Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jkksz Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T09:02:22.021Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

From Tragedy to Melodrama: Rethinking Liszt's Hamlet*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 June 2013

Joanne Cormac
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Liszt composed the symphonic poem Hamlet towards the end of his tenure as Kapellmeister of the Weimar Court Theatre, a time when he regularly conducted operas, concerts, incidental music and variety performances. It was also a time when he frequently came into contact with artists, writers, musicians and actors. One actor in particular left a memorable impression: Bogumil Dawison. Dawison's style was unusual at the time; his performances were noted for their aggression, expressiveness and energy, and many praised the flexibility of his voice and face. Dawison aimed for a realistic approach in response to Goethe's Classicism, but the result was closer to the melodramatic style that was gaining in popularity at the time. His portrayal of Hamlet was particularly innovative, and it captured Liszt's imagination shortly before he composed the symphonic poem inspired by Shakespeare's tragedy.

The relationship between the world of the theatre (particularly spoken theatre) and the symphonic poems has never before been explored in Liszt scholarship, yet, as this article reveals, spoken theatre had a significant influence on Hamlet. Indeed, this article will draw new stylistic and conceptual parallels between this symphonic poem and both melodrama as a genre and its related ‘melodramatic’ style of acting. The article argues that Dawison's influence can be traced in Liszt's approach to this work and that a ‘melodramatic reading’ can enable us to interpret some of its more puzzling aspects.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , June 2013 , pp. 29 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The author would like to thank Professor Kenneth Hamilton for reading an earlier version of this article. Any mistakes of fact or interpretation are mine alone.

References

1 Kleinertz, Rainer, ‘Liszts Ouvertüre und Chöre zu Herders Entfesseltem Prometheus’, in Liszt und die Weimarer Klassik, ed. Detlef Altenburg (Regenburg: Laaber, 1997), 155–178Google Scholar

2 Saffle, Michael, ‘Liszt's orchestral music’, in The Liszt Companion, ed. Ben Arnold (Westport CT and London: Greenwood, 2002)Google Scholar

3 Dan Wang, ‘Melodrama, Two Ways’, 19 th-Century Music 36/2 (2012), 122–135Google Scholar

4 These include the melodramatic ballad, the occasional use of melodrama within opera or an incidental set, and in hybrid concert genres, such as those pioneered by Berlioz and Schumann.

5 Williams, Simon, ‘Shakespeare and the Weimar Court Theatre’, in Shakespeare on the German Stage, Vol. 1: 1586–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 88–107Google Scholar

6 Paulin, Roger, ‘Wilhelm Meister and Shakespeare’, in The Critical Reception of Shakespeare in Germany 1682–1914 (Hildesheim: Olms, 2003), 215–227Google Scholar

7 Bailey, Helen Phelps, Hamlet in France: from Voltaire to Laforgue (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1964)Google Scholar

8 Styan, J.L., Modern Drama in Theory and Practice 1: Realism and Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)Google Scholar

9 Rosenberg, Marvin, The Masks of Hamlet (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992)Google Scholar

10 Osnes, Beth, Acting: An Encyclopaedia of Traditional Culture (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2001)Google Scholar

11 Genast, Eduard, Aus Weimars klassischer und nachklassischer Zeit (Stuttgart: Robert Lutz, 1904)Google Scholar

12 Peter Kollek, Bogumil Dawison: Porträt und Deutung eines genialen Schauspielers (Kastellaun, Henn, 1978), 163Google Scholar

13 J.W. von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Book V, The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction (New York: Collier & Son, 1917), 185–186Google Scholar

14 Mária Eckhardt and Evelyn Liepsch, Franz Liszts Weimarer Bibliothek (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1999)Google Scholar

15 Williams, Simon, German Actors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Idealism, Romanticism and Realism (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood, 1985)Google Scholar

16 Williams, German Actors, 101Google Scholar

17 Williams, German Actors, 102Google Scholar

18 Rosenberg, The Masks of Hamlet, 100Google Scholar

19 Habicht, Werner, ‘The Romanticism of the Shlegel–Tieck Shakespeare and the History of Nineteenth-Century Shakespeare Translation’, in European Shakespeares: Translating Shakespeare in the Romantic Age ed. Dirk Delabastita and Lieven D'Hulst (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993), 26–45Google Scholar

20 Williams, Shakespeare on the German Stage Vol. 1, 151–152Google Scholar

21 Knetschke, Emil, ‘Bogumil Dawison’, Deutsche Schaubühne, 6 (1861), 58Google Scholar

22 Pocknell, Pauline, Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth: a Correspondence (New York: Pendragon Press, 1999)Google Scholar

