RICHARD STR AUSS
ARIADNE AUF NAXOS
CONTENTS
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SYNOPSIS P.
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MYTHOLOGY OF ARIADNE
ARIADNE AUF NAXOS THRIVES ON ITS SUBTLETIES INTERVIEW WITH FRANZ WELSER-MÖST
THE ORIGINS OF ARIADNE ANDREAS LÁNG
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THEATER NEEDS VITALITY, THE IRRATIONAL AND THE CONTRADICTORY INTERVIEW WITH SVEN-ERIC BECHTOLF
“EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT EMOTION MUST FADE INTO THE BACKGROUND” MICHAEL WALTER
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THE GREAT TRANSFORMER ANDREAS LÁNG
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HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL ARTHUR KAHANE
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ARIADNE AND ZERBINETTA OLIVER LÁNG P.
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IMPRINT
RICHARD STR AUSS
ARIADNE AUF NAXOS OPERA in one act and prologue, op. 60 Libretto HUGO LAURENZ AUGUST HOFMANN, EDLER VON HOFMANNSTHAL
ORCHESTRA
2 flutes / 1 piccolo 2 oboes / 2 clarinets 2 bassoons / 2 horns 1 trumpet / 1 trombone timpani / percussion 2 harps / 1 harmonium piano / celesta violin I / violin II viola / cello / double bass
AUTOGRAPH
Richard Strauss Archive Garmisch-Partenkirchen WORLD PREMIÈRE FIRST VERSION 25 OCT 1912 Stuttgart Court Theatre, small theatre WORLD PREMIÈRE SECOND VERSION 4 OCT 1916 Vienna Court Opera WORLD PREMIÈRE THIRD VERSION 9 APR 1918 Deutsches Theater Berlin DURATION (SECOND VERSION)
PROLOGUE 45 MIN OPERA 1 H 20 MIN
ARIADNE AUF NAXOS
SYNOPSIS PROLOGUE The servants of the richest man in Vienna are busy preparing the stage for a performance in their master’s palace. Behind the scenes the two troupes hired for the occasion are making their preparations: the one troupe is to present its rendition of the first work by a young composer, the opera Ariadne auf Naxos, the other a dance masquerade in Italian buffo style. The mutual jealousy between the members of the two troupes causes emotions to run high. Even more so when the unexpected and incomprehensible programme change that the host, represented by his Majordomo, announces: at his wish, the two performances will not take place consecutively, but are to be presented simultaneously to the invited guests. Deeply distressed, the Composer, who is concerned about the accurate realisation of his artistic vision, wants to withdraw his creation and abandon the first public performance. But the pragmatic Music Master and above all Zerbinetta, who is adept in all the skills of seduction and in no time has the inexperienced young Composer in her sway, persuade him to change his mind. With an emphatic hymn to music, the Composer bows to reality and the instructions of his patron. The opera Ariadne auf Naxos is accordingly performed in the desired manner, with interludes by a troupe of Italian comedians.
Previous pages: KATE LINDSEY as COMPOSER
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SYNOPSIS
OPERA In front of a cave on the beaches of the island of Naxos, Ariadne awaits her death, as she has been deserted by Theseus, her res cuer and lover. And so she does not hear or pay attention to any thing around her: not the three nymphs, not the comedians who try to cheer her up, not even Zerbinetta, who based on her rich experience in a breakneck aria advises the grieving Ariadne not to shed a tear over her vanished lover and to be open to a new love. A radiant youth approaches from afar: Bacchus, the god of eternal renewal. He has just fled from the arms of the enchantress Circe, where he was unable to find what he was looking for. Ariadne, taking him for a messenger of death, goes to meet him and immediately, without realising it, becomes inflamed with an ecstatic passion that is reciprocated by the god. Each transformed by the other and as if newborn, Ariadne and Bacchus conclude the opera as a well-nigh mystically united couple.
