18 | F RIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2019 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
culture
Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s rarely heard
opera “Das Wunder der Heliane” is an
artifact from a high period of Viennese
style: specifically, the 1920s.
This was a time made vivid by experi-
mental, yet still crowd-pleasing, har-
monies, as well as salacious themes that
— in a post-Freudian atmosphere —
could also lay a claim to seriousness.
Those touches were all present in the
extremely belated American premiere
of “Das Wunder der Heliane” last Friday
at the Fisher Center for the Performing
Arts here.
And yet there was another era’s musi-
cal style stepping into the light for a
close-up.
The scoring for one scene in “He-
liane,” between a condemned man and a
jailer, at first leans appropriately hard
on the strings. Bursts of col legno an-nounce political gravity — and suggest
the prisoner’s need for a savior, which
the title character of Heliane will be-
come — before giving way to brooding
lines. But unexpected jolts ring out:
Harps ascend quickly, breaking free of
tutti passages that have submerged the
sound world in sadness; a mystical ce-
lesta accompanies the ambiguous mo-
ment when the man’s chains are loos-
ened.
Played brightly and adroitly by theAmerican Symphony Orchestra and
conducted by its music director, Leon
Botstein, these rapid changes of color
didn’t seem like embers of dying Ro-
manticism so much as the first stirrings
of the Hollywood epic.
Korngold, of course, would go on to
achieve his most lasting fame as a film-
score composer. His swiftly surging
themes for movies like “The Adventures
of Robin Hood” and “Kings Row” have
long been cited as an influence on John
Williams’s music for “Star Wars” and
“Superman.”
With “Heliane,” Korngold was sharp-
ening the talents he would use later in
the United States. Yet these facets of his
biography — grand opera composer of
interwar Europe and elder statesman of
Hollywood — are often treated like sep-
arate halves of an exile artist’s life.
If the connection between the early
moments of “Heliane” and Korngold’s
later work in film was clear on Friday,
that was in part because of how his mu-
sic is being presented at Bard Summer-
Scape. In addition to “Heliane,” which
continues through Sunday, Bard is tak-
ing a two-week deep dive into Korn-
gold’s broader catalog as well (through
Aug. 18). Tying the programs together is
a new collection of scholarship, “Korn-gold and His World.”
“This is a complete discovery for all of
us,” Mr. Botstein said in an interview.
“The whole idea: Where does this film
music come from, and how did he put it
together? And why did he succeed like
no one else?”
In addition to conducting “Heliane,”
Mr. Botstein is a contributor to “Korn-
gold and His World,” with an essay tak-
ing stock of a common charge againstKorngold by critics like Theodor Adorno
and Hanns Eisler: that by writing film
scores, Korngold had made music sub-
servient to the moving image.
Mr. Botstein duly admits, in his essay,
that Korngold struggled to repurpose
music from his films for stand-alone
scores (though he says the 1950s Sym-
phony in F sharp is Korngold’s “most
successful transfer” back into the con-
cert hall). But he also disagrees with
Eisler and Adorno, who, he writes,
“were wrong that the music in Korn-gold’s films was not meant to be heard.”
“The music actually was heard,” he
adds, “but as an integral part of the film
experience.”
Recently, while watching a succession
of films scored by Korngold, I found my-
self in broad agreement with Mr. Bot-
stein’s take. Korngold’s imaginative im-
print is all over otherwise strong,
though not quite brilliant, Warner Bros.
movies like the noirish “Deception” and
the melodrama “The Constant Nymph.”
Not surprisingly, both of those films
feature fictional composers and per-
formers in their narratives — opportuni-
ties that Korngold often seized to dram-
atize his own feeling that modernism
without melody is ruinous. (In the inter-
view, Mr. Botstein said, “If you want to
get under the skin of Korngold, what he
thought he was doing, ‘The Constant
Nymph’ is the thing to watch.”)
But, despite Korngold’s distaste for
the 12-tone music favored by modern-
ists, he was not averse to experimental
touches. In my favorite of his film scores
— for “Between Two Worlds,” a wartime
movie with touches of a morality play
and a thriller — Korngold provides the
material for a multimedia approach to
leitmotif: As the scholar Ben Winters
points out in “Korngold and His World,”a piano solo played by one character
also appears in a version for a jazz-
tinged ensemble, heard through a
phonograph. “That’s a very unusual
score,” Mr. Botstein said. “There’s some-
thing postmodern in it.”
Bard isn’t the only place where you
can see “Heliane” this summer. Naxos
recently released a DVD and Blu-ray
from a production of it by the Deutsche
Oper in Berlin. That staging takes a
more sedate approach to the political vi-
olence of the story, and offers Heliane a
way out at the end.
At Bard, Christian Räth’s production
is more literal, with a clearer broadcast-
ing of the libretto’s dated obsessions,
like sexual purity and the eternal femi-
nine. But, for an opera not seen in the
United States until now, the staging is
valuably crisp, the singing solid. Even
though Korngold’s most enduring lega-
cy may be in film, his take on 1920s Vien-
nese opera is well worth a trip to take in.
“What you learn from ‘Heliane’ is that
his particular, very distinctive melodic
and harmonic language was there al-
ready before he went to Hollywood,” Mr.
