yes, yes
by
Douglas Messerli
Hugo
van Hofmannsthal (libretto), Richard Strauss (music), Robert Carsen (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Der Rosenkavalier / 2017 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]
For
years when I’ve thought about Richard Strauss’ great opera, Der Rosenkavalier, I have always
imagined it as primarily a slightly sad lyric testament to the passage of time,
as an almost Proustian acceptance of the end of not only one’s own vitality,
but of the era in which one, by birth, has come to represent. That is certainly
true for the great Marschallin, in Strauss’s original a wealthy princess of the 18th-century,
wife to the head of the Austrian military (a force always central to Austrian
life), and lover to a young, only 17-years-of-age, count, a remarkably handsome
cavalier, who regularly brings her roses.
The remarkable aspect of this opera,
I have always imagined, is that the Marschallin’s love transcends even her own
happiness, a recognition that there will inevitably come a time in her intense
affair with her younger lover that he will perceive her for what she is, an
older woman moving towards death at the very moment that he is just coming into
a full recognition of his life. In the first act, when the Marschallin
(epitomized in Renée Fleming’s performance of her over many a year) recognizes
that she loves the young Octavian (performed by another consummate singer and
actor, Elīna Garanča—having played the role, she admits for the 17 years and 2
months, precisely her character’s age) and that she must someday give him up
to some younger woman with a fresher beauty with whom he falls in
love, the opera seems to sum up the facts of all of life. Love, beauty, wealth,
whatever one believes to be of value is impermanent, and those who live life
best know when to release their grasp of maintaining those qualities.
The director of this new MET Opera
production, Robert Carsen, has, I think quite correctly reset these events into
Vienna’s fin de siècle period, a
decade before Strauss’ own creations and those of similar-minded creators such
as Arthur Schnitzler, the early writings of Robert Musil, and, of course,
Sigmund Freud. Certainly, the rising militarism of that period resonates with
the opera’s own focus on off-stage violence and the antics of Baron Ochs
(Günther Groissböck) and his soldier friends.
What I always forget is that this opera is
also, and perhaps at heart, a raucous social satire for most of the next two
acts, and even within the first act when the lovers’ transcendent interludes
are interrupted, first by the completely insensitive Ochs, and then by the numerous
petitioners, peddlers, and simple “riff-raff” that the Marschallin must daily
face after her coffee and chocolates. Great lady that she is, the Marschallin
survives not only her daily petitioners, waving them off with gracious gestures
of hand and neck, but even partially escaping the rude and blustering bleats of
her obviously hated cousin, Ochs—who boasts of his upcoming marriage to a wealthy arms-manufacturers,
Faninal’s (Markus Brück) daughter—by playing along with Octavian’s pretense of
being his lover’s chambermaid (a noted incident in which an opera “pants”
character—a soprano playing the young male lover—is forced to appear in “drag”
of the sex she truly represents).
The Marschallin saves the day, while the
crude Ochs attempts to seduce the newly-minted Mariandel, by suggesting that
she cannot afford to give up her ill-conceived servant, but that she will
provide her cousin instead with Mariandel’s handsome noble brother, Octavian,
to serve as Ochs “Rosenkavalier,” to present the tradition silver roses of
family custom for all wedding engagements.
It is after Och’s departure that the Marschallin,
the utter opposite of her idiot cousin, suddenly perceives that she is quickly
growing old, singing her major aria, “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding” in
which she attempts to tell Octavian that nothing lasts forever, and that there
will come a time when, despite his protestations, he too will move on.
Of course, the ardent boy utterly denies
it, and she is forced to console him, instead, and he consoling the distraught
woman who sometimes gets up in the middle of the night to stop the clocks.
These are the scenes that I still believe
to be the heart of Der Rosenkavalier,
but, in fact, the Marschallin soon after disappears from sight for nearly two
acts, as the comedy’s rude mechanicals (to steal Shakespeare’s term) come
forward to battle it out. For the first few moments of Act II, as Octavian meets Sophie
and immediately falls in love, the gentle irony of Strauss’ work is maintained.
But moments later, as Ochs enters, to put it simply, all hell breaks loose, as
the Baron proves himself as the brute he is to his would-be fiancée Sophie. As
Morely described her in a inter-act interview, she is clearly an early feminist,
who simply cannot abide the absolute self-centeredness and the misogynistic
behavior of Ochs. Carsen clearly has made every attempt to underline the
similarities between this self-inflated fool with a certain contemporary
American president. If nothing else, we can now clearly recognize the type.
But the series of slap-stick actions that
follow, including Fanlin’s presentation of home-bound gun-turrets, the Keystone
Cop-like antics of Och’s personal soldiers, and general undefined chaos, as
Sophie is groped, pulled, pummeled, and finally thrown to the ground in the
ever-shifting emotions of Ochs, represent something I might describe as outside
the tone of the opera. That Carsten’s Ochs is a healthy antidote to the usual
operatic depiction of an old oafish man, I’ll agree; but there can be no
doubt that this moves not only toward the campy but is definitely
“over-the-top.”
And these qualities grow even more
extreme in the beginning of the next act, played out in a brothel (the prudish
MET-HD printout describes it as “a house of ill repute”), which, in this
production seems closer to the Weimar Republic’s cabarets than to a Vienna fin de siècle establishment. The attempt
to bring the dense Ochs to his senses involves Octavian, got up into a costume
that reminds one of Marlene Dietrich, a male-drag orchestra right out of Some Like It Hot, numerous undressed and
unwound floozies, a loud-mouthed Madame (Tony Stevenson), again in drag, and
gangs of a child chorus, a pleading ex-wife, dancers, waiters, food-sellers,
lackeys, and god knows who else to scare the Baron half-to-death, before, once
more, the even more beautiful Marschallin enters the fray to save the day and
send the Baron packing in utter embarrassment—although, we perceive, his
comeuppance will probably not ever enter this man’s pea-sized brain.
Once again, the opera returns to its
transcendent roots, as Fleming, Garanča, and Morley join together for an
all-female trio that sings of love, acceptance, and forgiveness simultaneously. Strauss’ tinkling music, with
its slightly discordant descending melodies says it all, even suggesting that
the intense love now shared by the young Sophie and Octavian may also one day,
too, come to an end. But, at least, as the Marschallin perceives, Sophie and
Octavian will be good together, if even for a too little while.
The three major singers, Garanča (who is,
after all, the lead in this opera), Fleming and Morley couldn’t have been
better, and the audience—knowing that this was the very last time they would
see the first two in these roles—applauded enthusiastically, tossing small
paper placards down from the balconies, and tossing flowers upon the stage.
Their performances were so remarkable that I am sure that the MET audience (all
of whom seemed pasted to their seats, except for their standing cheers) were in
tears, as was I. And everyone, I believe, perceived this was perhaps one of the
great Der Rosenkavaliers of all time.
If only the director had been a bit more
subtle in his comic inventiveness. For despite the manic energy of those
interactions between Ochs and the others, there seemed to have been no genuine
laughter. Surely a somewhat lighter touch might have redeemed the central
characters’ trials and tribulations. This production seemed to suggest that
Strauss’s and von Hofmannsthal’s 1911 opera was simply a farce surrounded by
slightly sentimental lovers. But then young lovers always behave that way,
observes Sophie’s father, to which the Marschallin responds: “Yes, yes”—the
very last words of Fleming’s long habitation of her character.
Los Angeles, May
14, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (May 2017).
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