Making audiences laugh, not just grin
Comedy for music by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Music by Richard Strauss.” That’s what the creators of Der Rosenkavalier wrote on the score, but don’t expect to see it reprinted in any programme books. Their careful wording doesn’t fit modern assumptions about Der Rosenkavalier, and not merely because it gives the librettist first place. There’s that troublesome word “comedy”, too. Advertising blurbs tell us that Rosenkavalier is a bittersweet meditation on love, transience and loss. Yet its creators meant it to be funny. “Don’t forget that the audience should also laugh!” wrote Strauss to Hofmannsthal. “Laugh, not just smile or grin!”
Richard Jones’s Glyndebourne production never forgets that. Nor do the cast, who embody the show’s opera buffa spirit as joyously — and as touchingly — as if they were in The Marriage of Figaro. There’s no reason why the Marschallin has to be a campy ageing diva. The work’s creators specified that she’s 32 at most, and it makes perfect narrative sense for her to be a lot younger. Rachel Willis- Sorensen’s Marie Therese is plausibly in the same age bracket as Octavian ( Kate Lindsey), and just as aroused by their illicit relationship: copping a quick, excited fondle even while Baron Ochs is noisily mansplaining his own philosophy of sex.
This is a playful, smitten young couple, and their quarrel at the end of Act One is a lovers’ tiff rather than a tragic farewell. The music provides all the subtext necessary, though Jones sets it up with telling details: a moment of ardent eye contact from Octavian, a sweet, brave smile from the Marschallin, or the way Louise Alder’s bright, anxious Sophie squeezes Octavian’s hand for reassurance. Robin Ticciati and the London Philharmonic dance along with operetta lightness and swing, the big set pieces unfold at conversational pace, and Jones tactfully deflates the Marschallin’s Act One soliloquy, so that instead of the operatic equivalent of a Sondheim torch song we get a lively but troubled young woman opening up to her therapist.
I can’t deny that the cartoonish costumes and lurid retro- kitsch sets initially made me wince. It looks like a collision between a G Plan showroom and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, with the Marschallin’s servants as Oompa Loompas. But I was wrong — after all, virtually the first instruction that Strauss writes in his score is “parodistisch!”.
The tension between artifice and emotion at the heart of Der Rosenkavalier becomes even more poignant when it’s played sincerely for laughs, and Jones’s stylised, quirky stagecraft complements some of the freshest, most lovable central performances you could possibly hope for.