Michael Andor Brodeur | January 20, 2023

This new class of artists is changing the sound of classical music.

David Hertzberg

This spring, Hertzberg heads from Los Angeles to Washington for a term as musician in residence at Dumbarton Oaks. Over the course of the pandemic, he released album versions of two of his operas, “The Wake World” and “The Rose Elf.” And while operas seem to be something of a comfortable wheelhouse, Hertzberg’s voice finds impressive variety in his orchestral pieces, chamber symphony, and cantata for high soprano and orchestra. While at Dumbarton, Hertzberg, 33, will continue work on “Grand Hotel,” a “beastly, sprawling fugue-of-a-thing” commissioned by experimental Los Angeles opera company the Industry. He’s also working on “HQ,” a “symphonic monodrama” inspired by “the strange life and death of America’s Premiere Picture-Man.”

Rick Perdian | January 30, 2022

Pennsylvania has been good to composer David Hertzberg. He studied at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and was named Composer in Residence for Opera Philadelphia and Music-Theatre Group in 2015, a post he held through the end of the 2017-18 season. His first opera, The Wake World, which won the Music Critics Association of North America’s Best New Opera Award, premiered there in 2017.

Pittsburgh Opera is now presenting his award-winning opera The Rose Elf, for which he wrote both the libretto and the music. The opera garnered universal praise when it premiered in the Catacombs at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 2018. […]

Hertzberg is a genius at creating rich complex sounds and scintillating orchestral colors from a small ensemble. Although he writes beautifully for the voice, many of the visceral thrills of The Rose Elf come from instrumental solos and the swirling sounds in the orchestra.

Opera News | January 2022

5 BEST NEW WORKS:

DAVID HERTZBERG: THE ROSE ELF

CD. Ensemble, Kahn. Meyer Media

“The endlessly swelling textures and iridescent color palette are evocative of Scriabin.” - Joe Cadagin

Joe Cadagin | March 2021

DAVID HERTZBERG’S comet-like ascent into the operatic cosmos was launched by his 2017 adaptation of occultist Aleister Crowley’s Wake World. A CD set of that breakout work, issued last year, confirmed that all the praises and prizes heaped on it were merited. This latest disc documents Hertzberg’s 2018 follow-up, The Rose Elf, which probes the same realms of the fantastic as his earlier success. He’s selected another dark fairy tale, this time a supernatural murder-mystery by Hans Christian Andersen. The composer is a skilled poet, his libretto steeped in the arcane language of fin-de-siècle Spiritualism and Symbolism. Moreover, his compositional style is indebted to the refined decadence of that period; the endlessly swelling textures and iridescent color palette are especially evocative of Scriabin.

The standard star-cross’d-lover scenario is embellished with literary images that are both charming and unsettling, notably the cluster of jasmine that grows from a pot containing the Beloved’s decomposing head. Hertzberg’s score revels in this sinister allure, its eerier passages conjuring the bony-fingered imps and gnarled trees of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations.

This uncanny quality may have something to do with the erotic energy the composer teases from Andersen’s ostensibly innocent children’s story. With her supple mezzo, Samantha Hankey transforms the meaning of the smothered Elf’s distressed cries from inside a rose placed over the Beloved’s (still-beating) heart. Her gushing consonants, fondling portamentos and libidinous low notes on the line “the white heat of his flesh makes me sweat” convey intense carnal—even sadomasochistic—desire. In a Liebestod on behalf of the dead couple, Hankey flits nymphlike through Hertzberg’s idiomatically graceful vocal writing, building up to the climactic “Apocalypse of Petals.” Mustering the nine-piece chamber ensemble, Robert Kahn unleashes this finale of symphonic proportions. A garden of instrumental sound effects—buzzing insect wings, sighing zephyrs, cascading blossoms, sparkling dewdrops—whirls around the ecstatically rising vocalise of soprano Sydney Mancasola and tenor Kirk Dougherty, positively apotheotic as the departed Girl and her Beloved. It’s a kaleidoscopic, narcotic vision that feels unnerving in its sheer excess, as if we were glimpsing some forbidden elven rite. The opera’s rainbow of sonic hues is appropriately wiped away for the Brother’s a cappella diatribe, delivered with hulking brutality by bass-baritone Andrew Bogard.

Anthony Tommasini | December 17, 2020

David Hertzberg: ‘Is that you, my love?’

“The Wake World”; Maeve Hoglund, soprano; Samantha Hankey, mezzo-soprano; Elizabeth Braden, conductor (Tzadik)

With his playfully convoluted 2017 fairy tale opera “The Wake World,” David Hertzberg demonstrated that voluptuous, sweeping elements of grand opera could be reimagined for today. In the work’s swelling, shimmering climactic duet between a young seeker and her fairy prince, Ravel meets Messiaen, and Wagner meets Scriabin; the music is spiky, original and wondrous strange.

Chris Ruel | November 27, 2020

Hertzberg Continues to Push Boundaries

Award-winning Composer/librettist David Hertzberg likes his stories dark and his music lush, and he’s back with another recording, this time “The Rose Elf,” a one-act opera that hews more to Andersen’s tale than Boccaccio’s. As I wrote in a previous Off the Beaten Track exploring Hertzberg’s MCANA Best New Opera Award-winning opera, “The Wake World,” the composer’s work is experiential and a sonic feast.

