Scan 5
Musical Courier 1900-04-11: Vol 40 Iss 1046, 1900
115 lines. Read by computer on 21 September 2026. Printed page 6. See the scan on archive.org.
A town on its own line is one of the directory's headings. That is where the town on a maker's page comes from.
1in the delineation of the characters and more replete with intellectual details, but Siegfried's book brings us into far closer sympathy with the hero and heroine of the story, and the whole exposé is clearer and more readily understood. With him Hans Kraft does not enter into a compact with the devil because an incomprehensibly fickle girl jilts him at the most inopportune moment, but because, returning from the war, the young soldier finds his poor mother dead and forgotten, himself unrecognized and because shelter is refused him even for one single night by hard hearted people. In Wette's book the disfigurement of the hero is brought upon him for no fault of his own, simply through the devil's own devilishness. Siegfried, however, gives the devil his due by furnishing him with a cause for changing Hans Kraft's outer physiognomy, because the young man has neglected to fulfill his duties in hell as agreed upon per contract. In a perfectly charming soliloquy Kraft, when scarcely left to his duties of stoker in hell, addresses his poor, dead mother in heaven, asking her pardon for having undertaken the job, and consoling her and himself by calling to mind that he has not sold himself, but merely hired himself out to the devil for one year. Then he begins to throw big logs of beech wood into the furnace under a big iron kettle, in which a number of damned souls are smouldering. Some of them, I don't know whether they are being boiled, steamed, roasted or broiled, begin to complain of the excessive extra heat, and, in the voice of one of them, who, though he has no longer a larynx or pharynx, emits tones of a veritable Fafner quality, Hans Kraft recognizes the soul of his former tyrant, the sub-officer Kaspar Wild. It is no more than human that he is about to put on a few extra logs to "devil" this old enemy, when he is stopped in this undertaking by the stranger. This personage Siegfried purloined from his father's Nibelungen "Wanderer," with whom he bears a striking resemblance. The stranger offers to throw dice with Hans Kraft for souls against gold, and the soldier enters into the bargain. Of course, he loses, just like the party in Meyerbeer's "Robert le Diable." The last throw of Kraft, however, with two dices, is the highest possible: it shows twelve points, and the young fellow is for a moment overjoyed. But then follows something that even Joshua Gregg never accomplished at Billy Moulds'. I have seen him throw twelve with two dices any number of times, and I thought, of course, the stranger was going to tie Kraft at a dozen points and then beat him in the throw off. But the stranger has simpler means at hand to win the game; he chucks—thirteen. The trick reminds me of an old poker story, supposed to have taken place in heaven, where somebody shows a hand of five aces, and is upbraided for committing "wonders," but which is too blasphemous to find a place in these columns. Kraft is, of course, amazed and then infuriated at this wonder, but when he raises a beech log to throw at the head of the stranger, a sort of getting at loggerheads with him, as it were, a radiant gleam of stage calcium light suddenly surrounds with a halo the saintly figure of the stranger, and Kraft is unable to execute the stroke. The stranger releases all the souls from the broiling kettle, and they sizzingly and steamingly escape in an upward direction, presumably, and as I sincerely trust, heavenward. Then the stranger retires, leaving Kraft cogitating. Not for long, however, for the devil, finding his mess of souls gone, begins to protest, and his imps blacken Kraft and put his bearskin upon him for punishment, while the devil ejects him from the subterranean cave with the curse that he is to walk the earth in this garb and color until he finds a pure maiden who will kiss him in love.
3This redemption is also brought about much more logically and easily in Siegfried's opera than in Mendelssohn's, through the circumstances that Luise, the youngest of the mayor's three pretty daughters, the two older ones of whom give Kraft the mitten, is touched by the fellow's tears and forlorn appearance. Pity, however, has often proved a mainspring to the engendering of love, and so it does in this case. Here, however, with the end of the second act, the opera should have ended. All the long third and final act brings, with its return to the Thirty Years' War and the heroic deeds of Hans Kraft, is irrelevant and has nothing to do with the development of the story. Moreover, the music, which is decidedly good, if at moments a trifle trivial, even to banality, also peters out in this last act. In the two first ones, however, it shows a lot of talent and not a little of ingenuity. Even the orchestration, though by no means so fine that it would needs have taken a Humperdinck, or a Mottl or a Kniese (I don't remember who else was said to have had a helping hand in it), is effective and musicianly; above all it never covers up entirely the voices, as does that of his father, mostly in moments of the highest dramatic importance. Nor is Siegfried Wagner's music (in contrast to his words, which often remind one of his father's Poeterei) in any sense Wagnerian. When I met young Siegfried two seasons ago, he told me, and I think I related the fact at the time, that he had turned more to Weber than to his father for the music he was writing for this opera. I did not think of this confession while listening to it, but I was suddenly strongly struck by the resemblance to the style of Weber. Not the Weber of "Oberon" and "Euryanthe," to which Wagner, Sr., applied for guidance in his first works, and most strongly in his "Lohengrin"; but to the creator of "Der Freischutz," with all its freshness, naïveté, humor and folksong popularity. I really wonder that not one of my confrères seems to have noticed this Weber influence, though it is plainly apparent in many scenes and musical episodes. Certain it is that Siegfried Wagner's "Baerenhaeuter" gives fair promise of better things to
5ESTABLISHED 1867.
6CHICAGO MUSICAL COLLEGE.
7DR. F. ZIEGFELD, President.
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11BOARD OF MUSICAL DIRECTORS.
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