Detlev Glanert
Encyclopedia
Detlev Glanert is a German opera composer, who has also composed numerous works for chamber and full orchestra, including three symphonies.
in Cologne.
It was at Henze's invitation that Glanert produced his first sizeable piece of music-theatre, the opera Leyla und Medjun which opened the first Munich Biennale
, set up by Henze in 1988. Glanert then became involved in Henze's other festival, the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte
in Montepulciano, firstly as assistant co-ordinator and head of the music school from 1989 to 1993, and later returning as artistic director for the years 2009 to 2011.
In 1992/93, he was a Stipendiat of the Villa Massimo
in Rome.
He reached widespread attention with his 1995 opera Der Spiegel des großen Kaisers, which was awarded the Rolf-Liebermann-Preis for opera composers. The 1999 premiere of his next opera, Joseph Süss, was a notable cultural event according to Die Welt, which wrote: "The anticipation was truly enormous. Half of operatic Germany sat in the stalls of the Halle Opera House."
In 2002, Detlev Glanert was elected academician of the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg
.
In 2006 Glanert's opera Caligula, on a libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel
after the play
by Albert Camus
on the last days of the Roman emperor Caligula
, was first staged at the Oper Frankfurt, conducted by Markus Stenz
. A recording of this production was reviewed:
He typically takes a traditional topos
– a standard story or situation – and interprets it with a contemporary slant. In Caligula, for example, the modern twist is that the emperor is not mad but cruel entirely by choice. In Joseph Süss, the story of a Jew executed after being made a scapegoat at a secret trial over 250 years ago, the story reflects not only the Germany of 1738 but that of 1933 to 1945. The darker side of human nature is a recurring theme in Glanert's work. "I look at people as animals because sometimes they behave as animals, as you know", he said of one of his larger orchestral pieces, the Theatrum Bestiarum.
Glanert talked about his musical influences in an interview in 1996. After an initial period of three years when he submerged his own musical personality under that of Henze, he developed his own style between the contrasting poles of Gustav Mahler
and Maurice Ravel
– Mahler for his structural perspective, "the simple, the dramatic sense of the music", and Ravel for his surface textures, "the artificial masquerade of sounds".
The chamber operas Leviathan, Der Engel, der das Wasser bewegte and Der Engel auf dem Schiff can be performed together as the trilogy Drei Wasserspiele.
Biography
Detlev Glanert was born in Hamburg in 1960. He came to music late, learning his first instrument, the trumpet, at the age of eleven and not starting his formal composition studies until his twenties, when he studied under Diether de la Motte, Günther Friedrichs and Frank Michael Beyer, and then for four years under Hans Werner HenzeHans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...
in Cologne.
It was at Henze's invitation that Glanert produced his first sizeable piece of music-theatre, the opera Leyla und Medjun which opened the first Munich Biennale
Munich Biennale
The Munich Biennale is an opera festival in the city of Munich. The full German name is Internationales Festival für neues Musiktheater, literally: International Festival for New Music Theater. The biennial festival was created in 1988 by Hans Werner Henze and is held in even-numbered years over...
, set up by Henze in 1988. Glanert then became involved in Henze's other festival, the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte
Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte
The Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte is an annual Italian summer school and musical festival for young singers, actors, musicians, conductors and composers. It was set up in Montepulciano in 1976 by Hans Werner Henze, a string of whose works have been premiered at it.Productions are worked on in the...
in Montepulciano, firstly as assistant co-ordinator and head of the music school from 1989 to 1993, and later returning as artistic director for the years 2009 to 2011.
In 1992/93, he was a Stipendiat of the Villa Massimo
Villa Massimo
Villa Massimo, short for Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo , is a German art institute in Rome, established in 1910 and located in the Villa Massimo....
in Rome.
He reached widespread attention with his 1995 opera Der Spiegel des großen Kaisers, which was awarded the Rolf-Liebermann-Preis for opera composers. The 1999 premiere of his next opera, Joseph Süss, was a notable cultural event according to Die Welt, which wrote: "The anticipation was truly enormous. Half of operatic Germany sat in the stalls of the Halle Opera House."