23 La Mara, Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt (Leipzig, 1895–1904), ii: 147–148Google Scholar

24 La Mara, Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, ii: 147 (letter 92, 28 December 1857)Google Scholar

25 La Mara, Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt, ii: 148Google Scholar

26 La Mara, ed., Franz Liszts Briefe (Leipzig, 1893–1905), i: 333Google Scholar

27 Adolf Bartels, Chronik des Weimarischen Hoftheaters 1817–1907 (Weimar, 1908), 120Google Scholar

28 Mayer, David, ‘Parlour and Platform Melodrama’, in Melodrama: the Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (New York: St Martin's Press, 1996)Google Scholar

29 Mayer, ‘Parlour and Platform Melodrama’, 225Google Scholar

30 Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 52/19 (4 May 1860), 170.

31 Singer, Ben, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001)Google Scholar

32 Brooks, Peter, The Melodramatic Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995)Google Scholar

33 Williams, German actors, 100Google Scholar

34 Williams, German actors, 101Google Scholar

35 Williams, German actors, 103Google Scholar

36 Devrient, Eduard, ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen Eduard Devrients über Darstellungen Shakespearescher Rollen: Karl Seydelmann als Shylock; Bogumil Dawison als Hamlet’, Shakespeare-Jahrbuch, 68 (1932), 146Google Scholar

37 Kennedy, Dennised., The Oxford Encyclopaedia of Theatre and Performance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar

38 Anger, Violaine, ‘Berlioz's “Romeo au tombeau”: Melodrama of the Mind’ in Melodramatic Voices: Understanding Music Drama, ed. Sarah Hibberd (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 193Google Scholar

39 Anger, ‘Berlioz's “Romeo au tombeau”’, 193Google Scholar

40 Johann Jacob Engel, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture and Action adapted to The English Drama, trans. Henry Siddons, 2nd ed. (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1822), 18–19Google Scholar

41 Engel, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture, 21Google Scholar

42 Williams, German actors, 101–102Google Scholar

43 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 166Google Scholar

44 Devrient, ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen’ 144Google Scholar

45 West, Shearer, The Image of the Actor: Verbal and Visual Representation in the Age of Garrick and Kemble (New York: St Martin's Press, 1991)Google Scholar

46 Blackman, Robert D.ed., Voice, Speech and Gesture: A Practical Handbook to the Elocutionary Art (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1908)Google Scholar

47 Devrient, ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen’, 144Google Scholar

48 Genast, Aus Weimars klassischer und nachklassischer Zeit, 355Google Scholar

49 Gustav Freytag, essay on Dawison in Aufsätze zur Geshichte, Literatur, und Kunst, Vol. 8 of first series of Gesammelte Werke (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1920), 319.

50 Engel, Practical Illustrations of Rhetorical Gesture, 60Google Scholar

51 Devrient, ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen’, 144Google Scholar

52 Freytag, essay on Dawison, 319. The original reads: ‘man merkt die Absicht, man sieht die Arbeit.’

53 Wagner, Richard, ‘Judaism in Music’ adapted from Richard Wagner, Richard Wagner's Prose Works Vol. III, The Theatre, trans. William Ashton Ellis, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1894), 83Google Scholar

Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig, 1888), v: 70Google Scholar

54 William Ashton Ellis, Richard Wagner's Prose Works Vol. III, The TheatreGoogle Scholar

55 Heilman, Robert Bechtold, Tragedy and Melodrama (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1968)Google Scholar

56 Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 38Google Scholar

57 Pet name for Daniela von Bülow (1860–1940), daughter of Cosima and her first husband, Hans von Bülow, and step-daughter of Wagner.

58 Cosima Wagner, Diaries, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, trans. Geoffrey Skelton Collins (St James's Place: London, 1980), ii: 300Google Scholar

59 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 134Google Scholar

60 Williams, German Actors, 103Google Scholar

61 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 164Google Scholar

62 Williams, German Actors, 103Google Scholar

63 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 164Google Scholar

64 Bartels, Chronik des Weimarischen Hoftheaters, 113Google Scholar

65 Pocknell, Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth: A Correspondence, 81Google Scholar

66 La Mara, ed., Franz Liszts Briefe, iv : 295 (Letter 212, 8 January 1856)Google Scholar

67 Pocknell, Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth, 82Google Scholar

68 Williams, Adrian, Portrait of Liszt: by Himself and his Contemporaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990)Google Scholar

