In 1924, the German director Robert Wiene was lured to Vienna by the Austrian company Pan-Film. This was one of the country’s leading production companies, with a distribution network that covered a large portion of central and eastern Europe. But the Austrian industry was struggling (especially in comparison with its mighty neighbour Germany), so the recruitment of Wiene—one of Germany’s most successful directors—was designed to bolster their status and generate a number of quality commercial productions. Accordingly, Wiene was appointed “Oberregisseur” and given a large degree of freedom. He stayed for three years and directed five films. Only three of these survive, Orlacs Hände (1924) being the most well-known. But the film with the most cultural clout was undoubtedly Der Rosenkavalier, made in 1925 and premiered in January 1926.
This was an adaptation of Richard Strauss’s opera of the same name, first staged in 1911. Strauss’s original librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal was hired to write a screenplay as early as 1923, and Strauss to adapt his score to the film. Although Hofmannsthal remained the accredited scenarist, his screenplay was in fact almost wholly rejected by Wiene, who wrote his own treatment with the Austrian scenarist Ludwig Nerz. Hofmannsthal’s treatment had significantly reworked the plot of the opera, whereas Wiene and Nerz actually stayed reasonably close to it (albeit with some significant changes). But Pan-Film were keen to emphasize the proximity of film and opera. After all, it was a considerable coup to have one of the world’s most renowned composers create a film score. So the names of Strauss and Hofmannsthal were mobilized prominently in Pan-Film’s publicity, as was Alfred Roller, the set designer—who was also the original set designer for the opera in 1911. What’s more, the film premiered on 10 January 1926 in the Semperoper, Dresden’s prestigious opera house—the very venue where the opera Der Rosenkavalier had premiered on 26 January 1911—with Strauss himself conducting the hundred-strong orchestra. Released across Europe later in 1926 (with Strauss reprising his role as conductor for the London premiere in April), the film was a critical success—but subsequently disappeared from public view. Various, incomplete, versions were revived from the 1960s onwards, but it wasn’t until Film Archiv Austria undertook a major restoration in the early 2000s that the film could be seen in anything like its original form—complete with a reconstructed version of Strauss’s score. The restoration was premiered in 2006—once again in the Dresden Semperoper—and released on DVD in 2007.
All that said, is the film any good? Well, not particularly. Which is to say, the music is superb, but the film itself has some significant drawbacks. My usual habit is to go through a film chronologically, but I don’t think that would reap a great deal of reward with Der Rosenkavalier. Instead, I’d rather concentrate on its personnel and weave my thoughts around how the film deals with character and tone. So:
Princess Werdenberg, known as the Marschallin (Huguette Duflos). The central character of opera and film, the Marschallin, is a married woman whose husband—the Marschall—is permanently away from home in the army. Her lover is a younger man, Octavian, who brings her happiness but whose youth she knows will one day lead him away from her. The film provides us with more backstory to the Marschallin, offering in the opening scenes a flashback to her youth in a convent. We see her forced to accept an arranged marriage to Prince Werdenberg. Her wedding day is also the day on which her husband leaves to take command of the army. The Marschallin looks like a Velasquez, wearing a gorgeous white dress with rather fin-de-siècle curled motifs running down its flanks. She looks beautiful, but also awkward, stiff, uncertain. The camera keeps its distance, as though proximity—sheer physical closeness—is alien to the mood of the scene. The flashback gives us a glimpse of the pressures on her to look and act a certain part, whilst simultaneously being denied the warmth of human connection from her husband.
But though this flashback signals the Marschallin’s melancholy in the present, the effect is not fully felt on screen. It is certainly indicated in titles and telegraphed with gesture. But Duflos offers no depth or complexity of feeling, nor does the camera offer any close-ups to seek out more. The Marschallin is the heart of the opera and should be the heart of the film. But Duflos and Wiene offer only surfaces, flat pictorial representations of melancholy, not melancholy itself. Strauss’s music is fully alert to what should be being conveyed on screen: all the feeling is in the music, not in the images. The film cries out for some close-ups, for some expressive way of externalizing the Marschallin’s complex emotions. But Wiene’s scenario even cuts the most intimate scenes from the opera, where the character’s subjective thoughts are explored.
In the opera, at the end of Act 1, the Marschallin is once more alone with Octavian. The morning routine has wearied her, and she begins to reflect on the passage of time. Her aria-cum-monologue, “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding”, has the following text:
Time is a strange thing. / When one lives heedlessly, time means nothing. / But then suddenly, one is aware of nothing else. / It is all around us, it is also inside us. / It trickles in our faces, / it trickles in the looking glass, / it flows through my temples. / And between me and you / it flows again, silently, like an hourglass. / Oh, Quinquin! Sometimes I hear it flowing— / ceaselessly. / Sometimes I rise in the middle of the night / and stop all the clocks, all of them.