In 2002, Detlev Glanert was elected academician of the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg
Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg
The Freie Akademie der Künste in Hamburg e.V. is a not-for-profit association of artists, founded in 1950. It now includes architecture, visual arts, performing arts, literature, media and music sections....
.
In 2006 Glanert's opera Caligula, on a libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel
Hans-Ulrich Treichel
Hans-Ulrich Treichel is a Germanist, novelist and poet. His earliest published books were collections of poetry, but prose writing has become a larger part of his output since the critical and commercial success of his first novel Der Verlorene...
after the play
Caligula (play)
Caligula is a play written by Albert Camus, begun in 1938 and published for the first time in May 1944 by Éditions Gallimard. The play was later the subject of numerous revisions. It was part of what the author called the "Cycle of the Absurd", with the novel The Outsider and the essay The Myth...
by Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
on the last days of the Roman emperor Caligula
Caligula
Caligula , also known as Gaius, was Roman Emperor from 37 AD to 41 AD. Caligula was a member of the house of rulers conventionally known as the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Caligula's father Germanicus, the nephew and adopted son of Emperor Tiberius, was a very successful general and one of Rome's most...
, was first staged at the Oper Frankfurt, conducted by Markus Stenz
Markus Stenz
Markus Stenz is a German conductor. He studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln with Volker Wangenhein and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa....
. A recording of this production was reviewed:
It's a scenario that Glanert could easily have depicted in sensationalist terms, but the hallmark of his score is its refinement, both in the wonderfully imaginative sound world he creates, and in the smoothly contoured vocal lines. It's an impressive achievement, and the sense of scarcely suppressed menace that pervades the work and carries unmistakable echoes of Strauss's Elektra and Salome is powerfully conjured.
Style
Glanert insists on the importance of connecting with the audience, of making them find something of themselves in the music:He typically takes a traditional topos
Literary topos
Topos , in Latin locus , referred in the context of classical Greek rhetoric to a standardised method of constructing or treating an argument. See topos in classical rhetoric...
– a standard story or situation – and interprets it with a contemporary slant. In Caligula, for example, the modern twist is that the emperor is not mad but cruel entirely by choice. In Joseph Süss, the story of a Jew executed after being made a scapegoat at a secret trial over 250 years ago, the story reflects not only the Germany of 1738 but that of 1933 to 1945. The darker side of human nature is a recurring theme in Glanert's work. "I look at people as animals because sometimes they behave as animals, as you know", he said of one of his larger orchestral pieces, the Theatrum Bestiarum.
Glanert talked about his musical influences in an interview in 1996. After an initial period of three years when he submerged his own musical personality under that of Henze, he developed his own style between the contrasting poles of Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler was a late-Romantic Austrian composer and one of the leading conductors of his generation. He was born in the village of Kalischt, Bohemia, in what was then Austria-Hungary, now Kaliště in the Czech Republic...
and Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...
– Mahler for his structural perspective, "the simple, the dramatic sense of the music", and Ravel for his surface textures, "the artificial masquerade of sounds".