69 Pocknell, Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth, 81–82Google Scholar

70 Waeber, Jacqueline, En musique dans le texte; le melodrama, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (Paris: Van Dieren, 2005)Google Scholar

71 Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 19Google Scholar

72 Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 19–22Google Scholar

73 Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 57Google Scholar

74 Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 77Google Scholar

75 Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 93–94Google Scholar

76 Waeber, En musique dans le texte, 95–97Google Scholar

77 J. Van der Veen, Le Melodrame Musical de Rousseau au Romantisme: Ses Aspects Historiques et Stylistiques (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955)Google Scholar

78 Van der Veen, Le Melodrame Musical, 61Google Scholar

79 It is possible that Liszt may also have known Beethoven's music to Leonore Prohaska, which also contains some Melodrama, though it does not appear to have been performed at Weimar.

80 Adrian Williams, ed. and trans., Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, 381. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar

81 Der Vampyr was performed in Weimar on 26 January 1850 and on 23 March 1850. Hans Heiling was performed on 21 December 1856 and on 11 January 1857. See the playbills on http://archive.thulb.uni-jena.de/ThHStAW/content/main/search-playbill.xml for details.

82 Trippett, David, ‘Bayeuth in Miniature: Wagner and the Melodramatic Voice’, The Musical Quarterly, 95 (2012), 71–138Google Scholar

83 Ramann, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, Vol. 2, Part 2 (Leipzig: Breikopf & Härtel, 1894), 359Google Scholar

84 Hibberd, ‘Introduction’, in Melodramatic Voices, 8Google Scholar

85 The entry for Hamlet in the work list provided by Maria Eckhardt and Rena Charnin Mueller merely states ‘1858’ under composition date. See ‘Liszt, Franz: Works’, in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, xiv: 833. This is probably based on the fact that the only existing complete autograph of the work (GSA 60/A 10a) carries the date June 1858.

86 Altmann, Wilhelmed., Letters of Richard Wagner (London: Dent, 1927)Google Scholar

87 Lina Ramann, Lisztiana: Erinnerungen an Franz Liszt in Tagebuchblättern, Briefen und Dokumenten aus den Jahren 1873–1886/87, ed. Arthur Seidl and Friedrich Schnapp (Mainz: Schott, 1983), 258Google Scholar

88 Göllerich, August, Franz Liszt (Berlin: Marquardt & Co., 1908)Google Scholar

89 Watson, Derek, Liszt (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar

Johns, Keith T., The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt (New York: Pendragon Press, 1997)Google Scholar

90 Ramann, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, ii: 293Google Scholar

91 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 165Google Scholar

Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 165Google Scholar

Devrient, ‘Tagebuchaufzeichnungen’, 145Google Scholar

92 Ramann, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, ii: 294Google Scholar

93 Ramann, Lisztiana, 258Google Scholar

94 Göllerich, Franz Liszt, 6Google Scholar

95 Searle, ‘Foreword’ in Franz Liszt, Hamlet (London: Eulenberg, 1976)Google ScholarPubMed

96 Johns, The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt, 78Google Scholar

97 Hans von Bülow, The Early Correspondence, ed. his widow, trans. Constance Bache (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1896), 98Google Scholar

98 Göllerich, Franz Liszt, 6Google Scholar

Göllerich, The Piano Master Classes of Franz Liszt 1884–1886, ed. Wilhelm Jerger, trans. Richard Louis Zimdars (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 157–158Google Scholar

99 Ramann, Lisztiana, 258Google Scholar

100 Liszt, Hamlet (London: Eulenberg, 1976)Google ScholarPubMed

101 Pocknell, Franz Liszt and Agnes Street-Klindworth, 82Google Scholar

102 Ramann, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, ii: 293Google Scholar

103 Knetschke, ‘Bogumil Dawison’, 58Google Scholar

104 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 163Google Scholar

105 Kollek, Bogumil Dawison, 165Google Scholar

106 Knetschke, ‘Bogumil Dawison’, 58Google Scholar

107 Ramann, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, ii: 298Google Scholar

108 Hibberd, ‘Si l'orchestre seul chantait’: Melodramatic Voices in Chelard's Macbeth (1827)‘ in Melodramatic Voices, 99.

109 Ramann, Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, ii: 298Google Scholar

Lina Ramann, Lisztiana, 258Google Scholar

110 William Shakespeare, Hamlet in The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (Walton-on-Thames: Nelson, 1998), 316Google Scholar