The Faber Pocket Guide to Opera (27 page)

In performance

With its glamorous heroine, dashing hero (Mandryka is a sympathetic role for a handsome baritone) and splendid ball scene,
Arabella
is a romantic fairy-tale for grown-ups.
Productions almost always limit themselves to a meticulous re-creation of the Vienna of the 186os – including some gorgeous frocks for Arabella.
Every generation has brought its great interpreters of this peach of a role – Lisa della Casa in the 1950s, Kiri Te Kanawa and Felicity Lott in the 1980s and more recently, Renée Fleming.

Recordings

CD: Kiri Te Kanawa (Arabella); Jeffrey Tate (cond.).
Decca 417 623 2

DVD: Kiri te Kanawa (Arabella); Christian Thielemann (cond.).
Metropolitan Opera production.
DG 073 005 9

Capriccio

One act (but often played with an interval). First performed Munich, 1942.

Libretto by the composer and Clemens Krauss

Inspired by a little comic opera by Mozart’s rival Salieri entitled
Prima
la
Musica
e poi
le
Parole
(
First
the
music,
then
the
words
) and originally conceived as a curtain-raiser to Strauss’s one-act mythological opera
Daphne
(1938),
Capriccio
grew into a nostalgic valediction to a civilization being destroyed by the brutality of the Second World War, as well as to the elderly Strauss’s own fifty-year career as a conductor and composer of opera.

Plot

An aristocratic salon in Paris, 1777, in the era when Gluck’s music was controversial (see p.
5).
Flamand the composer and Olivier the poet are rivals for the love of Countess Madeleine.
They are contributing to a birthday entertainment in her private theatre.
Along with the help of the worldly impresario La Roche and the Countess’s brother, who is in love with the actress Clairon, they debate the aesthetics of opera, notably the question whether words or music should dominate.
Various amorous intrigues run as undercurrent to the discussion, and the Countess promises to choose between her two suitors by eleven the next morning.
La Roche finally asserts the glory of theatre, its ability to speak to hearts and minds and reflect all human preoccupations.
The Countess is impressed and commissions Flamand and Olivier to write an opera to mark her birthday.
The Count adds that it should be based on all that has passed within the Countess’s salon and that the Countess must decide how the plot will end when Flamand visits her at eleven the next morning.

Night falls, and the Countess is left alone.
In a long monologue, she questions her own heart but is unable to decide how she will bring the opera to an end – whether to choose Flamand or Olivier, music or words.

What to listen for

A fluent, elegant, knowing diversion which wilfully averts its eyes from the ideology of the Third Reich and the horrors of the Second World War.
Warm, serene and a touch smug in its conservatism and arch references to previous Strauss operas,
Capriccio
is structured round a series of conversations, broken by several declamatory speeches, the intrusion of a comic Italian soprano and tenor (with a dancer in tow), several amusing ensembles, all crowned by Strauss’s self-conscious farewell to the operatic composition in the shape of an exquisite orchestral ‘moonlight’ interlude and the Countess’s final monologue – a long meditation on art and love which evokes the shimmering soprano music written for the Marschallin, Ariadne and Arabella.

As befits an opera which debates the relative values of words and music, the text is set so that every syllable should be readily audible, and the opera is best performed in a smaller auditorium where none of the singers have to strain to project.

In performance

Although the libretto firmly sets the action in pre-Revolutionary Paris,
Capriccio
works equally well when updated to the 1920s, a transformation effected with notable panache by John Cox’s production at Glyndebourne.
At the Berlin Staatsoper, Jonathan Miller eerily framed the opera with the sound of bombs and Nazi broadcasts – the background to the opera’s first performances in war-torn Germany.

Recordings

CD: Elisabeth Schwarzkopf (Countess); Wolfgang Sawallisch (cond.).
EMI 567 394 2

Video: Kiri Te Kanawa (Countess); Donald Runnicles (cond.).
San Francisco Opera production.
Decca 071 426 3

Arnold Schoenberg

(1874–1951)

Moses und Aron

Three acts (of which only two are normally performed).

First performed 1957. Libretto by the composer

In essence, a meditation on profound questions of the Jewish religion.
Schoenberg composed the first two acts between 1930 and 1932, shortly before he was forced to leave Nazi Germany.
In exile in California, he never found the inspiration to set his text for Act III to music, though he sanctioned the solution of reciting it as an epilogue.

Plot

Following the story in Exodus, the opera opens as Moses is instructed by God, speaking through the Burning Bush, to lead the Israelites from Egypt to the Promised Land.
Moses doubts his abilities, but is assured that his brother Aaron will act as his mouthpiece.
The Israelites are led out into the desert.

With Moses absent on Mount Sinai, the Israelites lose heart and at Aaron’s instigation, an orgy ensues around the statue of the Golden Calf.
On his return with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, Moses is horrified by the depravity.
He and Aaron quarrel: Moses cannot see how the mystery of God can be physically represented, but Aaron insists that idols and miracles win the people’s loyalty, and that even the tablets are material symbols of the invisible.
Aaron leads the Israelites onwards, following a Pillar of Fire.
Moses is left to mourn his failure.

The unperformed, uncomposed Act III consists mostly of the trial of Aaron before Moses, at the end of which Aaron falls dead.

What to listen for

The obvious highlight of this austere but mesmerizing opera, largely written in the twelve-note or serial mode, is the
extended orgy scene in Act II, a vast musical tapestry which vividly depicts processions and dances of increasing wildness, culminating in violent rape and pillage before concluding in utter exhaustion.