Ariadne:
Strauss's "Serious Trifle"
Of all Strauss’s
operas, none had such a complex
genesis as Ariadne auf Naxos.
He was at first uninterested in
the project; and it caused
friction with his librettist
Hugo von Hofmannsthal that might
easily have brought their
collaboration to an end. He had
completed the full score of Der
Rosenkavalier in September
1910 and was at once eager for
more work. On 20 March 1911,
Hofmannsthal came up with two
ideas in one letter. One was "a
thirty-minute opera for small
chamber orchestra... called Ariadne
auf Naxos", combining
“heroic mythological figures in
18th-century costume” with
characters from the commedia
dell’arte. The other was
“a magic fairy-tale with two men
confronting two women, and for
one of the women your wife might
well, in all discretion, be
taken as a model..." The second
project, which developed into Die
Frau ohne Schatten,
immediately attracted Strauss,
who badgered his librettist to
send him some of the text. But
Hofmannsthal refused to be
hurried. Meanwhile he went to
Paris where he saw Molière's Le
Bourgeois gentilhomme and
this gave him another idea: he
would adapt the play, Strauss
could provide incidental music
and in place of the Turkish
ceremony with which the Molière
ends, M. Jourdain (the
bourgeois gentilhomme)
would command an after-dinner
performance of the opera Ariadne
auf Naxos “punctuated now
and then by brief remarks from
the dinner guests”.
Strauss’s
reaction was cool. "The first
half is very nice... the second
half is thin. For the dances of
the Dancing Master, tailors and
scullions, one could write some
pleasant salon music". At this
point, it is clear, Strauss had
not realized what a novel
entertainment his collaborator
was proposing, a juxtaposition
of play-with-music and opera.
Strauss received the last part
of the Ariadne libretto
on 12 July 1911. He had already
sent Hofmannsthal a plan of the
set numbers, from which it
emerges that he originally
intended for Ariadne to be a
contralto and that the role
which immediately caught his
fancy was that of Zerbinetta,
one of the interpolated commedia
dell'arte characters. For
her, he wrote, he planned "a
great coloratura aria and
andante, then rondo, theme with
variations and all coloratura
tricks (if possible with flute
obbligato), when she speaks of
her unfaithful lover (andante)
and then tries to console
Ariadne: rondo with variations
(two or three). A pièce de
resistance" So it proved.
The aria “Grossmächtige
Prinzessin” outdoes the Queen of
Night’s two arias in Die
Zauberflöte for vocal
pyrotechnics.
Hofmannsthal
realized that perhaps he had not
emphasized strongly enough the
importance of Bacchus and
Ariadne if the composer regarded
Zerbinetta as the leading lady.
He pointed out that the opera
was about fidelity and that it
had the same fundamental theme
as Elektra: “the voice
of Elektra opposed to the voice
of Chrysothemis, the heroic
voice against the human...
Zerbinetta is in her element
drifting out of the arms of one
man into the arms of another;
Ariadne could be the wife or
mistress of one man only, just
as she can be only one man’s
widow, can be forsaken by only one
man. One thing, however, is left
even for her: the miracle, the
god. To him she gives herself,
for she believes him to be
death: he is both death and life
at once... But what to divine
souls is a real miracle is to
the earthbound Zerbinetta just
an everyday love-affair...” And
he added: “When two men like us
set out to produce a ‘trifle’
like this, it has to become a
very serious trifle.”
What is now known as the
first version of Ariadne
was produced by Max Reinhardt at
Stuttgart on 25 October 1912. It
was a fiasco. “The playgoing
public felt it did not get its
money‘s worth”,
Strauss wrote many years later,
“while the opera public did not
know what to make of Molière”.
Strauss was by now convinced of
the work’s quality, for which he
had virtuosically used an
orchestra of only 37 players
(including important parts for
piano and harmonium), and when
Hofmannsthal in 1913 decided
that the Molière should be
jettisoned and wrote an operatic
prologue in its place, Strauss
was not interested. Besides, he
was now composing the ballet Josephslegende
and after that he became
immersed in Die Frau ohne
Schatten.
