An issue of outstanding importance. King Candaules, based on a play by Andre Gide, is Zemlinsky’s last opera, written during the Nazis’ rise to power and complete in short score when he fled to America in 1938. He showed it to his pupil Artur Bodanzky, then a Principal Conductor at the Met, but Bodanzky seems to have warned him that the libretto would not be acceptable – in one scene Candaules tricks his wife into undressing in front of a fisherman he has recently befriended, then into sleeping with him. Zemlinsky proposed another subject, but was so short of money that he devoted the remaining few months of his life to hack work, and the orchestration of Der Konig Kandaules was never completed. He left, however, a large number of indications of scoring, and on the basis of that and the 846 bars that he had finished Antony Beaumont has now prepared what we should perhaps call a ‘performing edition’. It had its first production in Hamburg last October and this live recording was made at the same time.
Beaumont’s orchestration sounds perfectly convincing, as convincing as his by now widely accepted revision of the final scene of Busoni’s Doktor Faust. When two excerpts from the score were performed and recorded in 1994 as a sort of progress report on his work (Capriccio, 3/94) it already looked as though a major work by Zemlinsky was about to be revealed. And that indeed is the case: a marvellous and quite characteristic score, but in some ways a dismaying one. All the orchestral richness and the voluptuously singing lines that one expects are there, but wedded to a plot that seems all too accurately to reflect the disorder and disillusion of the times in which it was written.
Nyssia, the wife so chaste and beautiful that until now no one but Candaules has seen her unveiled, is portrayed in music of quite sumptuous allure, but her reaction to his betrayal is more Salome-like than tragic: she orders the fisherman Gyges to kill her husband and take his place, in her bed as well as on the throne. Gyges, the poor but honest peasant (and his music has a touch of nobility to it), is a murderer himself: he killed his own wife because, as Candaules would have agreed, she was his property. And Candaules the seeming altruist, whose greatest pleasure is to share his wealth with others, is in fact simply boasting of his good fortune: even his wife’s beauty is a sort of torment to him if other men are not jealous of it. And in Zemlinsky’s musical portrayal the more his baseness becomes obvious the more glamorous and sympathetic he is.
The performance is a fine one, O’Neal lacking only the last touch of heroic vocal stature for Candaules, Warren only a little stretched by the Ariadne-like role of Nyssia, Pederson first class (a moment or two of suspect intonation aside) as Gyges. Albrecht is perfectly at home in this sort of music, the orchestra’s admirable richness of tone does not obscure detail, and the recording is atmospheric (stage business audible) but clear. Zemlinsky’s reputation has been growing year by year recently. It can only be enhanced by this ravishing, richly complex, disturbing opera.'