Hertzberg’s libretto displays a sharp sense of poetic language that is rife with accessible beauty through an economy of words. And, as a composer, Hertzberg is masterful at using a minimal number of instrumentalists to create gargantuan sound.

Oussama Zahr | November 9, 2020

The musical language of fairies is well established. In a new recording of David Hertzberg’s one-act opera “The Rose Elf,” from 2018, the titular sprite darts about flowers and bowers to the sound of rolled piano chords and tinkling glockenspiel (played vivaciously by a chamber orchestra). Hertzberg adapted his poetic libretto from a particularly grisly Hans Christian Andersen tale: the rose elf witnesses a man’s murder and then breaks the news to the victim’s lover, who dies grieving. The carefree elf is changed by what he sees, and the mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey handles the rangy role beautifully. The elf’s music wilts in solemnity; in the finale, as he consoles the dying girl, it blooms with warmth and depth—the sound of someone who has learned compassion.

Steven Winn | October 23, 2020

Chimes clang. A piano sends up oscillating shivers. The strings weep and mourn.

All the spooky musical atmosphere serves The Rose Elf, a chamber opera based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale (rooted in The Decameron), with music and libretto by Los Angeles composer David Hertzberg. Haunting, seductive, and strikingly well performed, the Swan Studios recording debuts, fittingly, on Halloween.

Listeners can well imagine such effects from the vividly creepy score. Hertzberg — whose previous opera, The Wake World, won wide acclaim — writes equally well for voice and the nine-piece orchestra, under Robert Kahn’s direction here.

Mired in single-note chants or sent off on lyrical swoops and frenzied melismas, the singers are at once intensely human and fantastical phantoms. Their transfixed calms and melodic spasms drive the opera, yet the characters seem helpless in the face of propulsive forces. They are free agents in fate’s grip.

The composer’s flair for colorful and sometimes manic orchestration creates plenty of heat and light. But there’s a keen musical intelligence at work, evident in certain penetrating figures (a stepwise descent in the strings) that recur in different guises.

Th music has a near medieval cast at times. Elsewhere it’s reminiscent of Debussy, Berlioz, or Philip Glass. The score turns bluntly theatrical, with traces of horror film scores. Yet all the variety serves a purpose. Every scene and plot point feel carefully, tellingly deployed. When, to choose one example, the brother taunts his near catatonic sister, he does so in short, clipped phrases offset by alarming, erratic percussion thunderclaps.

The Elf’s aria at the top of Part II, by contrast, is gorgeous, wonderstruck, and empathic. Later on it turns piercingly anguished. Moods and emotions are labile, volatile, unstable.

The performers, led by Hankey’s captivating turn in the dominant title role, are all first-rate. The singing radiates conviction, character, and a delectable psychosexual ripeness. The mounting crescendo of voices in the final scene is a kind of apotheosis, beyond language or rational comprehension. The Rose Elf becomes what it’s about — a full-body spirit possession

Arlo McKinnon | August, 2020

The Wake World is based on an early short story by the English polymath occultist Aleister Crowley. At the time of its writing, in 1907, Crowley was a young man, still under the influence of the occult society known as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Written as a fairy tale for his young daughter, Crowley’s “Wake World” is an allegorical tale of a young aspirant’s initiation into the study of Kabbalah and occultism in general. Inspired by the story, Hertzberg wrote his own libretto.

The music frequently and masterfully honors his influences. Hertzberg evokes early-twentieth-century culture; the music of Ravel and Scriabin are obvious touch points, as are the more mysterious movements of Holst’s Planets. Dramatically, this hallucinatory opera shares structural elements with Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, with its progression from room to room and the great importance given to colored lighting for each new chamber. Parallels to Lewis Carroll’s Alice novellas can be found, as well, in the phantasmagoric nature of the different characters encountered along the journey.

The beauty of this opera is the virtuosity with which Hertzberg combines all these influences to create powerful, intoxicating music of his own, unique to him and to our current times. The score combines mystery, eroticism, vulgarity and euphoria, marshalling a few soloists, a small chorus and seven instrumentalists to create exciting, imaginative and kaleidoscopic timbral worlds. For once, one does not miss a full orchestra in a drama demanding continuous shifts of sound color.

Joe Cadagin | August 10, 2020

Hertzberg pushes his predecessor’s style to decadent extremes — the score exhibits all the narcotic sensuality of an Alphonse Mucha poster. Vivid descriptions of flowers, gemstones, and perfumes are translated into luxurious instrumental equivalents: violin solos that curl and coil like art nouveau foliage; glittering piano flourishes wrapped in opalescent bowed vibraphone; the smoky-sweet incense of muted trumpet. These sonorities, unified by a recurring bell motive lifted from Richard Wagner’s Parsifal, swell and surge in a kind of tantric lovemaking session that is always on the verge of rapturous eruption.

Conductor Elizabeth Braden unleashes some powerful Wagnerian climaxes from the seven-piece chamber ensemble.

Filling out the seven-piece “orchestra” is a sizable choir performing wordless vocalise, à la Scriabin’s Prometheus or Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé. Their etheric harmonies cast a continuous glow — a soft halo of moonlight that lends the work its sylvan sense of mystery.

