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Stefan Zweig was an Austrian writer.
At the height of his literary fame in the 1920s and 30s, Zweig was one of Europe's most popular writers. Though not as well known by modern audiences, his work has seen a resurgence of interest of late as the inspiration for Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel, which starred Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Bill Murray and Tilda Swinton, among others.
Following the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, Richard Strauss was seeking a new librettist. Zweig was the ideal candidate, well-established and with an ability to move between fiction, non-fiction and drama.
Due to the political situation in Germany at the time, they were only able to complete one opera together, beginning work on Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) in the early 1930s. By the time that Hitler came to power in January 1933, the piano score and the orchestration of the first of the opera's three acts was 'as good as finished'. As a Jew, however, Zweig was not welcome within Reich culture. But the Nazis were stuck: could they possibly ban an opera written by Richard Strauss, the president of the Reichsmusikkammer? Eventually the decision came from Hitler himself, who noted what he perceived as a 'slur' against the Reich, but allowed the performances to go ahead.
It was, however, to be Zweig's last stand. A letter from Strauss to him was intercepted by the Gestapo, in which the composer asked Zweig to begin work on a second opera. Seeing this as a clear affront to their authority, the Nazis condemned Die schweigsame Frau and terminated Strauss and Zweig's collaboration. In 1934, Zweig fled to Britain, living first in London and then in Bath, before moving to New York in 1940 and finally, later that year, to Rio de Janeiro, where he and his wife killed themselves by taking a barbiturate overdose.
'Something else was beginning', Zweig had written in his autobiography Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday), 'a new time, and who knew how many hells and purgatories we still had to go through to reach it?' But on the last pages of his memoir, Zweig had also offered a note of hope, not unlike the sunset described in the last of Strauss's Four Last Songs. 'Every shadow', he offered, 'is also the child of light, and only those who have known the light and the dark, have seen war and peace, rise and fall, have truly lived their lives'.
2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer has been celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).]]>
Living in Garmisch, Richard Strauss would have heard a lot of folk music in the surrounding countryside, including the famous Alpine yodel, which makes appearances in a couple of his scores.
First, rather fittingly, there is a yodel in Eine Alpensinfonie, played by an oboe in a scene entitled 'Auf der Alm' (In the Alpine pasture). The yodel crops up, slightly more surprisingly, in Arabella, when the Fiakermilli, the belle of the Coachman's ball in Vienna, sings 'Die Wiener Herrn verstehen sich auf die Astronomie'.
Strauss mimics the yodel's characteristic shifts between chest and head voice in the Fiakermilli's flurry of coloratura effects, wowing the other ball guests.
2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer has been celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).]]>
Richard Strauss employed a wide range of percussion instruments in his works, including the xylophone.
Although the score of Salome – one of the composer's most famous operas – contains no mention of the xylophone, a Holz- und Strohinstrument (wood and straw instrument) is listed. The name of this precursor to the xylophone describes the crude way in which the wooden bars of the instrument rested on straw supports. Such a design may suggest delicate, restrained usage but Strauss was characteristically demanding of its player, writing streams of semiquaver scales for the frenzied climax of the 'Dance of the Seven Veils'.
Salome is far from being Strauss's most extravagant score when it comes to such percussive effects. Die Frau ohne Schatten, for instance, boasts a glockenspiel, xylophone (listed under its modern name), five Chinese gongs, cymbals, side drum, rute (bound birch twigs), sleigh bells, bass drum, large tenor drum, triangle, tambourine, two pairs of castanets and tam tam. All these instruments compete for pit space with the glass harmonica, two celestas, and two harps; as well as the wind machine, thunder machine and four tam tams off stage. It adds up to a gigantic orchestra of over 100. 'It is extraordinary that Strauss had a brain that could conceive all [the opera] and a heart to express it', said conductor Semyon Bychkov in a recent interview.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer has been celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).]]>
Strauss is a common German surname. Richard shares it, of course, with the Viennese family who came to dominate dance music during the 19th century, first with Johann Strauss I, then with his son Johann Strauss II and his slightly less famous brothers.
While not related, Richard Strauss maintained his namesakes' predilection for triple time. He frequently uses waltz forms in his operas and both Salome's 'Dance of the Seven Veils' and Elektra's final triumphant dance swing into three-four time. The younger Johann Strauss's widow was present when Salome had its Austrian premiere in Graz, in the same room as luminaries including Mahler, Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
And then, of course, there's Der Rosenkavalier, which is set in 18th-century Vienna, but sounds much more like the Golden Age of Johann Strauss II, the time in which the drama of Strauss's later opera Arabella unfolds. The charm of the waltz permeates Der Rosenkavalier and gives the piece an aura of melancholy beauty; the opera was a huge success on its premiere in 1911, and became one of Strauss's most popular works.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer was celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (which ran until 13 July).]]>
Like many composers and artists before him, Richard Strauss felt himself drawn towards Vienna during the first decades of the 20th century.
The imperial capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had been the centre of musical creativity in Europe for over 150 years. Strauss's collaboration with the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal to the city made Vienna even more attractive to the composer, and the two set both Der Rosenkavalier and Arabella there.
Strauss moved to the city after World War I to take up the directorship of the Staatsoper, a position previously held by Gustav Mahler. But the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a consequence of its defeat in the War had turned the former imperial hub into the capital city of a small, landlocked republic. While Strauss and his colleague Franz Schalk oversaw a happy period in the Staatsoper's history, the premiere of Die Frau ohne Schatten in Vienna on 10 October 1919 fell on stony ground. Conceived before the horrors of the war, and the termination of an opulent empire, it was first performed to a broken society, wearied by the excesses of successive emperors and empresses. It would be the only opera Strauss chose to debut in Vienna during his tenure at the Staatsoper.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (until 13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Unheimlich is German for uncanny.
It is a word that appears in the librettos for many of Richard Strauss's operas, including Elektra, and it is a fitting word to describe the many eerie orchestral effects Strauss created to tell these stories in microscopic orchestral detail. Flutter-tonguing woodwind and brass depict a flock of sheep in his tone poem Don Quixote, the wind audibly howls and haunts Herod in Salome, the 'silver rose' music of Der Rosenkavalier glitters, and we hear Daphne's transformation from nymph to laurel tree as much as see it.
Interestingly, given the Freudian themes of Die Frau ohne Schatten, The uncanny is also a psychoanalytic concept describing an instance where something can be both familiar and yet alien at the same time, causing cognitive dissonance and a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.
So proud was Strauss of his expressive skills with the orchestra, that the composer boasted that he could even describe a knife and fork in music!
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Richard Strauss had a natural affinity for the soprano voice, unsurprising, given his wife Pauline de Ahna's talents, but he has often been accused of lack of generosity towards tenors.
Herod's vocal lines in Salome are particularly cruel, if fittingly exaggerated, which was a trend Strauss continued in Elektra with the brief appearance of Klytämnestra's lover Aegisth. In Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss sends up his contemporary Puccini's favouring of the tenor voice during the Italian tenor's aria in Act I.
However, this year, The Royal Opera performs two Strauss operas which feature extraordinary parts for tenors – the Emperor in Die Frau ohne Schatten and Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos – for whom Strauss provides some of his most ardent melodies.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
The Austrian city of Salzburg is perhaps most famous as the birthplace of Mozart. It's also situated around 100 miles east of Richard Strauss's home in Garmisch.
Festivals celebrating Mozart have taken place there since the late 1870s. In 1917, Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, director Max Rheinhardt, designer Alfred Roller and the conductor Franz Schalk – with whom Strauss ran the Staatsoper in Vienna from 1919 to 1924 – collectively decided to formalize these efforts and widen the festival's remit, creating an annual summer arts festival.
The Salzburg Festival opened on 22 August 1920 with a performance of Hofmannsthal's Jedermann play, a work now performed each year. In 1922 the work of Strauss and Mozart briefly converged as Strauss conducted Don Giovanni, the first operatic production staged at the event.
The Salzburg Festival has since been home to the premiere of the revised version of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Die ägyptische Helena in 1933 and the first performance of Die Liebe der Danae after Strauss's death, staged in 1952. The production had originally been planned for 1944, but following the 20 July plot to assassinate Hitler, Joseph Goebbels declared 'total war' and closed all the theatres and performing venues within the Third Reich. However, the Nazis permitted one dress rehearsal of Die Liebe der Danae – the only time Strauss would hear the work live. The Salzburg Festival has continued to proselytize its founder's work.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Alexander Ritter (1833–1896) was a German musician, composer and a friend of Richard Strauss.
They met in Meiningen and Ritter was keen to push the young Strauss in more radical directions than his established conservative diet of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms.
Ritter supported the 'new music' of Liszt and Wagner - to whose niece he was married - and felt that Strauss should be writing tone poems. By the time Ritter moved to Munich in 1886, Strauss was already hard at work on Aus Italien, his first symphonic fantasy. The pair travelled to Bayreuth together to visit Liszt's grave and to hear Tristan und Isolde and Parsifal.
While Strauss never shared Ritter's passion for Catholicism, he followed his (and Wagner's) philosophical lead by reading the works of Schopenhauer, which inspired Strauss's first opera Guntram (1894). Ritter died two years later, but his influence remained, even though Strauss turned his attentions towards Nietzsche, Wagner's arch enemy.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (now ended) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne are still available.]]>
The business-minded Richard Strauss was keen to make his operas work well financially. But they were often tricky to produce, with their lavish orchestrations and highly complex scores, so Strauss went about creating a series of orchestral highlights that could be performed outside the opera house.
