Arabella

Richard Strauss asked his long-suffering librettist, the Austrian playwrite and poet, Hugo von Hoffmanstahl, for a script that would reprise their success with the opera, "Der Rosenkavelier". The result is "Arabella," an opera premiered in Dresden in 1933, vexed from its outset by political misfortunes -- the Nazis were acceding to power and commencing their persecution of Jewish artists and musicians -- as well as a tragic backstory: Hoffmanstahl had sent a finished draft of Act I of the three Act libretto to Strauss, but, before he could open the composer's laudatory thank-you letter, Hoffmanstahl's son committed suicide and the writer, himself, died two days later from apoplexy. Strauss didn't revise Hoffmanstahl's drafts of Acts II and III as a memorial to his librettist, a fact, that some critics say, accounts for weaknesses in the opera's second half. (I read the libretto in the original language, unaware of this background, and didn't detect any noticeable flagging of inspiration or ingenuity in the second half of the play -- that is, the shorter two acts that exist only in Hoffmanstahl's rough draft form. But I should observe that the play reads better than it performs and there are some longeurs and repetitious passages in the latter half of the opera that, perhaps, Strauss and Hoffmanstahl would have eliminated under happier circumstances.) The finished opera, if it can be properly called complete under these circumstances, is not so much "Der Rosenkavalier" as the "anti-Rosenkavalier" -- the glittering and aristocratic milieu of the earlier success is not replicated in "Arabella"; rather, the play involves the family of a shabby genteel "Rittmeister", a former military officer who has lost his fortune gambling and his sordid plan to sell his beautiful daughter Arabella to an elderly roue to salvage the family's finances. Instead of the lavish balls and spectacular waltzes featured in "Der Rosenkavalier", Hoffmanstahl's story revolves around the "Fiaker-Ball" -- that is, a taxi-cab driver's ball (hansom-driver, I think is the proper translation), a seedy affair featuring a jodhpur-wearing dominatrix wielding a whip and various denizens of the debauched and impoverished Austro-hungarian nobility. The plot involves a "bed trick" (that is, one woman substituted for another in the bed of her lover), lots of drinking, cross-dressing, and a squalid family squabble that takes up all of the Third Act. All of this sounds more interesting than it plays on stage. Strauss is not a great inventor of melodies and the orchestral music, although always very intricate and "busy" is not particularly beautiful -- one expects that it is better and more ingeniously written than it sounds. There are no lavish choruses, no dance scenes, and most of the singing is declamatory, brusquely delivered at lightning speed to keep things from dragging too much. The "pant's" role of Zdenka, a young woman dressed as a boy because her parents don't have the resources to launch two debutantes into Viennese high-society clearly fascinates Strauss and affords him an opportunity to score several luscious duets between high soprano voices, a kind of music that seems to have some kind of sexual import for the composer -- there are several measures in the First Act that sound a bit like Strauss' heartbreaking and voluptuous "Four Last Songs" and so are very beautiful; unfortunately, these passages are short, seem abbreviated, and don't really develop. The opera ends with a long quasi-Wagnerian reconciliation and love duet between Arabella and her Serbian lover, Mandryka, and this climactic music is certainly imposing and majestic --the voices float on great surges of orchestral music with a strange, heavy, sometimes discordant bass-line striking emphatic notes below, underlining the words which sail above the opulent sound that the orchestra is making in the pit. It's impressive and reminds me of some of the love duets in Wagner's"Ring", an orgy of shame, humiliation, and anguished love that verges on the ridiculous and the tedious, but doesn't quite tip over into bathos. Arabella, who is cold, coquettish, and imperious, in the first Act inexplicably softens in the second half of the opera and, although at first she doesn't seem a prize worth all the "Sturm und Drang" becomes more and more convincing as a heroine as the show proceeds. The apparent moral of the work, which is cynical, very Viennese, and somewhat repugnant, seems to be that truel love requires infinite reserves of gullibility (or faith) and a seemingly infinite capacity to forgive since the object of one's affection is likely to humiliate or betray the other partner, probably within hours of plighting troth. The Minnesota Opera Company's production of this show on November 16, 2013, was willfully ugly. The sets, following an anti-Rosenkavalier design, were architectural fragments, more or less the color of soap or cheese that has gone off-quality. The heroine, sung by Jacqueline Wagner, was certainly beautiful, chilly, and graceful -- I think she sang well and the audience gave her a standing ovation. As always in Grand Opera, there were inexplicable lapses. In the final scene, a big family fight on the steps leading down from Arabella's bedroom (the place where the crossdressing Zdenka has just copulated with Matteo, Arabella's disappointed suitor), a group of kibbutzers stood outside the bedroom door in deshabille, night-shirts and trousers with suspenders loosened -- this gave the impression that this gang of men had just come from Zdenka/Arabella's bedroom, imparting a rather more lascivious tone to the already risque proceedings than I think was intended. (Rick Herreid who with his wife, Karen, attended the opera with us made this observation, an acute one.) How exactly little Zdenko persuaded Matteo that he was Arabella in bed is not clear -- the prima donna playing Arabella was exceedingly tall and willowy (she dwarfed the unfortunate Elemer, played by a very tiny man, an effect that seems to have been intended as comical) and was, at least, twice as tall as her sister, Zdenka. But in opera loves conquers all, including it seems biomechanical geometry.