For the couple’s final reunion, the composer has the Prince appear in female form, a change in pronouns announcing this transfiguration. Samantha Hankey — who has only a few lyric passages in her pants-role guise — suddenly bursts forth with an apotheotic aria set to sapphic verses from a Crowley Kabbalah manual. This homoerotic take on Isolde’s Liebestod is a supremely transcendent moment, Hankey’s crystalline mezzo spurting in jets to ejaculatory top notes before trickling down like the peach juice mentioned in the poem.

Richard Fairman | July 10, 2020

Here is “a tale for babes and sucklings”. It is related by Lola, who is the key of delights, and describes how her Fairy Prince rides to her on a beautiful creature like a swan, or sometimes a lion or bull, with a woman's face and breasts, and unfathomable eyes.

This is The Wake World, originally a short story by Aleister Crowley, free-loving poet, painter, occultist and magician, and now an opera by the young American composer David Hertzberg. First performed in Philadelphia in 2017, it won the Music Critics Association of North America award for best new opera and arrives here in a seductive recording.

What kind of music could possibly invoke Crowley's universe of the senses?

Hertzberg's music sets out to evoke a rapturous nirvana. Imagine an intoxicating mix of Szymanowski's ecstatic King Roger and Ravel's luminous Daphnis et Chloé. Offstage women's voices sing like sirens, the percussion glitters and perfumed harmonies hang in the air.

Remarkably, Hertzberg achieves this sumptuous array of sounds with an ensemble of just seven players. A cast mostly associated with the Opera Philadelphia premiere includes Maeve Höglund and Samantha Hankey as Lola and the Fairy Prince and Elizabeth Braden conducts a suitably otherworldly performance.

Steph Power | August, 2020

David Hertzberg’s The Wake World takes the fairy tale written by occultist Aleister Crowley for his daughter into a realm as narcotically debauched as the sex magic he’s said to have indulged in- and as darkly gothic, as Lola undergoes a series of otherworldly tests before she can unite with her Fairy Prince.

Like a carnal Bluebeard’s Castle with a happy outcome, Hertzberg’s libretto drips with with extreme, symbolist imagery, while his score conjures echoes of Debussy, Mahler, and Wagner - and especially Shreker - in its lush, opulent chromaticism. Yet his forces are worlds away from Shreker’s vast Die Gezeichneten. An ensemble of just seven players supports two principals and ten further characters - sung here by soloists who emerge from Philadelphia Opera Chorus - to tempt, beguile, aid, and torment Lola (sung by soprano Maeve Höglund) as she traverses depraved scenes in the palace of the Fairy Prince (mezzo-soprano Samantha Hankey).

Human sacrifice, cannibalism, vampiric seduction: all are described in orgiastic waves as Lola follows her of lust and animal instinct in pursuit of inner truth[…]

Hertzberg’s score is astonishingly imaginative and well-written, and the musicians on this recording prove fine advocates under their conductor Elizabeth Braden.

John Rockwell | August, 2020

One of the great joys of writing about the arts is stumbling across something previously unknown and strikingly new. Such was my happy experience in September of 2017 when I attended a performance as part of Opera Philadelphia’s autumn festival of mostly new work. The opera in question was called The Wake World and its composer and librettist was David Hertzberg. He was still in his 20s and had something of a track record in new-music circles. But this was his first opera and I had never heard of him. The Wake World was thrilling, full of musical and poetic allusions to the past, basically tonal harmonically, yet utterly original. Not everyone was thrilled: some found it confusing or overwrought. But enough of us loved it that it easily won the opera committee of the Music Critics Association of North America’s award (I am a committee member) as the best new opera of 2017. Hertzberg immediately vaulted into the small but expanding circle of prized young North American opera composers and librettists[…]

The fin-de-siècle era before World War I saw not only the flowering of the impressionist and modernist artists Barnescollected, but a dizzying assortment of occult movements. Prominent among them was the English-based Hermetic Order of The Golden Dawn, offshoot of the Rosicrucians, who in turn derived from the Freemasons. Hertzberg wrote his libretto based on the works of Aleister Crowley, the mystic and black magician, and in particular his story The Wake World, published in 1907 in a collection called Konx Om Pax but written a few years earlier. To that Hertzberg included an erotic effusion from Crowley’s The Temple of Solomon the King, from 1909. But the libretto emerges as remarkably original. Crowley’s The Wake World has its erotic elements, but was intended as a children’s fable about an adept’s progress toward enlightenment for his daughter Lola, with Crowley as her Fairy Prince. The opera libretto transforms that into a highly sensual, not to say sexual love story, with Lola being led through her prince’s palace from sleepy illusion to wide-awake fulfilment.

Hertzberg’s poetic text is positively lurid; it makes Wilde’s Salome sound downright prosaic. Hertzberg ties this eager pilgrim’s progress together with recurrent verbal (‘a woman arched for love over the hourless sky’) and musical motifs (a cooing downwards step-like line that serves as Lola’s leitmotif). Score and text echo the past: the lushness of Ravel (Daphnis) and Debussy (Mélisande’s dream-state); Wilde and Strauss’s Salome, of course, but also the Emperor of Die Frau ohne Schatten turning to stone, and the loving writing for the female voice; Wagner with the Venusberg sirens and the Flowermaidens and especially the Rhinemaidens; Lulu; Alice in Wonderland (falling down the rabbit hole); Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, with the prince’s magical transformation into a woman; and not least Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, but with a happy ending.

Yet for all that, Hertzberg’s opera sounds completely original.