First came Salomes Tanz, a concert version of the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' from Salome. The gorgeous waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier were also stripped of their narrative and published as two Walzerfolge (or waltz sequences), before Strauss and the Polish conductor Artur Rodziński produced an additional suite from the opera. Strauss also created a Symphonisches Fantasie from Die Frau ohne Schatten and separately published the interludes from Intermezzo, all testaments to his keen eye on the coffers.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo da Ponte's collaboration on Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte was a yardstick for Richard Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Da Ponte was one of 18th-century opera's most colourful characters: a former priest with a reputation as a womanizer, he emigrated to the US to start a new life as a greengrocer.
Writing to Strauss about Elektra in 1908, Hofmannsthal commented that 'you may wish me to transpose the whole thing into a simpler and more lyrical key, while preserving the scenario entire, an operation such as Da Ponte carried out on the text of the comedy Le Mariage de Figaro'. Strauss later praised Hofmannsthal as being like Da Ponte and Eugène Scribe, the librettist of Robert le diable and Les Vêpres siciliennes, 'rolled into one'. But perhaps the strongest parallel with the world of the late 18th-century Vienna and Mozart's collaboration with Da Ponte and came from Hofmannsthal in 1911, when he suggested that Die Frau ohne Schatten would 'stand in the same relation to Die Zauberflöte as Rosenkavalier does to Figaro'.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Ovid (43BC–AD17/18) was a Roman poet. Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's opera Ariadne aux Naxos, first performed in 1912 and revised in 1916, draws on Ovid's Heroides, among other sources.
Strauss returned to Ovid after Hofmannsthal's death for his 1938 opera Daphne, written with the librettist Josef Gregor. Based on an episode from Metamorphoses – as well drawing on The Bacchae by Euripides – it tells the story of Apollo's lust for Daphne. Gregor reimagined Ovid's nymph as a simple girl in love with nature. In his remorse over killing Leukippos, Daphne's childhood friend, Apollo asks Zeus to change Daphne into the kind of tree she dearly loves. This theme of transformation fascinated Strauss and it occurs in several of his works, not least the searing wartime threnody Metamorphosen, first performed in Zürich in 1946. Here, appalled by what had unfolded during the Nazis' '12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture', Strauss significantly reverses the classical idea that man can ultimately become divine.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
It is impossible to separate Richard Strauss from his Nazi associations.
While the music of many of his high-modernist and Jewish peers such as Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky was banned throughout the Reich (from 1933 in Germany and from 1938 in Austria) Strauss was appointed president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the state-run Nazi music bureau which promoted 'good German music' and suppressed 'degenerate' music including jazz, pop and atonal works.
Strauss used his position to improve the copyright situation for him and fellow German composers, yet he also had to kowtow to the party. Unfortunately, Strauss was often unable to differentiate between his and the common good and made palpable errors in judgment during the Nazi period, though it is essential to note that he was never a wholehearted adherent of the regime nor was he an anti-Semite. He often flouted party rule, including its insistence on everyone calling Hitler 'der Führer', but then promptly composed the Olympische Hymne for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. By doing so, Strauss hoped to curry favour with the authorities in a fight to keep Alice, his Jewish daughter-in-law, and his grandchildren safe, though he was sadly unable to save many of Alice's family.
At the end of War, when Strauss began to grasp the full horror of what had unfolded under the Nazis between 1933 and 1945, he wrote down his thoughts: 'From 1 May [1945] onwards, the most terrible period of human history came to an end, the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.'
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Munich is the capital of Bavaria and was Richard Strauss's birthplace.
Smaller than either Berlin or Vienna, Munich nonetheless enjoyed a cultural renaissance during the latter part of the 19th and the early years of the 20th century.
Before the construction of the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, Wagner had used Munich as the staging post for his operas. The city was also home to artists including Franz von Lenbach and Franz Stuck, Bavaria's answer to Gustav Klimt. Writers too were drawn to the city, with Thomas Mann (the writer of the novella Death in Venice, which inspired Britten's opera of the same name) moving to the city in 1891.
Strauss was born on 11 June 1864 in a second-floor apartment on Altheimer Eck, a street right in the heart of the city, adjacent to Strauss's paternal grandfather's brewery. Sadly the building, like much of Munich and Dresden, was destroyed in World War II. Pschorr's beer lives on however, meaning that 150 years on from the composer's birth, you can still sample Strauss's ancestral tipple.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Following in the grand tradition of Lieder, Richard Strauss wrote over 200 songs during the course of his career.
His first, 'Weihnachtslied', was written in 1870 when he was just six years old. His last, 'Malven', was written for the soprano Maria Jeritza in 1948, the year before he died.
Some of his songs clearly maintain the strophic structure of the original text, while others often show Strauss's dramatic bent, developing like operatic scenes in miniature. When Salome became a huge success in 1905 (despite the Kaiser's predictions), Strauss's focus on Lieder diminished, though he returned to song during his final years, not least with the intensely moving Four Last Songs, comprising three poems by Hermann Hesse, whose work had been banned by the Nazis, and one text by Joseph von Eichendorff.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Kaiser Wilhelm II (1859–1941) ruled the German Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia from 1888 to 1918.
After the 1905 premiere of Salome in Dresden, the Kaiser - otherwise a fan of the composer's work - told Richard Strauss that 'This Salome will do you no good'. In response, Strauss quipped that 'The "no good" enabled me to build my house in Garmisch'. Such was the sensation that the piece caused with the public and the press alike, that within two years it had been staged at 50 other opera houses around Europe.
The Catholic Church had condemned the piece and the Kaiser remained unconvinced, nearly banning the opera when plans were made for a Berlin premiere. The head of the Hofoper in Berlin appealed to the authorities, suggesting that they could put the star of Bethlehem in the painted sky over the stage, giving the sense that redemption would soon be at hand. Sadly, the management had confused the various Herods in the Bible - It is Herod Antipas who appears in Salome, while it is Herod the Great whom the wise men visit and who later slaughters the innocents. Nonetheless, with this historical inaccuracy intact, the opera was finally staged in Berlin, shocking and thrilling yet another audience on its way to becoming one of the iconic 20th-century operas.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Ben Jonson (1572–1637) was an English playwright and poet.
Jonson's 1609 play Epicœne, or The Silent Woman is the basis for Richard Strauss's comic opera Die schweigsame Frau, which had its premiere in Dresden in 1935. The opera was Strauss's sole collaboration with the writer Stefan Zweig (currently experiencing a surge of interest thanks to his influence on Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel), who succeeded the late Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Sadly, being Jewish, Zweig fell foul of the Nazis and his and Strauss's opera was banned after only four performances.
Like Jonson's play, Die schweigsame Frau is a light and witty work, featuring Sir Morosus, who seeks a quiet life with a silent wife. He dismisses his chatty housekeeper and is presented with three potential brides. Little does he know that they are all members of his nephew's wife's opera troupe in disguise, recalling Strauss's earlier opera Ariadne auf Naxos. The opera is hugely entertaining and, had it not disappeared from view, Die schweigsame Frau may well have become one of Strauss's most popular works.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (which ran until 2 April 2014) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos are still available.]]>
Intermezzo is the title of Richard Strauss's eighth opera.
With a title that referred to the often farcical performances staged during the intermissions of serious 18th-century operas, Intermezzo emerged after Die Frau ohne Schatten and Strauss wrote both the music and the libretto. Strauss had told Hofmannsthal, somewhat exasperatedly, that their highly symbolic Die Frau ohne Schatten should be their 'last Romantic opera'. Strauss accordingly created a contemporary, domestic work, revolving around a crisis prompted by misunderstood telegram. The opera features Robert Storch, a conductor and composer, and his wife Christine (a role created by Lotte Lehmann). The premiere took place in Dresden in 1924, with sets mimicking the Strauss home in Garmisch. Intermezzo continues to explore the marital themes of Die Frau ohne Schatten, albeit told in a pithier manner, more apt for the 1920s, dominated by the spirit of Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity).
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with an upcoming production of Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets are still available.]]>
Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) was a Vienna-born writer who became Richard Strauss's most persistent collaborator.
Their partnership spanned from Elektra (1909) to Arabella (1933). Hofmannsthal first approached Strauss in 1900 with a scenario for a ballet called Der Triumph der Zeit, but it was Strauss who instigated their working relationship proper when he asked Hofmannsthal if he could adapt the writer's 1903 version of Sophocles's tragedy Electra for the operatic stage.
Before he met Strauss, Hofmannsthal was a major figure within Jung Wien, the group of intellectual radicals who dominated the culture of turn of the century Vienna. On the face of it, a partnership seemed unlikely - Hofmannsthal was scholarly and cerebral, while Strauss was theatrical and practically minded. It proved a winning combination and together the pair wrote Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena and Arabella, as well as Hofmannsthal providing the scenario for the 1914 ballet Josephslegende and the opera Die Liebe der Danae.
As you might expect from two contrasting personalities, their relationship was frequently marked by disagreement, as detailed in their extensive correspondence. The partnership had a particularly tragic end, when Hofmannsthal died of a stroke in July 1929, two days after his son Franz had committed suicide. A telegram had arrived from Strauss in the 48-hour period between the two deaths, congratulating Hofmannsthal on his superb work on Arabella. But he neither read the missive nor saw the result of that hard work and Strauss, learning of his friend's death, was plunged into a deep depression, which prevented him from attending the funeral. 'No musician ever found such a helper and supporter', Strauss wrote. 'No one will ever replace him for me or the world of music!'.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (until 2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.]]>
Garmisch is the town in the Bavarian Alps where Richard Strauss made his home.
The old Teutonic settlement is now part of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, together constituting a major stopover on the route south to Italy.
During the late 19th century, Garmisch became a retreat for wealthy Munich residents – a trend enhanced by the opening of the railway at the beginning of the 20th century. It was here, after the success of Salome, that Strauss decided to build a home. Kaiser Wilhelm II had disapproved of the opera after its premiere, saying 'This Salome will do you no good'. ' The "no good" enabled me to build my house in Garmisch,' Strauss later mused, albeit in the privacy of his own diary.
