Paul Hindemith’s operas, nine of them altogether, have not been well served by posterity. In the 60 years since his death, none of them has come close to establishing itself in the canon, and stagings of even the best known of them, Mathis der Maler, are still notable events. Cardillac, the earliest of his full-length stage works and first performed in 1926, has fared worse than most. Though it was hugely popular immediately after the Dresden premiere, with no less than 13 further productions across Germany in the first year alone, it disappeared from the repertory with the rise of the Nazis, and never regained its former status after the end of the second world war. Hindemith produced a revision in 1952, though nowadays it’s generally the original version of the score that’s performed, as on this recording, which is taken from a concert performance in Munich in 2013 and has been released now as a tribute to the conductor Stefan Soltész, who died a year ago this month.
Cardillac is based on a novella by ETA Hoffmann; it’s a murder mystery of sorts, though in the libretto the story is radically changed and the central character omitted altogether, to become a portrait of the 17th-century Parisian goldsmith Cardillac who is so obsessed with the beauty of the objects he produces that he kills to get them back. When the opera was conceived, Hindemith’s music was at its most rigorously neoclassical, and it was planned as a fiercely objective series of self-contained scenes, bound together by the slenderest of narrative threads, and driven along by an uncompromisingly dry, motoric score, with all 18 scenes, in three acts, over in a rather breathless 90 minutes.
Even in a fine performance like this – conducted with great energy and dramatic focus by Soltész, with Markus Eiche as Cardillac, and Juliane Banse as his daughter – it’s a hard opera to love. Cardillac himself is a scarcely credible figure; the other characters are only identified generically (the daughter, the officer, the lady); and the ending, when the goldsmith confesses to his crimes and is beaten to death by a crowd, seems contrived. But it is an important historical curiosity, and only one other CD version is currently available. No libretto is included with the BR Klassik set, though there is a detailed, scene-by-scene synopsis in English.
This week’s other pick
François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles continue their Ravel series for Harmonia Mundi with a pairing of the one-acter L’Heure Espagnole with the composer’s best known score, Bolero. Isabelle Drouet is the desperate housewife Concepcion in the opera, with Thomas Dolié as Ramiro, the hunky muleteer who catches her eye. Both are excellent, but it’s the quality and character of the orchestral playing that is truly exceptional here; the instrumental colours glow and shimmer, so that even an overplayed score like Bolero seems freshly minted.