What operas does Hertzberg have in store? In the meantime, here is The Wake World, shorn of its staging but eminently listenable. Anyone interested in the future of opera should seek it out.

Clive Paget | June 16, 2020

The Wake World, an opera by the preternaturally gifted composer David Hertzberg receives a stunning premiere recording.

[…] it’s a ravishing score. Orchestrated for five instruments, it’s surprisingly sumptuous, richly romantic, and magically delicate, full of graceful instrumental lines (think Szymanowski, Ravel, even early Messiaen, and then project that forward a century). Soprano Maeve Höglund is quite extraordinary as Lola, bold, fearless, and sensual all at once. Samantha Hankey is a warm Fairy Prince with Jessica Beebe making up a trio of female voices that endlessly seduce the ear. Conductor Elizabeth Braden corrals her ensemble with enormous skill and the brilliantly engineered recording is out of this world. Watch it win awards.

Margaret Darby | May 27, 2020

David Hertzberg’s fanciful opera The Wake World was premiered at Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O in 2017 and received the 2018 Music Critics Association of North America Award for Best New Opera. The work, co-commissioned by the Barnes Foundation and Opera Philadelphia, is based on a fantastical tale by occultist Aleister Crowley (1875–1947).

How could this mystical experience be reproduced without the visual aspect? I was happily surprised that the sound on the two-CD set, recorded at the Curtis Institute’s Gould Rehearsal Hall in 2018, is lush and focused. Elizabeth Braden, who also conducted the premiere, uses a slightly larger chorus (24 singers instead of the premiere’s 16) and hones the choral sound into an orchestral instrument. The smooth harmonies that Hertzberg scored for the chorus come through vividly. After a single voice traces descending fourths at the start of the first CD, the chorus sings the same motif in canon, blending with chimes, glockenspiel, crotales, and wind gong, and supported by the impressive playing of pianist Grant Loehnig, who also performed at the premiere and is head of Opera Philadelphia’s music staff.

Hertzberg’s original score for five instrumentalists – violin, French horn, trumpet, piano/keyboards, and percussion – was rich and sonorous in the original performance, but the CD is enhanced by a Fender Rhodes keyboard supplementing the bass without creating overwhelming volume. Even with a second percussionist to help deploy an arsenal of instruments – chimes (with upper extension), crotales (two octaves), large thunder sheet with claw, glockenspiel, wind gong, vibraphone, two melodicas, soldering iron, vibrator, electric toothbrush, musical saw, ratchet, two suspended cymbals, inverted cymbal (into which nuts, bolts, screws, etc. were dropped), and an assortment of bows, brushes, beaters, sticks, mallets, and chains – the sound never gets messy.

Hertzberg’s score manages to weave ribbons of sound into a rich tapestry that retains clarity through Braden’s clean conducting and the outstanding recording quality. […]

Maeve Höglund’s Lola has both a delicate soprano and the ecstatic quality of her character’s awakening to the sensual revelations of the Fairy Prince’s palace. […]

The booming voice of Andrew Bogard as the Bone Man, new in this role, is striking. His resonant bass is perfect for the tortured characters he performs with great expression: “I used to be whole, then the cannibals undid my flesh.” George Somerville, as Morbus, and John David Miles, as Pestilitas, infuse amazing energy, giving special inflection to their voices in the wild lyrics of the libretto. Jessica Beebe’s agile soprano and ability to negotiate the difficult part of Luna reminded me of her superb performance in the 2017 premiere.

Parthenope (Maggie Finnegan), Ligeia (Veronica Chapman Smith), and Leucosia (Joanna Nelson Gates) maintain very tight harmonies in their triadic chorus of wisdom – guiding Lola through her journey. Both trio and chorus sound more intense in the recording than in my memory of the Opera Philadelphia performance.

Anthony Creamer’s production creates a permanent record of David Hertzberg’s inventive endeavor. The score has the flavor of Debussy, Ravel, and Scriabin with added crunches, crushes, and other noises that never mar the crystalline experience of the music. While it is tempting to label Hertzberg a post-impressionistic composer, he is blazing an entirely new trail. He uses Ravelesque sounds in his score, but also includes discordant, expressionistic passages to create a mixed palette of harmonic color. He draws lines with delicate trumpet (Steve Franklin), uses the pastels of soft and mournful horn (played masterfully by Bryn Coveney), and outlines voices and harmonies with violin (Eunice Kim).

This recording, engineered by Andreas Meyer and mastered by Scott Hull, is an impressive first opera release for John Zorn’s Tzadik label and a vivid aural encapsulation of the premiere. The Wake World will be given a new production by Mary Birnbaum for Catapult Opera’s 2021-22 season, presented by Peak Performances at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

Chris Ruel | May 20, 2020

Lurid, strange, wild, frightening, and weird are supreme compliments. “The Wake World” is hands-down one of the most atmospheric pieces I’ve encountered thus far. A cinematic quality reigns from the get-go.

How do you take five instruments and make them sound as profound as 120? I have no idea, but somehow Hertzberg got all the lushness and bombast of Wagner or Strauss from one horn, one trumpet, one violin, percussion, one Fender Rhodes, a piano, and 16 chorus members.

Moving beyond the technical and into the score, Hertzberg has written music that is, at times, as profound as Wagner in both the big and little moments. When the five-member orchestra opens up, (it sounds weird just writing that), the lushness rivals that of film composers who looked to Wagner and Strauss as their models–think John Williams, Hans Zimmer, or Howard Shore (who scored also scored a Ring saga).

