Matthias Pintscher
A Fairy Tale Opera Trades the Moral for the Mysterious
Matthias Pintscher’s first opera in 20 years invites audiences to find their own meaning in a macabre 19th-century tale.
By Jeffrey Arlo Brown
The composer Matthias Pintscher was hiking in the Black Forest a few years ago, considering an offer to compose a new work for the Berlin State Opera, when the words to a German fairy tale came rushing back to him.
When he was 5, Pintscher had listened obsessively to a story called “The Cold Heart” (“Das kalte Herz”) on cassette. The tale is about a poor charcoal burner who trades his heart for a slab of stone. The haunting story seemed like the ideal subject for a new opera — Pintscher’s first in over 20 years. That piece, also titled “Das kalte Herz,” premieres in Berlin on Sunday, then travels to the Opéra-Comique in Paris on March 11.
Pintscher, now 54, is the music director of the Kansas City Symphony, a frequent guest conductor with the world’s leading orchestras and a composer of darkly mysterious and precisely imagined music. Born in Marl, Germany, he now lives in New York City and teaches composition at the Juilliard School.
In an interview, Pintscher said he saw “Das kalte Herz” as a breakthrough work that shows the confidence to let the audience reach its own conclusions. In the kind of art he wants to make, Pintscher added, “there’s always that element that something feels not completed by the artist, but it’s passed over to the viewer, to the reader, to the listener.”
A man stands on a platform and holds a baton while directing an orchestra.
Pintscher will conduct the premiere on Sunday at the Berlin State Opera.Credit…Bernd Uhlig
For that to happen, Pintscher and his librettist, Daniel Arkadij Gerzenberg, had to adjust their source material. In the original fairy tale, written by Wilhelm Hauff in the early 19th century, Peter, the charcoal burner, longs to be wealthy and enters into a Faustian bargain with an evil forest spirit. After exchanging his heart for a piece of marble, he becomes a brutal miser, whipping his wife to death for giving a poor man some of his wine. The moral is that a person should accept his lot in life, no matter how lowly.