Nikolaus Harnoncourt insights into the autograph score and libretto recorded and introduced by Monika Mertl

A writer of popular hits must bear the concomitant consequences. The tunes of Der Freischütz were soon being whistled by barrow boys all over Europe following the opera's hugely successful première in Berlin on 18 June 1821, a success that led to an ectended run of performances in the city and that spread like wildfire across the rest of the continent, with stagings in Vienna, Dresden and Hamburg within a matter of months. In a whole series of often bizarre adaptations, the work caught on even in France, while at the same time dominating a middleclass domestic music-making in a way that has never been equalled before or since. In a graphic and satirical account of 1822, Heinrich Heine describes how he felt constantly "stifled vy violet silk" (a reference to the Bridesmaids' Chorus), yet not even he could gainsay the "excellence" of Weber's score.
Such immense popularity invariably rests upon misunderstandings. Thanks to the pioneering work of the Weber scholar, Friedrich Wilhelm Jähns, the reception history of Der Freischütz has benn charted in detail from the 1830s onwards, and a farrago of idées reçues it turns out to be. Although the complex background of what seems a simple enough story has been thoroughly analyzed over the years, in practice the prevailing impression remains one of harmlessness - a classic case of repression, one suspects. The myth of the German forest may long ago have been discredited, but our secret desire for a rural idyll and for unspoilt Nature is greater than ever, and gothic horror with a happy ending continues to warm the cockles of the heart.
Of particular relevance to anyone wanting to gain access to the fascinating but sinister world that lies concealed beneath its harmonious surface is the fact that the opera was written in the wake of the Napoleon Wars and was consciously located by both Weber and his librettist, Friedrich Kind, in a parallel post-war period, namely, in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War.

No flaxen-haired daredevil
The present recording was made in September 1995 in conjunction with a series of concert performances at the Berlin Philharmonie. One of the points that emerged most forcefully from these sessions was the way in which Max is characterized vocally. The young tenor Endrik Wottrich is uncharacteristically self-effacing for a singer of his Fach, ridding the role of its heroic pretensions and giving it a totally different aspect from the one that has become associated with it over the years.
This is of central importance for Harnoncourt's interpretation of the work: Max is no dashing huntsman who suddenly has a run of bad luck in the psychologically stressful run-up to his marriage. He is a dreamer and a fantast - as Weber makes clear in his score. In turn, this inevitably affects the relationships between the other characters.
On a personal level, Harnoncourt has no time for the general tendency to set store by psychology, but in this particular case he proves, once again, highly sympathetic in his analysis of the characters, advancing his own interpretation of Der Freischütz on the strenght of his fundamental loathing of every form of violence, be it war or "merely" hunting. The opera, he argues, is about outsiders in conflict with crumbling conventions, a conflict located in a field of tension between an unprincipled utilitarianism, with its instant gratification, and a sense of higher morality.
Harnoncourt first realized this interpretation of his at the Zurich Opera in 1993 in a production by the late RuthBerghaus. That he felt encouraged to renew his acquaintance with the work was due, above all, to the special sound quality of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra - a quality that has to do with more than merely the orchestra's famous brass section. He regards the sound of this orchestra as specifically "German" and, hence, as ideally suited to Der Freischütz.
The following conversation was recorded during the series of concert performances in Berlin.

Is Der Freischütz one of the pieces - like Fidelio and Mozart's operas - that you've always wanted to conduct?
Yes, long before I first did in Zurich, I wanted to get to grips with it. Der Freischütz is terribly compromised as a work - that's something you feel especially here in Berlin. The two numbers that are always immediately applauded are the Bridesmaid's Chorus and the Huntsmen's Chorus.

Compromised in the sense of intensely popular?
In the sense of intensely popular but also in the sense of a longing for pine-scented forests. For me, there's a big difference between Weber's and Heine's use of the word "German" and the way that other people use it. Then it loses all its subtlety and suggests nothing so much as 'gemütlichkeit' and picture-postcard kitsch. The players understood this very well. We simply refuse to believe that Weber wanted to present such a caricature of the "typical German", any more than his librettist, Kind, did- I'm reluctant in any case to distinguish between the two of them, since words and music form a single and indivisible whole in this work.

Two basically different women - two basically different men
How does this express iteself - in the way the characters are depicted, for instance?
There are the two female characters, for example they're totally different as individuals, Aennchen simply can't understand Agathe's grief and anxienties. She not only tries to comfort her, she also makes fun of her and may even hurt her feelings. I think the Bridesmaids' Chorus tends in the same direction. While we were rehearing it, I suddenly remembered how, on the eve of my daughter's wedding in Upper Austria, peasant girls from the surrounding area had arrived outside the house and sung exactly the same sort of serenades. Songs of advice from one woman to another, some of them even a little obscene, a mixture of love and malice, based on the principle: "you'll soon see for yourself!"

