The Wind"), a quintet written in 1908 by Franz Schreker. Once hailed as the natural successor of Richard Strauss, the Austrian composer wrote steamy operas that outraged the Nazis, who stripped him of his teaching positions and hastened his early death, in 1934. His dance-based piece for piano, violin, cello, clarinet and horn is a gorgeous, "Tristan"-esque miniature lasting but 10 minutes, and mixing Debussyan impressionism with Straussian lyricism. There's even a subtle quote from Strauss' "Salome," which had its premiere only three years before.
Conlon, who has championed Schreker's music near and far, elicited an assured performance from Mary Sauer, piano; Stephanie Jeong, violin; John Sharp, cello; John Bruce Yeh, clarinet; and Dale Clevenger, horn. None of the musicians were credited in the program book. Such lapses seem to be becoming epidemic at the festival.
Twitter @jvonrhein