It
was not until late in 1915, when
the war had held up progress on
Die Frau ohne Schatten
because Hofmannsthal could not
find enough time to complete the
Act III libretto, that Strauss
decided to set the Ariadne
prologue. This was based on a
spoken scene which had linked
the Molière play to the opera
and in which the character of
the young composer of the opera
was introduced. In the Prologue,
M. Jourdain is converted into
“the richest man in Vienna”.
He has engaged an opera company
and a troupe of comedians to
entertain his dinner guests. But
through his major-domo he gives
orders that the two
entertainments must be given
simultaneously, and he insists
that a display of fireworks is
to begin precisely at 9 pm. The
Composer is scandalized, but
agrees to cut the opera,
composes a new melody and falls
in love with Zerbinetta.The
tenor and soprano who are to
sing Bacchus and Ariadne plead
for cuts in the other’s part.
Zerbinetta calmly and
professionally works out how the
entertainment can be
satisfactorily presented. Not so
the Composer, who is in despair
over what has happened to his
“sacred art”.
In
fact, as a glance at the
libretto of the Ariadne
opera in both versions will
show, the bourgeois
gentilhomme was not obeyed
and the two pieces were not
served up simultaneously.
Although the comedians pass
comments on Ariadne’s behaviour,
and Zerbinetta at one point
speaks directly to her, the two
plots are at no time commingled,
but developed separately.
If
this may be regarded as a
constructional fault, it does
not detract from Strauss’s
compositional skill and
sleight-of-hand - perhaps to be
expected from so expert a
card-player! - in reconciling
and contrasting the two
competing influences on his
creative personality, Mozart and
Wagner. The commedia
dell’arte characters are
treated in a light, pastiche
18th-century style, not really
Mozartian at all but emulating
the lightness of touch which
Mozart brought to Alfonso and
Despina in Così fan tutte
or Susanna and Cherubino in Le
nozze di Figaro. Ariadne
and Bacchus are given the broad
flowing melodic lines of Tristan
and Isolde.
Ariadne
auf Naxos has a crucial
place in Strauss’s operatic
development and output. Its
popularity today is all the more
remarkable in view of the
vicissitudes through which it
passed on its way to the version
most often performed. The
fashioning of the libretto has
to be considered in any
assessment of the work’s musical
structure. As Strauss was always
prepared to admit, his musical
imagination needed to be
stimulated by an extra-musical
idea, usually literary or
poetic. He only “became Strauss”
(in the sense that Mahler
“became Mahler" with Das
klagende Lied) when he
abandoned the forms of symphony,
concerto and sonata in which he
composed in his youth and
adapted the Lisztian symphonic
poem. Yet here, too, it was the
idea that stimulated the
music: in most of the tone-poems
the detailed programme was
written after the music had been
completed, the most obvious
examples being Tod und
Verklärung and Also
sprach Zarathustra.
Strauss
also liked his dramatic material
to be complex and variegated, as
in Salome and Der
Rosenkavalier and, after
Hofmannsthal’s death, in Die
schweigsame Frau. At first
glance he found the text of Ariadne
too thin. He could not respond
to characters who merely
embodied artificial ideas, such
as the commedia dell’arte
characters other than
Zerbinetta, on whom he fastened
at once as having potential
musical interest. In this
context, one should remember
that Ariadne was
composed almost as a subsidiary
task while Die Frau ohne
Schatten was being
laboriously written by
Hofmannsthal, and that at an
early stage in discussions on Die
Frau, Strauss dissuaded
his librettist from having
Harlequin and Esmeraldina as the
earthly couple in contrast to
the magical Emperor and Empress,
hence the substitution of the
dyer Barak and his wife.
The
musical importance of Ariadne
auf Naxos is twofold: as a
combination in one work of opera
buffa and opera seria
and as a stage in Strauss’s
conversion of Mozartian recitativo
secco into the
continuously melodic
conversational style that he
perfected a few years later in Intermezzo.
We do composer and librettist an
injustice if we judge the
creation of Ariadne only
through the published
correspondence, which has
misled a number of writers into
the assumption that Hofmannsthal
was Strauss’s intellectual
superior and that this was a
partnership between a Viennese
man-of-letters and a Bavarian
musician baffled by his
collaborator’s metaphysical
flights of fancy. Strauss
certainly acted as a brake on
these, because he knew their
works were intended for the
theatre and its public, but he
understood totally what
Hofmannsthal was aiming for,
even if he sometimes thought it
unnecessarily obscure.