The Villa Strauss was built by the Bavarian Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) architect Emanuel von Seidl, and Strauss lived and worked there for the rest of his life. The Villa was nearly commandeered during the war, following a decision high up in Hitler's command that it should be used to house evacuees from Munich. Strauss fought the pronouncement and it was eventually overturned, albeit bringing an end to all 'personal dealings' between Strauss and the Nazis. Left alone, Strauss focussed once again on his music, until American troops arrived on 30 April 1945, demanding use of the house. Strauss, now an aged man, simply stood at the end of his drive and said, 'I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Der Rosenkavalier and Salome'. Luckily the particular soldier ordered to seize the Villa was fond of Strauss's music. So apart from keen autograph hunters, Strauss was left alone for the remainder of his days.
The town that Richard Strauss made his home is now home to the Richard Strauss Festival each summer, which attracts opera fans from around the world.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer is celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (until 2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.]]>
Richard Strauss's father Franz Strauss (1822–1905) was a highly esteemed horn player and composer.
He married twice: first to Elise Maria Seiff, who died, along with both of their children; and then to Strauss's mother, Josephine Pschorr, the daughter of a wealthy brewer in Munich. Franz held the position of principal horn in the Munich Court Orchestra for 40 years and he played in the premieres of Das Rheingold, Die Walküre and Tristan und Isolde in Munich as well as Parsifal at Bayreuth. Richard Wagner reportedly consulted Franz Strauss about the famous 'Siegfried' horn call in Der Ring des Nibelungen. Yet despite these experiences and Franz's steadfast professionalism, he loathed Wagner, calling him 'the Mephistopheles of music'. His dislike was duly reciprocated when Wagner said that 'Strauss is a detestable fellow, but when he plays the horn you can't be angry with him'.
Guided by his traditional musical tastes, Franz kept a keen eye on his precocious son Richard's musical education, instituting a strict diet of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. The young Richard eventually broke away from his father's edicts and pursued an operatic career. Strauss's father, having died in May 1905, did not live to see the first performances of Salome that December.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer will be celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (14 March-2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.]]>
The last opera Richard Strauss worked on is called Des Esels Schatten (The Donkey's Shadow).
It was a comic opera, not intended for the grand companies of Berlin, Munich or Vienna, with which Strauss's professional career had been associated, but for his grandson Christian's school. Sadly Strauss died in 1949 before he could finish his tale, based on a satirical story by Christoph Martin Wieland of a hapless donkey whose shadow provides shelter from the sun for a Greek dentist. The sketches were later expanded, completed and orchestrated by Karl Haussner and the opera was performed in 1964 in Christian Strauss's former school to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of his grandfather, whose 150th birthday we mark this year.
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2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer will be celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (14 March-2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.
Though Richard Strauss was raised in Munich and found his calling in Berlin, Dresden - the capital of the state of Saxony - was the city that was perhaps dearest to him.
It was at the Dresdner Semperoper that his operas Feuersnot, Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier all had their premieres. Their collective success cemented Strauss's relationship with the Semperoper, continuing with the first performances there of Intermezzo, Die ägyptische Helena, Arabella, Die schweigsame Frau and Daphne.
Strauss adored Dresden's baroque cityscapes, as well as its justly famous orchestra, the Staatskapelle. And the city was perfectly placed geographically, pulling people from across Central Europe to hear Strauss's new operas. Indeed their appeal was so potent that a special train was laid on from Berlin to Dresden for the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier in 1911. When Allied bombers destroyed the Saxon capital in February 1945, Strauss was distraught and it is believed that the razing of his three favourite cities - Munich, Dresden and Vienna - that prompted the composition of Metamorphosen in 1945.
View other posts in our weekly Richard Strauss A-Z series
2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer will be celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (14 March-2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for Die Frau ohne Schatten are still available. Tickets for Ariadne auf Naxos go on general sale 8 April.]]>
Richard Strauss was a fierce advocate and defender of a composer's ability to assert copyright.
He was often embroiled in battles with publishers and at turn of the last century helped establish the first society to protect the rights of German composers. The Genossenschaft Deutscher Tonsetzer became the model for other international societies.
These efforts are indicative of Strauss's business-minded approach to composition. It was therefore particularly galling for him to realize that when Bote & Bock published his op. 56 songs, they had immediately acquired the rights to his next six Lieder. Indignant, Strauss composed Krämerspiegel in 1918, a song cycle which lampoons the publishing industry. Bote & Bock refused to accept the songs and Strauss was forced to compose six more in order to honour his contract, offering three Goethe settings and three songs based on Ophelia's mad scene in Hamlet. While subtler in message than Krämerspiegel, the three Goethe poems, taken from the Buch des Unmuts (Book of Bad Temper) and Ophelia's wild rants nonetheless helped Strauss vent his anger over the publisher's greed and his own shortsightedness.
View other posts in our weekly Richard Strauss A-Z series
2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer will be celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (14 March-2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.]]>
Johannes Brahms (1830–1897) was a German composer who wrote for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, voice and chorus. While Strauss would later dedicate his career to opera, during his youth he pored over the music of the Austro-Germanic symphonic tradition, particularly that of Brahms, its then greatest living exponent.
While Strauss was Hofmusikdirektor in Meiningen from 1885 to 1886, he had the great fortune to meet Brahms, who had a strong working relationship with the city's orchestra. Brahms was critical of Strauss's musical style, but the younger composer nonetheless maintained what he called his Brahmsschwärmerei ('Brahms adoration'), until his friend Alexander Ritter, the husband of Wagner's niece, placed him on a very different path.
View other posts in our weekly Richard Strauss A-Z series
2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer will be celebrated at the ROH with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (14 March-2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.]]>
Pauline de Ahna (1863–1950) was Richard Strauss's wife. She was a soprano, who trained in Munich, as well as having private lessons with her future husband.
De Ahna and Strauss first met on the shores of the Starnbergersee, the great lake south of Munich, during the summer of 1887. Three years later, Pauline was making her professional debut as Pamina in Die Zauberflöte in Weimar. She sang the role of Elisabeth in Tannhäuser at Bayreuth in 1891, as well as one of the Flowermaidens in Parsifal.
In 1894, she created the role of Freihild in Strauss's first - highly Wagnerian - opera Guntram and the couple married on 10 September that year. Strauss gave his wife a set of four Lieder (op. 27) as a wedding present, including the glorious song 'Morgen'. It is no exaggeration to say that, even after Pauline's retirement from the stage in 1897, Strauss continued to hear her voice whenever he composed. She is immortalised in his large output of songs and, of course, in the major roles he wrote for sopranos, from Salome through to Ariadne and the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten, and finally, the Countess in his last opera Capriccio. More touchingly (and amusingly), Pauline appears as Christine Storch - a composer's wife - in Strauss's semi-autobiographical opera Intermezzo.
View other posts in our weekly Richard Strauss A-Z series
2014 sees the 150th anniversary of Richard Strauss's birth. The composer will be celebrated with stagings of Die Frau ohne Schatten (14 March-2 April) and Ariadne auf Naxos (25 June-13 July). Tickets for both are still available.]]>
Composers often face significant challenges when composing for the ballet: what instruments might denote a flock of swans? How do you evoke a forest at midnight? Choreographer Marius Petipa set the bar particularly high when he created the scenario for The Nutcracker. Petipa wanted Tchaikovsky to write music for a Sugar Plum Fairy, but how might she sound? And what exactly is a sugar plum?
A sugar plum is not, as you might think, the kind of candied fruit that you can buy on the ground floor of Fortnum and Mason - In fact a sugar plum is nothing to do with fruit at all and is a hard sweet made up of several layers of sugar, not dissimilar to a sugared almond or the shell on Smarties. The process used to make that coating is called dragée in French, which is how Petipa refers to the Fairy who commands the Kingdom of Sweets and like her namesake, she glitters with sugar.
The second act of The Nutcracker is full of such delicacies, specified by various flavoured national dances. There at least Tchaikovsky had musical tropes he could turn to, but there was little musical guidance when it came to La Fée dragée. Tchaikovsky's solution was simple but radical: he would use an entirely new instrument, the céleste (or celesta).
Auguste Mustel invented this keyboard instrument in 1886, six years before The Nutcracker had its premiere. Mustel had built harmoniums for a number of years, but his father had meanwhile pioneered the dulcitone, in which hammers strike a series of tuning forks. The glockenspiel-like metal plates that his son Auguste used in the new version of the instrument allowed its delicate sound to carry within an orchestral context (aided by a system of wooden resonators). Its high, bell-like sonority was doubtless what led Mustel to dub his new invention the céleste (heavenly).
Having heard the instrument in Paris in summer 1891, Tchaikovsky asked his publisher Pyotr Jurgenson to acquire one for The Nutcracker. Keen not to let this innovative detail of orchestra out of the bag, he asked Jurgenson to keep it a secret; otherwise colourful colleagues such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov might use the instrument first.
Sadly Parisian composer Ernest Chausson had already pipped Tchaikovsky to the post by using the celesta in his 1888 incidental music to The Tempest. But what Tchaikovsky has over Chausson (and many composers since) is the clear link he created between the sound and a specific character. When the Sugar Plum Fairy first appears in Act 2, among the transparent columns and fountains of Petipa's synopsis, the celesta plays in combination with two harps, high woodwind and shimmering string harmonics. The effect is magical.
Later on in the act, as part of the Grand pas de deux, the Sugar Plum Fairy has an equally beguiling solo variation. Here Petipa wanted the music to sound like droplets of water falling from a fountain. Tchaikovsky's combination of pizzicato strings, celesta and a descending bass clarinet offers the perfect musical representation, to which Lev Ivanov (who continued the choreography of The Nutcracker due to Petipa's illness) added difficult but delicate steps.