Hertzberg infuses “The Wake World” with other-worldliness normally reserved for futuristic cinematic landscapes—sparkling and grand as well as post-apocalyptic. “Lilith Arrives, Aeons Late,” shimmers with repetitive bell tones backed by the chorus before growing, surging, and spilling out, uncontainable by the bounds of earthly reality. The listener is continually brought from grandiosity to chaos to sublimity and back around for another go.

“Is that you, my love,” shares qualities with that of lieder—albeit on a bit of acid or hashish, Crowley’s recreational drug of choice—in both word and style with the opening lines of “She’s dancing,” sung in a gravelly, monstrous shout, not unlike vocal lines spun up by the eclectic and wonderfully strange singer/songwriter Tom Waits. Hertzberg grabbed incongruent styles, perhaps said a few of Crowley’s incantations and poof! “The Wake World,” appeared, its disparate parts forming a miraculous whole.

I’ll close out my thoughts on “The Wake World” with a look at Hertzberg’s world-building prowess.

His use of color words is phenomenal, and the manner in which he weaves the sexuality into the poetic nature and imagery is akin to passages found within the biblical book of the Song of Solomon, relating the body using images of fruit and color.

As a writer, I was in heaven reading such beautiful poetry and it inspired me to explore and look for ways to enhance my fiction with similar poetic flourishes.

To get as close to the full, immersive experience as possible, take some time to dig into “The Wake World.” It’s well worth the energy.

David Patrick Stearns | May 20, 2020

David Hertzberg’s opera The Wake World arrives on a new recording with a lot of praise already behind it. Though written in a matter of months by a composer who was then hardly known, the piece was a curious success at Opera Philadelphia’s O17 festival and won the 2018 Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America. But time and again while listening to the Tzadik-label release, I asked myself, What zeitgeist did this arrive from? What cultural phenomenon contributed to why it was written now? And why have audiences responded to it so readily?

Here are the pieces that don’t even begin to add up.

The story comes from the deeply enigmatic Aleister Crowley (1875-1947, author, occultist, spy and God only knows what else), whose sensibility might described as J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan on acid – lots and lots of acid, with creepy overtones as the child heroine Lola is led on a dream journey that strips her of everything, including flesh and bones. The musical language is post-Debussy, in the realm of late Szymanowski: shamelessly lush, opiated, over-ripe and gothic. Few scores, recent or not, are so sensually inviting yet ultimately so disturbing, as if you’re experiencing something that has been secret (for good reason) and possibly forbidden.

I say this as someone who didn’t get to see the O17 staging. As a purely audio experience, The Wake World holds up far better than the more lavishly acclaimed operas of George Benjamin and Thomas Adès, which demand to be seen before they can be properly heard. Though Hertzberg’s music has too many obvious antecedents to be called innovative, his synthesis is so convincing that the music achieves its own originality.

“It’s so over the top and lurid that it makes Salome read like something out of the telephone book,” declared critic John Rockwell, who was part of the MCANA panel that named it opera of the year.

“It uses five instruments that sound like an orchestra of 40 not just in terms of volume but color and variety,” said Heidi Waleson on the same panel.

So, with the close scrutiny allowed by the studio recording masterfully led by Elizabeth Braden, how are that color and variety achieved?

The Wake World‘s landscape arrives in seven sections that are variously titled Ritual Procession, Preludium, The Beginning, The Palace, Treasure House of Gold, Mistress of It All, and Out of Doors. The ultimate contradiction is stated close to the beginning: “The language of The Wake World is silence.” (Oh, sure.) The main characters are the innocent young girl Lola (sung by Maeve Höglund) and her enigmatic Fairy Prince (Samantha Hankey), who was costumed, in the original R.B. Schlather production, in a natty business suit with a mid-century British smoking pipe. Amid this ostensibly benign dreaminess appear ultimate nightmares — including a giant being consumed by cannibals (Lola included) but still conscious enough to sing a lament about his predicament.

The Fairy Prince refers to Lola’s “sweet supple flesh” and asks her to remove her clothes — and also her skin. “And when all these happy husks are shed, you will find yourself crouched beneath the canopy of light …” That, plus language that is extravagantly affectionate or mystical rather than blatantly sexual, keeps the opera out of the pedophile zone. A sense of ominous eternity often hangs in the air. When Lola is abandoned, she fears that she’ll “lose myself in foreverness.” A choral entity known as the “they” sing about romantic pledges “until the end of time and space … and you writhe underground … besidest the worms wherein all co-mingle…”

The dramatic structure is a bit like Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle. Lola seems to go from one phantasmagorical realm to another, kind of by choice but propelled by the momentum of her dream. If it’s possible to an opera to float decisively, this one does.

The remarkable sense of sonority isn’t achieved entirely by the tiny orchestra. The 24-part mixed chorus plays a major role, though this isn’t a choral opera in the Boris Godunov sense of the term: the voices are often used for textural purposes, more like Ravel in the full-ballet version of Daphnis et Chloé. The sonority’s foundation is provided by the keyboard, the edge by the trumpet: sometimes muted, sometimes soaring above the rest, delivering the closest the opera comes to a traditional melody.

