presided over by her friend Michael Tilson Thomas. She has, however appeared theatrically in Ravel's other opera, L'heure espagnole, singing the role of Concepción under Seiji Ozawa in Tokyo (2003). In Poulenc's Catholic-themed rarity, Dialogues des Carmélites, she was Sister Blanche de la Force in a single run of performances at the Met (1983). German-language opera The first major role in a German opera that von Stade assumed was Hänsel in Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. She played him in eleven child-oriented performances (sung in English) at the Met between 1972 and 1983; that of Christmas 1982 was televised. The rest of her German-language repertoire was drawn from the 20th century. Octavian in Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, an opera notably richly orchestrated, was a role that tested her lyric voice to its limits but was also one of her especial favourites. "I love that age in boys," she says. "If they feel good about themselves, it comes out. ... Octavian might be boastful, but it's not offensive. Why shouldn't he be boastful? He moves from palace to beautiful palace, head to toe in silver, coming on in that crash of musiche's just too gorgeous to be true. And he's also full of his own sexual pride and discoverythe whole Mrs Robinson thing. I mean, what a gas! To go through that initiation with such a superb woman, not fumbling around with some kid his own age. He's had the best, and it's been done with taste and finesseand great fun." She first portrayed him in Houston (1975), revisiting him at the Holland Festival (1976), in Hamburg (1979), in Paris (1981), on a Met spring tour (1983) and in San Francisco (1993). Her other Richard Strauss role, the Komponist in Ariadne auf Naxos, she abandoned after concluding from a production in Hamburg (1983) that it called for a voice with more thrust than hers. The tormented lesbian Countess Martha Geschwitz in Alban Berg's Lulu, essayed by her in San Francisco (1998), was another role that was only peripheral to her career, although her interpretation of it was favourably received by critics. But a venture into the world of operetta was more profitable. She had loved Franz Lehár's Die lustige Witwe ever since one winter in a rural phase of her childhood, when "the fire trucks sprayed water on the ponds to make them smoother for ice skaters. Then the waltz from The