But as well as the glittering sound of the celesta, its heavenly name may have also caught the composer's attention; Tchaikovsky had certainly been thinking of the afterlife during the completion of The Nutcracker. The death of his sister Sasha in the spring of 1891 had affected him deeply, but it also provided the inspiration for a project he had previously struggled to complete. Clara and her candied counterpart, the otherworldly Sugar Plum Fairy, were to be Tchaikovsky's tribute to his late sister. He now had the perfect instrument to describe her.
The Nutcracker runs from 4 December 2013-16 January 2014. Tickets are still available.
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I was 11. The opera was Elektra. It was an evening that completely changed my life. We all have stories about the first time we went to the opera or the ballet, but few people start their journey with something as ferocious as Elektra. The opening D minor chords pinned me to my seat, blood was spattered all over the walls, and five maids scrubbed furiously to remove the evidence. I couldn't believe what I was hearing, what I was seeing. I remember some happier music too, sung by Elektra's sister, and a searing moment when their brother reappeared, long into the nightmare. It made me think: if someone had killed my father, would I be driven to these dark ends? I was gripped.
Elektra is a lot to take, even for the most seasoned operagoer. But, for me, it was the ideal introduction to opera, unleashing the full force of the art form with 100 minutes of pure music and drama. But could I honestly encourage others to launch into opera with this staggering piece? Wouldn't Carmen or La bohème – both masterpieces, both performed this Season at the Royal Opera House – be a better first port of call?
The packaging for Carmen and La bohème is instantly more appealing: sun-baked Seville and Paris at Christmastime. And Bizet and Puccini, popping out great tunes at a terrific rate, are decidedly less dissonant than Strauss. Certainly, watching the elated crowd at a schools matinee performance of La bohème in 2012, as part of a project I undertook with conductor Semyon Bychkov, I could grasp the evergreen appeal of Puccini's 1896 opera.
Look beyond the surface, however, and you quickly find that neither Carmen nor La bohème is particularly youth-friendly. One is a tale of revenge, ending with murder. The other is a depiction of the impossible cruelties of love, concluding with the sad demise of its heroine. Ballet has more immediately amenable stories, with The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty chief among them (putting their darker elements aside). But I wonder if we've got it wrong when it comes to introducing newcomers to what takes place on stage at the Royal Opera House.
What do we hope they will get out of their first experience? Are the goals musical, dramatic or educational? Of course the aim is to enchant and find new enthusiasts, but we should want them to learn lessons from what they see on stage. Maybe, surprisingly, Wozzeck is a more direct way to go.
Certainly for Alban Berg, the point of Wozzeck was an 'appeal to humanity', as he described the great interlude before the chilling final scene. After the Captain's baiting, the Doctor's experiments and all the horrors of Wozzeck's world, Berg reaches out to the audience with a music passage of indescribable heart. That can speak to younger audiences too. Some might be concerned about exposing young people to violence and the dark world of Berg's tragedy. But unlike in the television and cinema that is part of their everyday lives, violence is rarely (if ever) glamorized in opera. The kaleidoscopic score of Wozzeck leaves us in no doubt about that.
Shedding the pomp and pageantry of opera from previous centuries, Berg's 20th-century masterpiece really grabs its audience by the scruff of the neck. It doesn't let go for its short but intense 90 minutes. And with bold characterizations, its mixture of everyday sounds and rich underscore and totally lucid storytelling, Wozzeck really is, alongside my first-time experience of Elektra, one of the most vivid introductions anyone could have, regardless of their age. It might shock, but it's a risk worth taking for the interest it could easily inspire.
Escapism is wonderful: we all need it. But I think you truly open eyes and ears and create enduring fans when they are realize that what is presented on stage is happening in the world around them. With time and experience it's easier to see through the analogies and parallels of historical settings and traditions. But the earlier that youngsters particularly realize that opera is not about the there and then, it is the here and now, the better.
What was your first operatic experience, and what did you think? Do you wish your introduction had been through another piece instead?
Wozzeck runs from 31 October–15 November 2013. Tickets are still available.]]>
In his article for The Royal Ballet's programme book on Don Quixote, writer and musicologist Gavin Plumley examines the sunny wit in Minkus's quintessential ballet score.
Ludwig Minkus is the polyglot of ballet music. Born in Vienna to a Czech father and a Hungarian mother, he studied in the Austrian capital before moving to Russia. There, and in Paris, his exotic ballet scores, including the Hispanic Don Quixote and the oriental La Bayadère, gained him international recognition.
In creating the musical text for this latest version of Don Quixote by Carlos Acosta, conductor Martin Yates has gone back to Minkus's original Russian piano score. Yates and Acosta have constructed their new three-act structure for this production, highlighting the colourful and contrasting nature of Minkus's score.
Act I centres on the romantic interest, Kitri and Basilio. For these scenes and the third act, Minkus wrote dazzlingly sunny music in bright G major. Kitri and Basilio are given peppy, swaggering entrances to contrast with the clipped, pompous chromatic music of Gamache, Kitri's unwanted fiancé. Kitri's kowtowing father Lorenzo unsurprisingly echoes Gamache's 'aristocratic' bearing. No less amusing, but instantly more endearing, is Don Quixote's hapless, slapstick sidekick Sancho Panza, while the eponymous, chivalric Quixote has poco maestoso ('somewhat majestic') music. The high energy of triple-time dances dominates, coloured by an appropriately Spanish tinge of seguidilla and habanera rhythms and the continual clack of castanets. Equally indigenous are the dotted rhythms of the Toreadors' entrance (though without their tambourines and castanets, these dances could easily be mistaken for the waltzes and marches of Minkus's Viennese youth).
The second act is in much darker hues. F major and F minor predominate, while more rhapsodic structures, with harp, woodwind solos and other wistful touches of orchestration, supplant the first act's quick-fire dance sequences. Minkus also provides a good dose of local colour with stamping gypsies and, in Martin Yates's version, a decidedly Hispanic dream sequence. Collectively, this act – particularly with its hallucinatory second scene – looks forward to the Kingdom of the Shades in La Bayadère and the lake scenes of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and The Sleeping Beauty. It is from such ambiguous and occasionally violent tones that Minkus rescues us, returning via G minor to the sun-drenched key of Act I.
Having re-established the primacy of G major at the start of Act III, Minkus provides a veritable riot of nuptial colour, made even brighter by the comparative darkness of the second act. As Kitri and Basilio prepare, somewhat pre-emptively, for married life, Minkus's waltzes rub shoulders with yet more seguidillas and habaneras, whose melodies are decorated with the curlicued turns, trills and mordents of flamenco tradition. And there is jeopardy here too, with the strutting, chromatic reappearance of Gamache. As Basilio pretends to stab himself, Minkus sends up Gamache's pompous idiom, throwing it all away with a rapid fandango and the catchy Viennese Luftpausen (a breath, literally 'air break', for the orchestra) of his Grand pas de deux. Witnessing the happiness of Kitri and Basilio, Don Quixote gives up his hazy claims and realizes that he has, rather unexpectedly, completed his quest to right the wrongs of this world. As he ventures off anew, in search of Dulcinea, the ballet closes with his poco maestoso music in raucous C major.
This extract is taken from Gavin Plumley's article 'An Innate Flair for Dance Music'. The full article can be found in the Don Quixote programme book, available in the theatre at performance times and from the ROH Shop.
Don Quixote runs 25 November 2014–22 January 2015. Tickets are still available.
The production is generously supported by the Friends of Covent Garden.]]>
In a slight departure for our Accessible Arias series, this post will focus on a chorus – the most famous number in Verdi's 1842 opera Nabucco.
In the opera, the chorus singers play a prominent role. Each of the opera's four acts or parts features a grand tableau. This was a hallmark of the operas Verdi wrote with the patriotic librettist Temistocle Solera. The best way to express unified fervour and belief, Verdi and Solera demonstrated, was with the chorus. So rather than its previous function in Italian operas, of setting scenes and providing local colour, Verdi puts the chorus at the forefront of his drama.
At the point in the score when 'Va pensiero' is sung, the Hebrews are being held captive in Babylon. The Babylonians have threatened to kill them, which sparks an argument between the High Priest of Baal, Abigaille and King Nabucco (Nebuchadnezzar). Abigaille is determined to destroy the tribe, including Nabucco's own daughter Fenena, and tricks Nabucco into signing their death warrant. When he realizes what he has done, Nabucco begs Abigaille for mercy, but it is too late.
On the banks of the Euphrates, the slaves, ignorant of these events, are dreaming of the homeland they saw destroyed in the first act of the opera. The violence and the vehemence of Abigaille and Nabucco's argument is still evident in the brooding orchestral introduction to this second scene, but the Hebrews are untouched by it, and remain prayerful. Moving away from the dark flat keys that have dominated the first scene, Verdi composed this chorus in a warm F sharp major.
The chorus sings as though with one voice; their gently sweeping melody and the basic harmonies give the impression of a folk song-like innocence and simplicity. Solera's text – inspired by Psalm 137 – is more of a lament. The country the slaves are describing is now gone. It is the tension between the music and its message that gives the chorus its power.
After the first muted statement of the theme, the chorus surges towards the phrase 'O, mia patria, sì bella e perduta!' (Oh, my country, so beautiful and lost!). This inspires an outspoken fanfare of defiance, swinging between very soft and very loud. After a more pensive passage, the initial theme returns. Now, however, it is accompanied by a winding chromatic line, which places a question mark over the slaves' hopes of ever returning home.
Verdi and Solera's prayer has unmistakable potency. During the 19th century, the chorus – and Nabucco as a whole – became an inseparable part of the mythology surrounding the reunification of Italy, and 'Va pensiero' was sung by massed forces at Verdi's funeral. Highlighting the parallels between the Hebrews' lot and the nationalists' hopes of reviving Italy, people drew allegorical strength from Verdi's opera. Some modern scholars have sought to distinguish the facts from the myths, but no one denies the power of this stirring chorus.