Botstein said. “There is something
naïvely optimistic about his music, sub-
consciously beautiful. And winningly
so.”A scene from “Das Wunder der Heliane,” which is having its American premiere, nearly a century after it was written, at the Bard SummerScape festival in New York State. Below, its creator, Erich Wolfgang Korngold.STEPHANIE BERGERA Korngold opera finally finds America
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y.The composer’s future
in film is hinted at in a
rarely performed workBY SETH COLTER WALLSAKG-IMAGESThe twin facets of his biography
were grand opera composer of
interwar Europe and elder
statesman of Hollywood.The best piece of advice I’ve ever
heard about being a journalist is from
the investigative reporter Amy Good-
man, who has worked in Nigeria and
East Timor, among other places. Good-
man said this: “Go to where the silence
is and say something.”
That sentence hung in my mind
while I was reading “Our Women on
the Ground: Essays by Arab Women
Reporting From the Arab World,” a
stirring, provocative and well-made
new anthology edited by the Lebanese-
British journalist Zahra Hankir. It’s a
book that banishes all manner of si-
lences.
Hankir invited 19 Arab and Middle
Eastern sahafiyat — female journalists
— to detail their experiences reporting
from some of the most repressive
countries in the world. The result is avolume that rewrites the hoary rules of
the foreign correspondent playbook,
deactivating the old clichés. Each of
these women has a story to tell. Each
has seen plenty.
Some of these journalists work (or
have worked) for establishment media
outlets like the BBC, NPR, The Finan-
cial Times, Bloomberg, Al Jazeera, The
Washington Post and The New York
Times. Others are freelance photogra-
phers, or small website operators.
They hail from, among other places,
Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Yemen, Iraq,
Lebanon, Sudan and Libya, though
many also have a foot in the Western
world. There’s a lot of self-scrutiny in
this volume. A subtheme is the guilt
many of these reporters feel over their
own relative privilege, the fact that
their own families are safe while the
people they write about tend to live in
poverty and in terror.
“Our Women on the Ground” has
many aspects to it — it’s about ambi-
tion, harassment and misogyny, sex,
family, bravery, politics, religion, his-
tory, broken lives and double lives —
but at bottom it imparts a pervasive
sense of fear and loss. There are two
harrowing deaths before we are 30
pages in.The first is that of a young Syrian
woman, a philosophy graduate named
Ruqia Hasan, who was abducted and
killed by ISIS for her outspoken posts
on social media. She knew what was
coming. She wrote on Facebook:
“While they will cut off my head, I’ll
still have dignity, which is better than
living in humiliation.” Her story is
delivered by Hankir, in her introduc-
tion.
The second is that of The New York
Times’s Beirut bureau chief Anthony
Shadid, who died at 43 in 2012, appar-
ently of an asthma attack, while report-
ing in Syria. The author of this power-
ful and rueful essay is his widow, Nada
Bakri, who has also reported for The
Times.
Bakri, like nearly all the writers in
this book, does not hold back. After
Shadid’s death, she writes, “I quit
journalism, left my home in Beirut and
moved thousands of miles away from
everyone I knew and everything famil-
iar. Along the way, I became someone I
don’t recognize.”
Many of these essays are about
trying to work in dangerous circum-
stances, doubly so for women. As
Zaina Erhaim writes in her essay: “I
am a Syrian; a woman who lived in themost masculine of spaces; a journalist
in a land of warlords; a secularist
living among different kinds of extre-
mists.” She adds: “I would be a great
target, someone a fighter would be
proud to have killed.”
There are accounts here of reporting
from war zones and, for example, of
being embedded with the United
States military during the Iraq War.When these journalists were unable to
be on the scene, they became skilled at
scanning social media, especially
YouTube videos, and gleaning informa-
tion from those sources. Another kind
of silence this book charts is the one
that arrives when sources go dark,
because they’ve keen killed or forced
out of their homes.
There are places these journalists
can go that men cannot: kitchens and
hair salons, to name two. In her essay,
Hannah Allam, an NPR national secu-
rity reporter who worked for Mc-
Clatchy newspapers during the Iraq
war, suggests that reporters ignore
so-called women’s stories at their peril.
Noting that on an average day at the
height of the Iraq war, it was common
for 80 men to die from car bombs,
Allam writes: “Consider those num-
bers for a moment: 80 dead men
meant 80 new widows and dozens of
newly fatherless children. Every day.”
These women needed to become
providers.
There is a good deal of gallows hu-
mor in “Our Women on the Ground.”
There are high spirits; several ro-
mances are recounted. There are
many, many stories of frightening and
unwanted attention from men. Yet inher essay, Donna Abu-Nasr, Bloom-
berg’s Saudi Arabia bureau chief,
catches some of the absurdity that can
be in the air, too.
“Often, while I was stuck in traffic,
young men would slam Post-its or
papers with their mobile phone num-
bers scribbled on them on the window
of my car,” she writes. “That was one
way to pick up women. Another was to
go to the mall and throw the little slips
of paper at the feet of women covered
head to toe in black.”
The optimism that attended the Arab
Spring in the early 2010s slowly evapo-
rates in these essays. Things grow
worse, not better. About the Syrian
crisis that began in 2011, Hwaida Saad,
a reporter for The New York Times,
notes: “Ideas changed, and so did
faces — many of which grew beards.
On the radio, jihadi songs replaced
those of Elissa. Innocence gradually
disappeared.”
The Palestinian writer and free-
press advocate Asmaa al-Ghoul recalls
some of the romance that attended the
early days of the Arab Spring protests.
“We thought that we were going to
change the world,” she writes. “How I
pity the generation that will have to go
out to do it all over again.”Rewriting reporting in the Arab world
BOOK REVIEWOur Women on the Ground:
Essays by Arab Women Reporting
From the Arab World
Edited by Zahra Hankir. Illustrated.
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