Reflecting on a lesser-known Strauss opus
Both sopranos reacted with a puzzled look when I told them I had once described Richard Strauss’s Arabella as a watered-down Der Rosenkavalier.
Yes, the veteran opera composer had written in 1922 to his collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal that he felt like composing another Rosenkavalier and, yes, both operas are suffused with a Viennese ambience.
But when the Canadian Opera Company (COC) decided to open its 2017-18 season this coming Thursday with its first production of the lesser-known Strauss opus, both Erin Wall (who plays Arabella) and Jane Archibald (who plays Zdenka) leapt to the opera’s defence.
For Archibald, this would be a first opportunity to portray a unique trouser role — a woman pretending to be a man because her parents cannot afford to put two daughters on the marriage market.
For Wall, it would be an opportunity to revisit a role she had already sung in Santa Fe (where the COC production originated) and at the Metropolitan Opera.
“I feel Arabella is a fully drawn character,” Wall said. “And both sisters are doing what they have to do for the family,” her onstage sibling added; “there is genuine warmth between them. People should expect to hear beautiful Strauss music, the kind of music they would find in Rosenkavalier and Ariadne ( auf Naxos).”
“It is an opera about love and money, if you boil the plot down,” Wall suggested. “They have been waiting here a long time to do it.”
It was done for the first time in Dresden in 1933 and, for most of the intervening decades, has been unfavourably compared with Der Rosenkavalier, a judgment vigorously refuted by the American scholar Patrick J. Smith, who has described it as “one of the very few mature comedies of manners in operatic history.”
The plot does have its problems, most of them revolving around the improbability of portraying a woman pretending successfully to be a man (it would be several decades later before David Henry Hwang successfully pulled off the trick in reverse in his Broadway hit M. Butterfly). Hofmannsthal’s sudden death before he could revise the second and third acts did not help.
Strauss, ever loyal, refused to alter Hofmannsthal’s text, and in a sympathetic production it has been shown on the whole to work.
Tim Albery, director of the Santa Fe/Toronto production, has moved the action forward from the 1860s to the 1930s, but without distorting the story, according to his lead sopranos. “I’ve been in a few horror productions,” Archibald laughed, “but it is an interesting process for us when a director rethinks a score. And sometimes you find something new. We always aim to keep the art form alive and vital.”
“The production I did at the Met was by Otto Schenk and more traditional,” Wall echoed, “but they both work. I like directors who take you as you are and let you find your way into a role. When I was a young singer I didn’t always trust my instincts. I trust them more now.”
Both singers expressed enthusiasm for the music of Strauss, Archibald having played five of his operatic roles and Wall three.
“He is fiercely cruel to tenors, but he really understood the soprano voice,” a smiling Wall said.
“He rarely gets you up there and leaves you.”
Archibald agreed: “Mozart is actu- ally harder. Strauss writes for a singing actress. The parts are always hard to learn but they feel good. I’ve never taken a pants role like Zdenka, where I play a young man when I’m with others but can be a sister when I’m with Arabella. We have a beautiful duet in the first act. Zdenka is sacrificing herself for the good of the family and I take a fair amount of pride in the character as well as in overcoming technical difficulties.”
Wall noted that an arranged marriage is Arabella’s supposed destiny and added, “Fortunately she gets a happy ending. A lot of the characters I sing don’t.”
It is the happy ending that helps make Arabella a comedy. Its musical tone is lighter than that of Der Rosenkavalier and the action takes place within a single day.
It takes only a few minutes for Strauss to exhibit the characterassociated motifs he will weave into the orchestral fabric, with a Viennese waltz often lurking in the background.
And those with fond recollections of the composer’s skill in portraying “the sexual act” in the “Prelude” to Der Rosenkavalier will find it successfully reprised in the “Prelude” to Act III of Arabella.
A watered-down Der Rosenkavalier? Well, perhaps Patrick J. Smith hit closer to the mark when writing that, “Arabella is not faultless but few, if any, operas can be said to express so profound and so beautiful a loving understanding of human nature. The achievement is Hofmannsthal’s, and the achievement is Strauss’s.”