Watch opera fans around the world singing 'Va pensiero', collected as part of Royal Opera LIVE
Nabucco runs from 30 March - 26 April 2013. Tickets are now available.]]>
The arias in Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) offer a vivid series of vignettes. Papageno's introductory 'Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja' immediately conveys his winning if occasionally brainless charm. Tamino's ardent 'Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön' shows that he is clearly the man for Pamina. And while the intensely moral Sarastro occupies the depths of the vocal range with his 'O Isis und Osiris' and the gentle 'In diesen Heil'gen Hallen', his adversary, the wicked Queen of the Night, spins stratospheric magic with her aria 'Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen'.
Mozart knew the theatrical troupe of his librettist (Emanuel Schikaneder) well. He made several visits to the Freihaus Theater an der Wieden where the troupe performed, and conceived the roles in his and Schikaneder's operatic collaboration for specific members of the company. Mozart knew thesoprano marked to sing the Queen of the Night particularly well, as she was his sister-in-law, Josepha Hofer (née Weber).
Despite her famously high tessitura, Hofer was reportedly rather underwhelming on stage. So Mozart did her a huge service in writing this virtuosic showpiece, and the Queen of the Night's Act I aria 'O zittre nicht, mein lieber Sohn'. 'Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen' is a literal high point of the score of Die Zauberflöte and Hofer, unwilling to let others dazzle in her role, continued to perform the Queen for a decade after the premiere in 1791. 'Der Hölle Rache' has remained a must-sing aria for coloratura sopranos ever since.
Anna Devin as Papagena and Christopher Maltman as Papageno in Die Zauberflöte © ROH / Mike Hoban 2011
Joseph Kaiser as Tamino and Jessica Pratt as Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte © ROH / Mike Hoban 2011
The Queen of the Night sings this aria to express her fury and longing for revenge ('rache'). Mozart chose the key of D minor for this aria. It is a key often associated with tragedy, and prevalent in the Requiem that Mozart was writing, that would dominate his thoughts in the weeks following the premiere of Die Zauberflöte.
The aria contains marked dynamic contrasts, accents land on and off the beat and the vocal line is often highly chromatic. Rather unexpectedly, after the opening bars the music suddenly moves to F major, the relative key of D minor. Gaining in confidence, the Queen scales the vocal heights. The Queen tells Pamina that if she does not kill Sarastro as the mother has asked then she will no longer be her daughter, and sings a series of repeated notes on a high C before climbing even further to several dizzying top Fs. Nothing, it seems, can stop her.
After Sarastro's thoughtful hymnic aria 'O Isis und Osiris', the Queen's virtuosity is all the more staggering. And however hollow her threats will prove – she clearly does not know her daughter's moral strength – the aria could not make its point any clearer. The recurrent gestures, manic twists and turns and final ferocious D minor cadence place a thrillingly thunderous cloud of wrath over the proceedings.
Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) runs from 16 April – 9 May 2013. Tickets are still available.]]>
In Russia, Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin is as well known as Hamlet is in Britain and as cherished as Pride and Prejudice. It is little wonder, then, that it has inspired numerous adaptations, including Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera and John Cranko's 1965 ballet Onegin. Outside Russia, it is these lyrical adaptations rather than Pushkin's original that have entered our cultural consciousness.
In May 1877, Tchaikovsky was feeling bruised after the failure of Swan Lake in Moscow. Petipa and Minkus's La Bayadère had been that year's great balletic success, so, turning away from ballet, Tchaikovsky began to think about a new opera. The choice of Pushkin's much-revered Eugene Onegin, suggested during a conversation with friends, was decidedly bold:
The idea seemed wild to me and I did not say anything, but later, while eating alone in a pub I remembered about Onegin and started thinking. I thought the idea […] possible, then became captivated and by the end of my meal I had decided.
Rather than a straight word-for-word adaptation, however, Tchaikovsky's own libretto binned Onegin's youthful exploits and focused on Tatyana Larina's fate. For the many Russians who loved the original, the opera proved almost unrecognizable.
Not only had Tchaikovsky cut one of the most admired texts in Russian literature to ribbons, but he had also changed its tone, echoing a predominant new trend for realism. One reviewer sarcastically pondered "How can you really write music to words like these: 'Hello, how are you?' – 'Very well, thank you'?" But that emotional honesty was the opera's eventual key to success and was due to Tchaikovsky's own experiences in matters of the heart.
Simon Keenlyside as Eugene Onegin and Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Simon Keenlyside as Eugene Onegin and Peter Rose as Prince Gremin in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana, Simon Keenlyside as Eugene Onegin and Peter Rose as Prince Gremin in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Simon Keenlyside as Eugene Onegin and Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Thom Rackett as Young Eugene Onegin and Vigdis Hentze Olsen as Young Tatyana in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana and Vigdis Hentze Olsen as Young Tatyana in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Pavol Breslik as Lensky, Simon Keenlyside as Eugene Onegin and Thom Rackett as Young Eugene Onegin in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana and Diana Montague as Madame Larina in Eugene Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana and Diana Montague as Madame Larina in Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Thom Rackett as Young Onegin, Vigdia Hentze Olsen as Young Tatyana and Krassimira Stoyanova as Tatyana in Onegin © ROH / Bill Cooper 2013
Eugene Onegin was written at a decisive moment in the composer's life. Bowing to external pressures, he married Antonina Miliukova in July 1877, 'a woman,' he said, 'with whom I am not the least in love'. The marriage was Tchaikovsky's well-meaning attempt to conceal his homosexuality, as he had explained to his gay brother Modest the previous year:
"I am now going through a very critical period of my life. I will go into more detail later, but for now I will simply tell you, I have decided to get married. It is unavoidable. I must do it, not just for myself but for you, Modest, and all those I love. I think that for both of us our dispositions are the greatest and most insuperable obstacle to happiness, and we must fight our natures to the best of our ability. So far as I am concerned, I will do my utmost to get married this year, and if I lack the necessary courage, I will at any rate abandon my habits forever."
The marriage was disaster and, as Tchaikovsky's fame grew, that balance between public and private life became ever more precarious. Tchaikovsky poured his insecurities into Eugene Onegin, completed shortly after his marriage collapsed. Pushkin's story offered a perfect opportunity to explore the wrestle between desire and social convention.
The opera took a while to find favour at home, but its expressive and musical power communicated immediately in countries where audiences were less familiar with the original. Gustav Mahler was an early advocate for the opera and performed Eugene Onegin both in Hamburg and in Vienna, where he became director of the Imperial Opera House. Since its UK premiere at the Olympic Theatre in London on 17 October 1892 it has been a staple of the British repertory, providing a dramatic and musical showcase for subsequent generations of actor-singers.
Tchaikovsky's opera had a even wider impact in 1965, when its structure - rather than Pushkin's verse novel - became the inspiration for John Cranko's ballet. Cranko had originally pitched the idea to the board of the Royal Opera House, though it was rejected, possibly due to their unswerving admiration for Tchaikovsky's opera. Moving to Stuttgart, Cranko was determined to pay his homage and commissioned a 'new' Tchaikovsky score from Kurt-Heinze Stolze, who in turn became Cranko's most important musical advisor.
In creating the score for Onegin, Stolze deliberately avoided any material from the opera. Instead he focussed on music from The Seasons, Tchaikovsky's collection of piano pieces composed a couple of years before Eugene Onegin. Additionally, Stolze employs themes from the opera Cherevichki (performed as The Tsarina's Slippers at the Royal Opera House in 2009) and, for Tatyana and Onegin's gruelling farewell, the second half of the symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini.
Whether sung or danced, however, Tatyana Larina and Eugene Onegin's story has an irrepressible power to move. Their tragedy may be Pushkin's invention, but it was Tchaikovsky's emotional honesty that gave the opera its clout. In the fatalistic tones of Swan Lake and Eugene Onegin or the fairy-tale narrative of The Sleeping Beauty, Tchaikovsky continually reminds us of his negative views of love.
Providing a suitably heady soundworld for those tales, audiences now treasure his adaptations as much as the originals. Adapting Pushkin's Eugene Onegin was a particularly bold decision, but it proved decisive, producing one of the greatest operas of all time and, in turn, spurring an equally poignant full-length ballet.
Eugene Onegin will be screened live into cinemas on 20 February. Find your nearest cinema.]]>
The curtain rises on a frozen landscape at dawn. A lone figure is waiting for his closest friend, whom the previous night he challenged to a duel. This is the landowner and poet Vladimir Lensky, and, as he sits waiting for Eugene Onegin, he meditates on what will happen to him, with a premonition of his death.
Tchaikovsky's 1879 opera Eugene Onegin, based on the Pushkin novel in verse of the same name, is the story of Tatyana Larina, and the tragic outcome of her love for the dashing but emotionally immature Eugene Onegin. Tatyana is not the only one to suffer the effects of Onegin's carelessness. Having rejected Tatyana, Onegin flirts with her sister Olga – the fiancée of his best friend Lensky – and is challenged by the furious Lensky to fight a duel. He kills Lensky, just as he earlier destroyed Tatyana's hopes.
Alone, waiting for the duel to begin, Lensky asks where his youth has gone. Pliant strings accompany his appeal for sympathy while a descending line introduces the aria proper. The main theme is immediately familiar from an earlier, less angular, version that accompanied Tatyana's declaration of love for Onegin in the Letter Scene at the end of the second scene. Here, however, the theme has a cruel chromatic sting in its tail - hope is futile.
This musical parallel in the two arias confirms an underlying kinship between Tatyana and Lensky. Furthermore, both arias are implicitly addressed to Onegin: Tatyana's letter scene is founded on misplaced hopes, while Lensky's farewell to life is tinged with regret. Both Tatyana and Lensky are dreamers – one lost in the romantic world of novels, the other an aspiring poet – and they suffer because of it.
