Metropolitan Opera Archives

Florence Easton, who was last night, as before, in the cast of Richard Strauss's "Rosenkavalier" at the Metropolitan, tells an amusing story about the composer in James Francis Cooke's "Great Singers on the Art of Singing" (Philadelphia, Theodore Presser)"

"Strauss was one of the leading conductors while I was at the Royal Opera in Berlin and I sang under his baton many, many times. He was a real genius - in that once his art work was completed, his interest immediately centered upon the next. Once while we were performing "Rosenkavalier" he came behind the scenes and said: "Will this awfully long opera never end? I want to go home." I said to him "But Doctor you composed it yourself, and he said "Yes, but I never meant to conduct it."

The opera certainly is long - uncut it last three hours and a half, and no wonder, for the original libretto is a pamphlet of eighty-eight pages and in Schattmann's Guide there is a list of its themes which the composer elaborates contrapuntally and otherwise. As English critics said of this opera and its composer: "He sometimes enchants and sometimes astonished, and the less he astonished the more he enchants."

With all its super subtleties and over-intellectualism, "Der Rosenkavalier" has held its own, here as well as abroad. One cannot but agree with the Hamburg critic Fredinand Pfohl, who after the first performance in his city wrote that the endings of the first and third acts are so exquisitely beautiful that they make one desire to hear the opera over and over again, forgetting and forgiving the excessive lengths, the coarsened, the farcical excesses and other assaults on good taste.

Mr. Gatti's cast includes, besides Florence Easton, at least two other artists who have often sung under him: Maria Jeritza whose Octavian he has specially endorsed and Mr. Bender, whose Baron Ochs has the pardonable fault of not being as disgustingly vulgar as the libretto makes him. Probably Miss Rethberg also has sung under his baton, perhaps Mr. Schützendorf too. At any rate the cast was a big one last night, and big casts draw large audiences. It was the fourth performance this season and it went more competently than the first.

Search by season: 1922-23

Search by title: Der Rosenkavalier,

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