In other words, the sort of bitchiness that can characterize women in their dealings with each other.
Yes, indeed. But more important in my own view is the electricity between the couples. On the one hand, there is this relationship between the women, a relationship that's very strong, and on the other hand there are two assistant foresters, Max and Caspar. Max is a huntsman who's really no such thing. I always used to say at the rehersals he reads Goethe all the tima. I felt that was important on account of the way the part is characterized vocally. Normally tenors who sing this part begin by striking a heroic note: "Oh, this sun!" But the problem is that 80% of the part is marked piano, whereas the forte and fortissimo passages are really meant to suggest a sense of drowning in the orchestral floodtide.

In order to show Max failing.
Exactly. Caspar, by contrast, is an assistant forester who has just returned home the war. That seems to me to be an extremely crucial point. In other words, we see the demobbed soldiers and the huntsmen who remained at home and who represent something very traditional; and the peasants who don't like the huntsmen - that's an age-old antagonism. And it is very much the peasants who score a victory over Max here. These contrasts, and the fact that Cuno's two assistant foresters embody such extremes - it is all this, taken together, that creates such violent tension.

And what about the electricity between the couples?
For me, the real couple is Aennchen and Max. He may not be exactly the man she'd like him to be, but when she sings her aria about the dashing youth, it's a musical portrait of Max, as she imagines him to be. I think this is bound to hurt Agathe's feelings: "Aennchen is talking about my bridegroom!" Weber casts this aria in the form of a polonaise, a dance that involves stamping the ground with one's heel - the result is something very muscular and powerful. But the really great couple is Caspar and Agathe. Agathe is too classy for Max.

Can you justify that musically?
I can also justify it in terms of the text. There may here been something between Caspar and Agathe before he went off to fight in the war, but after his return he must heve given her the creeps with all his experinces - presumably he spoke ot nothing else. You can imagine all sorts of reasons. They then split up and the next man to come along was Max. But on a subliminal level, this bond still exists, hence, presumably, Caspar's hatred of Max.

Fear as a decisive motive
That would certainly account for Max's depression
Something must already have happened to affect the relationship between Max and Agathe. Max is constantly afraid that Caspar's more powerful personality might cause him to be sidelined. Agathe is always talking about Caspar, even when she condemns him. In that way she turns him into a threat. It seems to me impossible to overlook that fact.
At the same time, it's very Freudian. The closer the wedding gets, the more Max is conscious of his failure, of his weakness. He's anything but a flaxen haired daredevil. When he says, "At the evening I brought home a rich catch," you don't have the feeling that the object of his hunting expeditions is deer and wild boar.

Agathe certainly puts a lot of pressure on him.
Yes, she does, but very unconsciously. With her, too, fear is a decisive factor in motivating her behaviour. And Max's fear continues to increase in the course of the action. He knows exactly what he's let himself in for: The position of hereditary forester means a job and a girl. "If you fail at the trial tomorrow," says Cuno, "you'll lose the girl and your job."

His whole existence is at stake.
His whole existence. I see it like this: here's a man who bot has to and wants to achieve a state of normality and who, in order to do so, has to act as a huntsman - professionally. Scoring, after all, always represents a concrete success and at the same time is proof of one's virility. By scoring, Max would achieve a middle-class, well-ordered existence. The world of hunting is one that has had nothing to do with the war, a world where everything is regulated: the poacher is punished, and the peasants have no say. But when the opera begins, this well-ordered world of hunting has been disrupted as a peasant proves the better marksman, and the huntsman has to put up with public ridicule. The huntsmen's idyll is under threat from two different quarters: from the peasantry and from the world of Caspar and Samiel. Although Caspar would normally be part of the world of hunting, he stands apart from it by virtue of the fact that he is a war victim.

A clear political component
You've said several times that war plays an important role in the piece.
Yes, that's because the work describes a post-war period and was written during a real post-war period.

Whit pieces like Fidelio and Figaro you've repeatedly stressed that they contain no political agenda whatsoever. But Der Freischütz must be interpreted as a political piece in the sense that it depicts a post-war period, in ither words, a period when there are no longer any valid, functional social worms, where people attempt to cling to traditional rituals, where there is a blind faith in God and where superstition...
The character of Ottokar is conceived along these lines. I think that was intended by the two authors. I don't think you can read an unambiguous political dimension into the work, though it's certainly a powerful component. That's clear from the archaic world of hunting and also from the world of authority to which the huntsmen belong. It's obvious from Ottokar's music that he's not a powerful, authoritarian figure. He must be a young mand and totally inexperienced as a ruler - a man who still has to fight to assert his position and who keeps on cracking up. Weber wrote in his sketchbooks in this context: "An angry judge cannot be just." That's very significant: he wants to show us an unjust judge who has to mend his ways. It's brilliantly done.
This is where the Hermit comes in - not as a representative of religion, but as a kind of incorruptible conscience. The Hermit's entrance is tremendously powerful and suggests great authority - not in the modern, negative sense, but in the sense that he exudes a particularly powerful feeling of strength, something that one can trust in. As a couple, I see the Hermit and Samiel as embodying the black and white aspects of the human soul. Samiel's pronouncements in the Wolf's Glen Scene are every bit as authoritarian. Here, too, contradiction is out of the question.