So
while Hofmannsthal here provided
a text about which he himself
had very definite musical ideas,
Strauss was prepared to concede
a loss of musical autonomy with
his belief that text and music
were an integrated entity and
that music alone was not the
sole purpose of opera. This
creative tug-of-war became the
basic inspiration of the
crowning glory of his operatic
career, Capriccio, where
it was left unresolved.
Strauss’s method when receiving
a libretto was to read and
annotate it extremely carefully,
often scribbling a theme in the
margin if it occurred to him.
His annotation of Hofmannsthal’s
Ariadne text is in the
archive at Garmisch, and so are
Hofmannsthal’s suggestions -
almost instructions - to Strauss
on how the text should be
treated musically. This was not
really his province, but he was
not deterred, observing how the
composition should be arranged,
where there should be ensembles
and repeats etc.
Strauss
for the most part followed these
recommendations, but his
divergences are significant.
Hofmannsthal wanted the dialogue
between the Music Master and the
Dancing Master in the Prologue
to be spoken, but Strauss was
clear that the only spoken part
was to be the Major-domo’s. In
this way he separated the world
of the richest man, or the bourgeois
gentilhomme, from the
world of the artists, whether
they were opera singers or
comedians.
Strauss
also made rough sketches
outlining the harmonic, melodic
and rhythmical structure of
large tracts of the text. He
indicated keys, which he
allocated to characters or
crucial words, differentiating
through major or minor the
contrasting approaches to a
subject. For instance,
optimistic and down-to-earth
Zerbinetta sings Tod on
a major chord, the Composer
sings it on a minor. The tonic
of the whole work is C major,
the key of the light of common
day, but Zerbinetta is given
sharp keys and Ariadne flat
throughout. The final duet for
Bacchus and Ariadne is a similar
contrast of flat and sharp, as
if to convey misunderstanding,
although bitonality - D flat and
A major - is also used here and
the opera ends in Ariadne's key
of D flat major. The use of key,
therefore, is symbolic
throughout, virtually a leifmotif
system.
In
his treatment of the commedia
dell’arte element, Strauss
was as ever up with or even
ahead of contemporary fashion,
for 1912 was also the year of
Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire,
and the 17th- and 18th-century
re-creations by Prokofiev,
Stravinsky, Respighi and Casella
were to follow. Ariadne auf
Naxos is as innovative and
advanced an opera as any Strauss
composed and is the complete
refutation of the discredited
belief that after Der
Rosenkavalier he went into
decline. Far from it: Ariadne
signalled a new branching-out.
Michael
Kennedy
Strauss, Dresden
and "Ariadne"
The Dresden
Staatskapelle‘s worldwide renown
as a “Strauss orchestra” is
based essentially on two
circumstances: a friendly
association of more than 65
years between the composer and
his “beloved Dresdeners", and a
performing tradition of over 100
years, founded at the turn of
the last century by Ernst von
Schuch, Dresden’s then Generalmusikdirektor
and Strauss’s “personal
conductor”.
The
collaboration began in 1882 with
the première of the Wind
Serenade op. 7 at the Dresden
Tonkünstler-Verein (Musical
Artists’ Society). A year later
Strauss himself appeared with
this group as pianist in his
Cello Sonata op.6, accompanying
Ferdinand Böckmann in the work’s
first Dresden performance, and
soon after he dedicated his Horn
Concerto op.11 to the Court
Orchestra player Oscar Franz. In
1884 the young composer’s
Concert Overture in C minor was
performed at a symphony concert
of the Royal Court Orchestra,
and starting in 1890 the
orchestra included one of his
symphonic poems nearly every
year in their programmes. That
laid the groundwork for the
series of nine opera premières
that took place between 1901 and
1938 and perhaps most powerfully
underscored the intensity of
this unusually close artistic
and personal relationship:
following the success of Feuersnot,
the sensationally acclaimed
first performances of Salome,
Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier
all made headlines in the
international opera scene. Later
there were Intermezzo, Die
ägyptische Helena, Arabella,
Die schweigsame Frau and
Daphne. In 1915 Strauss
conducted the première of the Alpensinfonie,
which he dedicated to the
Dresden orchestra, and as late
as 1944 he granted the
Tonkünstler-Verein
first-performance rights to his
Wind Sonatina subtitled “From an
Invalid’s Workshop”, with the
proviso that as long as he lived
the work was to be played only
by principals of the Court
Orchestra. In 1948 the
84-year-old composer confessed
in his now-famous letter to the
Staatskapelle on the occasion of
its 400th anniversary: “Out of
the profusion of wonderful
memories of my artistic career,
the sounds of this great
orchestra always awaken new
feelings of heartfelt gratitude
and admiration.”