Stage works
| Title | Format | Libretto and source | Premiere |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leviathan | Chamber opera, 18' First part of the Drei Wasserspiele trilogy |
Thornton Wilder Thornton Wilder Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,... |
13 May 1986, Casino, Evian (concert); 2 October 1991, Opera stabile, Hamburg (staged) |
| Leyla und Medjnun | Fairytale for music, 90' | Aras Ören (de) and Peter Schneider Peter Schneider (writer) Peter Schneider is a German novelist.-Life:Peter Schneider is the son of a conductor and composer. He spent his early childhood in Königsberg and Saxony; from 1945 to 1950 he lived in Grainau near Garmisch-Partenkirchen and from 1950 in Freiburg im Breisgau... , after the epic poem Layla and Majnun Layla and Majnun, also known as The Madman and Layla – in Arabic مجنون ليلى or قيس وليلى , in , Leyli və Məcnun in Azeri, Leyla ile Mecnun in Turkish, in Urdu and Hindi – is a classical Arab story, popularized by Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi's... by Nizami |
29 May 1988, Munich Biennale Munich Biennale The Munich Biennale is an opera festival in the city of Munich. The full German name is Internationales Festival für neues Musiktheater, literally: International Festival for New Music Theater. The biennial festival was created in 1988 by Hans Werner Henze and is held in even-numbered years over... |
| Der Engel, der das Wasser bewegte | Chamber opera, 25' Second part of the Drei Wasserspiele trilogy |
Thornton Wilder Thornton Wilder Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,... |
16 May 1995, Concordia, Theater Bremen Theater Bremen Theater Bremen is the collective name for four auditoria in the city of Bremen - these are the Oper Bremen, the Schauspiel Bremen, the Tanztheater Bremen and the MoKS Bremen.... |
| Der Engel auf dem Schiff | Chamber opera, 15' Third part of the Drei Wasserspiele trilogy |
Thornton Wilder Thornton Wilder Thornton Niven Wilder was an American playwright and novelist. He received three Pulitzer Prizes, one for his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey and two for his plays Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, and a National Book Award for his novel The Eighth Day.-Early years:Wilder was born in Madison,... |
16 May 1995, Concordia, Theater Bremen Theater Bremen Theater Bremen is the collective name for four auditoria in the city of Bremen - these are the Oper Bremen, the Schauspiel Bremen, the Tanztheater Bremen and the MoKS Bremen.... |
| Der Spiegel des großen Kaisers | Opera in two acts, 110' | Detlev Glanert and Ulfert Becker, after the novel by Arnold Zweig Arnold Zweig Arnold Zweig was a German writer and anti-war activist.He is best known for his World War I tetralogy.-Life and work:Zweig was born in Glogau, Silesia son of a Jewish saddler... . |
23 November 1995, Nationaltheater Mannheim Nationaltheater Mannheim The present National Theatre Mannheim , which dates from 1957, is a theatre and opera company in Mannheim, Germany with a variety of performance spaces... |
| Joseph Süß | Opera in thirteen scenes, 105' | Werner Fritsch (de) and Uta Ackermann. | 13 October 1999, Theater Bremen Theater Bremen Theater Bremen is the collective name for four auditoria in the city of Bremen - these are the Oper Bremen, the Schauspiel Bremen, the Tanztheater Bremen and the MoKS Bremen.... |
| Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung | Comic opera, 110' | Jörg W. Gronius (de), after the play by Christian Dietrich Grabbe Christian Dietrich Grabbe Christian Dietrich Grabbe was a German dramatist.Born in Detmold, Lippe, he wrote many historical plays and is also known for his use of satire and irony. He suffered from an unhappy marriage... |
2 February 2001, Opernhaus Halle |
| Die drei Rätsel | Opera in two acts for children and adults, 85' | Carlo Pasquini (it) | 12 October 2003, Opernhaus Halle |
| Ich bin Rita | Intermezzo, 9' | Elke Heidenreich Elke Heidenreich Elke Heidenreich is a German author, TV presenter and journalist.- Life :Heidenreich studied German studies in Munich, Hamburg and Berlin. Heidenreich works as German author and wrote several books... (de) |
15 November 2003, Yakult-Halle, Oper Köln |
| Caligula | Opera in four acts, 135' | Hans-Ulrich Treichel Hans-Ulrich Treichel Hans-Ulrich Treichel is a Germanist, novelist and poet. His earliest published books were collections of poetry, but prose writing has become a larger part of his output since the critical and commercial success of his first novel Der Verlorene... , after the play by Albert Camus Albert Camus Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957... . |
