Strindberg haunts you whether you want him to or not. The Swedish playwright’s late chamber plays — The Ghost Sonata, A Dream Play, The Stronger — operate on a logic closer to nightmare than drama, and any composer who takes them on accepts a peculiar bargain: the symbolism does half the work for you, but the absence of conventional dramatic architecture leaves you exposed, with nowhere to hide.
Aribert Reimann has spent his career in that exposed territory. Before Lear made him famous — or as famous as a German opera composer gets outside Germany — he was known primarily as a pianist, one of the most searching accompanists of his generation, the man beside Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau at the keyboard through some of that singer’s greatest recorded performances. That intimacy with the voice, with what a singer can actually do at the edge of expression, saturates everything Reimann has written. It’s not nothing. It’s actually quite a lot.
Die Gespenstersonate, completed in 1984 and premiered at the Berlin Festival that September, arrived in the wake of Lear‘s considerable success — though “success” is a relative term when we’re talking about an opera built on a Shakespeare tragedy that Fischer-Dieskau had originally tried to commission from Benjamin Britten. Britten died before he could write it. Reimann inherited the project, and the result was, by any measure, remarkable. Die Gespenstersonate is smaller in every dimension: chamber orchestra instead of a full pit, no chorus, three scenes knotted together by interludes, the cast drawn from a world of rotting bourgeois interiors rather than a kingdom unraveling on a heath. Strindberg’s play, already skeletal, is stripped further — which proves to be both the opera’s formal strategy and its central problem.
The trouble is this. Strindberg’s characters carry their full weight of guilt and memory and social interpretation only when we’ve spent time with them. Reimann’s libretto compresses ruthlessly, and in the first two scenes the music largely serves as atmosphere — well-crafted, atmospheric in the atmospheric sense, but not yet doing the harder imaginative work of making us care. The Colonel, the Mummy, the Student Arkenholz moving through that poisoned house — they register as symbols before they register as people.
Then something changes.
The interlude before the final scene, and the scene itself — the two young figures, children of all this inherited sin — releases music of a different order altogether. It is abstract, yes, in the way that late Reimann is always somewhat abstract, but abstraction here becomes expressive rather than evasive. The writing for voice opens up. There’s a quality to the sustained lines — something between elegy and resignation — that earns its emotional authority honestly. The last fifteen minutes of this opera are genuinely radiant, and not in a way that flatters you for finding them so.
The cast assembled for that first production was distinguished by the presence of Martha Mödl, by then in the long late autumn of a career that had made her one of the defining dramatic sopranos of the postwar German theater. Hans Günter Nöcker’s Hummel and the tenors David Knutson and Horst Hiestermann navigate writing that asks the older singers especially to sustain forte across passages that go on rather too long — Reimann, who knows the voice so well, occasionally seems to forget that knowing and demanding are different things. But the veterans hold. They get the words out with the clarity that matters in music this close to speech, and they never sound merely victimized by the score.
Max Loppert, reviewing the premiere for Opera, predicted a brief vogue followed by obscurity. He was half right. The opera did travel — Stuttgart, Vienna, Hamburg — before settling into the silence that most new operas settle into, even good ones. This DVD, preserving the television broadcast from April 1985, is almost certainly the only document of the work most listeners will ever encounter. That’s a melancholy fact, and not entirely a just one.
What we have, then, is a flawed work filmed at its moment of first discovery, performed by singers who understood what they were doing and why, ending in beauty it took too long to reach. Worth your time — but start with the knowledge that patience is part of what’s being asked of you.
