Der Vampir oder Die Gejagten

Hans Müller-Einigen’s drama Der Vampir oder Die Gejagten [The Vampire or the Hunted] was premiered at the Volkstheater in Vienna on 3 February 1923. To accompany Müller-Einigen’s drama, Korngold composed the discrete incidental music for a small ensemble consisting of flute, percussion, harp, piano/harmonium, two violins and a cello. The work exists as a set of eight brief numbers that have a total duration of ten minutes and span the first three acts of the drama. It cannot be ruled out that additional pieces that accompanied acts four and five have since been lost. Korngold frames the grotesque plot with brief, incisive interludes: text and music become blended in melodramatic vocal passages or rhythmically through-composed (spoken) choral sequences. Der Vampir oder Die Gejagten tells the story of the sculptor Johannes who is desperate to win the bid for a monument. The (anti)hero attempts to win over not only the patron Katzwendel but also his influential wife by passing off a design by his more gifted brother as his own work. The play is simultaneously a drama about artists and a highly entertaining piece of nonsense in which Müller-Einigen combines expressionist pathos with cabaret humour. His world of the absurd teems with phantoms and dead persons, sculptures which have come to life, a crippled artist, a simple-minded chambermaid, a second fl autist, and a beautiful widow. The main protagonist, a vampire called ‘Männchen’ [manikin] in the surviving printed version, is the brother of Mephistopheles preys on over-ambitious artists. In the end, Männchen does not get Johannes’ soul, who repents just in time to save himself. The ‘role’ of the title figure only extends to one line of song (‘Wovon sind Floh und Wanze so fröhlich und so fett? Sie gehen auf das Ganze, die Welt ist nur ein Bett!’) [‘Why are fleas and bedbugs so cheerful and fat? They go for the jugular and the whole world is a bed!’], but the role includes numerous passages in which the actor speaks exactly in the rhythm of the music. Hans Müller-Einigen was one of the most well-known interwar authors in Vienna and Berlin. He shared Korngold’s love of film and operetta and worked with the composer on a number of occasions, writing the short libretto for the Renaissance drama Violanta as well as the text for the composer’s opera Das Wunder der Heliane. Müller-Einigen’s scripts were filmed in Hollywood from the 1920s onwards and Ralph Benatzky‘s singspiel The White Horse Inn [Im weißen Rössl] – for which Müller-Einigen was involved in the preparation of the text – has remained a great success up to the present day. The writer made his home in Switzerland in 1930 where he found a refuge in exile as a homosexual author with Jewish origins during the terror of the Nazi regime.