The Count of Gleichen:

Bauernfeld spoke ironically of his libretto as a "Turkish-Christian mess"[1]. It has several weaknesses which are not balanced by an operatic effectiveness, as is the case with other rather weak libretti of better-known operas by, say Cammarano, Scribe or Romani. Some good ideas are not completely worked out and some conceptual failures remain.

The first act subtitled "Orient, morning, spring", is set in the Sultan’s palace in Cairo. The Count and his squire, Kurt, are prisoners of the Sultan of Cairo and work there as gardeners. The Sultan’s daughter, Suleika, is about to celebrate her 15th birthday. On this occasion she is congratulated by three Indian princes from amongst whom she has to choose her future husband. But she secretly loves the Count. He offers her a red rose that he has specially grown for her, which is an unmistakable sign of love in the Orient. In the meantime Kurt has been surprised by the seraglio-keeper Hassan while kissing Suleika’s servant Fatime. Hassan is jealous, of course, but Kurt and Fatime tell him clearly he is too ugly and too dull to be loved by Fatime. Although the Count tells her he has a wife and a child waiting for him in Europe, Suleika succeeds in convincing him of her sincerity. After she has promised to become a Christian, she and Fatime leave on a European ship, together with the Christian slaves who have been freed by the Sultan.

The second act "Occident, evening, autumn" is set in the Gleichen castle near Erfurt. The Countess Ottilie despairs about her husband’s long absence. Her servant Susanne tries to comfort her but she retires. A group of pilgrims arrive led by the returning Count. Ottilie is overwhelmed by happiness, which does not disappear after the Count and she have talked together in secret. Suleika cannot believe that she can make friends with Ottilie and she prays to the Christian God to rescue her. After Kurt has realised his former beloved Susanne is now engaged elsewhere and brought to an end a jealous scene between her and Fatime, the Count reveals the secret he has already told Ottilie: on their way back to Europe, he visited Rome and got permission from the Pope to marry Suleika, provided Ottilie would agree, and to live thereafter with two wives. The opera concludes with the wedding ceremony.

The opera is supposed to be a comical one, and therefore has the traditional structure in two acts. We are still in the world of the 18th century opera buffa and its conventions. The main characters (the Count, Suleika and Ottilie) have serious parts, the comic parts are devoted to traditionally comical characters such as Kurt, Hassan and Fatime. Hence the need for secondary intrigues, which just slow down the pace of the play. At about the same time, Rossini’s Italian girl in Algiers, had comical main characters and Weber’s Der Freischütz succeeded in mixing serious and comical elements without the need of secondary plots. Bauernfeld’s goodwill may have prevented him from abandoning the conventions and creating an "heroic" or "historical" opera, which would have better fitted the subject. Schubert had already tried this in his earlier opera Fierrabras, albeit with a far less skilled librettist.

Actually, the first act seems to be drawn from the Abduction from the Seraglio and the second from Tannhäuser. This is unsurprising given the origins of the legend, but it makes it uncomfortable for the modern opera listener, who is reminded of two masterpieces. It is a little unfair on Bauernfeld too since he couldn’t know about the future Wagner opera and the theme of the "Abduction" and the operatic description of seraglios was, as we have already noted, very common at the time. The weight of Mozart’s work is so strong that the differences (in Schubert’s opera the slaves are freed by the Sultan without having tried to escape, Fatime is not a slave like Blonde, Suleika cannot claim to be a Konstanze-like figure, the Count has a more complex psychology than Belmonte) are completely overshadowed by the similarities (the Count-Kurt pairing seems to be a copy of Belmonte-Pedrillo and also of Weber’s Huon-Scherasmin in Oberon; and all these people work as gardeners, which must have been a common workplace for Christian slaves).

Another writer of that time, Ludwig Tieck, produced a similar mixture of oriental tale, which was gradually getting out of fashion and mediaeval legend, which was getting more and more fashionable. His Story of the fair Maguelonne and the Count Peter of Provence, was to inspire a Brahms song cycle. In this story. Count Peter, who loves Maguelonne and is loved by her, happens to be captured by pirates and sold as a slave. The Sultan’s daughter, Sulima, falls in love with him and helps him to take flight. Unlike Ernst von Gleichen though, Peter leaves Sulima behind in spite of his promise and comes back to Europe where he finds his mourning beloved again. Incidentally, Tieck was one of the authors of the Shakespeare edition Bauernfeld was completing; and he can also be considered as the creator of the German mediaeval tale with The Blond Egbert and also published a story of Tannhäuser.

