Der Zwerg at the Dutch National Opera review — a timely tribute to its troubled composer

The clue is in the title, Der Zwerg (The Dwarf). Alexander Zemlinsky’s heart-wrenching opera about identity, rejection and callous ambivalence is about a special present given to the Spanish Infanta on her 18th birthday: a dwarf. The dwarf has no insight into his diminutive stature, and when people laugh at him, he thinks they are laughing with him. A darn good singer, he falls in love with the Infanta, is left a broken plaything, recognising himself for what he is when confronted in a mirror and dies of heartbreak.

The work is challenging enough in its own right. But this was Zemlinsky’s autobiography. He was an unattractive, diminutive man who had been rejected by a young woman. The experience was so searing that he chose eventually to bare his soul in Der Zwerg. That took extraordinary courage.

But to make any sense at all, the opera needs, let’s face it, a dwarf. Instead, Dutch National Opera gives us a strange cloaked man with multicoloured bird wings who occasionally, on background film, was to be seen rolling around in the mud. Ridiculous.

I had some doubts about using the “dwarf” word in this febrile era. Should I instead play it safe? Head down the PORG (People of Restricted Growth) euphemism road? It shows where we’ve arrived at in today’s woke Britain.

After all, if art historian Andrew Graham Dixon can be shown the red card by the drunken President of the Cambridge Union Society for even mimicking Hitler’s words while denouncing the dictator in a debate on Good Taste, am I risking being besieged by a Twitter mob?

I was much reassured to learn that Little People of America, the go-to organisation for dwarves in the land of the erstwhile free, recently celebrated “October is Dwarfism Awareness Month”. Their gripe is with the common term, “midget”, which is deemed derogatory. All in all, they simply wish to be understood rather than capitalise on some confected grievance, so I shall tip my hat to them. So, dwarf it is, folks.

The dwarf dilemma is compounded by the fact that diminutive heldentenors – this is a taxing, heroic role Zemlinsky crafts – are thin on the ground. There are work arounds. Deutsche Opera found a satisfactory solution in 2020, mounting a doppelganger approach.

The singing tenor was shadowed by a mouthing dwarf. Sometimes the tenor sang from a rostrum while the dwarf acted with the Infanta. At others, they were an ensemble, especially in the mirror scene towards the end when the dwarf eventually confronts reality. Opera is hardly reality. This illusion was convincing, and the mind rapidly screened out the duality.

Nanouk Leopold, this Dutch National production’s director, would have done well to consult both LPA and Deutsche Opera’s approach. She is an avant-garde Dutch film director, now turning her attention to opera. The IMDb entry for her romantic work, Brownian Movement, is, to put it charitably, sardonic. “Clearly an art house sort of film with little in the way of appeal to the average viewer.” Oh dear.

This average opera critic, feathered hero boo-boo and mud flailing apart found much to admire in her production. Leopold’s stroke of genius was to have the Infanta step out of Diego Velázquez’s 1656 enigmatic portrait of the Spanish court, Las Meninas. And the illusion was created by the simplest device, triangulating the Infanta’s blond hair, as in the portrait. The icon was standing before us.

Velázquez’s masterpiece is autobiographical and features a dwarf. Leopold uses Zemlinsky’s opera to bring the painting’s characters to life. Even though the dress is modern pink confection, we are watching the arch, overindulged, sideways glancing Infanta of the portrait spring into action.

The stage is set in tiered squares, each character occupying their own box. As in life. As a film director, Leopold uses projections backstage and on an opaque front screen. This is the only point where the characters come together.

There is a lot of nonsense. The female courtiers – all beautifully dressed in candy floss pink – appear on film with pigs’ trotters for hands and feet, rip up Astroturf, then indulge in a synchronous, choreographed wallow in mud on their backs. “Is there a Dr Sigmund Freud in the audience?”

The plot is relatively straightforward. At her birthday party, the Spanish crown princess, the Infanta, receives a very special present: a little person who is supposed to cheer her up. Der Zwerg soon falls madly in love with the Infanta and sings her a love song. This is the moment when Zemlinsky casts his most magical spell, the “Blood Orange” aria. The dwarf – he is pointedly given no name in the libretto, magnifying his tragedy – bares his soul. If trifled with he will, like a blood orange, bleed.

