Often I get up in the middle of the night and stop all the clocks - Hofmannsthal's melancholy Mozartish Cavalier of the Rose

The Cavalier of the Rose (1911), better known as Der Rosenkavalier, was written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal as a libretto.  Strauss had wanted to follow the intense Salome (1905) with something more light and fun and Mozartish.  Instead, working with Hofmannsthal, he did the intense and in many ways quite similar Elektra (1909) as his next opera.  They saved the farcical romantic comedy for next time.  I doubt I would guess, blindfolded, that the music was by the same composer, although the many waltzes might let me guess it was Austrian; I would never guess that the cross-dressing hero and fast-moving physical comedy came from Hofmannsthal, who is admittedly a pretty blank slate, at least not until the great act of renunciation in the last act of the opera.

PRINCESS: There’s many a matter here on earth
nobody could ever believe
did they but hear the story told.
But the one it happens to, that one believes and knows not how…  (Act 3, p. 524)

The princess, the tragic figure of the comedy, begins the play in bed with her young lover, the 17-year-old Octavian, who is so beautiful that everyone he meets, female and male, falls in love with him.  When the grotesque and foolish Baron intrudes on the boudoir, Octavian disguises himself as a female servant.  The Baron is smitten; the comedy is ready to begin – a duel, disguises, pranks, waiters dashing about, like that.  In the next act, Octavian meets his female counterpart Sophia, coincidentally engaged to the vulgar Baron.  There’s the romance.

But wait, didn’t the play begin with Octavian in love with – sleeping with – the Princess?  Didn’t he burst into tears when she suggests that “sooner or later” he will leave her for “one younger and more lovely than I” (427)?  Hofmannsthal includes the necessary frothy, sparkling romantic plot, but he puts this sadder love affair behind it.

PRINCESS:  Time is a strange thing.
While one just lives for the moment, it is nothing.
But then all at once
we feel nothing else but it,
it’s all around us, it’s right inside us,
it trickles away in our faces, it trickles in the mirror,
in my temples it flows away.
And between you and me it is flowing too.
Soundless, as an hour-glass.
Ah Quinquin [Octavian’s nickname]!
Often I hear it flow incessantly.
Often I get up in the middle of the night
and stop all the clocks.  (Act 1, 428-9)

Or as she says earlier, “It’s all a mystery, so much is mysterious” (424).  She is such an unusual character that as beautiful as her part is, she is absent for most of the rest of the opera.  There are hints that she is the Empress of Austria.

Another unusual feature of the libretto is that it only occasionally looks like a libretto, employing choruses and refrains and set-piece arias and so on, although it has all of those at times.  It mostly looks like a play.  The dialogue mostly looks like conversation.  It is highly readable.  Thus, I read it.

Christopher Holme did the version in Selected Plays and Libretti.

To my loathing I find only ever myself - notes on Richard Wagner's Ring as literature

I am going to write one post about Richard Wagner’s four Ring of the Nibelunga operas, or really the texts.  To do that I need a translation, a book.  The book is Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (1993), edited by Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, which has German and English texts (translated by Spencer) side by side, along with a number of helpful essays  about the operas’ sources, composition, performance, and also the minor side issue of the music.  What a helpful book.  The translator’s general method is to sound like he is translating the Poetic Edda, with punchy lines and lots of alliteration, while Wagner’s method was to sound like he was imitating the Poetic Edda.

Das Rheingold (1869), Die Walküre (1870), Siegfried and Götterdämmerung (both 1876).  I have identified the dates of first performance, but the texts go back to the 1848, with some version of them published – without any music – as early as 1853.  Wagner began with the idea of an operatic version of the great medieval German epic Die Nibelungenlied, but kept discovering that he needed to move backwards.

The history of the text and score, evolving over almost thirty years, gives Wagner experts a lot to do.  My favorite part of this story is that Wagner insisted that his texts embodied the ideas of Ludwig Feuerbach, until he discovered the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, after which, having changed almost nothing, he claimed that the Ring exemplified the ideas of Schopenhauer.  I assume Wagner was as right as wrong each time.

The Ring is a cosmological story, beginning, obliquely, with the creation and ending with the apocalypse.  Less symbolically, a dwarf steals a gold treasure from some mermaids, and the pursuit of this treasure by various parties, especially the Norse gods, Wotan and so on, leads eventually to the destruction of the heroes and gods by fire.  The dwarf puts a curse on the gold when, in Das Rheingold, it is seized from him by the might-makes-right gods, and supposedly this curse generates much of the subsequent action:

No joyful man
shall ever have joy of it;
on no happy man
shall its bright gleam smile;
may he who owns it,
and he who does not
be ravaged by greed!  (Das Rheingold, Sc. 3, p. 98)

But one of the finest subtleties of Wagner’s conception is that there is no curse.  No curse is needed to evoke ordinary human nature at its worst.  Almost all of the characters – the dragon, the dwarfs, the gods – are credibly human.

The Ring is gigantic enough – Götterdämmerung in particular always seems like it will never end – to include many stories.  The Ring is about many things.  What struck me most strongly this time was what I will call the Tragedy of Wotan, the Shakespeare-like story of the king with too strong of a sense of fate, the existentialist Odin.  He schemes, he acts, he even triumphs, but always with the knowledge that in the end, even for an all-powerful, all-knowing being, none of it matters:

How can I make that other man                                                
who’s no longer me
and who, of himself, achieves
what I alone desire? –
O godly distress!
O hideous shame!
To my loathing I find
only ever myself
in all that I encompass!  (Die Walküre , Act II, Sc. 2, p. 152)

What will strike me next time I read the Ring is anybody’s guess.  Would a reading of the Ring plays have any meaning to someone who had no interest at all in the operas, the music?  I don’t know.  Probably not.

I found that backstage image of Siegfried slaying Fafner the dragon, as portrayed in Paris in 1902, in The New Grove Book of Operas, 2000 edition, p. 586.

A lovely travesty at the Vienna Staatsoper

Meine Frau and I saw a production of Massenet’s Werther (1892) in the legendary, historic, blah blah blah, Vienna Staatsoper. The production, although not insane, included the usual attention deficit disorder- induced decisions (set the story in the 1950s, put a working television on stage, why not?) They were in keeping with the main curtain or drop which had images of Popeye and the Incredible Hulk on it.*

The story, the adaptation, of The Sorrows of Young Werther was unbelievable, a disgrace, the creation of someone who apparently actively hated Goethe’s story and wanted to destroy it. A bizarre and inappropriate Christmas theme runs through the entire opera. Charlotte is given a younger sister who has a crush on Werther. And the entire last act is the final meeting between Werther and Charlotte, after (after!) Werther has fatally shot himself. That last act is a travesty, really.

But that last act (most of the previous act as well), a long duet between the two leads, was also a sort of pure flow of song that was basically as beautiful as any opera I know. I was best off ignoring the subject, ignoring the words entirely, just luxuriating in the singing.

Werther was sung by the young Spaniard Rolando Villazón. He was not the most forceful tenor I’ve ever heard, but he had an amazing clarity, a perfect tone. The Viennese audience applauded him as soon as he came to the fore of the stage, before he had sung a note, which I found weird, but he’d earned the applause by the end. Sophie Koch was Charlotte, almost as good.

Opera fans put up with a lot of nonsense. Maybe that’s true of fans of anything, 19th century literature included.

*In general, Vienna felt genuinely elegant. So I can’t explain this lapse.