As Lensky questions what lies ahead, Tchaikovsky uses an ascending and descending melodic line both in the voice and the woodwind, much as he does in the equally fatalistic Swan Lake (completed shortly before Eugene Onegin). Lensky's future is unclear and the overlapping woodwind solos that snake around his vocal line illustrate this. The effect is increasingly claustrophobic.
A middle section moves away into the relative key of G major. But such sunny music is cruelly short-lived; the melody's punishing chromatic twist is repeated and we are soon back in E minor. A dialogue between an oboe and clarinet recalls Olga and Lensky's past happiness. Such memories inspire a more dramatic reprise of the opening melody, with the accompanying woodwind lines becoming ever more elaborate.
The cruellest illusion, however, is yet to come. Lensky calls for Olga to come to him and declares his intention to marry her. Tchaikovsky shifts into distant key of A flat major and Lensky's vocal line takes on a heroic style; briefly, he is the model of a daring lover. But that tonal disparity merely underlines the impossibility of such a resolution and, as soon as Tchaikovsky has established his 'false' key, the music shifts back into E minor. Lensky repeats the opening question of the aria, the violins and a lone horn respond and Onegin arrives for the duel.
The aria text, in English:
"Where, oh where have you gone,
golden days of my youth?
What does the coming day hold for me?
My gaze searches in vain;
all is shrouded in darkness!
No matter: Fate's law is just.
Should I fall, pierced by the arrow,
or should it fly wide,
'tis all one; both sleeping and waking
have their appointed hour.
Blessed is the day of care,
blessed, too, the coming of darkness!
Early in the morning the dawn-light gleams
and the day begins to brighten, while I, perhaps,
will enter the mysterious shadow of the grave!
And the memory of a young poet
will be engulfed by Lethe's sluggish stream.
The world will forget me; but you, you! Olga!
Say, will you come, maid of beauty,
to shed a tear on the untimely urn
and think: he loved me!
To me alone he devoted
the sad dawn of his storm-tossed life!
Oh, Olga, I loved you,
to you alone I devoted
the sad dawn of my storm-tossed life!
Oh, Olga, I loved you!
My heart's beloved, my desired one,
come, oh come!
My desired one,
come, I am your betrothed,
come, come!
I wait for you, my desired one,
come, come; I am your betrothed!
Where, where, where have you gone,
golden days, golden days of my youth?"
Kasper Holten's new Royal Opera production of Eugene Onegin opens on 4 February 2013.]]>
When Giacomo Meyerbeer's Robert le diable was first performed in 1831, Paris was the centre of the musical world. It was also a turbulent place, struggling to get on its feet after the radical Napoleonic era. The monarchy that followed Napoleon's abdication proved an unhappy affair, so the 1830 July Revolution routed Charles X. He was replaced with Louis Philippe I, the 'citizen king' as he was initially known. Alongside this majestic new order, grand opera was born.
Grand opera is sung throughout (unlike opéra comique, it has no spoken dialogue). But its essential characteristics give rise to the genre's imposing moniker, as many of the works of the 1830s and beyond show. Plots set tragic private romance against a background of impressive and heroic historical events; there were impressive stage effects; the chorus played a major dramatic and vocal part; there were many leading characters and, increasingly, a ballet was included at some stage in the drama. With vast forces in big ensembles, stage tableaux and complex plots, the operas usually stretched to five acts. And Robert le diable was right at the forefront of this new all-embracing idea of drama, music, movement and image.
Composers such as Meyerbeer, Fromental Halévy and Daniel Auber displayed a real talent for combining such elements as medieval stories, grand flights of passion, stunning vocal showpieces and grand spectacle. Auber's 1828 La Muette de Portici set a trend, especially by including a volcanic eruption on stage (a trick nicked from La Scala's production of Giovanni Pacini's L'ultimo giorno di Pompei). Gioachino Rossini, brought to Paris by the former king, followed suit with the equally imposing historical epic Guillaume Tell in 1829. Both operas were designed by Pierre-Luc-Charles Ciceri, whose visual genius was also used for the staging of Robert le diable. Meyerbeer had come to Paris after becoming successful in Italy, and his experience and the new cultural atmosphere he encountered fired his theatrical imagination. Robert le diable appeared in 1831.
The Paris Opéra, then resident at the Salle Le Peletier, was the place to see and be seen, the heart of Paris society. But if these entertainments seemed the preserve of the upper classes from the expensive seats, the general public were also avid fans higher up in the cheap ones. On stage, the operas often have a spirit of class conflict through stories in which powerful, privileged characters are brought face to face with the rebellious masses. La Muette de Portici revolves around an uprising in 17th-century Naples, the like of which Paris knew well. Partisan clashes – often religious – run through Halévy's La Juive as well as Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots and L'Africaine. The premiere of Robert le diable comes shortly before the events that inspired Victor Hugo's Les Misérables. Not surprisingly, the opera house was under the constant scrutiny of the censors!
Although Robert le diable was relatively tame politically as one of the earliest of these grand operas its impact on French culture was immense. The night-time nuns' bacchanal in Act III, captured vividly by Edgar Degas in 1871, was an inspiration for Giselle (which had its premiere at the Salle Le Peletier in 1841). Giselle in turn travelled to Russia in 1842 and inspired similarly eerie, moonlit scenes in La Bayadère and Swan Lake.
Ballet was, in itself at the time, part and parcel of grand opera and many would come just to see the dancing. Perhaps the clearest indication of the importance of this type of opera and its structures during the 19th century was when Wagner's Tannhäuser came to Paris in 1861. The all-too-powerful Jockey Club had grown used to turning up halfway through the evening. Its members would watch their girls in the corps de ballet and then promptly leave for dinner. But Wagner did not play by the rules, moved the ballet from its customary position well on in the opera to the beginning of Act 1, and uproar ensued.
Robert le diable continued to be staged at the Paris Opéra throughout the 19th century, both at the Salle Le Peletier and at its even grander successor, the Palais Garnier. And even when operetta and opéra comique became more fashionable, Meyerbeer's supernatural masterpiece survived. But, as naturalism made its mark at the end of the 19th century, and the economics of opera production became more challenging, French grand opera increasingly lost its place on the stage and with the audience. And so Robert le diable fell out of favour. As well as being absent from the Royal Opera House since 1890, it disappeared from the Paris stage for nearly a century. But like its famous phantom nuns, the opera has recently begun to rise again and, with it, a flavour of the volatile world in which it was created.
Robert le diable returns to The Royal Opera from 6 December]]>
Donizetti's timeless opera L'elisir d'amore focuses on an Italian bumpkin called Nemorino (played in this revival by Roberto Alagna), who has fallen in love with a landowner, Adina. She however, couldn't care less; she's far too superior to reciprocate the affections of a lowly peasant.
But after hearing Adina read the story of Tristan and Isolde to some enrapt harvest workers, Nemorino turns to a love potion, peddled by the travelling Dr Dulcamara. Little realizing that the brew he's provided with is simply a bottle of cheap Bordeaux, Nemorino is disappointed when Adina presses on with plans to marry the pompous Sergeant Belcore. Things are not looking good for our likely lad.
At the wedding, Nemorino arrives late to find Adina annoyed that he isn't there. Depressed and desperate to get money to buy more of the elixir, Nemorino has enlisted in the army. The other girls in the village start to flirt with him, but only because they've heard that a wealthy uncle has left him a pot of cash. Adina is upset by this flirtatious display and, witnessing her upset, Nemorino sings the aria 'Una furtiva lagrima'.
In an opera about fake potions and feigned emotions, Donizetti invests this aria with considerable pathos. It is set in B flat minor, a dark key with often tragic associations. It is closely related, however, to the balmy key of D flat major, which became ubiquitous in operatic love scenes. It is to that warmer, happier key that the aria aspires. The aria begins in a darker mood with Harp arpeggios and a plangent bassoon solo showing Nemorino's compassion for Adina. A clarinet provides its own sympathetic echo, while the melodic line is littered with rising appoggiaturas, which provide brief harmonic crushes. And, as Nemorino realises that Adina loves him, the music finally moves into the major.
The second verse, although a repeat of the first, has greater emotional intensity. The flute now doubles the clarinet's compassionate response. But the most significant alteration is the eventual shift into a sunny B flat major. The strings move from tentative pizzicato to broad bowing and Nemorino, once feckless appears an ardent lover at last. His decorative run of notes before the final cadence displays overflowing happiness.
Like L'elisir d'amore as a whole, Nemorino's famous aria could seem sweet but inconsequential. Unwilling to shortchange his singers and audience, however, Donizetti invests such milestones in the story with pathos and panache. Seeing beyond the quacks and elixirs, Nemorino is a boy worth catching. So it's little wonder that Adina ends up confessing her love for him.
L'elisir d'amore returns to The Royal Opera from 13 November - 7 December.
For a playwright who described music as 'the food of love' it is little wonder Shakespeare has inspired so many composers. Prompting operas by Adès, Bellini, Berlioz, Britten, Gounod, Purcell, Rossini, Thomas and Verdi, as well as several ballet scores – to say nothing of a certain musical by Leonard Bernstein – Shakespeare's impact on the world of music has been enormous.
No composer has yet to prove more fanatical in his love of Shakespeare than Verdi, although he had significant local precedents. The earlier operas were, however, rather more loosely based upon the work of Shakespeare: Rossini's Otello came from a modern French adaption of the play's source material, while Bellini's I Capuleti ed i Montecchi had little to do with the Englishman's drama.Verdi decided to be more thorough and went back to the originals via reliable Italian translations.
