Brahms was enchanted by Schubert’s unfinished Easter cantata Lazarus when he came across the manuscript score in 1863; and in our own century the work has drawn superlatives from Schubertians such as Maurice Brown and Alfred Einstein, who wrote of the music’s “shimmer of transfiguration” and provocatively claimed that as a through-composed music drama Lazarus was far ahead of Tannhauser and Lohengrin. Certainly, Schubert’s setting of August Niemeyer’s text, with its subtle, fluid intermingling of arioso and aria and its complete absence of formal division, has a flexibility and dramatic continuity unmatched in any opera of the time. But if the structure of Lazarus, including the occasional use of leitmotifs, looks forward to Wagner, much of the invention has a solemn simplicity and diatonic radiance that owe something to Gluck, especially his Iphigenie en Tauride, one of Schubert’s favourite operas. Gluckian, too, is the powerful use of ostinato in several numbers, notably the despairing scene for Simon the Sadducee in Act 2, one of Schubert’s most inspired stretches of dramatic writing, and the turbulent E minor aria for Lazarus’s sister Martha later in the same act.
Tantalizingly, Schubert’s surviving score breaks off in the middle of this aria. And while it is likely that he completed the number and the remainder of the Second Act, it is virtually certain that he never set Act 3, dealing with Lazarus’s resurrection. At the time he composed Lazarus (1820), Schubert’s style was evolving rapidly, and he would often abandon a work if inspiration temporarily ran dry or if a new creative challenge presented itself. He may have abandoned Lazarus for mundane practical reasons: perhaps the original commission was cancelled, or perhaps he lost momentum after his brush with Metternich’s police in March 1820, when he was arrested for suspected political subversion. Or perhaps, as Walter Durr posits in his excellent note, Schubert was drawn to the notions of fulfilment and salvation in death but could not, in the end, find inspiration in Lazarus’s resurrection, his “return to the world of discord and lovelessness”.
At Helmuth Rilling’s behest, Lazarus has now been completed by the Russian composer Edison Denisov, who has previously incorporated quotations from Schubert in works such as his Violin Concerto and Viola Concerto. The latter work, in fact, ends with Schubert. Here the roles are reversed. Once past Martha’s incomplete aria Denisov makes little attempt to imitate Schubert’s idiom, though he does tellingly re-use several key motifs, including one from the First Act introduction at the moment of Lazarus’s resurrection. In several of the arias Schubert’s manner is refracted through a twentieth-century prism, rather as Stravinsky refracted Handel in parts of Oedipus rex; there are distorted echoes of Rossini and early Verdi, too, in, say, Mary’s Act 3 aria, “Auferwecker! Heil und Leben!”, with its repeated-note accompaniment and coloratura flourishes, and brief but unmistakable allusions to Eugene Onegin in Martha’s scene that opens the act. Elsewhere Denisov’s idiom often suggests a post-Mahlerian expressionism, with stretches of 12-tone writing in one or two of the choral numbers (which are far more numerous in Act 3 than in the previous acts).
Denisov’s stylistic eclecticism, his reliance on a range of disparate allusions, can be disconcerting. But he has a sure feeling for dramatic rhythm and his orchestration is often inventive and atmospheric (as in Simon’s nocturnal graveyard monologue near the start of Act 3). His completion certainly makes intriguing listening, even if the transition from Schubert to Denisov inevitably produces a sense of stylistic culture shock. The performance from Rilling and his excellent chorus and orchestra is sympathetic and shrewdly paced. All the soloists acquit themselves well enough, though in the title-role Scot Weir’s agreeable light tenor can be a touch bland and monochrome. As the doubt-ridden Martha Camilla Nylund displays an exciting, if not always perfectly controlled, soprano; Sibylla Rubens is a tender, involving Mary, and Matthias Gorne brings a Lieder singer’s verbal acuity and range of colour to the challenging role of Simon. Recorded sound and balance are fine. The Sawallisch/EMI performance (part of a three-disc mid-price set containing various shorter Schubert sacred works) is not, of course, strictly comparable, though with a rather more espressivo style of phrasing and, in Robert Tear, a more interesting Lazarus than Weir, it is highly recommended to collectors who are happy to remain with Schubert’s beautiful and innovative score as it has come down to us.'