The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (26 page)

Like
Der
Rosenkavalier,
this opera offers three marvellous roles to female singers, but confronts directors with the difficulty of presenting an elegant farce through which Hofmannsthal’s more serious themes – the meaning of sexual fidelity, for example – can also shine.
Again, Hofmannsthal’s libretto is so beautifully crafted and specifically detailed that there is not much that can be done in the way of updating or conceptualizing.
Audiences always regret the way that the sympathetic figure of the Composer vanishes from the action after the Prologue: some productions compensate by having him silently watch the action of the opera-within-an-opera from a chair at the side of the stage.

Recordings

CD: Leontyne Price (Ariadne); Georg Solti (cond.).
Decca 460 230 2

Video: Jessye Norman (Ariadne), Kathleen Battle (Zerbinetta); James Levine (cond.).
Metropolitan Opera production.
DG 072 411 3

Die Frau ohne Schatten
(
The Woman without a Shadow
)

Three acts. First performed Vienna, 1919.

Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

A twentieth-century rewriting of
Die
Zauberflöte,
with the glory of human fertility as its theme.
Although its orchestration is the most grandiose Strauss ever used and its physical landscape is cosmic, the opera is closely focused on individual dilemmas and marital relationships.

Plot

The daughter of Keikobad, ruler of the spirit world, has married a human Emperor.
As she is neither mortal nor immortal, she cannot bear children – a sterility symbolized by her lack of a shadow.
If she cannot find one within three days, Keikobad will turn the Emperor to stone.
The scheming Nurse leads her to the mortal world and the house of a good man, Barak the Dyer, whose nagging and dissatisfied wife is also childless, much to Barak’s disappointment.
The Nurse bribes the Dyer’s Wife with riches to sell the Empress her shadow.
But the Empress is filled with remorse when she understands what misery this will cause Barak, and tells her father Keikobad that she cannot go through with the bargain.
She pleads to save her husband, offering herself as a sacrifice.
Finally, her resolution prevails.
The Dyer’s Wife learns to love Barak, and eventually both she and the Empress are allowed their shadows and the promise of children.

What to listen for

Strauss’s most aurally glittering and spectacular score, rich in heavily underlined themes and virtuoso orchestral interludes, but lacking the obvious vocal ‘highlights’ of his previous operas and perhaps too rich in narrative complexity and symbolism for its own good.
It marks a peak in Strauss’s aspirations – his subsequent operas are either more modest in scale or formulaically repetitive of the successful elements of
Der
Rosenkavalier.
The sort of Straussian soprano who wallows in
Der
Rosenkavalier
tends to find the role of the Empress exhausting – she rises to a testing top D in the course of her long (and admittedly very beautiful) solo scene in Act III.
The Dyer’s Wife is written for a heavy dramatic soprano with enough personality on stage to suggest that she is more than just a venal and loud-mouthed shrew.
The Nurse is one of Strauss’s few roles for contralto, but its rewards are entirely dramatic.
The Emperor’s music provides further evidence for the view that Strauss had something against tenors – and it is the baritone singing the sympathetic character of Barak who gets the opera’s best tune, ‘Mir anvertraut’, sung at the beginning of Act III, in assertion of love for his wife.

In performance

A nightmare to stage – hugely expensive and complicated, and so overloaded with scenic transformations and special effects (including the
Peter
Pan
problem of lighting the Empress so that she does not cast a shadow) that a director has little hope of communicating the human implications of the fable.
Many productions end up in consequence resembling a cross between Santa’s Christmas Grotto and an episode of
Star
Trek.
Rather more tasteful is John Cox’s staging, designed by David Hockney, and seen in Los Angeles and at Covent Garden.
In Vienna, Robert Carsen presented the opera as a sort of Freudian nightmare, set at the time of the opera’s composition on a stage dominated by a series of beds; at the Met (where star sopranos such as Leonie Rysanek and Deborah Voigt in the role of the Empress have made the opera very popular), Herbert Wernicke had surprising success with a glacially minimalist but highly evocative approach.

Recordings

CD: Julia Varady (Empress); Georg Solti (cond.).
Decca 436 243 2

Video: Cheryl Studer (Empress); Georg Solti (cond.).
Salzburg production.
Decca 071 425 3

Arabella

Three acts. First performed Dresden, 1933.

Libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal

‘A second
Rosenkavalier,
without its mistakes and longueurs’ was what Strauss suggested to his librettist Hofmannsthal in 1923.
Hofmannsthal obliged with an adaptation of one of his short stories, but tragically died in 1929 before he and Strauss had completed the fine-tuning of his draft libretto.
In tribute to his memory, Strauss set Hofmannsthal’s every word as he left it, which explains a certain wordy slackness in Acts II and III.
A second
Rosenkavalier,
or a pale imitation of it?
Or a subtle romantic comedy in its own right, with a rather more acid edge than its precursor?

Plot

Vienna, 1860.
The impoverished Count Waldner is reduced to taking rooms in a hotel with his wife and two daughters, Arabella and Zdenka.
All hope of a revival of the family fortunes depends on a wealthy husband for the charming and beautiful Arabella; Zdenka has been brought up as a boy, in order to save money.

Arabella rejects her playboy suitors, but falls for the mysterious Mandryka, nephew of an old army comrade of her father and the heir to some distant rural estates.
At the Coachman’s Ball (an actual annual event in mid-nineteenth-century Vienna), Arabella falls in love with Mandryka, but the happy ending is delayed by an intrigue and misunderstanding.
Zdenka is in love with Matteo, one of Arabella’s suitors.
Zdenka gives Matteo a key, telling him that it belongs to Arabella’s room.
This is merely a ploy to get Matteo into bed with Zdenka, who impersonates her sister when Matteo makes use of the key.
But Mandryka overhears Zdenka talking to Matteo, and believes that Arabella is betraying him.
He resolves to return home without her.

Zdenka reveals her trickery just in time and Matteo transfers
his affections to her.
The opera ends as Mandiyka rapturously watches Arabella radiantly descending the hotel staircase carrying a glass of water, symbolic of her chastity, in accordance with a country custom that Mandryka explained to her at the ball.

What to listen for

The score is predominantly wistfully sweet and gentle in character, with the orchestration kept under firm rein.
Arabella is a role with a high-lying lyric line that will ‘fit’ any singer of the Marschallin (in
Der
Rosenkavalier
) like a glove.
Highlights include the Act I duet for Arabella and Zdenka, ‘Aber der Richtige’, based on a Balkan folk-song; Arabella’s monologue ‘Mein Elemer’ as she reflects on what life would be like if she is reduced to marrying her suitor Elemer; a daft coloratura number for the cabaret artiste Fiakermilli, who presides over the Coachman’s Ball; and the lush Straussian orchestral apotheosis as Arabella descends the staircase with her glass of water.