Genoveva oder Die weiße Hirschkuh

Genoveva, also known as Vevchen, is thrown out of the house of her mistress Mrs Adolphine Plückerjahn who disapproves of Vevchen’s love affair with her nephew Adelkurt. At the grave of her mother, Vevchen becomes secretly engaged to Adelkurt and travels to Berlin. In the Berlin Tiergarten, she almost becomes a victim of Hugestine, a murderer targeting women, but is saved miraculously by the angel Ezekiel and is turned into a white doe. In the meantime, Adelkurt has frittered away his substantial inheritance; he murders his aunt Adolphine and buys a ticket to Berlin with the proceeds of the money he has taken from her. In the meantime, Kaiser Wilhelm II nearly shot the white doe during a nocturnal hunt in the Tiergarten, but the doe is transformed back into her human form at the last minute with the help of the angel and is promised a pension by the Kaiser. Adelkurt is summoned, pardoned by the Kaiser and raised to the status of a Count. The Kaiser endorses the marriage between Vevchen and Adelkurt – on the condition that Vevchen should produce seven healthy sons for the Kaiser’s army.
It was György Ligeti, teacher of the only eighteen-year-old Detlev Müller-Siemens, who introduced his pupil to this tale written by the Wilhelminian writer Julie Schrader and termed by the author herself as a ‘genuinely great drama’. Although today the author is only familiar to specialists of Wilhelminian literature, Julie Schrader (1881-1939) was reputedly one of the most read authoresses in Imperial Germany, although it appears that a large proportion of the works attributed to her were actually written by her great nephew Bernd W. Wesseling. Müller-Siemens was however fascinated by the simultaneous ironic ambiguity and unbroken naivety of the text of ‘Hirschkuh’. His music frequently seems to be composed at a tangent to the text; it breaks down the naïve-optimistic façade of the story, revealing the protagonists as schizophrenic doll-like characters who are torn between puerile simplicity and an abysmal weakness in character. Müller-Siemens takes particular care in giving the three main figures a distinct musical profile: Adolphine Plückerjahn sings mannered, stilted and pompous cantilenas, Adelkurt is characterised by ornamental, empty stock phrases and Vevchen’s naivety is borne out by her child-like and simple melodic vocal line.