Halffter: Schachnovelle

Schachnovelle summarises the last phase of Stefan Zweig’s life: his loathing of the Austro-Fascist and the Nazis’ takeover of control, as well as the confrontation with state power. That social upheaval concerned large parts of the Vienna intelligentsia, as well as Zweig himself.

His novella recounts a happily successful escape and a journey into a new world (the librettist enclosed a return ticket). On the way to an interrogation, the persecuted and imprisoned attorney Dr. B is able to purloin a small book wrapped in paper from the jacket pocket of one of the guards, hoping to gain food for thought from it; but to his immeasurable disappointment, it is a documentation of legendary chess games.

To avoid utter despair, the prisoner passes the shapeless time in total isolation by replaying the masters’ duels on the checkerboard pattern of his bedspread, with pieces taken from a tin of rock candy. But during the journey to South America, Zweig’s protagonist Dr. B. happens to meet Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. His professionalism was challenged by the purely theoretical game intelligence hitherto of the attorney departing into exile, just as did the memory of the time of torture reawakened it.

Czentovic and Dr. B are chess players who could not be more different from each other. One of them can only play when he has the chessboard and the pieces concretely in front of him; the game rescues the other one from persecution at the hands of National Socialism – even if the game only takes place in his head, against himself and drives him to the brink of madness. The decisive struggle ensues: materialism versus idealism. A formal error ends the game in a draw, but Dr. Berger wins something else.

Cristóbal Halffter’s tonal language took shape in the 1960s, honed in opposition to the Franco regime, which suppressed constructive modern music, just like the other totalitarian systems of the middle of the last century. Although it has developed in some ways, the Madrid composer’s style has remained principally the same during the past six decades. “The flux velocity and fine shadings in the composition – which, first and foremost, follows its own laws and rules – of course correspond to the text source and, in particular, its psychological configurations,” notes Frieder Reininghaus.

Most audibly, Halffter links up to Alban Berg’s operas – all the way to a symphonic movement which separates the Old and New Worlds and the parodying way he integrates something resembling an East European national anthem into the music the ship’s band plays to welcome Czentovic, the world champion of chess. Furthermore, Halffter’s music largely avoids bold and simple effects, no matter how significantly he anchors the singing roles so prototypically. However, the Gestapo officer who heads the interrogations, soliloquizing and threatening, has the effect of “a shrivelled Aryan à la Dr. Goebbels” – a garish, grotesque countertenor.

In the final scene, Dr. B. calls for dignity and liberty in life – also meaning his own inner freedom.

Translation: Grant Chorley