Utilitarianism versus morality
In other words, absolute authority in its positive and negative manifestations.
We're dealing with ideas here. You could say that Samiel and Caspar embody utilitarianism at its most extreme: the arm in using magic bullets is deferred, the price doesn't have to be paid for three years, only then can one see the consequences. Against this is the authority of a morality that negates utilitarianism. After all. morality can't be justified on the grounds of usefulness, but must be motivated by some other factor. It isn't so easy to justify morality.

As a general concept, it's very interesting to see how these principles of good and evil square with characters who are incredibly modern from a psychological point of view.
I agree. I also find it interesting that the piece originally began with a scene between the Hermit and Agathe. Weber had already started to set it to music, when his wife, who, as a singer, had a well-developed sense of the theatre, said that it was silly and that the opera should begin with the common people. The librettist must have been really furious, letters were exchanged, he felt that his  views had been ignored and insisted that the scene should at least appear in the printed edition of the libretto. On the one hand, it's a brilliant idea that the Hermit is now mentioned only in passing. On the other hand, it would of course be great if the Hermit's entrance were a reappearance, since it would provide a tremendous link between the beginning and end of the work.

As it is, it is, of course, an extremely effective moment on stage.
I think Weber was grateful to his wife for her advice. The relationship between the two of them is extremely interesting, quite apart from all this.

A musicall portrait of a disrupted idyll
When you studied the autograph score, what were your principal discoveries?
That the autograph score contains no mistakes! It's perhaps worth adding here that there is a very fine facsimile edition of it. My main discovery was that in later editions everything has been standardized by analogy, even - and especially - where Weber has drawn the most extraordinarily subtle distinctions; articulation and dynamic markings have been totally unified. If one part is marked forte or fortissimo, this has simply been carried over into all the other parts, too. But Weber uses fives different dynamic markings from pianissimo to fortissimo, sometimes at one and the same time. Which is surprisingly modern. A clarinet will have a sudden crescendo, for example, while the other instruments remain quiet. During the double chorus for huntsmen and peasants, the strings play piano, the horns fortissimo. It barely comes off, but it's so well done that the result is a real sense of transparency. I've simply restored the original dynamics. The result, in a word, is a different tonal picture.

And it is this that conveys the feeling of disquiet that is so striking about your interpretation of the score. With all these dunamuc shifts and displaced accents, all these syncopations, you feel that there's something not quite right beneath the surface.
The metrical hierarchy is constantly undermined. But there's something else that's important. Jähns, who was only twelve when he attended the first performance, later consulted many of the musicians, including the first Agathe. He wrote down the metronome markings, showing how Weber took the different tempi, and he commented on them, comparing them with what was normal in his own day. I found that very interesting and have allowed it to filter through into my own interpretation.

In my own recollection of the Zurich production there was one particularly striking departure from the usual tempi, the aria "Leise, leise".
Of course, one has to take account of the fact that different singers have different lungs. But there's a sense of total calm, total stasis here. I do believe that that os what Weber wanted.

You've mentioned the progressive nature of the score...
The use of leitmotifs to hold the piece togheter is really very noticeable. There'd been nothing like this previously, at least not on this scale. The overture is almost like a quarry, a great mine of blocklike material from which the veins of the music extend as far as the finale.
The overture begins with a crescendo extending over the first two bars. It quite clearly signifies a threat. The answer on the violins is equally certainly an expression of consolation. And then you get this passage on the horns that must represent Nature. One mustn't be afraid of conjuring up the German forest here, there's nothing evil about it. This helps to locate the piece in a specific place: it is an outdoor piece and at the same time a night-piece.
But the cellos then add a sforzato accent that has nothing to do with the forest but which disrupts the horn melody suggesting that there's something not quite right about this forest, something sinister and oppressive: it's not just a place of peace. It's also dark in the forest, there's that as well. That's why it's so quiet - in contrast to the Huntsmen's Chorus, which is incredubly loud and up-front.
The Samiel motif then bursts into this world of the German forest, a motif heard on timpani and pizzicato double bass on the second and fourth beats of the bar. It's clear to even the dullest listener that this motif will dominate the piece. And this disquiet associated with Samiel proves the starting-point for the Vivace, which begins with the very motif that Max will later sing in his aria: "But dark forces are ensnaring me!" - although Nature is really great! We've just heard what these dark powers sound like.

