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Die drei Pintos (The Three Pintos) Comic opera in three acts by Carl Maria von Weber restored and completed by Mahler (1887-1888). Naxos 8.660142-43, two CDs, 114 minutes 22 seconds. Wexford Festival Opera Chorus National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus Paolo Arrivabeni, conductor
Reviewed by Mark DeVoto
Carl Maria von Weber excelled as a composer in many genres, but his permanent reputation primarily rests on
Der Freischütz, arguably the finest magic opera of all time and certainly one of the most popular. The stunning success of
Der Freischütz in 1821 was not repeated with Weber's last two operas, Euryanthe (1823) and Oberon (1826), which suffered from weak libretti although their music has always been respected, and Weber's earlier works for the stage, some of which are lost, are mostly known today for their overtures. Weber's one unfinished opera was a comic work,
Die drei Pintos, some of whose sketches he may have worked on simultaneously with
Der Freischütz and intermittently thereafter until 1824.
After Weber's death in 1826, his widow showed the sketches for Die drei Pintos and Theodor Hell's libretto to several composers, including Giacomo Meyerbeer and Franz Lachner, hoping to find one who might undertake a practical completion, but nobody wanted to make the attempt. The principal obstacle seemed to be that although Weber had written out a plan for the different numbers in the opera, he had actually sketched out music for only about half of these. Nothing further happened until 1887, when Carl von Weber, the composer's grandson, showed the sketches to the twenty-seven-year-old Gustav Mahler, who was then Arthur Nikisch's assistant at the Stadttheater in Leipzig. Once he was able to decipher Weber's difficult style of sketching, Mahler was interested, and Carl von Weber, similarly galvanized, rewrote Hell's libretto in a form that Mahler could use. Mahler worked intensively on the score during the summer and early fall of 1887. His intensity had an extramusical reason as well: his love affair with Carl von Weber's wife Marion, described in Henry-Louis de La Grange's biography of Mahler. The most difficult task was to supply music for those numbers in the libretto that Weber had not sketched at all; Mahler's wise decision was to use other music by Weber, ranging from early songs to later choral pieces. Only a few numbers were wholly composed, or at least recomposed, by Mahler himself from Weber's themes. One of these was the first part of the Act III finale, which is based on Weber's Act I; another was the Entr'acte after Act I, in which one can hear an especially transparent example of Mahler's early but expert orchestral style. It is a tribute to Mahler's skill that his own musical personality, already distinctive by 1888, never submerges Weber's; above all, Die drei Pintos sounds like Weber and no one else, and this was obviously Mahler's intention, successfully met. It is true that Mahler's orchestra makes use of valved brass that did not yet exist in the 1820's, but one would have to listen very closely to find this a perceptible difference; otherwise, one would be hard put to find significant differences from the orchestral styles of any of the Austro-German opera composers before Wagner, from Weber himself and Spohr to Marschner and Nicolai. Die drei Pintos was instantly successful when Mahler conducted the premiere in Leipzig in January 1888, and a piano-vocal score was published by C. F. Kahnt in the same year. The opera was soon produced elsewhere, and its success enhanced Mahler's professional reputation at a time when he was about to present his First Symphony to a public little prepared to comprehend it. Yet after just a few years, Die drei Pintos fell out of public favor, and remained almost completely unknown for more than 80 years, until the opera was rediscovered in the general revival of interest in Mahler's music in the 1960's. A complete recording of a first-rate performance conducted by Gary Bertini appeared only in 1977 (RCA PRL3 9063; reissued in 1995 on compact disc, 74321-34426-2), and in 2000, A-R Editions published James L. Zychowicz's definitive critical edition of the full orchestral score of Die drei Pintos, in two volumes. The new Naxos recording of Die drei Pintos, a sparkling live performance, brings together a fine international cast of singers, well supported by the Wexford (Ireland) Festival Opera Chorus and the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Belarus directed by Paolo Arrivabeni. The singing is excellent overall, and the orchestral playing especially good; the conductor manages superbly to keep the ensemble under precise control even when the textures are complex and the tempi constantly changing. The recorded sound is excellent, although there is sometimes an irritating amount of stage noise. I found no deviations from the score other than a few minor cuts of repeated passages, and in some disagreements about whether some string passages should be non-legato or slurred. As for the spoken dialogue, much of what appears in the libretto is omitted in the performance without serious impediment to the continuity of action. The recording should go far to stimulating a public appreciation that the opera surely deserves. Hearing it today, we can hardly imagine why Die drei Pintos failed to remain popular. The story is well crafted and no more silly than any of a dozen immortal operettas; it has impersonations but no disguises; dances and dance rhythms abound, from waltz and polonaise to fandango and polka; and above all, the music is irresistibly tuneful. Given a strong string section, the orchestration presents no unusual difficulties and should be well within the capabilities of university productions. It should be worth while, now and then, to forgo one more production of Die Fledermaus or The Mikado in order to promote a fine comic work like Die drei Pintos. Back to the home page of The Chicago Mahlerites |