Metropolitan Opera Archives

It was a delightful experience to sit again before "Der Rosenkavalier" at last night's Metropolitan revival of the captivating work, which had not been heard there since the season of '34-'35. Among the great comedies of music, this, with one exception, comes closest to achieving that fusion of blitheness and humor and gravity which the ideal comedy embodies. If the fusion had been a bit more perfectly proportioned by Strauss, we should have a work that it would be difficult to over praise.

But even as it is, the opera is a masterpiece-a prodigy of wit and grace and gusto and loveliness, allied with that marvelous gift of musical characterization which Strauss has evidenced in his tone poems, Even with its faults, what a dazzling and irresistible thing this opera is, how unerring the craftsmanship, how enchanting the comedy at its best!

How completely the charm and loveliness and brilliance of the music are caught up and symbolized in that incomparable moment at the beginning of the second Act, when Octavian the Rose Bearer enters the salon of Faninal's palace, arrayed in gleaming white and silver, bearing as emissary the ceremonial silver rose to Sophie, the betrothed of Baron Ochs, while the music blazes like an argent conflagration, and we hear in the orchestra the famous theme with its glittering, dissonantal chords of the celesta, harp, flutes and solo violins which limn the symbolic rose.

No one had ever done anything quite like this in opera: no one had had the blend of wit, audacity, uncanny skill, plus the gorgeous palette of the modern orchestra and the necromantic brush to spread it on a crowded and glowing and superbly decorative canvas. But the gleaming surfaces of the enchanting work are only an invitation to the hearer to look within a score which holds the gravest, most deeply sensitive, and most affecting pages that Richard Strauss has given us-those which create for us the living portrait of that great and patrician lady of the play, the Marschallin, Princess Wardenberg, lonely and proud and sorrowful and gallant in her moment of renunciation.

Happily for Strauss and for the audience at last evening's revival, it was precisely the crucial and most poignant moment in the Marschallin's relation to the tragicomedy, her difficult moment of renunciation and acceptance, that was realized most completely by Lotte Lehmann-inimitable mistress of the great role-by her new associate in the part of Octavian, Mme. Thorborg, and by the orchestra under Mr. Bodanzky.

The Baron Ochs von Lerchenau (enacted with capital skill and effectiveness by Mr. List) has departed, leaving the Silver Rose with the Marschallin, who has agreed to send it to Octavian for ceremonious delivery to Sophie, the Baron's bride-elect. The Marschallin, left alone, begins her famous and exquisite monologue. Her thoughts here, and in the colloquy with her lover Octavian that follows, are of the mutuability and the vanity of life. She sits before her mirror, musing upon her passing youth, upon the gathering shadows that fall across the years; and she accepts their slow, implacable ascendancy. Octavian returns, and the renunciatory sadness of the Princess deepens the music of their dialogue into a sorrowful fine-grained beauty such as Strauss has not elsewhere matched.

This scene, the cardinal one in the opera, was movingly conveyed to us last night by Mme. Lehmann, who caught in her voice and phrasing the passionate and melancholy loveliness of the music as she had seldom done before; and by the new Octavian, Mme. Thorborg, who filled her role with its essential qualities of youthful impetuosity and fervor, with grace and vividness of pantomime, and a welcome comprehension of the values of her music and its words.

As for the orchestra, it traversed the rich and subtle complexities of the score with a beauty and precision and vitality which gave unmistakable notice to discerning listeners of the fact that Mr. Bodanzky now has at his command an assemblage of players worthy of his gifts and authority as a leader. The delicate transparency of the strings and woodwind at the beginning of the Marschallin's monologue; the cantilena of the horns, later in the Act, and the revery of the strings at its close; the clear magic of the orchestra in its limning of the Silver Rose; the glow and soar of the instruments in the music for Sophie-sung with the right note of innocent and artless ecstasy by Miss Susanne Fisher -these were among the many achievements of the evening to remember with warm pleasure. Nor should I forget to mention the new Faninal, none other than our beloved Sachs and Wotan, Mr. Schorr, resplendent in white wig and gleaming satin and buckled shoes-a long, long way from medieval Nuremburg and the rocky summits of the Sagas!

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