An ambiguous finale
What does the musical subtext have to tell us about the character's state of mind?
The Trio in Act Two is very interesting in this context. It's dominated by Agathe's feelings of anxiety. The motif, "I'm so afraid, o stay!", is a very Romantic figure, except that it's normally syncopated: this descending scale is very striking. And this motif is taken up again and again. Max sings the words "Should fear dwell in a huntsman's heart?" to it, punching out the crotchets as though trying to pluck up courage. Following a vigorous phrase in the orchestra, during which Max looks at the moon - it's brilliantly orchestrated with the flutes, so that the moon actually seems to shine - Aennchen asks, "Do you want to observe the heavens?" - very cheekily, without any reference to the events outside. To which Max replies, giving his voice a totally new colour: "My word and my duty call me from here. "At this point the orchestra plays the motif first heards "O stay". That is to say: "I'd much rather stay here, since I too feel a very reals sense of panic." And this fear is now fortissimo, whereas previously it was piano. And then he sings, to the Fear motif: "My word and my duty call me from here." I think it's very subtly worked in. After that it gets quieter and quieter, and the word "Farewell" is sung to a very inward dolce: it's not just any farewell. They're all afraid, even Aennchen. And then the figure is inverted: Max has to summon up his whole strenght before finally tearing himself away. If Max were portrayed as a valiant huntsman, there'd be horn calls here: no fear dwells in the huntsman's heart. But the music says it all: he's scared shitless.

Yes, I can see that. I always have a problem with Max's aria: is it only in his imagination that he was once a dashing youth, or was he really once like that?
When he explains what he used to be like, the tenderness and lyricism of the music contradict him. The melody expresses an incredible sense of happiness and delight, as though he's floating on air. It's impossible to imagine him in a huntsman's boots. What he remembers I see as unreal. Huntsmen, like anglers, are known for their tall stories.
His memory of himself as a hard-hitting, optimistic, fashionable and dashing hutman is nowhere confirmed by the music. The only hunt that takes place is the Wild Hunt in the Wolf's Glen Scene. If the forest that is heard in the music at the very start of the overture were a game reserve, it would sound completely different. Virtually every symphony of the period ended with a tempo da caccia - it was a language that all composers spoke fluently. But Weber describes a dark forest with a groan of anguish on the cello. It hardly suggests the good luck of a German huntsman. For that, you'd need at least to have a reminiscence of the Huntsmen's Chorus in the overture, but that's precisely what you don't get.

One thing is certainly noteworthy: quite apart from the fact that Weber's intentions are clearly written into the score, he also expressed his views most emphatically in an interview with his fellow composer, Johann Christian Lobe, in the course of which he explicitly stated that he was concerned with images of the sinister and eerie.

He said that people would be surprised that so much takes place in the dark.

And in spite of these remarks, which were published as long ago as 1855, people have consistently interpreted it differently.
Even Jähns reports that the work's performing history was tending in the direction of greater liveliness and gaiety. The whole of the German gymnastics movement that arose in the early years of the 19th century and that stressed the importance of physical exercise in moulding the German national character at a time of nationalist aspirations had a powerful influence on Spieloper, altough it is not clear exactly why this should have been so. But it may have been this mentality that allowed numbers such as the Bridesmaids' Chorus and the Huntsmen's Chorus to take root in the German consciousness. Weber could certainly write effective numbers. I've never attended a performance of Der Freischütz when the audience hasn't applauded Agathe's aria or Aennchen's two arias. But I've never know Max's aria to be spontaneously applauded. It ends on such an oppressive note that there's no sense of joyful expectation. Weber was aware of what he was doing: something like that doesn't happen just by chance.

A brief word on the ending of the piece. It ends in C major, and Weber writes: "The whole thing ends happily. "But is it really a happy ending?
There's certaninly something of a happy ending about it. At that time, a year's delay in an engagement was like saying: "You can get married tomorrow." But Caspar's death overshadows everything. The finale seems something of an afterhought. It includes a quotation from the overture, which also ends in C major. Formally, it's good that this whole arch rests on two such solid pillars. But I must say that I sometimes find C major to be particularly oppressive. The saddest funeral march that I know is the Dead March from Handel's Saul - and it's in C major. And then there's the ending of Così fan tutte: there's this sense of upheavel; everything seems to have sorted iteself out, and yet you feel that it's all wrong, in spite of the C major, or precisely because of the C major. The same is true of Der Freischütz. In the hierarchy of tonalities, C major means "everything's all right", but not in the way that F major does. F major is really yhe tonality of Christmas. But in any case, things are not all right at the end of Der Freischütz: this remote and isolated world is now severely compromised. The messages is: let's be brave! We'll go on living we'll manage somehow, in five years' time we'll have forgotten all about it. Like all great pieces, it has these ambiguities to it.