7 October 2006, Oper Frankfurt |
| Nijinskys Tagebuch | For two singers, two actors, two dancers and instrumental ensemble, 95' | Carolyn Sittig, after the German translation by Alfred Frank, of the diaries by Waslaw Nijinsky. | 6 April 2008, Theater Aachen Theater Aachen Theater Aachen is a theatre in Aachen, Germany. It is the principal venue in that city for operas, musical theatre, plays, and concerts. It is the home of the Aachen Symphony Orchestra. Construction on the original theatre began in 1822 and it opened on 15 May 1825... |
| Das Holzschiff | Opera in one act, 100' | Christoph Klimke (de), after the novel by Hans Henny Jahnn Hans Henny Jahnn Hans Henny Jahnn was a German playwright, novelist, and organ-builder.As a playwright, he wrote: Pastor Ephraim Magnus , which The Cambridge Guide to Theatre describes as a nihilistic, Expressionist play "stuffed with perversities and sado-masochistic motifs"; Coronation of Richard III ;... . |
9 October 2010, Staatstheater Nürnberg Staatstheater Nürnberg The Staatstheater Nürnberg is a theatre building in Nuremburg. One of the largest theatres in Germany, it is housed in the Opernhaus Nürnberg, built from 1903 to 1905 in the Art Nouveau by the architect Heinrich Seeling.-Sources:*... |
| Solaris | Opera, 120' | Reinhard Palm (de), after the novel Solaris (novel) Solaris is a 1961 Polish science fiction novel by Stanisław Lem. It is about the ultimate inadequacy of communication between human and non-human species.... by Stanislaw Lem Stanislaw Lem Stanisław Lem was a Polish writer of science fiction, philosophy and satire. He was named a Knight of the Order of the White Eagle. His books have been translated into 41 languages and have sold over 27 million copies. He is perhaps best known as the author of the 1961 novel Solaris, which has... |
18 July 2012, Bregenzer Festspiele Bregenzer Festspiele Bregenzer Festspiele is a performing arts festival which is held every July and August in Bregenz, Austria.Founded in 1946, the festival presents a wide variety of musical and theatrical events in several venues:... |
The chamber operas Leviathan, Der Engel, der das Wasser bewegte and Der Engel auf dem Schiff can be performed together as the trilogy Drei Wasserspiele.
Other works (selected)
- Mahler/Skizze (1989)
- Geheimer Raum ('Secret Room'). Chamber sonata no.3 (2002)
- Theatrum Bestiarum, (Subtitled 'Songs and dances for large orchestra'). (2005)
- Vier Präludien und Ernste Gesänge ('Four Preludes and Serious Songs', after Brahms) (2005)
- Fluß ohne Ufer ('Shoreless River') (2008)
- Einsamkeit ('Loneliness', an orchestration of the Schubert song D.620) (2010)
Recordings
- Mahler/Skizze. London SinfoniettaLondon SinfoniettaThe London Sinfonietta is an English chamber orchestra founded in 1968 and based in London. The ensemble specialises in contemporary music and works across a wide range of genres, performing modern classics alongside world premieres, and includes music by electronica artists as well as folk and...
/ Oliver KnussenOliver KnussenOliver Knussen CBE is a British composer and conductor.-Biography:Oliver Knussen was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His father, Stuart Knussen, was principal double bass of the London Symphony Orchestra. Oliver Knussen studied composition with John Lambert, between 1963 and 1969 and also received...
. WER 6522-2 - Theatrum Bestiarum. WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln / Semyon BychkovSemyon BychkovSemyon Mayevich Bychkov is a Russian-Born conductor.-Childhood and studies in Russia:Born in Leningrad to Jewish parents, Bychkov studied at the Glinka Choir School for ten years and later at the Leningrad Conservatory with Ilya Musin...
. SACD AV 2137 - Caligula. World premiere recording. Oper Frankfurt / Markus StenzMarkus StenzMarkus Stenz is a German conductor. He studied at the Hochschule für Musik Köln with Volker Wangenhein and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa....
. OehmsClassics OC 932
External links
- Composer page at Boosey and Hawkes: biography, works list, recordings and performance search.
- Recent and future performances of Glanert's operas from OperabaseOperabaseOperabase is an on-line database of opera performances, opera houses and companies, performers themselves as well as their agents. Operabase, found at operabase.com, is owned and operated by Operabase Ltd, a company located in Luton, England. The site started in 1996 as the hobby of Mike Gibb,...