Despite never having seen Macbeth on stage, Verdi created a formidable adaptation. He provided a vivid score, pitting fantastical elements against the brooding world of its infamous central couple. The opera Macbeth was so well received at its premiere in 1847 that Verdi was keen to capitalize on the success. But he faced more of a challenge with King Lear. Verdi commissioned a text from Salvadore Cammarano, but the librettist died before he could complete either King Lear or Il trovatore.
Undeterred, Verdi turned to Antonio Somma – the librettist of Un ballo in maschera (1859). But even though two versions of the libretto still exist, Verdi left Lear undone. After the premiere of Aida in 1871, he announced his retirement and his Shakespearean ambitions seemed at an end.
But Verdi's publisher Giulio Ricordi knew just how to tempt him back. Working with the writer Arrigo Boito – who had at one time been a harsh critic of Italian opera – Ricordi proposed a new work based on Othello. Duly intrigued, Verdi and Boito began work on their radical revision of the play, cutting the entire first act and slowly conceiving an adaptation to rival even the original play.
Such sweeping changes were to become an essential part of their working relationship. After the terrific success of Otello at La Scala in 1887, the pair began a new opera based on the Falstaff narratives in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the two parts of King Henry IV. Falstaff opened in 1893, throwing down a gauntlet to subsequent operatic adaptors.
Shakespearean adaptations closer to home include Benjamin Britten's 1960 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Written quickly to mark the reopening of Aldeburgh's Jubilee Hall, Britten found a dazzling idiom for Shakespeare's eerie fairies.
More recently Thomas Adès and his librettist Meredith Oakes took a suitably radical approach with The Tempest – a subject Verdi himself considered. Preserving the spirit of the original, but creating a new text, Adès's opera not only proved that Shakespeare is an unbeatable source of material but that Verdi's dramaturgical daring is worth the gamble.
Otello is part of the World Shakespeare Festival and London 2012 Festival. Elijah Moshinsky's production runs from 12 - 24 July.]]>
Salome is a woman possessed - she is determined to kiss John the Baptist's severed head. The final scene of Strauss's opera delivers everything this implies and more. It's a thrilling moment, almost too much to bear. But what's going on in the score?
When Richard Strauss composed Salome (1903), he was emerging from a period of intense orchestral writing. He had created a great stream of tone poems – including Don Juan (1889), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), and Don Quixote (1897) – and Strauss brought that symphonic understanding to his new stage work.
The Bavarian-born composer's scores are replete with motifs and signifiers that help us understand the unfolding drama. Over the course of Salome's final 15-minute scene, all of the themes we have heard during the opera – particularly in the famous Dance of the Seven Veils – come home to roost.
This last scene begins with a huge outburst, as the executioner appears with the severed head of John the Baptist (known in the opera as Jochanaan). The orchestra screams out a theme from the opening bars of the opera: clearly the whole drama is predestined and Salome greets her prize in ecstasy. Salome gradually draws the orchestra from a minor key into the warmer tonality of C sharp minor/major, showing the strength of her will through the shift.
After such gory glory, the music settles down into something more amorous and creepy as Salome toys with Jochanaan's head. She delays her much-desired kiss, but we know it is coming and, having established the key centre of C sharp, Strauss' music dances, with sprightly harp and pizzicato strings.
The Princess's vocal line and the underlying harmonic language become more extreme, throwing the scene into jeopardy. But as soon as Salome says 'Ah! Ah! Jochanaan, du warst Schön' [Oh, Jochanaan, you were beautiful] the music settles back into C sharp major. A jangle of celesta announces Salome's swooping love theme, with kitschy percussion, harp and strings making the whole scene even sicklier.
Something more troubling, however, sits at the heart of this monologue. Salome sings that 'wenn ich dich ansah, hörte ich geheimnisvolle Musik!' [when I looked at you, I heard the strains of sweet music!], but she has misinterpreted those strains. The theme that reappears in the woodwind previously accompanied Jochanaan's assertion that she was accursed.
Even the degenerate Herod is by appalled (while Herodias gloats at the horror on display). Fractured motifs appear in the orchestra, with Herod braying like a hysterical ape. Glowering chords, grinding C sharp minor against elements of E flat major, create a sinister backdrop to Salome's final moments. She has kissed Jochanaan's mouth.
Salome glories in her conquest, but Herod will have none of it. After a fiercely iridescent cadence in C sharp major, Herod commands the soldiers to kill his stepdaughter. The music snaps back into minor key and the wilful tragedy of the Princess of Judea comes to a dark end.
More information on Salome including a full synopsis and history
Salome opens on Thursday 31 May.]]>
Rusalka is an opera about singing. Or rather, what happens when you cannot sing. Echoing the story of The Little Mermaid, Rusalka gives up her voice to be united with a Prince. But he is distinctly put out when his bride-to-be cannot say a word. Instead he accepts the hand of a Foreign Princess and Rusalka, obeying the witch Ježibaba's curse, is doomed to live in the depths of the lake forever.
The aria 'Song to the Moon' comes right at the beginning of the story as Rusalka, still a nymph, sings with full-throated ease to the moon. There are nocturnal serenades throughout the repertoire and Dvořák starts his aria with the proverbial sweeping harp arpeggio, sounding just like a wooing guitarist tuning up. But rather than a trite tune under someone's balcony, Rusalka's aria is a luscious vocal display.
Listen to the full aria from last year's Cardiff Singer of the World
The opening chords, passing to muted strings, hover in the air, seeking resolution. Two intertwining clarinets describe a still night and, when Rusalka begins her song, the music finally settles into a balmy major key. The rocking accompaniment has folk-like sincerity and Rusalka's equal four-bar phrases give her song an uncomplicated sheen.
The harmonic language, however, becomes more knotty just before Rusalka launches into the refrain - rather than being a simple hymn to the moon, Rusalka needs help. Moving slowly down in step, she asks where her beloved is. Her plea is underpinned by a subtle sequence of chords via E flat major to a crueller E flat minor. It's a tiny harmonic indication of the tragedy in store.
There's another brief frisson before Rusalka begins a second verse. Dvořák plays another small but significant trick here. While he gave Rusalka four bars of introduction at the beginning of the aria, here there are only two; Rusalka's need is clearly greater. And rather than floating her second refrain, Rusalka pleads directly and more urgently through a yearning octave leap.
This aria offers a beautiful showcase for the heroine, but it likewise tells us of the tragedy at the heart of the opera. The Prince may swim in the lake, but he's never heard Rusalka sing and, if she becomes a human, he never will. For Dvořák that created a considerable structural problem; operatic love stories demand duets. And it's only in the final act, when the lovers are reunited in death, that he is able to create such a moment.
But there are plenty of other glories in the score. The Prince is a hero in the Wagnerian mould and Dvořák leaves us in little musical doubt as to why Rusalka is attracted to him. Their wedding banquet in the second act is littered with vivid choruses and dances, though Rusalka sits silently apart from the festivities. She has given up everything to be there and Dvořák writes equally theatrical music for world of the forest. Rusalka's father Vodník is a suitably melancholic soul, while the witch Ježibaba is the quintessence of evil magic. The cheeky water sprites are very much like the Rhine maidens in Wagner's Ring.
Although these characters provide great colour, the tragedy is ultimately Rusalka's. And what is so fascinating about the opera is Dvořák's ability to create both a charming fairytale and also to explore music as an overriding metaphor. Clearly without song our world would be considerably poorer and Rusalka's aria offers a radiant warning.
|Mesiku na nebi hlubokem
Svetlo tvé daleko vidi,
Po svete bloudis sirokém,
Divas se v pribytky lidi.
Mesicku, postuj chvili
|O moon high up in the deep, deep sky,
Your light sees far away regions,
You travel round the wide,
Wide world peering into human dwellings
O, moon, stand still for a moment,
Translation by Jules Brunelle, originally published on Aria Database.
Gavin blogs on Entartete Musik - a cultural journal taking in opera, ballet, music, film and literature]]>
When Peter Shaffer's Amadeus was made into a film in 1984, the producers were faced with a major problem. Much of Mozart's Vienna no longer exists. Half a century after the composer's death in 1791, Emperor Franz Josef made sweeping changes to the capital. He knocked down the city walls, and the suburbs (such as the one in which Die Zauberflöte was first performed) doubled in size. What urban planners hadn't changed in the 19th century, Allied bombing destroyed in the 20th. And although some of the centre's medieval streets are still there, unfortunately it was impossible to recreate what Mozart would have seen and known.
The producers of Amadeus eventually went to Prague (where Don Giovanni was first performed in 1787). There, director Miloš Forman gained access to the Estates Theatre where the opera premiered; the whole city, blanketed in snow, looked as close to 18th-century Vienna as you could get. But for those of us wanting the real deal, we can only imagine what the city might have looked like when the 25-year-old composer first arrived in the Austrian capital, which by 1781 had become a fortress.
Le nozze di Figaro
Coming from Munich, where Idomeneo had opened to an enchanted public, Mozart wanted to write a new piece for the Viennese stage. Lorenzo Da Ponte's libretto arrived in the summer and the premiere of Die Entführung aus dem Serail (set in a Turkish harem) took place the following year. Flying high, Mozart rented lavish rooms in the city centre, at the heart of Imperial society. Changing flats every few months, the composer had had no fewer that eight separate residences by the time that he moved into a house on Domgasse (in the shadow of the cathedral where he and Constanze Weber married in 1782).
It was here - with Le nozze di Figaro - that the composer began his first collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, a former priest turned brothel owner. The house sits snugly in a labyrinth of medieval streets with inner courtyards providing the only open spaces in a network of religious institutions, businesses and, nowadays, the ubiquitous coffee house. There's even one on the ground floor of Mozart's old home, named after the servant hero of his fizzy comedy.