Not that the score is un-melodic. It seems too preoccupied with otherworldly matters to deal with anything so mundane as a tune. The vocal lines are parlando style — singable, sometimes challengingly so. This sort of vocal writing has a somewhat bad name in contemporary opera: pacing often gets weighed down in the name of conversational verisimilitude. Strangely, pacing is not an issue The Wake World. The opera seems to proceed with its own kind of amorphous confidence, suggesting that the major missing piece of the antecedent puzzle here is the time-suspended quality of Morton Feldman. One passage has a kind of ominous ding-dong tolling bell effect that suggests somebody is about to pay — but for what? Certainly, there’s something sinful here. And when you think it can’t go any further on any number of fronts, whether saturated sonorities or dramaturgical weirdness — it does. And does so again and again.

Musical shock arises from the unexpected. And now that I’ve failed to locate any zeitgeist for The Wake World, I can only conclude that its shock value comes from its lack of context. Nobody will ever be able to point to this score and say that this came out of the era of Donald Trump, the gritty horrors of the national opioid addiction, the flagrant disregard for the truth that has become so common, or the unchecked bigotry that has so far afflicted the 21st century. Yet The Wake World is not an escape from all of that. The opera is what it says it is: an alternate world that is like our unconscious mind, with all of its non-linear irrationality, yet only two closed eyelids away from reality.

After a piece so singularly entrancing as The Wake World, it’s hard to know what to expect from Hertzberg in the coming years. Will he go further into the ozone or, like the filmmaker Alain Resnais, pull back from the tuxedoed surrealism of Last Year at Marienbad and into something more accessible but less distinguished? I can’t call it either way. Which is what makes Hertzberg so intriguing.

Dæv Tremblay | May 13, 2020

The Wake World is a new contemporary opera work by composer David Hertzberg. It’s a surreal and hypnotizing musical journey on two discs that starts up relatively slowly, but ends up being quite astonishing and gripping. It’s difficult to put such a massive and ethereal piece into more words, so I strongly suggest you watch this video and listen to the whole thing for yourself. Sit down comfortably, put your headphones on or plug in a good sound system, and let yourself sink into this magical experience. I’ll end with a quote.

I think the opera is pretty whacky.

— David Hertzberg

Frank Meadows | May 8, 2020

DAVID HERTZBERG “The Wake World” (Tzadik 4030; USA) “Tour-de-force” is a descriptor that I frankly feel gets thrown around in the world of creative music, but for David Hertzberg’s mesmerizing chamber opera “The Wake World”, it resonates fittingly. This is not just an ambitious and forcefully dramatic extended work; it is strangely simple, colorfully complex and fully engaging throughout its massive length. On many levels, it forges a melismatic thru line from the Downtown canon to the antique avant-garde canon of Strauss’ “Salome” and Berg’s “Wozzeck”. First premiered to wide acclaim 2017 at the Barnes Foundation under the aegis of Opera Philadelphia, it offers no surprise to longtime Tzadik fans as to why this is a perfect pick for the label. The libretto is an adaptation of Aleister Crowley’s short Beckettian fantasy of the same name which was written whilst under the influence of The Golden Dawn. Zorn has long composed and championed works with heavy reference to magick and its many paths, and while it is clear that Hertzberg’s piece offers many layers of meaning to the arcanely experienced, the pure sonics and poetic texts offer a rich and rewarding world to the uninitiated. The expert orchestration and recording quality offer an enormous dynamic range, and while many of the vocal parts are doubled, it is still astounding to understand that this is music written for only 5 instruments and 9 singers. The instrumentalists, particularly the percussionist, cover a staggering range of sound, and the choral writing is thoughtfully staggered to create vast sheets of dreamy hallucinations, that sometimes reduce down to fragmentary whispers. The soloists are sinister and yearning, and while I still need to read up on the magical context meaning of houses, colors, and love, the emotional range and intensity translates universally. This is the “other world” that so much music on the fringe strives for, but is rarely channeled into something so gripping. The harmonic language offers an uncluttered density, with a spectral palette studied in Scriabin, Debussy, Ravel etc. Moments of aggression are acutely punctuated across an organic landscape that breathes. Highly recommended for deep cerebral transportation. Look forward to seeing what else comes from this startlingly young mastermind.

John Sobel | April 30, 2020

Opera Philadelphia premiered David Hertzberg’s stunning new opera The Wake World in 2017. Based on a mystical fairy tale by occultist Aleister Crowley, it’s an exercise in glorious, phantasmagorical excess, both story-wise and musically. In 2018 the Music Critics Association of North America awarded it Best New Opera in North America.

In anticipation of a Fall 2021 tour-ready production by Catapult Opera, Tzadik Records has released a world premiere recording that leaves me anxious to see the work live.

If you glance at the libretto (included in the CD booklet) on and off, but keep your eyes closed the rest of the time, the music plunges you into Crowley’s mystical world. Lola, sung by soprano Maeve Höglund (from the Opera Philadelphia cast), undergoes an epic journey toward eventual bliss with her Fairy Prince, who is essayed with bold fluidity by Samantha Hankey.

As Barnes’ eccentric juxtapositions make the arrangements say something beyond what the individual items do, the vivid wholeness of the opera likely also relates to Hertzberg’s having written the libretto and the score simultaneously. Words and music share an impressionistic, dreamlike quality that corresponds to the original story from which its main images and incidents derive.

