The Birthday of the Infanta: Suite

Round Dance –

Procession and Sham Bull-Fight –

The Puppets –

Minuet of the Dancing Boys –

The Dwarf’s Dances –

With the Wind in Spring –

In Blue Sandals over the Corn –

In the Red Raiment of Autumn –

The Infanta’s Rose –

Epilogue

Considering the occasion for which it was written – the Vienna Art Show of 1908, which was presented in a pavillion specially designed by Josef Hoffmann and featured 16 new paintings by Gustav Klimt among other progressive art works – Schreker’s music for The Birthday of the Infanta might seem suprisingly conservative. In fact, the Viennese Secessionist artists were well ahead of their musical counterparts at this time. It would be a few years before the so-called “Second Viennese School” of composers, represented mainly by Schoenberg and his pupils, would be recognised as a force to be reckoned with. There was Mahler, of course, but he was far too preoccupied by universal matters (he had just completed his Eighth Symphony) to be interested in writing a ballet on a children’s story by Oscar Wilde. So Grete and Elsa Wiesenthal – protagonists of a new kind of “expressive dance” – turned to the little-known Franz Schreker and were rewarded for their enterprise with an enchanting and highly effective, if as much Parisian as Viennese, ballet score.

The Suite from The Birthdy of the Infanta consists of a selection of episodes that the composer rescored for large orchestra – including guitars and mandolins as well as a colourful array of percussion – and dedicated to Willem Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw in 1923. Although the ten excerpts (played for the most part without a break) do not tell the whole story, it is possible, with some help from Wilde, to relate them to their narrative context. The opening, a happily melodious Round Dance, delightfully sets the scene in the gardens of the Spanish royal palace where the Infanta is celebrating her twelfth birthday with her friends. One of the entertainments they have arranged for her, signalled by the horn fanfares in the middle of the next movements, is what Wilde describes as a “sham bull-fight” with a wicker-work bull and boy toreadors on hobby-horses – “much nicer, the Infanta thought, than the real bull-fight that she had been brought to see at Seville.” A lovely oboe solo introduces The Puppets, an episode devoted to an interpratation, Wilde tells us, of the “semi-classical tragedy of Sophonisba” by marionettes “who acted so well that at the close of the play the eyes of the Infanta were quite dim with tears.”

She was impressed too by the dancing boys – performing a “wonderful ceremony from the great cathedral of Saragossa,” according to Wilde, whose description of their “grave dignity” and “elaborate grace” inspired the stately Minuet of the Dancing Boys. But then, immediately after the last old-fashioned cadence of the minuet, there is a distinct change of demeanour. Agitated strings and exclamations on woodwind and brass and a briefly grotesque bassoon solo mark the start of another birthday entertainment, The Dwarf’s Dances. When the little Dwarf ”stumbled into the arena,” says Wilde, “waddling on his crooked legs and wagging his huge misshapen head from side to side, the children went off into a loud shout of delight.” Discovered running wild in the woods only the day before, he was at one with nature and knew all the “wind-dances” – three of which Schreker depicts in brilliantly scored series of picturesque fantasies: “the blossom-dance through the orchards in spring” beginning on flute and mandolin, “the light dance in blue sandals over the corn” beginning on bassoon, and “the mad dance in red raiment with the autumn” beginning on four horns in unison.

The Infanta was hugely amused by the ugly little Dwarf and, indeed, laughed so much that “she took outbr of her hair the beautiful white rose and threw it to him across the arena with the sweetest smile.” Sadly, as the romantically expressive The Infanta’s Rose suggests, the Dwarf, by now in love with the Infanta, took the rose as a token of reciprocated affection. Schreker spares us the moment when, for the first time in his life he caught sight of himself in a mirror, saw how impossibly ugly he was, and died of a broken heart at the Infanta’s feet. “For the future let those who come to play with me have no hearts,” she cried in disdain as she ran out into the garden. The poignancy of the situation is reflected, however, in the beautiful cello solo of the short Epilogue.