Under these last lines, Strauss uses harp and celesta to mimic the sounds of a clock. Their high, metallic notes strike thirteen times. It’s a chilly pulse, chiming through the orchestra. It’s a premonition of death, of stillness—and the music comes to a halt at the thirteenth stroke. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking moment. The Marschallin voices her thoughts (and fears), but the real poignancy is in the way the orchestra articulates her subjective mood. It’s not just those thirteen chimes—that seem to come from within the Marschallin’s imagination, not from any real clock within the external scene—but the melancholic tone and texture of the orchestra. Strauss’s sound world is suspended in a kind of autumnal half-light, so that even when it dances to the rhythm of a waltz its tone is gently nostalgic—as though it knows that the dance must come to an end, or has already come to an end. Even when the Marschallin tries to convince herself (in subsequent lines) that the passage of time is all part of God’s plan, the orchestra is not convinced. The orchestra is all-knowing, and its early twentieth-century mindset is subtly at odds with the eighteenth-century mindset of its character. The passage of time is already apparent to us, as the world on stage is a rococo past at odds with our present—be it 1911 or 2023. Indeed, the waltz themes of the opera are deliberately at odds with its historical setting: the waltz was a nineteenth-century mode, and (while still being in use in new compositions in the 1910s) already a kind of old-fashioned musical idiom by the time Strauss wrote Der Rosenkavalier in 1909-10. Act 1 of the opera ends with Octavian leaving the Marschallin’s room, and the Marschallin realizes that she forgot to kiss him goodbye. The curtain falls as she looks at herself in the mirror. For all the apparent lightness of the opera’s treatment of love and sex, there are much deeper strata of meaning and feeling at work throughout.
Where, where in Wiene’s film is there anything like this? Yes, there are moments where we see the Marschallin look pained or sad, but they are so fleeting, so superficial. When she sees Octavian kissing a young woman (Sophie) at the tavern, she looks hurt—but no more. It’s not just that the performance is awkward (it is), it’s that Wiene’s camera doesn’t react. There is no movement, no proximity, no expression. For a director best-known for the most famous expressionist film ever made—Das Cabinet der Doctor Caligari (1920)—Der Rosenkavalier film lacks any sustained externalization of feeling in sets, in lighting, in performance, in camerawork. One of the only times in the entire film we see the Marschallin alone is after her husband has (unbeknownst to her) triumphed on the battlefield. In her room, she remembers the kiss Octavian bestowed on Sophie in the garden. She says she knew this time would come, that she had tried to hide it from herself… Strauss’s music makes magic of this scene, but the visual equivalent is bereft of magic. The Marschallin clutches her dog and swoons a little on her chaise longue. There is no sustained close-up, the camera (as throughout the film) hardly wishing to move beyond a medium close shot of the performers. And Duflos herself is hardly the most subtle performer here, looking pained but never convincingly sorrowful. We should be more moved, infinitely more moved, here. The music is crying out for a more convincing, a more filmic, moment of expression. Oh, for a different director, or for a script that allotted more room and more power to the close-up.
Count Octavian (Jaque Catelain). It doesn’t help that the Marschallin’s young lover is played by Jaque Catelain. In real life, Catelain was the lover of Marcel L’Herbier, who gave him leading roles in many of his silent features during the 1920s. Catelain is an acknowledged “weak point” in L’Herbier’s filmography. As Noël Burch puts it: “Boasting an unsettling androgynous beaty but lacking ability as a mime or comedian, this star resembles a kind of wooden Harry Langdon, charmless and humorous, as stiff as a shopfront mannequin.” (“Ambivalences d’un réalisateur ‘bisexuel’”, 204.) Catelain’s androgyny is at least a potential advantage for his role as Octavian: a lover younger than the Marschallin who can convincingly disguise himself as a maid for the plot’s various subterfuges. In the opera, all three members of the central love triangle are played/sung by women: the Marschallin is a dramatic soprano, Octavian a mezzo-soprano, and Sophie (Octavian’s subsequent lover) a lyric soprano.
