DG - 2 CDs - 471 323-2 - (p) 2001

Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)






Ariadne auf Naxos
122' 04"
Oper in einem Aufzuge nebst einem Vorspiel (Libretto: Hugo von Hofmannsthal)







Compact Disc 1
71' 25"
VORSPIEL
1. Orchestereinleitung 2' 19"


2. "Mein Herr Haushofmeister!" (Musiklehrer, Haushofmeister, Lakai, Offizier, Komponist) 5' 55"



3. "Du allmächtiher Gott! O du mein zitterndes Herz!" (Komponist, Tenor, Perückenmacher, Zerbinetta, Primadonna, Musiklehler, Tanzmeister) 6' 12"


4. "Hast ein Stückerl Notenpapier?" (Komponist, Zerbinetta, Musiklehrer, Primadonna, Tanzmeister, Lakai, Haushofmeister) 3' 43"



5. "Ist schon geschehn. Wir sind bereit" (Musiklehrer, Haushofmeister, Primadonna, Tanzmeister, Tenor, Zerbinetta, Komponist) 8' 26"


6. "Nein, Herr, so kommt es nicht" (Komponist, Zerbinetta, Musiklehrer) 5' 17"



7. "Ein Augenblick ist wenig - ein Blick ist viel" (Zerbinetta, Komponist, Musiklehrer, Primadonna) 5' 06"


8. "Seien wir wieder gut" (Komponist, Musiklehrer) 3' 02"

OPER 9. Ouvertüre 3' 43"


10. "Schläft sie?" (Najade, Dryade, Echo, Ariadne) 3' 53"


11. "Wo war ich? Tot?" (Ariadne, Echo, Harlekin, Zerbinetta, Truffaldin) 3' 15"


12. "Ein Schönes war: hieß Theseus - Ariadne" (Ariadne, Najade, Echo, Dryade, Harlekin, Zerbinetta, Scaramuccio, Truffaldin) 7' 01"


13. "Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen" (Harlekin, Echo, Zerbinetta) 2' 16"


14. "Es gibt ein Reich, wo alles rein ist" (Ariadne) 6' 02"


15. "Die Dame gibt mit trübem Sinn" (Brighella, Scaramuccio, Harlekin, Truffaldin, Zerbinetta) 5' 00"


Compact Disc 2
50' 39"

1. "Großmächtige Prinzessin" (Zerbinetta) 11' 10"


2. "Hübsch gepredigt! Aber tauben Ohren!" (Harlekin, Zerbinetta, Brighella, Scaramuccio, Truffaldin) 8' 01"


3. "Ein schönes Wunder!" ... "Ein reizender Knabel!" (Dryade, Najade, Echo) 3' 40"


4. "Circe, kannst du mich hören?" (Bacchus, Ariadne, Najade, Echo, Dryade) 6' 08"


5. "Theseus! Mein, nein!" (Ariadne, Bacchus) 10' 35"


6. "Das waren Zauberworte!" (Ariadne, Bacchus) 3' 14"


7. "Gibt es kein Hinüber?" (Ariadne, Bacchus, Najade, Echo, Dryade, Zerbinetta) 7' 51"






 
Deborah VOIGT, Primadonna / Ariadne STAATSKAPELLE DRESDEN
Anne Sofie von OTTER, Der Komponist Giuseppe SINOPOLI
Natalie DESSAY, Zerbinetta

Ben HEPPNER, Der Tenor / Bacchus

Albert DOHMEN, Ein Musiklehrer

Romuald PEKNY, Der Haushofmeister

Klaus Florian VOGT, Ein Offizier

Michael HOWARD, Ein Tanzmeister

Matthias HENNEBERG, Ein Perückenmacher

Jürgen COMMICHAU, Ein Lakai

Stephan GENZ, Harlekin

Ian THOMPSON, Scaramuccio

Sami LUTTINEN, Truffaldin

Christoph GENZ, Brighella

Christiane HOSSFELD, Najade

Angela LIEBOLD, Dryade

Eva KIRCHNER, Echo

 






Luogo e data di registrazione
Lukaskirche, Dresden (Germania) - settembre & dicembre 2000

Registrazione: live / studio
studio


Executive Producer
Ewald Markl

Recording Producer
Sid McLauchlan

Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)

Klaus Hiemann

Recording Engineers
Jürgen Bulgrin, Mark Buecker, Wolf-Dieter Karwatky

Editing

Ingmar Haas

Prima Edizione LP
-

Prima Edizione CD
Deutsche Grammophon | 471 323-2 | LC 0173 | 2 CDs - 71' 25" & 50' 39" | (p) 2001 | DDD

Note
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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