Metropolitan Opera Archives

With all its preposterous fun and a half hour less ponderous music the "Rose Cavalier" on the season's third Monday fulfilled a Metropolitan official promise of enhancing its value as an evening's entertainment. Bodanzky had cleverly reduced the comedy's length till it ended before the clocks struck 11 on theatrical Broadway. Last night's audience was not to be kept from the thousand waiting limousines by a trick like that. Boxes and floor became blank in the usual rush during Strauss's trio, one of the first ensembles since the Wagner "Meistersinger" quintet.

Now the "Rose Cavalier" isn't a play for Puritans. It belongs in the rouge's gallery of those not recommended by the Parents League. But it really is funny. Big Goritz shedding wig and coat in a Vienna cabaret was again a sight for gods and men to laugh at till they wept. Hempel as a Dresden china princess, her great role and Ober in man's clothes masquerading back into petticoats, proved mighty as ever on the singing side. Herman Weil and modest Edith Mason represented the golden house of Vienna's splendor, while Reiss, Bayer and twenty more added deft miniature portraits, and a little black slave, Ruth Weinstein, shared in the final curtain call.

As told in the programme, Richard Strauss was 1 year old when another Richard, the only Wagner, produced "Tristan." That drama will be done for the first time this season tomorrow night. It was Jean de Reszke as the first German Tristan under Grau who exclaimed: "What a distance we had gone since the old French opera days." Much water has flowed under bridges since then. The house that holds a "Rose Cavalier" is actually to be regaled by Nijinsky this season in the Afternoon of a Faun." There is even the whispered possibility of a Farrar in "Salome."

Search by season: 1915-16

Search by title: Der Rosenkavalier,

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