But even if the sexual ambiguities of the original opera suit Catelain superficially, he still needs to convince us through performance in the film. The opening scenes immediately present us with the problems that continue throughout the film. Octavian’s arrival, through the Marschallin’s window, and meeting with her in the early hours are awkward, stiff, contrived. Duflos and Catelain move round each other, pulling poses, throwing back their heads, clasping their hands. Nothing about them suggests the physical, let alone emotional, attraction for the lovers. Nor does the camera. It remains motionless, just keeping its distance and watching the performers go through the motions. “There are no words in the world to tell you how much I love you…” Octavian says to the Marschallin. Fine, but how about a performance to tell her—to tell us—that you love her? Clasping and twitching and grinning and moving awkwardly doesn’t do it.
Even less convincing is Octavian’s subsequent flirtation with Sophie: there is nothing in his body or face that suggests genuine desire or feeling, let alone the complexities of being torn between his old and new love interests. I’d say that the music saves both these scenes—and my god, the music is beautiful—but it doesn’t. The music in fact underlines how compromised are the performances, and how inadequate is the direction in lifting the film above a series of gestures without deeper meaning.
Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau (Michael Bohnen). The best performance in the film is in the part of the impoverished Baron Ochs, the Marschallin’s cousin who wants to marry Sophie and thus inherit her dowry. In this role, Michael Bohnen is far more engaging a presence than Duflos or Catelain. He had every reason to be, for he was a professional baritone and had played the role of Ochs on stage: this was his part, and you can tell. We first see him in bed, buried under a mountain of blankets. When he gets up, his character is fully formed, convincing, human. Bohnen knows how to put on a pair of round spectacles and make it funny. And Ochs’s servants—impoverished like their master—are likewise more human and interesting than the powdered servants who staff the Marschallin’s apartments. Ochs’s chief servant is hairy, gruff, always chewing, stifling his giggles; and the stableboy looks pleasingly gormless, countrified, confused.
See how these scenes have a kind of life and vitality not seen in many other places in the film. And listen how—at last—music, image, and performance work in accord. Strauss’s elegant waltz theme as Ochs has his servants dress him underlines the contrast between the Baron’s aristocratic pretensions and his impoverished state. Just as Ochs reads the letter, a delightful waltz—orchestrated to resemble a hurdy-gurdy—strikes up. It is the stableboy, playing a hurdy-gurdy in the yard, a group of cats feeding near his feet. Once more, the waltz is suggestive of Vienna—Ochs’s destination—but performed on a peasant’s instrument, a rural counterpart to the orchestral strains of the melody heard in the Marschallin’s aristocratic world. It is Ochs’s exuberant presence and performance that makes his appearance in the Maschallin’s world such a relief: here at last is someone who conveys emotions, even if they are comic rather than tragic. Bohnen makes his eyebrows twitch, he wriggles with delight, dances with glee, puffs himself up with pride and arrogance. He enlivens every scene he’s in. It’s as though he’s being directed not by Wiene but by Lubitsch. He also gets the only proper close-up in the film: when he roars with pain, having been wounded in a brief swordfight with Octavian. It’s a marker of the film’s emotional range that the only time it deigns to provide a real close-up is for a crude expression of pain, and never for the subtle pangs of melancholy, sadness, or love.
Sophie von Faninal (Felicie Berger). Sophie is the daughter of a parvenu bourgeois, whose fortune as the army’s provisioner has made her desirable to the impoverished blueblood Ochs. Octavian encounters her at an open-air dance, where he takes pity on her because she is being shunned as a newcomer. Berger is very pretty, and appropriately youthful (given the need to contrast her with the older Marschallin). And I think her performance—girlish, slightly gauche—looks all the better for being opposite the utterly unconvincing Catelain. Catelain’s facial expressions in his first scene with Sophie make him look like a chipmunk: he’s all goggling eyes, silly smile, bared teeth, trembly little gestures and ticks.
The centrepiece of the film has the same issue. Here, Octavian has been nominated by the Marschallin to act as “Rosenkavalier”, giving a silver rose to Sophie as a promise of Ochs’s betrothal. The scene is as musically beautiful as any in the film. The descending motif of the rose—spelled out by harp, celesta, triangle, and glockenspiel—has an unearthly, otherworldly texture. In the opera, the rose theme is a counterpoint to the similarly high notes of the chiming clock in the Marschallin’s monologue in Act 1. The lovers have their own kind of time signature in their theme, floating high above the rest of the orchestra. Their music is piercingly lovely. But the film cannot match it. Catelain’s performance in the rose-giving scene is unmoving in every sense: stiff, awkward. Berger’s performance is as natural as the circumstance allows: she is meant to be awkward, shy, smitten. But surely there are subtler, more emotionally revealing, ways of rendering this encounter: to reveal the love beneath the formality. The contrast between music and image is again evident in Octavian and Sophie’s final meeting in the extended ball sequence at the end of the film. They meet, knowing that they can surely be together at last. And the music is as meltingly tender, as gentle, and rapt as the scene demands. But the scene doesn’t work on screen. Berger is perfectly good here: her hesitancy, her disbelief, her restrained joy. But Catelain is dreadful: he can’t hold his body naturally, can’t suggest any kind of emotion with his arms, his posture, his face. Thus, the climactic emotional scene between the lovers is a dud.
