The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (25 page)

When he arrives at the inn, Ochs is perturbed by both Mariandel’s reluctance to be seduced and her startling resemblance to Octavian.
Then Annina arrives and noisily accuses
Ochs of being the father of several of her children.
Faninal is summoned and witnesses further farcical complications, all carefully stage-managed by Octavian, which culminate in Ochs’s total humiliation.
Only the Marschallin’s sudden and surprising arrival quells the hubbub.
She firmly dismisses the disgraced Ochs, and shows a gracious and generous understanding of Octavian’s new passion for Sophie.
The two young lovers are left happily alone together.

What to listen for

An opera dominated by female voices and containing three of the repertory’s most beautiful and gratifying roles for full lyric soprano (the Marschallin), a lighter high lyric soprano (Sophie) and high mezzo-soprano or low soprano (Octavian).
Ochs is a great favourite of bass-baritones, too, though finding the balance in the characterization between the country gentleman and the lecherous boor is not easy: however coarse he may be, Ochs is still some sort of aristocrat.

Note the graphic description of sexual climax in the prelude (whooping horns depicting orgasm); the elaborately detailed scene-painting of the Marschallin’s levee, full of typically Straussian little jokes; the almost Puccinian sweetness of the aria sung by the Italian tenor who serenades the Marschallin as she receives her guests; the suppleness and warmth of the conversations between Octavian and the Marschallin, and the subtle colouring of word and shaping of phrase with which a good singer will mark the Marschallin’s melancholy monologue.

Act II centres on the dazzling scene of the Presentation of the Rose, a scene for Sophie and Octavian which serves as the classic example of Strauss’s obsession with the shimmering silvery glamour of the soprano voice.
Like the Italian tenor’s aria, the waltzes at the end of Act II are an anachronism, but one that seems to fit the pastiche so perfecdy that it is impossible to object.
The over-egged farce of the first half of Act III melts into the rapturous trio (‘Hab mir’s gelobt’) and the almost childlike innocence of the ensuing rocking duet for
Sophie and Octavian (modelled, it is believed, on the duet in
Hänsel
und
Gretel,
one of Strauss’s favourite operas).

For all these marvels,
Der
Rosenkavalier
remains an opera for those with a sweet tooth.
It is a long work (three and a half hours of music) with a lot of text and a bewildering confusion of secondary characters, requiring superlatively disciplined conducting and magnificent singing if it is not to drag in the middle.

In performance

An opera so intricately and meticulously written that it does not take kindly to being messed about with, though attempts have been made to lift it gently out of the 1740s Viennese setting and eliminate some of its whipped-cream and sugared-icing ingredients by updating the scenario to the turn-of-the-century era of its composition.

The list of great female singers who have given memorable interpretations of the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie is endless: many have graduated from Octavian to the Marschallin (Christa Ludwig), and several from Sophie to the Marschallin (Lucia Popp), but only three have also played Sophie – Lotte Lehmann, Lisa della Casa and Elisabeth Söderström.
Outstanding recent interpreters of these roles include Felicity Lott and Renée Fleming (Marschallin), Ann Murray, Susan Graham and Anne-Sofie von Otter (Octavian) and Barbara Bonney and Kathleen Battle (Sophie).
Strauss’s score specifies that Octavian should be sung by a soprano, but in the interests of contrasting vocal weight and colour with the Sophie and Marschallin, the role is usually taken today by a high mezzo-soprano.

Recordings

CD: Régine Crespin (Marschallin); Georg Solti (cond.).
Decca 417 493 2

Kiri Te Kanawa (Marschallin); Bernard Haitink (cond.).
EMI 754 259 2

DVD: Felicity Lott (Marschallin); Carlos Kleiber (cond.).
Vienna State Opera production.
DG 073 008 9

Ariadne
auf Naxos

Prologue and one act. First performed Vienna, 1916.

Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

Strauss and Hofmannsthal originally planned to append a small-scale half-hour opera on the theme of the mythological Ariadne to a version of Molière’s play
Le
bourgeois
gentilhomme,
for which Strauss would provide incidental music.
In the event, Molière was compressed and Ariadne expanded, and in 1912 the diptych was performed in Stuttgart.
But it made for an awkwardly long and ill-balanced evening, and the additional expense and difficulty of hiring troupes of both singers and actors meant that the work was never likely to establish itself.

In 1916, a shorter and more coherent revision was performed, and it is this version which, despite several substantial musical losses, has remained standard.
In place of
Le
bourgeois
gentilhomme,
it substituted a prologue with themes and setting loosely drawn from Molière, but newly focused on the figure of the Composer, and the dilemmas of the creative artist in a society which wants cheerful entertainment rather than profound art.

Plot

In the house of a rich Viennese gentleman, preparations are under way for a theatrical entertainment.
There is consternation when it is announced that, to save time and money, the brilliant young Composer’s serious opera on the tragic situation of the deserted Ariadne is to be performed with elements of a farcical
opera
buffa
intermixed.
Zerbinetta, the vivacious leading lady of the comic troupe, flirts with the Composer in an attempt to unravel the plot of his opera.
Idealistic though he is on matters of both music and love, the Composer cannot help but be charmed by her gaily cynical attitude to the tragic Ariadne.
Then a bell rings: the performance is due to begin, and it is too late for the Composer to prevent the botch of his tragic masterpiece.

The opera-within-an-opera opens to reveal the inconsolable Ariadne lying outside a cave on the island of Naxos.
She has just been abandoned there by her lover Theseus and, for all the efforts of the
opera-buffa
troupe to cheer her up, she longs to die.
Zerbinetta preaches a more down-to-earth attitude – one man can soon be replaced with another.
When Bacchus arrives, Ariadne at first mistakes him for Theseus, then the Herald of Death.
But to Zerbinetta’s satisfaction, Ariadne and Bacchus fall in love, celebrating their union in a long and rapturous duet.

What to listen for

Most of
Ariadne
auf Naxos
was composed in conscious reaction to the Wagnerian scale and effects of
Elektra
and
Der
Rosenkavalier.
The orchestration is modest and contains several discrete arias – the tone is Mozartian.
Yet Strauss could never altogether resist firing the big guns.
Ariadne
contains three female roles similar to those in
Rosenkavalier
– the Composer (high mezzo-soprano, although, as for Octavian in
Der
Rosenkavalier,
the score specifies a soprano), Ariadne (full lyric soprano, requiring stronger and deeper low notes than the Marschallin or Arabella) and Zerbinetta (a lyric soprano with facility for coloratura and high notes) – as well as a cruelly testing and ungrateful role for the tenor Bacchus.

It is also a score which contains several magnificent outbursts.
The Composer makes an impassioned defence of the ‘Holy Art of Music’ at the end of the Prologue; Ariadne paints a moving vision of the kingdom of death in ‘Es gibt ein Reich’; and in ‘Grossmächtige Prinzessin’, Zerbinetta shows Ariadne the error of her views.
The latter is one of the great coloratura showpieces: its interminable 1912 version hits a stratospheric F; rewritten and mercifully shortened in 1916, it rises only to a more modest E (a semitone lower than the Queen of the Night’s top F).
Even so, few singers manage the trill on the top D and E which Strauss cruelly specifies at one point.
The great blot on the score, by common consent, is the
coarse, noisy and over-extended duet for Bacchus and Ariadne which ends an otherwise enchanting piece.

Note also the lovely music for the Rhinemaiden-like trio of nymphs who surround Ariadne, and the gently simple song, ‘Lieben, hassen’, crooned by the
opera-buffa
figure of Harlequin in an attempt to comfort Ariadne.
It’s a marvellous opportunity for a young lyric baritone hoping to make his mark.

In performance