After
the triumphs of Salome,
Elektra and Der
Rosenkavalier, Richard
Strauss and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal initially wanted
another Dresden première under
Ernst von Schuch for Ariadne
auf Naxos, but when the
composer learned that “the
smaller house was not possible
and only the large opera house
was available”, he wrote on 27
January 1912 to the librettist
that "this would be suicidal"
and suggested instead “two model
performances” in Stuttgart.
Hofmannsthal countered on 30
January by asserting that “all
our work would then have been
for no more than two times 800
people, 90 percent of whom are
quite the most disgusting types:
critics, envious colleagues,
opera insiders - that leaves
literally no room for the real
audience... whereas in Dresden -
say about Dresden what you will
- there remains what we four
[including the director Max
Reinhardt and the designer Ernst
Stern] have achieved...
Thousands and thousands of
people can see it, among them
the anonymous, truly sensitive,
finer elements of the public...”
Strauss
ended up getting his way, and on
14 November 1912 Dresden‘s
Semper Opera became the second
house, following Stuttgart, to
stage Ariadne auf Naxos.
The Dresdner Nachrichten
regretted that, in comparison
with earlier Strauss premières,
this one was “not a wholehearted
success", but the review added
that "the performance was
another brilliant accomplishment
by the Dresden Court Theatre.
Ernst von Schuch is unrivalled
as a Strauss interpreter".
But adverse criticism was
levelled against the work from
all sides, and it was not
silenced even when, on 7
December 1912, Strauss himself
conducted. After the first
Dresden performance of the
revised version, on 24 January
1917, the press reaction once
again was largely negative. But
the tables were turned
completely after Fritz Busch
took over the production on 12
January 1926: there was applause
during the performance and “the
cast, Busch and Strauss - who
demonstrated his approval from
beginning to end - were
repeatedly called back to the
stage” (Dresdner Nachrichten).
The
next production of the work on
13 April 1932 - again under
Busch - was described (by the Dresdner
Anzeiger) as “one of the
greatest successes that
Strauss’s chamber opera has
enjoyed here or anywhere”. After
Busch‘s opposition to the Nazis
led to his dismissal from
Dresden, in 1934 Karl Böhm took
over the production’s musical
direction and even brought the
company to London for a guest
performance of Ariadne
at Covent Garden on 6 November
1936. On 25 May 1944, three
months before “total war” forced
the opera house to close, there
was another revival of Ariadne.
And Richard Strauss, who was one
of the first to yell bravo “from
the darkness of a box”, “ended
up in the midst of the artists,
the object of enthusiastic
tributes” (Dresdner Zeitung).
The
heavy bombardment of 13 February
1945 reduced Dresden to rubble
and ashes, including all the
city’s theatres. But already on
10 August the Opera resumed
activities with a performance of
Figaro on the provisional
stage of the former Tonhalle. A
few weeks later, on 12 October
1945, Joseph Keilberth conducted
Ariadne in the first
Strauss première of the postwar
period, thereby continuing
Dresden’s special relationship
with the composer.
The
work received further new
stagings in 1956 and 1964 at the
Dresden Staatstheater. In 1968
the Staatskapelle made its first
recording of the opera under its
former Generalmusikdirektor
Rudolf Kempe. The revival of
1982 under the musical direction
of Siegfried Kurz, which also
travelled to Edinburgh, Madrid
and Moscow, became the inaugural
production of the rebuilt Semper
Opera in June 1985. In the
current production, which had
its première there on 14 March
1999 under the baton of Sir
Colin Davis, the opera is about
to celebrate the 250th Dresden
performance since it was first
heard in the same venue in 1912.
Eberhard
Steindorf
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