Schillings: Mona Lisa
Soloists
Schillings is another of those early 20th century composers whose name I recognise but about whose music I knew nothing. The only thing that I did know about the composers was that he was somehow associated with the Nazi regime - although like many of the German composers of the time the evidence is far from clear and somewhat contradictory.
I was impressed by the opera. It was very much in the post-Wagnerian style and on an innocent hearing would probably pass for Richard Strauss. The musical language is largely post-romantic but there are some passages which have an almost Puccinian lyricism. But it does have some of the rhythmic stoginess that one does associate with German opera. There are many of the typical tropes of post-Romantic opera including offstage choirs, an organ part, a very large orchestra (including a heckelphone and two tubas) but unusually the opera has a ‘distancing’ prologue and epilogue in which tourists are told the story of Mona Lisa by one of the monks. It foreshows the way in which Britten uses a similar technique so effectively.
