Oh, So That's Rosenkavalier

It took us three weeks—three Sunday evenings, actually—to watch Der Rosenkavalier at Il Teatro Buce, but that is one of the advantages of ADHD TV—you can spread things out and give them time for thought. Good thing, too, because I had a fair amount of clutter to get out of my head.

First, I thought I’d seen it before. Can’t imagine what I was confusing it with—Die Fledermaus? Merry Widow? Whatever, but it was clear in the first ten minutes that I was wrong, and this was going to take some attention.

Second—well, Mr. and Mrs. B had sojourned to Dresden a while back for a Strauss Festival—three Strauss in three nights. Let’s say the experience was broadening. We saw Salome—a screamer’s opera sung by a screamer on one of those weird faux-Caligari sets that the Germans seem to fancy these days. We saw Ariadne auf Naxos, which I just can’t get my mind around somehow. We saw a pretty decent Elektra, but it got more or less lost in the shuffle. Not a high point of my cultural consumption career, then, though it beats a poke in the eye with a pointed stick (OTOH, maybe the locals knew something I didn’t know—Dresden is Strauss central, and this was a much-hyped special program, but on each of three nights, there were lots of empty seats).

A third threshold barrier was that I’d read somewhere how Rosenkavelier is infra dig among the amateurs, faux Strauss for amateurs.

Well, I guess that tells me, because in the end I loved it. Accessible, alright, and I don’t necessarily regard that as a barrier. A soupçon of Mozart here and there, but that’s not a problem for me: Indeed I’d say it is part of the charm: it puts it in a class with those pieces (Britten’s Ceremony of Carols is the classic example) that seem deliberately to transcend generations or even centuries. I also found it a good deal edgier than its billing. Might have been the performance (see infra, passim), but Gilbert & Sullivan this is not.

Three weeks: one consequence of the stretch-out is that we came to grips with it as three rather different items—different in purpose and correspondingly in tone. The first act for my money belongs to the Marschallinwho played it a bit like my favorite Cleopatras—a bit long in the tooth, a girl who knows that she has pretty much played out her string. Nothing funny about that, and Gwyneth Jones made it bracing conviction.

The second act belonged to Der Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau (Manfred Jungwirth). I suppose you could just wring it dry for comedy, and Jungwirth got a few laughs at appropriate places. But he’s really a pretty awful man: I kept remembering Homer Simpson saying “It’s the SS Homer Comin’ Into Port with a Cargo full o’love!). You really wouldn’t want that big tub o’lard landing on you in any circumstances.

The third act is a tavern scene of sorts, “and the gang goes wild,” as the sitcom blurbwriters might say (especially when they hadn’t yet finished their script). I must say it wanders a bit, but the final seven minutes for the three sopranos must be something that seasoned performers throw their grandmothers under a bus for (candidate bus-throwers here, along with Gwyneth Jones, are Brigitte Fassbaender and Lucia Popp).

The conducter here is Carlos Kleiber; the director, Otto Schenk. A couple of pretty good Amazon reviews help to untangle the somewhat confusing performance history. Anyway, Richard, I’m sorry about all those cheesy things I said about you. I’ll gladly try another Rosenkavalier, and I may even have to give Ariadne another try. Still not so sure about Salome, though.