A Bitter-sweet Lyric Comedy in Music and Vision 26 Giugno

A Bitter-sweet Lyric Comedy 'Arabella' from Festival Strauss in Leipzig, reviewed by GIUSEPPE PENNISI Leipzig has never been the capital of Saxony: the King and the Court had their residence in Dresden. However, since the Middle Ages, it has been the main commercial and financial center. It is now a flourishing town of nearly half a million residents, and culture has an important place in its life. It was Richard Wagner's birthplace, and where J S Bach, Mendelssohn Robert Schumann and Clara Wieck lived. The Leipzig Gewandhaus, originally an association of artisans and traders in love with music, started some five hundred years ago and was guided by internationally known conductors such as, in the last century, Riccardo Chailly, Kurt Masur, Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler. When Chailly decided to become musical director of La Scala, Ulf Schirmer became musical director of both the Gewandhaus and the Leipzig Opera. A concert in the Leipzig Opera House. Photo © 2016 Kirsten Nijhof. Click on the image for higher resolution Leipzig Opera is a repertory house with forty opera titles — five of these are 'premiere', ie new, productions — and ten ballets a year. Another repertory house is devoted to operetta and modern musical theatre. In mid June, there were, in parallel, two festivals of international standing: a Richard Strauss Festival in the opera house and a Bach Festival in churches and concert halls. I focus on the Strauss Festival held on the weekend of 16-18 June 2017, featuring recent productions of Arabella and Die Frau ohne Schatten, and the premiere of a new production of Salome. This review deals with Arabella, seen and heard on 16 June. Two others will comment on Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome. Arabella is very seldom performed in Italy, mostly due to difficulties of merging words and notes. It is the last opera of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal collaboration. Due to his tragic death, the poet was only able to complete the first act, part of the second act and a preliminary draft of the third act. Strauss had to find other collaborators. In short, the opera was started in 1928 and only completed in 1933. It is a bitter-sweet lyric comedy. After the 1868 Prussian-Austrian war, an impoverished aristocrat (also a card gambler) has only one asset to pay his debts and start a better life: to marry his twenty-year-old daughter Arabella to a wealthy man. There is also a younger eighteen-year-old daughter, Zdenka. In order not to miss the primary objective, Zdenka has to dress and act as a boy. A larger number of intrigues follow until Arabella gets happily married to Mandyka, a forty-year-old wealthy Croatian, a real 'gentleman from overseas'. Hofmannsthal and Strauss had developed their opera in the vein of the late Viennese operetta with musically expansive passages which are serene apotheoses during which dramatic time is stretched. These passages borrow from folk songs to color deeply instinctual motives. Ulf Schirmer conducted the Gewandhaus orchestra gently. Jan Schmidt-Garre (stage direction), Heike Scheele (sets) and Thomas Kaiser (costumes) set the action in the nineteen thirties. Six different elements showed the various parts of the places where the action develops on the immense stage. A scene from 'Arabaella' as performed at Opera Leipzig as part of the 2017 Strauss Festival. Photo © 2016 Kirsten Nijhof. Click on the image for higher resolution It's impossible to comment on all seventeen soloists. Arabella is the American Betsy Horne, a warm voice, passionate but also quite sweet. Betsy Horne (left) as Arabella with Olena Tokar as Zdenka in 'Arabella' as performed at Opera Leipzig as part of the 2017 Strauss Festival. Photo © 2016 Kirsten Nijhof. Click on the image for higher resolution Mandryka is the baritone Thomas J Mayer. Their final duet was marvellous. Noticeable among the others were mezzo soprano Olena Tokar as Zdenka, whilst Jan-Hendrik Rootering (father of the two girls) had volume problems. Copyright © 26 June 2017 Giuseppe Pennisi, Rome, Italy RICHARD STRAUSS LEIPZIG OPERA LEIPZIG GERMANY  << M&V home       Concert reviews        Il viaggio a Reims >>