Cardillac is one of the most provoking and fascinating operas of its time; it is ferociously inventive and packs a dramatic punch that knocks the breath out of you, yet it inhabits only the outer suburbs of the 'standard repertory' and in Britain has received only one professional staging, twenty years ago. Hindemith's youthful reputation as an irritatingly clever enfant terrible has something to do with this, no doubt; so has his own later disowning of the work. A wholesale emasculation of the opera appeared in 1952, and the original version (recorded here) was not heard again during Hindemith's lifetime. This new recording makes an imperatively eloquent case for its reassessment (if the English National Opera could play Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to packed houses they would have queues round the block for Cardillac).
The rediscovery of its three one-act predecessors (this recording of the 'Burmese marionette-play' Das Nusch-Nuschi completes the trilogy Gerd Albrecht's accounts of its companion-pieces having already appeared—WER60132, WER60132-50: WER60106, WER60106-50—both 2/89) puts Cardillac into focus as the culmination of a process. In the three one-acters Hindemith in effect boxes the compass of how music may 'accompany' violent or lurid action: in brutal ritual, as in Morder, Hoffinung, der Frauen, in Sancta Susanna's dismaying counterpoint of chaste lyricism and abnormal psychopathology or in the cheerfully riotous burlesque of Das Nusch-Nuschi (please don't ask me to explain the plot). Elements of all these are present in Cardillac, but in the service of a difficult and deeply serious objective: the portrayal of a monster who is also a hero, an archetype of the creative artist, even in some sense a self-portrait.
Cardillac is a goldsmith so obsessed with the inviolable perfection of his creations that he murders to regain them, when he dies, his last loving glance is directed not at his pitying daughter kneeling by his side, but at the gold chain round her neck, his handiwork. That his love for his golden creatures has a bleak lyrical nobility, that his death scene is moving, even, are striking achievements, and most cunningly contrived. Cardillac himself is depicted not so much in arias (he has only one, in which, like a Verdian father he surveys his 'children' and resolves to defend them) but in a sequence of duets with the other, significantly unnamed, characters. They may be cyphers by comparison, but they are carefully differentiated in order to cast varying lights on the protagonist who, daringly but no less significantly, does not appear until Act 2. The music for Cardillac's daughter, including a florid Handelian aria complete with instrumental obbligatos, marks her off very clearly from the lyrically seductive but heartless Lady, just as the officer (the daughter's lover) has an ardour quite lacking in the Lady's posturing paramour, the Cavalier. In the portrayal of these characters (even the silent role of the King) the stylized neo-baroque forms that give this opera its apparent 'artificiality' are in fact expressively functional. Hindemith, like Cardillac, was at this stage of his career a passionate as well as a perfectionist articifer.
So is Gerd Albrecht: the cogs and springs of Hindemith's precisely dimensioned chamber orchestra could not be more clearly displayed (a pity, then, that the engineers adopt the usual voices-to-the-fore balance; I would have liked the orchestra to dominate more) and the coups-de-theatre (the coups-contre-theatre, really: the bedroom scene and murder presented in dumb-show to the elegantly antiseptic accompaniment of two flutes, the decidedly 1926-style tavern music that echoes through the streets of seventeenth-century Paris) are pungently characterized. The cast is very accomplished, though close recording gives a touch of squalliness to both sopranos. Schunk is a ringingly full-voiced Officer and Nimsgern an expressive Cardillac whose voice sounds a bit smaller in this focus than it does on stage: he therefore lacks a shade or two of implacable authority. If DG were to reissue their 20-year-old recording (2543 246, 4/82) on CD it would be welcome for the sake of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau's balefully over-life-size Cardillac and Elisabeth Soderstrom's brief appearance as the Lady, but in most other respects the newcomer equals or surpasses it.
Das Nusch-Nuschi (you won't ask about the plot, will you?) is the most inventive and musically substantial of the pre-Cardillac trilogy. (You insist? Well, don't blame me: Field-Marshall Kyce-Waing is accused of enjoying all four of the King of Burma's wives during a single night; he is sentenced to 'the usual'—castration: cue for rib-nudging quotation from Tristan, he isn't guilty, actually, and there's an unexpected last-minute impediment to the execution of the sentence, there are also these singing apes what do apes sing? ''Rrrai, rrrai'', of course—and four dancing girls and a couple of poets and a comic servant and in any case the real principal character doesn't sing—he would hardly have time to in a sixty-minute opera with a cast list of 25—and besides there's the Nusch-Nuschi, half rat, half alligator, quite possibly a symbol of the destructiveness of desire—enough? I did warn you.) Despite the plot the score is an alluringly vivid kaleidoscope of orientalisms, lyrical arabesque, languorous allure and brilliant colour. In its orchestral mastery alone it demonstrates that Hindemith was ready for Cardillac; that he later suppressed this music-packed score entirely is breathtakingly inexplicable.
The performance is very fine, the recording—close focus on the voices apart—is excellent. As with Cardillac the libretto is printed in German only. Cardillac is a 'number opera', and has cueing bands for each number, Das Nusch-Nuschi has none, which is a pity, since you'll probably want to play the interludes and dance-music to friends who think they don't like Hindemith.'