Annina and Valzacchi (Carmen Cartellieri and Friedrich Féher). These two minor characters appear only in a few scenes in the film. Either their roles are somewhat underwritten or there may be some missing fragments of the film that would give greater prominence to them. Early in the film, hoping to reveal the Marschallin’s affair, Annina engages with “Her High Apostolic Majesty’s Commission” for morality, a group of bewigged old men. (In the opera, there is none of this: Annina and Valzacchi are employed by Ochs to find “Mariandl”, the name given by Octavian when he is disguised as a maid.) The “Commission” likewise isn’t developed much in the film, but they get a lovely, slightly cumbersome waltz in the score: the tempo relents, as though the fuddy-duddies of the Commission are circling in slow-motion. In the opera, Annina and Valzacchi are niece and uncle; in the film, they are unrelated and form the third romantic couple to find happiness in the final scenes. Do they have inner lives? The film doesn’t, can’t, will not, show us.
The Marschall (Paul Hartmann). We never see or hear this character in the opera. The Marschallin’s husband is permanently absent from her life, hence her lover and her sense of loneliness. For the film version, we see the Marschall in a flashback of his wedding to the Marschallin. Strauss accompanies the scene with martial music: trumpets and timpani thump out a repetitive melody; it’s a march rather than a dance, a fanfare for a different kind of ceremony—not a wedding. It’s a simple and effective means of underlining the total absence of sentiment in this marriage. The Marschall’s music dominates the scene, obliterating any joy his bride might have felt.
But the film complicates our impression of the Marschall, for we subsequently see his military campaign, together with his frustration at not hearing from his wife. Strauss’s martial music gives the character a sense of pomp, but also of activity and passion. (The way he bosses the army is also played for laughs: he gets them all up early and on parade because he’s jealous of the letters they get from their loved ones.) The film wants us to feel sympathy for him, but Wiene’s direction is not sympathetic enough. The camera never bothers to find filmic ways of emphasizing the Marschall’s mood. We just watch him wander around looking stiff and uncomfortable. That said, perhaps the only time Wiene uses effectively dramatic lighting in the film is when we see the Marschall alone in his billet, the firelight casting shadows around him. It makes him look all the more lonely, angry, isolated. But (as ever) Wiene never makes much or more of this. No close-up, no development of character. Yet again, I can only find fault with the direction: why doesn’t it do something with its material?
The film brings back this character in the climactic sequence, a masked ball set in and around the Marschallin’s estate. Everyone is in disguise, trying and succeeding to lure Ochs into a compromising situation in order to break his engagement with Sophie. The final scenes unite three couples: Octavian and Sophie, Annina and Valzacchi, the Marshall and Maschallin. Ochs, meanwhile, slinks away in shame… Thus, the film offers a neat tying-up of ends that the opera eschews. (In the latter, the Marschallin relinquishes Octavian to Sophie, but she is left alone at the end. The Marschall never appears.)
Hofmannstahl, Strauss, Wiene. The tensions between the film’s three major “authors” are evident in its original release. The Dresden premiere was conducted by Strauss on 11 January 1926. Despite his decades of experience at the podium, Strauss has never accompanied a film projection: the film had to be stopped twenty times during the performance because Strauss was concentrating on his musicians and not the screen (Jung & Schatzberg, 126). A critic said that Strauss had “torn the film to shreds” to preserve the continuity of his musical performance. By the time of the Berlin premiere, just five days later, the experienced cinema musician Willy Schmidt-Gentner had taken over the duties at the podium and rearranged the music to better its synchronization with the film. (Strauss merely sat in the audience.) The film was a great success, much bolstered by the score and the fame of its author—as well as the supposed involvement of Hofmannsthal as scenarist.
Hofmannsthal himself was initially full of praise for Wiene, persuading Strauss to approve the project on the basis of the director’s success. But when he saw Der Rosenkavalier on the screen, Hofmannsthal described it as “the most dilettante and clumsy film imaginable” (qtd in Jung & Schatzberg, 123). This was partly sour grapes at having his scenario rejected, but I cannot but agree that the film is less than the sum of its parts. The direction of performers is one thing (if you can’t make Catelain a better actor, you can surely film him differently), but the direction of action is another. The music is a supple, shifting tapestry of themes. It’s charming, wistful, melancholic, joyful, exciting. But Wiene’s direction is flat, static, unimaginative. The camera never once moves, hardly ever cuts close to the performers. (I could understand if they were actually singing: close-ups in broadcasts of live opera are often quite awkward. But this is an opera which suffers none of the inconvenience of operatic performance.)
