by Douglas Messerli
Hugo van Hofmannsthal
(libretto), Richard Strauss (music), Robert Carsen (stage director), Gary
Halvorson (director) Der Rosenkavalier / 2017 [The
Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]
For years when I’ve
thought about Richard Strauss’ great opera, Der Rosenkavalier, I
have always imagined it as primarily a slightly sad lyric testament to the
passage of time, as an almost Proustian acceptance of the end of not only one’s
own vitality, but of the era in which one, by birth, has come to represent.
That is certainly true for the great Marschallin, in Strauss’s original a
wealthy princess of the 18th-century, wife to the head of the Austrian military
(a force always central to Austrian life), and lover to a young, only
17-years-of-age, count, a remarkably handsome cavalier, who regularly brings
her roses.
What
I always forget is that this opera is also, and perhaps at heart, a raucous
social satire for most of the next two acts, and even within the first act when
the lovers’ transcendent interludes are interrupted, first by the completely
insensitive Ochs, and then by the numerous petitioners, peddlers, and simple
“riff-raff” that the Marschallin must daily face after her coffee and
chocolates. Great lady that she is, the Marschallin survives not only her daily
petitioners, waving them off with gracious gestures of hand and neck, but even
partially escaping the rude and blustering bleats of her obviously hated
cousin, Ochs—who boasts of his upcoming marriage to a wealthy
arms-manufacturers, Faninal’s (Markus Brück) daughter—by playing along with
Octavian’s pretense of being his lover’s chambermaid (a noted incident in which
an opera “pants” character—a soprano playing the young male lover—is forced to
appear in “drag” of the gender she truly is).
The
Marschallin saves the day, while the crude Ochs attempts to seduce the
newly-minted Mariandel, by suggesting that she cannot afford to give up her
ill-conceived servant, but that she will provide her cousin instead with Mariandel’s
handsome noble brother, Octavian, to serve as Ochs “Rosenkavalier,” to present
the traditional silver roses of family custom for all wedding engagements.
It is
after Och’s departure that the Marschallin, the utter opposite of her idiot
cousin, suddenly perceives that she is quickly growing old, singing her major
aria, “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding” in which she attempts to tell Octavian
that nothing lasts forever, and that there will come a time when, despite his
protestations, he too will move on.
Of
course, the ardent boy utterly denies it, and she is forced to console him,
instead, and he consoling the distraught woman who sometimes gets up in the
middle of the night to stop the clocks.
But
the series of slapstick actions that follow, including Fanlin’s presentation of
home-bound gun-turrets, the Keystone Cop-like antics of Och’s personal
soldiers, and general undefined chaos, as Sophie is groped, pulled, pummeled,
and finally thrown to the ground in the ever-shifting emotions of Ochs,
represent something I might describe as outside the tone of the opera. That
Carsten’s Ochs is a healthy antidote to the usual operatic depiction of an
old oafish man, I’ll agree; but there can be no doubt that this moves not
only toward the campy but is definitely “over-the-top.”
And
these qualities grow even more extreme in the beginning of the next act, played
out in a brothel (the prudish MET-HD printout describes it as “a house of ill
repute”), which, in this production seems closer to the Weimar Republic’s
cabarets than to a Vienna fin de siècle establishment. The
attempt to bring the dense Ochs to his senses involves Octavian, got up into a
costume that reminds one of Marlene Dietrich, a male-drag orchestra right out
of Some Like It Hot, numerous undressed and unwound floozies, a
loud-mouthed Madame (Tony Stevenson),
Once
again, the opera returns to its transcendent roots, as Fleming, Garanča, and
Morley join together for an all-female trio that sings of love, acceptance, and
forgiveness simultaneously. Strauss’ tinkling music, with its slightly
discordant descending melodies says it all, even suggesting that the intense
love now shared by the young Sophie and Octavian may also one day, too, come to
an end. But, at least, as the Marschallin perceives, Sophie and Octavian will
be good together, if even for a too little while.
If only the director had been a bit more subtle in his comic inventiveness. For despite the manic energy of those interactions between Ochs and the others, there seemed to have been no genuine laughter. Surely a somewhat lighter touch might have redeemed the central characters’ trials and tribulations. This production seemed to suggest that Strauss’s and von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 opera was simply a farce surrounded by slightly sentimental lovers. But then young lovers always behave that way, observes Sophie’s father, to which the Marschallin responds: “Yes, yes”—the very last words of Fleming’s long habitation of her character.
Los Angeles, May 14, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater,
Opera, and Performance (May 2017).
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