You can’t beat it for dramatic texts: the Bible’s Book of Revelation, its visions of the end of time like something out of a drug trip. The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, creatures with multiple eyes and horns, great battles, earthquake, weeping and wailing are revealed as, one by one, a wounded lamb opens seals on a book.
These are scenes dramatized by vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra in The Book with Seven Seals, a 1937 oratorio by the Austrian composer Franz Schmidt. While not exactly a repertory staple, and a demanding work for both chorus and orchestra, it has its devoted admirers, including the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s music director Fabio Luisi. Luisi has recorded it with the MDR Leipzig Radio Symphony Orchestra, and video of a concert performance with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra is available on YouTube.
Luisi had programmed the work here before the COVID-19 pandemic made such an ambitious undertaking impossible. But he’ll finally conduct it March 1-3 with the DSO, Dallas Symphony Chorus and soloists.
Tenor Paul Appleby will sing the heroic role of the narrator, St. John the Divine, with bass Franz-Josef Selig as the Voice of the Lord. Rounding out the solo lineup will be soprano Meghan Kasanders, mezzo Kelley O’Connor, tenor Matthew Pearce and bass Hadleigh Adams. Bradley Hunter Welch will play the organ part, including two prominent solos. Running about two hours and a quarter, with intermission, the work will be sung in the original German, with projected English translations.
Visions of end times may have had particular resonance in mid-1930s Vienna, when Schmidt composed The Book (Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln in German). An Austrian chancellor had been assassinated, but not before dismantling the constitution in favor of conservative government modeled on Italian fascism. Hitler’s army marched into Austria in March 1938, just over a year after Schmidt completed the score. The oratorio was premiered in Vienna three months after the annexation.
Although little known on these shores, Schmidt, who lived from 1874 to 1939, was a major figure in early 20th-century Austrian music. Acclaimed as a pianist, cellist and conductor, he also taught at and headed a Vienna conservatory. His compositional output included two operas, four symphonies, chamber music and works for piano and organ. The DSO has played the Fourth Symphony twice in recent years, under Luisi and former music director Andrew Litton.
Next to contemporaries including Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg, his post-romantic musical language is conservative, but with plenty of surprises. The late Michael Steinberg cited three of Schmidt’s four symphonies as “among the strongest this symphony-rich twentieth century has produced,” adding, “It is not music for everybody, but if Bruckner speaks to you and if in general you are susceptible to expansive utterance, it may be music for you.”
Except for a patch here and there, The Book with the Seven Seals sounds nothing like Bruckner. True, Schmidt can write choral passages in a musical language Brahms would have found comfortable, but elsewhere the writing can be chromatically tortuous in post-Mahlerian manner. Orchestral sonorities are imaginatively varied, and soloists and chorus represent personages and celestial forces in ways you don’t always expect.
Fire and brimstone hardly dominate. The score includes surprisingly jolly marches, passages of great tenderness and mystery, and big choral fugues. The final chorus is a great celebration of salvation of the faithful.
“I believe that this work, together with Britten’s War Requiem and Frank Martin’s Golgotha, is the most important oratorio written in the 20th century,” Luisi says. “The visionary energy of St. John’s Revelation is put in music with both grace and power, actually and quite surprisingly (unlike Britten’s masterwork) without bombast.
“It’s trusting old forms like the fugue, developed in a very virtuosic manner, and therefore creating a connection with the old style of this genre, with Bach and Handel.”
He hopes audiences will be “seduced by the energy, the gravitas and the important meaning of this work, the great vocal parts, fantastic choral moments.”
For the premiere, Schmidt himself wrote, “My approach to the work had always been that of a deeply religious man and of an artist. … If my musical setting of this unparalleled work, which is as relevant today as it was at its creation eighteen-and-a-half centuries ago, should succeed in bringing the hearer spiritually closer to it, then that will be my greatest reward.”
Details
The Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Chorus perform Franz Schmidt’s Book with Seven Seals at 7:30 p.m. March 1 and 2 and 3 p.m. March 3 at Meyerson Symphony Center, 2301 Flora St. $45 to $248. 214-849-4376, dallassymphony.org.