More recently, it has been argued that Wiene “tried to replace what is essential for an opera—namely, the arias—with what is outstanding in a silent film—namely, the opulence of the images” (Jung & Schatzberg, 129). But “opulence” is not enough. You can have “opulence” on stage. Alfred Roller’s sets for the film are “opulent”. (It was Roller—ever the perfectionist—who picked the exterior locations for Ochs’s estate (Hartmann, 78-79).) Sets and costumes were modelled on eighteenth-century patterns, and Wiene clearly sought to replicate some of these directly in his compositions (see Krenn, 31, 223-41).
But none of this is a substitute for the voice, or the function of the voice in opera: i.e. a carrier of emotion, a means of emotive expressive. Arranging “opulence” before a camera isn’t the same as filming something in a way that conveys meaning or emotion. Why can’t Wiene match the sensuous dimension of the music in the way the scene is shot? It’s not as if silence cannot be expressive, as though images cannot conjure subjective moods, feelings. Wiene’s direction is—at best—old fashioned, shunning the innovations evident in any number of other German productions of the time. I can imagine an infinitely more interesting film being made in 1925 by Murnau or Lubitsch. In 1928-29, Hofmannsthal himself hoped to remake Der Rosenkavalier in Hollywood with the backing of Lillian Gish (Krenn, 90-95). In the 1930s, Lubitsch wanted do adapt the opera, hoping to cast Emil Jannings as Ochs—he was still planning an adaptation shortly before he died in 1947 (Eyman, 243, 357). There was and is a great film to be made out of Der Rosenkavalier, but Wiene’s is not it.
Finally, a few words about the restoration of Der Rosenkavalier. Material for this 2006 restoration came from the Bundesarchiv Filmarchiv (Berlin), the Narodni Filmovy Archiv (Prague), National Film and Television Archive (London), and the Österreichisches Theatermuseum (Vienna). In the gorgeous book that comes with the DVD, there are images from these prints to show the qualities and limitations of each (Krenn, 139-63), and there are several obvious moments when the print source switches mid-scene. (I also note that the English-language print clearly had more elaborate title designs than the others; rather than subtitles, the DVD uses digital replicas of the text for each language option. It’s a shame that the nice painted title designs couldn’t be reused.) And though the reconstruction of the film from these various sources is clearly a labour of love, visually it leaves a lot to be desired. Many of the scenes are scratched, flickery, and soft. The film once looked a lot better than it does now. There was also more of it. Der Rosenkavalier was originally 2996m long, equating to 115 minutes at 22fps. The 2006 restoration is only slightly shorter, running to 109 minutes (at the same speed), but the final scenes are missing and must be replaced with stills and fragments from the film’s original trailer (clearly in worse condition than the rest of the footage).
But the music is superb, and again we hear the superb work of Bernd Thewes in the reconstruction of the score. As ever, various sources had to be used to rebuild the score—and lots of creative decisions had to be made to achieve synchronization. The music was recorded at a live performance of Der Rosenkavalier in September 2006 at the Semperoper, Dresden—the very location of the film’s premiere in January 1926. The DVD presentation starts and finishes with footage of the musicians—Frank Strobel conducting the Staatskapelle Dresden—taking the applause of this live audience. It’s a great way to feel involved in the occasion, and sense something of the original excitement in the collaboration of Strauss with cinema. It’s also appropriate to close with an image of the orchestra, for Strauss’s music is certainly greater than Wiene’s film.
Paul Cuff
References
Noël Burch, “Ambivalences d’un réalisateur ‘bisexuel’. Quatre films de Marcel L’Herbier”, in Laurent Véray (ed.), Marcel L’Herbier. L’art du cinema (Paris: AFRHC, 2007), 201-16.
Scott Eyman, Ernst Lubitsch: Laughter in Paradise (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Rudolf Hartmann, Richard Strauss: The Staging of his Operas and Ballets (New York: Oxford UP, 1982).
Uli Jung and Walter Schatzberg, Beyond Caligari: The Films of Robert Wiene (New York: Berghahn Books, 1999).
Günter Krenn (ed.), “Ein sonderbar Ding”, Essays und Materialien zum Stummfilm “Der Rosenkavalier” (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2007).
The Realm of Silence 