Especially on a recording, the music is all. Here it’s a vivid mix of French romanticism, a downtown avant-garde vibe (from the heavy reliance on keyboards and percussion), and Hertzberg’s own distinctive hallucinatory modernism, alternately propulsive and atmospheric. A band of only seven musicians creates orchestral walls and curtains of sound ranging from the gossamer far-away to percussive smashes and howls that are almost painful.

I really like Hertzberg’s controlled yet surprising approach to melody, as well as his theatrically paced sense of rhythm.

A large (in context) chorus of 24 singers, which includes members of The Crossing and the Opera Philadelphia Chorus, provides rich backdrops. In fact some of the most powerful effects and moments arise from the choral passages, culminating in the eloquent and forceful “Things both strange and true.” The music packs a sustained and even overflowing emotional wallop.

Though this is a love story, only at the very end do Lola and her Fairy Prince duet, and only when they come to sing of the “joy of dissolution.” But the opera does not leave one with a feeling that anything has dissipated. Though it puts aside reason in favor of mysticism, its artistic effect is unambiguously solid.

Naturally, an opera performance lacks important dimensions on an audio recording. But the press announcement’s description of The Wake World as a “hallucinatory choral fantasy” is a good one too. As Hertzberg says, “The Wake World represents a deeply personal vision, an attempt to render in lurid detail the strange, frightening, inarticulable mystery of the imagination, into which I poured every iota of my creative being.” Every iota of this audio recording leaves no doubt he’s speaking the truth.

Rick Perdian | April 30, 2020

[…]
Hertzberg turned to a fairy tale by the British poet, magician and occultist, Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), who dabbled in practices such as sex magic, for the source of his libretto. Although later published in a collection entitled Konx Om Pax: Essays in Light, Crowley’s ‘The Wake World’ was originally conceived as a bedtime story for his daughter, Lola Zaza, in which he portrayed himself as the Fairy Prince who leads the child through an ecstatic journey of initiation that ends with her attaining enlightenment in a magical palace. Hertzberg’s libretto, however, is as lush and erotic as his score.

The mysticism and exoticism of the story not only fueled Hertzberg’s musical and literary gifts, it made him aware of the synergies that existed between two world-class eccentrics who were exact contemporaries. […]

Writing for an orchestra of five instruments, Hertzberg crafted a score of exceptional complexity and depth in The Wake World. His libretto is full of color, and the orchestrations capture images such as ‘the vermillion of pomegranates’ and ‘amber scarlet-flecked gold’ in scintillating, jewel-like tones. Hertzberg injects the same sonic splendor into the opera’s vocal lines. Stylistically, Hertzberg is hard to peg. There are traces of Hollywood film music from the 1930s (think Shirley Temple); rich, colorful orchestrations that some have likened to Ravel; and Straussian climaxes that create a sense of awe and ripple with sensuality. The latter are remarkable for their clarity and spaciousness. One has to suspend belief that five instruments can produce such sounds.

We tend to think our current situation is unique, but it has played out on local and global levels countless times before. In August 1892, the thirty-two-year-old Mahler was on his way to Hamburg, where he was chief conductor at the Stadttheater, when a cholera epidemic hit the city. Defying orders that he report to work, Mahler instead retreated to Berchtesgaden, one of the Alpine Mountain retreats that he favored, to ride it out. He was single, making his living as an opera conductor and barely known as a composer: his next major composition would be the Resurrection Symphony.

Escape, whether physical or mental, is a luxury at present. Many of us are cut off from society, and all of us from the live musical performances that entertain, sustain and nurture so many. Drawing any comparisons between 1892 and the present is folly, as are predictions for the future, but I can offer you a means to escape reality for a brief while. Just enter into an exotic, mesmerizing place where goodness and perseverance triumph – David Hertzberg’s The Wake World. It’s every bit as stunning as the mountains of Southern Bavaria where Mahler sought refuge.

David Salazar | April 8, 2020

Tzadik Records has announced that it will release David Hertzberg’s “The Wake World” on April 24, 2020, making the debut recording of the work.

Michael Cooper | January 9, 2019

The following fall, the company will perform David Hertzberg’s “The Wake World,” which had its premiere at Opera Philadelphia in 2017, in a new production by Mary Birnbaum. (Before Gotham closed, it had awarded Mr. Hertzberg, whose music Mr. Goren described as “wildly ecstatic and erotic,” a prize and commission that it could not see through.)

Fred Plotkin | December 17, 2018

BEST NEW OPERA:
The most impressive new opera I saw in 2018 was THE ROSE ELF, with music and lyrics by David Hertzberg based on a dark and frightening tale by Hans Christian Andersen. It was part of a nighttime series in a catacomb at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood cemetery. It was superbly performed by a cast of four (Samantha Hankey, Alisa Jordheim, Kyle Bielfield, Andrew Bogard), played by a nine-member orchestra led by Teddy Poll, and produced in terms of costumes, lighting, makeup and stage direction. I think this work could have a rich life outside of a cemetery.

David Patrick Stearns | December 1, 2018

MUSIC UNDERGROUND

“In June, The Rose Elf sealed David Hertzberg’s reputation as one of the most notable up-and-coming composers with his lush, dramatically alert Hans Christian Andersen adaptation.”

