Melusine (Reimann)

Melusine is a 1971 German-language opera by Aribert Reimann, on a libretto by Claus H. Henneberg after Melusine, a 1920 play in four acts by Yvan Goll which transposes the legendary water-spirit to Goll's time. The opera was written for the Schwetzingen Festival, where it premiered in 1971. It was recorded in 2010.

History
Melusine, Aribert Reimann's second opera, was written on the seventh commission from the Süddeutscher Rundfunk for a new opera for the Schwetzingen Festival, following for example Hans Werner Henze's Elegie für junge Liebende (1961) and Fortner's In seinem Garten liebt Don Perlimplin Belisa (1962). The libretto was written in German by Claus H. Henneberg, based on a 1920 play of the same name by Yvan Goll, which was again based on Mélusine, a French-language libretto written by Goll for an earlier – possibly unperformed – opera by Marcel Mihalovici in 1920.

Plot
The title refers to the legendary water spirit Melusine. Derived from French legend and later a German folk book by Thüring von Ringoltingen, the topic is transposed to modern everyday life ("modernes Alltagsleben") in France before World War I. The main character is married to a real estate agent, but still a virgin, focused on the preservation of a local park (or forest) that she sees filled with nature spirits. She is unable to stop a castle being built on the land, a building in which she loses her virginity and dies.

Performances
Melusine premiered at the opening of the festival Schlosstheater Schwetzingen in 1971, conducted by Reinhard Peters, staged by Rudolf Sellner, with Catherine Gayer in the title role, and Martha Mödl as Pythia. The opera was recorded by Wergo in 2010 from a live performance at the Staatstheater Nürnberg. A 1974 handbook on opera production notes the features of aleatoric passages, dissonances and atonality. A reviewer of The Guardian described the musical language as neo-expressionist, with writing for voices in declamatory style and with demanding coloraturas. A reviewer of the premiere, writing for the weekly Die Zeit, found the vocal writing for the three main characters convincing, and compared the work's expressivity to Alban Berg's Lulu and its atmosphere to Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, noting the similarities of the three female characters.

In 2016, a production by the Berlin University of the Arts, where Reimann had been a professor of contemporary Lied, honoured the composer's 80th birthday.