Erwartung 1983Edinburgh International Festival
Read more about the opera Erwartung
The 1983 Festival, directed by John Drummond, was generally agreed to be a vintage one, with a Viennese theme. It had an effectively varied operatic programme.
The Hamburg State Opera packed the Playhouse with a successful, modernistic take on The Magic Flute, while the more intimate King's Theatre was the venue for a double-bill of unknown Zemlinsky pieces. These were A Florentine Tragedy and The Birthday of the Infanta (The Dwarf) - both derived from Oscar Wilde stories. Opera Theatre of St Louis brought a new American piece, The Postman Always Rings Twice by Stephen Paulus, and an unknown British one, Fennimore and Gerda by Delius. Scottish Opera mounted Britten's Death in Venice, a decade after its premiere, with Thomas Mann's source novella linking it to the Viennese theme.
The Usher Hall also contained two semi-operatic concerts, with Claudio Abbado on unfamiliar Wagnerian territory (Act 2 of Lohengrin), and Alexander Gibson and the local team tackling Schoenberg's huge Gurrelieder for the first time. Another Schoenberg rarity, the monodrama Erwartung, was also conducted by Abbado.
This concert paired Erwartung with another mould-breaking Viennese piece from a century earlier - Beethoven's Eroica. Phyllis Bryn-Julson found modern twentieth-century scores something of a speciality, as, indeed, did Abbado and the LSO.