Arlo McKinnon | September, 2018

THE ROSE ELF

“In early June, The Angel’s Share presented what was billed as the “world premiere” of David Hertzberg’s The Rose Elf, a compelling and welcome addition to the operatic canon.

Hertzberg’s music is vital, colorful and dramatic.”

David Patrick Stearns | June 27, 2018

OPERA EVENT OF THE HALF YEAR

“…The Rose Elf, a long-in-the-works opera by David Hertzberg, opened the new concert series The Angel’s Share in June at the unlikely environs of the Green-Wood Cemetery catacombs. But the venue novelty was the least of it: The opera is based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale of a murder-avenging elf that sounds potentially silly. But Hertzberg is a masterful dramatist with a particular ability for building long dramatic arcs with saturated harmonies — like some imaginary, phantasmagorical flower. Even more than his much-acclaimed opera The Wake World (which I've only heard on recording), this one signals the arrival of a major compositional personality. The opera was directed with up-close intensity by R. B. Schlather.”

David Patrick Stearns | June 15, 2018

“Much in line with harmonically lush, neo-Impressionistic past works by Hertzberg, this adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen’s short story “The Elf of the Rose,” with a self-authored libretto, was compelling on every level throughout its one-hour running time.

Hertzberg (born in 1990 in Los Angeles) wrote and workshopped The Rose Elf prior to writing The Wake World – in record time – for the O17 Festival of Opera Philadelphia, where Hertzberg has been a composer in residence. I didn’t see The Wake World, though I have heard sound files of the piece that left me not only enthralled with the composer’s dreamy post-Impressionist, Kaija Saariaho-influenced harmonic language but also wondering about his storytelling acumen. No such reservations were possible with The Rose Elf, whose score had exactly the right touch at every turn with an unerring sense of pacing.

The lushness (often reminding me of the little-known Dutch composer Alphons Diepenbrock) provided the basic dramatic canvas for the story, conveying the story’s extensive floral life – intoxicating but often emotionally neutral, as is the plant life it portrays. From there, the well-crafted, dramatically apt vocal lines rode the piece’s waves toward some sort of resolution but were constantly hijacked by new harmonic avenues. Yet never did the piece meander. Hertzberg is a master of the slow dramatic buildup that starts gathering force almost imperceptibly, until you realize the music has insinuated itself into your soul. A passage about grief, for example, began with what sounded like repeating tubular bells, and then climaxed with a more relentless percussive piano in a similar musical gesture. You wonder how a composer so young achieves such psychological depth.

Each of Hertzberg’s slow buildups has a distinct character, though sometimes with a kinship suggested by recurring motifs. Also, below the music’s surface luster is a Puccinian streak. In contrast to, say, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, which implies more than it states, Hertzberg isn’t at all afraid to be more frankly passionate or to write effusive, rhapsodic vocal lines in a genuine love duet. Some of the opera’s more arresting moments, though, came with dramatic excursions into musical starkness that felt harmonically naked, with loud, slashing gestures. The smartly orchestrated ensemble sounded at least three times bigger than it was.

[...] As the couple, Kyle Bielfield and Alisa Jordheim sang a love duet that convinced me that this music is at least the equal of Puccini.”

Rick Perdian | June 15, 2018

For a young composer deemed ‘opulently gifted’ and ‘a twenty-first-century Ravel’, David Hertzberg is a rather modest fellow, cheerful and friendly, but then he has a lot to smile about. He was the Composer in Residence with Opera Philadelphia and Music-Theatre Group for the 2017-2018 season, commissions seem to flow his way, and his works are performed in major venues across the country.

Vivien Schweitzer | June 10, 2018

“Stories featuring murder, suicide, necrophilia, and cannibalism have inspired both staples of the operatic repertory and contemporary works: a grisly legacy continued by the gifted young American composer and librettist David Hertzberg. His engrossing chamber opera The Rose Elf is based on a grim fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, about an evil brother who murders his sister’s lover and buries the decapitated body, the horrors witnessed by a tiny elf sheltering in a rose. The sister unearths her beloved’s head and plants it in a flower pot.

Where better to stage such a bone-chilling work than a cemetery?

Teddy Poll deftly conducted a kaleidoscopic score whose luxuriance contrasted with the spartan surroundings. Flickers of arpeggios and soft filigree alternated with luminous Messiaen-like piano chords and darts of percussion color. A whispered, mournful cello line morphed into voluptuous outbursts. The expressive vocal palette ranged from the gruff declamations of the brother, portrayed with sinister conviction by the bass-baritone Andrew Bogard, to the soaring vocal lines that concluded the work. The music stopped as the brother dragged his victim’s body along the floor, his contorted movements riveting in the silent, close quarters.

While recent operas by George Benjamin and Charles Wuorinen have seemed too chilly and cerebral for their gruesome and tragic subject matters, Hertzberg has turned a morbid fairy tale about a shattered love affair into a suitably full-blooded and passionate opera. The catacombs were cold, but the music and singing certainly generated plenty of heat.”

Rebecca Richardson | June 11, 2018

"Powerful, disturbing, and clocking in at just an hour in length, The Rose Elf was captivating and intoxicating from start to finish, fueled by the lush orchestration and illustrious singing.

This succinct opera holds an enormous amount of weight and splendor. Hertzberg’s soaring vocal lines and orchestral richness as well as the cast’s commanding performances have stuck with me since departing the catacombs last night, and I expect that they will continue to do so for some time.”