Don Giovanni
Mozart stayed at the address for a full year after the premiere and it still stands, now a museum to one of the city's greatest adopted sons. But Mozart's fortunes took a turn for the worse and, by April 1787, the family had to move to the less impressive surroundings of Landstrasse, south of the centre. Unfortunately, the building in which he lived and wrote Don Giovanni no longer exists, knocked down during the 19th century and replaced by large apartment blocks. Only a small plaque marks the site where Mozart composed the opera.
The Prague premiere brought renewed wealth, but the last years of Mozart's life were dogged by financial problems. He often visited pawnbrokers and wrote to the wealthier members of his Masonic Lodge for help. Determined to save face, he refused to sack the maid and, in order to lessen their woes, he took on pupils as well as shifting the family between pokey flats in the city centre and more spacious but cheaper homes in the suburbs.
Così fan tutte
The Mozarts eventually took a flat on Judenplatz – right in the heart of the medieval Jewish ghetto – where the composer began to plan for a more successful 1789. Unfortunately, his arrangements for a German tour failed and the year proved equally disheartening. It was overlooking this spacious square however – now dominated by Rachel Whiteread's chilling Holocaust memorial – that Mozart wrote Così fan tutte, again with Da Ponte. The first rehearsals took place in the apartment, which became another victim of 19th-century town planning. A plaque now testifies to Mozart's presence.
But by wandering the streets, you glean a hint of the city Mozart would have known, however, by wandering the streets of the area. Buildings, heavy with crests and crosses, lean over the cobbled streets, just as they do on Rauhensteingasse, where Mozart and Contanze finally moved in September 1790. A commission from Prague (La clemenza di Tito) and Die Zauberflöte kept the wolf from the door.
But by the time that inflammatory rheumatic fever took hold in late 1791, Mozart was unable to pay for proper medical attention. Adding insult to injury, the building in which he died was demolished in the 1840s. A department store now stands on the site.
A city of Mozartian imagination
Mozart had entered Vienna a chipper young man, but he was unable to capitalize properly on his achievements. The oddly fleeting success of his operas during his lifetime and a lack of imperial patronage following the death of Josef II in 1790 became his downfall. Today Mozart is celebrated everywhere you go in Vienna. Chocolates, postcards, T-shirts and mugs bear his name. But unfortunately only one of the houses in which he wrote his greatest comedies still stands. Our imagination has to fill in the gaps.]]>
The dashing young Alfredo has declared his love, the guests have left the party and Violetta is alone. But to her, love means nothing: she's a courtesan; she gets money by faking emotion. After a brief setback, she's back to her party girl antics in 'Sempre libera', one of Verdi's most dazzling showcases. But how long can she keep up the pretence?
Woodwind introduces her aria, the very picture of girlish glee. Its trilling tune and bouncing accompaniment stop abruptly and Violetta starts her carefree bright stream of vocal fireworks. In this clip from the opening run of the Royal Opera production in 1994, Angela Gheorghiu hits the consonants, creating bounce and bravura in the vocal line.
But however happy and energetic Violetta sounds, Verdi keeps a dark harmonic card in his back pocket. She cannot help but land on that shadowy diminished chord at the bottom of each phrase. So although the music is resolutely in a major key, Verdi mixes minor tones into the harmonic palate.
Other heart-stopping elements lurk in the background. As soon as Violetta climbs to a ringing top C, Alfredo's amorous voice is heard in the street. It stops Violetta abruptly. Snapping out of her reverie she launches straight back into the dizzying coloratura. These vocal leaps became a prominent feature of 18th and 19th century opera and were a staple of bel canto repertoire. Often these indicated jollity or madness. Here, Verdi blurs the boundaries between the two states.
In the second part of the aria (a modified repeat of the first), Violetta won't be deterred and she skips ever higher, even when Alfredo interrupts. Gheorghiu is particularly effortless in the way she throws away these rising phrases. This is a woman in her prime, but we know it won't last.
If on the surface 'Sempre libera' is a coloratura platform for the soprano, it similarly uncovers the central conflict in Violetta's life. Alfredo may be singing in the street, but it's as if his voice haunts her. Domesticity calls her away from high society. And although she commits to a life of pleasure in these jovial bars, three months later (at the start of Act II) she is living with Alfredo. This aria unlocks the tragedy that awaits them both.
Free and aimless I frolic
From joy to joy,
Flowing along the surface
of life's path as I please.
As the day is born,
Or as the day dies,
Happily I turn to the new delights
That make my spirit soar.
Love is a heartbeat throughout the universe,
mysterious, altering,
the torment and delight of my heart.
Oh! Oh! Love!
Madness! Euphoria!
Gavin writes, lectures and broadcasts widely about music in the 19th and 20th centuries. www.entartetemusik.blogspot.com
La traviata is on stage at the Royal Opera House until 25 January 2012.]]>
Puccini was a stickler for detail, taking great care to set his operas in exact geographic locations. When he first saw the play La Tosca, by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, in Milan in 1887, he found a golden opportunity to write a very meticulously placed opera. Although a Tuscan by birth, Puccini would have known the Italian capital well – indeed Tosca had its premiere in the city. Sardou set the action of the play in three contrasting settings: the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle; the elaborate Palazzo Farnese nearby; and the commanding Castel Sant' Angelo over the River Tiber.
These famous buildings survive to this day. So you can go and 'recreate' Tosca in your mind (all with the aid of a trusty MP3 player). Since the premiere at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome, many productions have taken Sardou and Puccini at their word by replicating the exact timings and settings of the three acts and, in 1992, a performance was broadcast live from the actual locations. So visiting these sites is a great way to get to know your Tosca.
A painting of the crucified St Andrew dominates the church of his name: Sant'Andrea della valle © ROH 2011
Setting the scene: Tosca opens with the escaped convict Angelotti stumbling into the church of Sant'Andrea della Valle, right in the heart of Rome. He's looking for the Capella Attavanti (the private chapel of his sister the Marchesa).
On location: Angelotti must have been searching for a while, as there's no such chapel in the church. The name was Sardou's invention, but the chapel on which it is based is immediately to the left of the door. Coming in off the teeming main street, the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, Sant'Andrea really is a quiet haven in the midst of the racket of central Rome.
The Barberini Chapel is the only private space to be hidden behind gates. Sadly, those expecting Cavaradossi's blonde bombshell of a Madonna peering down at them with her infamous blue eyes will be disappointed. The chapel is rather dark and features more muted religious paintings. Buried in the corner of the church, it doesn't really benefit from the streaming light of an Italian afternoon (as it must have done on the June day on which Sardou set his play). But the dark recesses in the chapel must have been perfect for Angelotti's hiding place. And looking down the nave, towards the gruesome painting of St. Andrew's execution on an inverted cross, you can feel the chill of Scarpia, chief of police, approaching.
Setting the scene: Once Scarpia is on to Angelotti's scent, there's no stopping him. But rather than pursuing the prisoner through Rome's cobbled winding streets, he preys on Tosca's jealousy to unlock the clues. Through Tosca he will crack her lover Cavaradossi, who he's sure has helped Angelotti to escape. After the scenes in the church, Scarpia retreats to his apartments in the nearby Palazzo Farnese. Tosca, something of a local celebrity, just happens to be performing in the gardens that evening. Situated between the River Tiber and the church, the Palazzo is an enormous Renaissance villa, originally built for the Farnese family, one of the most powerful and influential dynasties of the Renaissance.
On location: For such a grand building, it's unlikely that a civil servant such as Scarpia (however controlling) would have been gifted apartments in the building. Part designed by Michaelangelo, it had been the home of Cardinals and Queens, rather than policemen. But it's an evocative edifice, framed by an impressive square. Unfortunately, nowadays, you can't gain access to the palace unless you have business with the French, as this is where they've had their Roman embassy since 1874. Although Mussolini sequestered the property during his time in power, the French were allowed to stay on for the princely rent of 1 Euro a year.
You can get some sense of the atmosphere of Act II when the great doors to the palace open. There are vast courtyards stretching behind its imposing façade. And the gardens that extend at the back it would have been where Tosca sang her festive cantata in Act II (with Scarpia listening from his rooms above). But as the French diplomats leave work, throwing jackets over their shoulders and making their way to local bars just off the Campo de' Fiori, it's impossible to think of Scarpia torturing Caravadossi behind its closed doors. Still, on a balmy Roman evening, you can pause and imagine that you hear Tosca's sublime 'Vissi d'arte', just as Scarpia does at the climax of Act II.
Setting the scene: The opening of the final act of Tosca is one of the most evocative in the repertoire. The pitches of the bells across Rome that can be heard at dawn are entirely accurate, notated on a trip the composer took to the city when he sat on the ramparts of the castle. A Roman poet, one Luigi Zanazzo, wrote the authentic text for the Shepherd Boy's half-heard song. It makes for a placid opening to a violent finale. Having got his guarantee for Cavaradossi's release, Tosca kills Scarpia. But the joke is on her; Scarpia has not kept his promise.
Cavaradossi has been imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo. The imposing cylindrical building was first built as a mausoleum for the great Emperor Hadrian, around 135 AD, but it was later used as a Papal prison and is attached to the Vatican by a lengthy series of ramparts. Executions used to take place in the inner courtyard, but productions of Tosca tend to set the action right up on the battlements. The reason being that Tosca, discovering that her lover has actually been killed (rather than the fake execution for which she hoped), soon dispatches herself by leaping to her death from the roof.
On location: Whatever time of day you visit (dawn feels a little merciless on a holiday), the Castel is still an imposing sight, with Peter Anton von Verschaffelt's 1753 statue of St. Michael slaying Satan (in the figure of a dragon) dominating the skyline. Unlike in Tosca's time, however, when fields surrounded the Castel, the present-day rush of the cars along the riverbank disturbs anything of the eerie peace that Puccini so brilliantly captures. But with all Rome laid about before her, you still can't imagine a more dramatic suicide than throwing yourself off this terrifying parapet. 'O Scarpia, avanti a Dio!']]>