The Devil's Pleasure Palace Read Free Page A

Teufels Lustschloss ( The Devil’s Pleasure Palace) , with a libretto by August von Kotzebue. The work remained unperformed until 1978, when it finally was staged in Potsdam, outside of Berlin. To say that Schubert was young when he composed this youthful but culturally seminal work partially obscures that he also proved middle-aged, dying at thirty-one in 1828. People got older younger then, grew up faster, and perhaps lived life more fully. In any case, the creative force embodied by Schubert was in a hurry to meet its negation, which is to say, its completion.
    In Des Teufels Lustschloss , Oswald, a poor knight, marries Luitgarde, an aristocrat’s niece who is promptly disinherited. Heading for a new life, they are caught in a raging storm and take refuge in a nearby inn. When superstitious villagers tell of a strange, haunted castle in the vicinity, Oswald and his faithful squire, Robert, set off to investigate the manor house, which indeed turns out to be bristling with terrors and temptations. One of the latter takes the form of a shapely Amazon who tries to seduce Oswald, warning him of dire consequences should he not succumb. (He does not.) The more adamantly faithful Oswald is, though, 9the more terrors rise up to threaten him. He is finally saved by the timely arrival of Luitgarde, who, when threatened with death herself, stands fast—and suddenly the castle crumbles.
    In the end, it all turns out to have been an illusion. The spirits were the villagers in disguise, hired by Luitgarde’s uncle to test Oswald’s courage under fire and prove him worthy of Luitgarde.
    Conventional musical wisdom has long held that Kotzebue’s libretto is the principal reason for the opera’s neglect—an explanation applied to all Schubert operas, as it happens. More likely, the cause is Schubert’s inexpert handling of the dramatic necessities inherent in operatic composition; what works so brilliantly for him in songs and song cycles failed him as a composer in the larger forms of vocal compositions (although, curiously, not in his symphonies, each of which grew in sophistication and scope).
    But, seen in another light, Kotzebue’s work is entirely in line with European philosophical thought of the time as expressed through art. Recall that this is the early nineteenth century, not the twentieth; the horrors of 1914 and 1939 are still far in the future. The happy ending (a victory of love over death) is not a cop-out but the proof of the promise of redemption—that we must suffer the temptations and travails of Christ and face our worst fears in order to win in the end. That its conclusion (“And then I woke up . . . and it was all a dream!”) has since become a groan-worthy cliché is not Kotzebue’s fault, given that he wrote in a less cynical age, but anyone ever tempted to throw a shoe at the end of Fritz Lang’s 1944 film noir, The Woman in the Window , knows what I mean. Not to mention Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .
    And who represents the saving power of divine grace? Almost invariably, the woman, whose own self-sacrifice rescues and transfigures the flawed male hero. In Goethe’s famous words from the second part of Faust : “ Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan ,” or, “the Eternal Feminine draws us onward.” The Eternal Feminine, a sexually anti-egalitarian concept that feminists of both sexes today would regard as laughable, is one of the organizing principles of the cosmos, and a crucial factor in the hero’s journey. Even the pansexuality of today, try though it might, cannot replace this naturally primal force: the union of opposites into a harmonious, generative whole.
    Crucially, then, Oswald is saved by the love of a good woman; so is the Flying Dutchman in Wagner’s opera; so is Robert le diable inMeyerbeer’s opera of the same name; so is Max the Freischütz in Weber’s masterpiece. And so, in another Wagner