Holger Drachmann

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HOLGER DRACHMANN

MAXIMILIAN SINGER

While studying art in Copenhagen, Holger Drachmann (1846-1908) came under the influence of the celebrated literary critic and political radical Georg Brandes. His career began in 1869 with an exhibition of seascapes, but in 1871 he travelled to England, where he came into contact with workers in London's East End. The experience inspired him to write poetry expressing sympathy with the Socialists, but his enthusiasm for their cause was short-lived. Passionate, volatile and self-possessed, Drachmann was a Peer Gynt-like figure whose first reaction to any personal crisis was to travel - and he spent much of his life on the road. He was contemptuous of petit-bourgeois Danish society, and his kinsmen found him outspoken and immoral.

In London he fell in love with a sixteen-year-old Danish girl, whom he married shortly afterwards and divorced in 1875. He remarried in 1879, divorcing again ten years later due to an affair with a cabaret singer.

«Der var engang» was written in the summer of 1884 at Tarvisio in the Italian Alps. At its premiere in I887 the play was an instant success - thanks primarily to the incidental music and songs by the Danish composer Peter Lange-Müller - and it remained in the repertoire of the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen, for several decades. Lange-Müller's setting of the 'Hymn to the Summer Solstice', with which the play ends, became in Denmark a popular national song. Performances were also frequent in Germany, and Drachmann followed the progress of «Es war einmal», which he himself rated 'a classic in our literature', with undiminished interest.

He appears not to have been informed of Zemlinsky's operatic version, however, which was premiered while he was on a visit to New York. Zemlinsky took little heed of red tape - the co-librettist of «Circe», Walter Firner, once described his attitude to international copyright law as 'weltfremd' (naïve) - and it is not inconceivable that he overlooked the question of obtaining the rights from Drachmann's German publisher. However, Maximilian Singer's* operatic adaptation was published in Vienna shortly before the premiere, and it would appear that some form of copyright licence was eventually obtained.

* Singer (1857-1928) wrote librettos for «Esther» (1886) and «Don Juan de Galeano» (music by Julius Stern), as well as several operettas, including «Der Weise von Cordova» (music by Oscar Straus), Der Schwur and Das Jagerhaus (music by Wilhelm Reich). His spoken dramas included «Junius Brutus» (Vienna, 1881) and «Der Wunderstein» (Prague, 1912).

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