The Infanta is mercilessly trifling with him. An encouraging white rose falsely buoys his hopes. Even when rejecting him, she says she will dance with him at her party, but never value him.To everyone’s surprise, the little man has no idea of his true appearance, and while he fancies himself a brave knight, he manages to move everyone with his singing. The princess plays a contradictory game of attraction and pouting repulsion.

It is clear throughout that a relationship might develop between the two, but in a world of outward appearances, the reality of the mirror image can sometimes be tragically confrontational.

The opera is based on a text of Oscar Wilde on the theme, “Only the shallow know themselves”. Leopold riffs off the modern fixation with image, selfies, social media obsession. The 16th century Infanta is today’s valueless “Influencer”. Her equivalent lives amongst us today, on west coast America, the Duchess of Sussex.

Who the hell is Zemlinsky anyway? I am ashamed I had never heard of him until I experienced Der Zwerg. Cognoscenti readers may titter, but it’s a failing shared by none other than the conductor Pierre Boulez. I am not alone.

He was of the turn of the century Viennese school, Mahler’s brother-in-law, tutor of Arnold Schönberg, friendly with Berg. And, like many of his Jewish contemporaries, fled Nazism for America, where he died in Larchmont in 1942, having only four days before moved into a beautiful home where he had hoped to find peace.

One of Germany’s “forgotten” composers, stripped of their reputations at home by anti-Semitism, he never made it to the pastures of Hollywood. Kurt Weill, Igor Stravinsky and his erstwhile pupil, Schönberg, burnished their European reputations with American audiences, and Zemlinsky faded into obscurity.

The author, critic and Zemlinsky biographer, Antony Beaumont, is on a one-man mission to revive the composer in public esteem. For all that you need to know about Alexander Zemlinsky, I thoroughly recommend watching a talk Beaumont delivered in 2014 at the Hampstead Arts Festival.

Zemlinsky was influenced by Brahms, Mahler, Wagner and Schönberg, consolidating late-Romanticism and twentieth-century modernism. His works experiment with tonality, but he did not embrace atonalism or the twelve-tone technique. His later works show movement towards neoclassicism and jazz. He never courted fashion.

In New York, he struggled to receive recognition for his work. He wrote a few popular songs, and a Sinfonietta was performed by the Philharmonic Society of New York in December 1940 and broadcast by NBC. Efforts to get his opera, Der König Kandaules premiered in at the Metropolitan Opera received little interest.

He began work on a new opera, Circe, in 1939, but it was never finished. Zemlinsky suffered several strokes, but he did meet Schönberg for a reconciliatory final time. The composers had not seen each other since 1933 when they had fallen out over that 12 tone thing.

His music slowly disappeared from concert halls until the 1960s, when a revival of works by Mahler initiated a revival for Zemlinsky, too. His Fourth Quartet and Psalm XIII were discovered in his desk after he died, and the symphonic poem Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), which had been premiered in 1905 but was thought lost, was assembled in 1984 from manuscripts found in Vienna and Washington. It is now one of Zemlinsky’s most-performed works.

The opera Der Traumgörge (Görge the Dreamer) was scheduled to receive its premiere at the Vienna State Opera in 1907, Mahler conducting, but the concert was cancelled by Felix Weingartner, the Austrian conductor. Even in his early days, Zemlinsky struggled to get a hearing. But, courtesy of Beaumont, Deutsche Opera and Dutch National Opera, the Zemlinsky voice is making itself heard once more.

In today’s internet age, perhaps we risk aping early twentieth-century Viennese modernity, obsessed with identity in crisis. Like the Viennese, we are increasingly preoccupied with the play between external appearances and internal dimensions of the self.

The fatal end to the dwarf’s encounter with his reflection speaks to the devastating consequences of the limits of self-knowledge. Delusional conceptions of recognition – ranging from self-identity to the need for acknowledgement by others – have become increasingly prominent in our teeming blogosphere.

Oddly, theories of recognition have rarely played a role in the interpretation of operatic works. The engagement with Zemlinsky’s opera, and the Oscar Wilde text on which it is based, makes Der Zwerg truly an opera of today.

I forgive Nanouk Leopold for her birdman and wallowing pigs. This Las Maninas interpretation of Der Zwerg is a true tribute to its troubled composer.