Metropolitan Opera Archives

That nagging new feeling that no good thing must be missed these days for fear that another chance at it may never come no doubt had a good deal to do with the big turnout for last night's "Rosenkavalier" in the Metropolitan, Lehmann, List and Stevens in the cast, Leinsdorf in the pit, everything incredibly stable and fine, but for how long?

It was the season's last "Rosenkavalier," last Lehmann, last Stevens, and first opera of the last week. Those who have been waiting for Eleanor Roosevelt to make it unanimous that this is the "Met" and therefore current opera at its best now will have to risk the wait for the next "Rosenkavalier" next year.

This is the opera, it is said, which caused the latter day leaders of the new German kultur to suspend approval of Richard Strauss until something could be done about erasing from his record that he had composed this score to the libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

The adjective "decadent" gets attached to things of art much too easily. Any fool can make a case for its use in connection with "Der Rosenkavalier." Does it not recite the adventures of a woman involved in intrigues with libertines, blackmailers, procurers and a lover of gender so dubious that the Mozartean practice of writing the juvenile lead for a girl in trousers was revived to fit the case?

Decadence, for sure, is what "Der Rosenkavalier" is about, but decadence is not what it is. Since Wagner, no healthier music of the theater has been created than this bountiful score, with its perpetual bubble of waltzes glittering in a fabric of masterly symphonic writing, like metal thread in a fine brocade. Indeed, the total effect of this opera, score and script alike, is the diametrical reverse of decadent.

Maybe its question is, what is decadence after all? For some it is the movies, for others James Branch Cabell, others again the Republicans or contrarily the Communists. For some musicians it is composers who write for more than 72 instruments, for others those who write for less than ten. Maybe there is no such thing, but new things following on older things. Wagner following on Beethoven, Strauss on Wagner. But what, in the opera house, on Strauss?

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