The comparison reveals another critical point of the opera: the end with the wedding ceremony for the Count and Suleika in presence of the Countess Ottilie. In a story or a tale, it would not be so problematic, but when it is to be shown on stage, it is very difficult to find appropriate music for it. That may be why Rossini, in his Cenerentola, left out all the tale-like elements, giving by way of the music the right atmosphere to a rather positive plot. Not until the end of the century, with such different works as Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel or Dvorák’s Rusalka can we find really successful operatic tales. In the aesthetic of the early 19th century, a comic opera should conclude with the traditional happy ending and thus it would be quite difficult to avoid this scene of blessed mariage à trois becoming ridiculous. Perhaps this was the reason why Schubert did not even sketch it - we may even have his (non) solution.

Perhaps Bauernfeld intended this scene to be a comical finale, thus showing he didn’t take the legend very seriously. The problem then would simply have been that Schubert was not the right composer for it. With the historical distance, we feel it would require Offenbach’s way of dealing with myths and legends, but that style of theatre was still to be born. Moreover, apart from the fact that Schubert is supposed to have said "Do you know happy music? I don’t"[2], the best of his earlier comedies (Die Zwillingsbrüder or Die Verschworenen) is to be found in the lyrical scenes rather than in the comical ones. Even in his songs, very few can be found which could be genuinely comical. Humour means you have fun about somebody or something and Schubert’s compassion, his perception of other people’s feelings, made that quite impossible for him. A sympathetic irony is the closest thing to humour we can find in Schubert’s work and that was probably not what Bauernfeld had in mind.

The hero of the story is rather passive. In the first act, Suleika leads the action and in the second, the threads are in Ottilie’s hands. The scene between the Count and the Pope takes place offstage between the two acts (similar to the corresponding scene in Tannhäuser); and there is no room for an aria which would characterise him as positive person or at least a person with control of his feelings. In that regard he is similar to Max, the equally passive hero of Der Freischütz.

Despite the weaknesses, there are also successful elements of this libretto, one being the fine characterisation of the two main female parts: Suleika and Ottilie. They are different in their culture, status, age, experience, and so they are shown. Ottilie appears only in the second part, but she has an immediate presence. She has little time to evolve, but she is skilfully shown as a constant person, the personification of steadiness and truth. On the other hand, Suleika is first shown as an impulsive youth, who discovers love in the person of Ernst. Her first act aria ja, ich liebe ihn (yes, I love him) is the first climax of the opera. She leads the action in the first act, then in the second is confronted by Ottilie. Bauernfeld chose to show her then as a shy person, exhausted by her efforts until then and looking for help from the Christian God, another step in her evolution to a mature woman.

Bauernfeld has also been really successful in distributing the arias, ensembles and choruses. There is perhaps too much spoken dialogue but room is left for a good two hours of music of various kinds; and from that point of view he has fulfilled Mozart’s wishes without sacrificing anything of the logic of the play. Unlike Italian librettists, he didn’t pay very much attention to the quality of his verses and they are not very original, but provide good support to music. A point which can be considered either as positive or negative is the symmetry of the play: the two acts are built on the same scheme, and how well this would works on stage would depend on the music.

Footnotes

[1] "Dramatic-musical contrast: Orient and Occident, janissaries and knights, romantic and conjugal love, etc. Briefly, a Turkish-Christian mess". From his diary, 2nd May 1826, quoted in Franz Schubert by Brigitte Massin (Fayard, Paris, 1977) p. 350, See also O. E. Deutsch; Schubert: A Documentary Biography (Dent, London, 1946) no. 652.

[2] Quoted by Bauernfeld in Meister Favilla. In Memory of Josef Dessauer (1877). The translation given in Deutsch’s Memoirs, page 241, is: Dessauer wondered "whether the song was not indeed too sad, too melancholy." Schubert replied: "Do you know any gay music?".