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CONDUCTOR FRANZ WELSER-MÖST TALKS TO ANDREAS LÁNG
ARIADNE AUF NAXOS THRIVES ON ITS SUBTLETIES al M aestro Welser-Möst, Karl Böhm described Ariadne auf Naxos as his personal favourite. Can you appreciate why in all Strauss’s œuvre precisely this opera should have been so important to Böhm? fwm Karl Böhm certainly had private reasons for his classification, but at the same time it is clearly an artistic assessment. It is the opinion of a great interpreter who had a considerable affinity for Mozart and who, I assume, found easy access to this opera as it has more than a few Mozartian characteristics. It must be said that most conductors – including myself – generally enjoy conducting any Strauss opera. For myself, I have also found that I become particularly wrapped up in first one opera, then another. For example, I had an intense Elektra phase. At pre sent, naturally Ariadne has a special place in my life. al To what extent is the quality of the libretto important to a conductor? In other words: aside from the music, does it make a difference to you
whether you are conducting a Strauss opera with a libretto by Hofmannsthal or with one by Joseph Gregor? fwm It makes a huge difference! I said to the singers before we even started rehearsals for our new production of Ariadne: be careful! The intonation, the specific Hofmannsthal intonation, must always be preserved, must always come into its own, as it is also expressed in the music – especially in the prologue. We are talking about a very specific Viennese speech intonation used by the upper classes in the fin de siècle era; incidentally it is distinct from that of the aristocracy. I can still hear the way my great uncle Josef Wild talked; he owned a delicatessen on Neuer Markt in the first district in Vienna. That was precisely the style of speech that Hofmannsthal modelled. You can essentially hear it in all Viennese audio and video recordings of plays, for example with Attila Hörbiger or Rudolf Leopold. And this intonation is part of the musical colour. So it is much more than the question of where I put in a rubato, fermata or
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the like. Rather, what is important is revealing the similarity between Viennese classicism and classicistic Richard Strauss, in other words making it audible and appreciable. Especially today, in an age of general internationalisation, it sometimes takes a great deal of preparation to do justice to this mandate. al Ariadne auf Naxos features a very small orchestra. Does that make it easier for the conductor? At least there is hardly a danger of covering up the singers. fwm Ariadne presents quite different challenges for the conductor. For example the two aspects, the one of comedy, the other heroic opera, must be seamlessly blended – and it begins as early as the orchestral introduction to the prologue. In addition, it takes considerable conducting skill to get the recitative style of the prologue just right. And the Mozartian aspect mentioned earlier requires a lightness, a steady flow in the musical progression. And as far as the small orchestra is concerned, we are all well aware of Richard Strauss’s magnificent orchestration skills. It was not without reason that Marcel Prawy referred to the amazing fact that the last part of the opera sounds as if not 38 but 80 musicians are sitting in the orchestra pit. al Hofmannsthal’s treatment of Ariadne includes a great deal of irony that Strauss picked up on. How do you as a conductor deal with that? Do you amplify it, or do you leave it unemphasised? fwm I always find it terrible when interpreters set out to hammer something into you and do so with great vigour. Unfortunately, these days it is
like swimming against the tide when you underscore subtlety. But Ariadne auf Naxos thrives on such subtleties. Zerbinetta’s harlequin troupe is anything but a cheap funfair troupe, an Oktoberfest troupe. The necessary measure of elegance should never be allowed to be lost. The comedy should never become vulgar. al What the Composer experiences in the prologue was and is an everyday occurrence in opera. Is Strauss here articulating the reality that art is not possible without compromise? fwm At the premières of his works, Richard Strauss always insisted very meticulously that everything should be performed exactly as he had written it in the score. After the première, by contrast, he turned into the pragmatist who was willing to make all kinds of compromises. I find this attitude interesting, since the Composer in the Ariadne prologue is surely to be seen to some extent as a self-portrait of Strauss. A portrayal of the man who tries to make the impossible possible, namely performing his work of art the way he envisioned it. And when reality presented him with the choice of staging the work either not at all or only in compliance with the conditions imposed by the client, the genius succeeds in realising the amazing feat of uniting both, as desired: the sad and the funny, without betraying either himself or the piece. al The fact that the last few bars of the opera are not comic but rather beautiful is gratifying to audiences and performers alike, isn’t it? fwm Naturally! Strauss knew exactly how to treat his audience, what he
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ARIADNE AUF NAXOS THRIVES ON ITS SUBTLETIES
owed them. In Die Frau ohne Schatten for example, a chorus of unborn children is heard at the end – one can hardly imagine anything more moving. And in Ariadne we hear the three voices of Dryade, Echo and Najade singing a melody in harmony. Strauss knew that he could not thwart this and destroy the emphasis. It is the last climax of a wave motion that moves through the entire opera and on which the listener, as if on a surfboard – to use a modern comparison – is borne to his goal. That is always the brilliant thing about the great composers: they have the knowledge and feeling for the necessary sequence of peaks and valleys in this wave motion, but they also know when a climax can have or even demands a continuation and when no further increase is possible. The first meeting of Bacchus and Ariadne, for example, has an incredible effect. Naturally Strauss could theoretically have stopped here, but he knew that he would not have said everything in music about Ariadne. To prepare the final wave, he logically had to scale back somewhat. The overall dramaturgy of the musical structure is therefore perfect in Ariadne. al How do you as a conductor deal with these waves? Do you have to invest emotion in the peaks and, as it were simply, maintain the valleys? fwm It’s just like driving a car. There is the exhilaration of driving fast, and then there is good sense when the road curves. al In general Strauss liked working with all kinds of stylistic quotations, and Ariadne is no exception. Is it the job of the conductor to present the different quotations to the
audience so that they can recognise them as such? fwm I believe the first and foremost the audience should enjoy the opera. It is the job of the performers to grapple with these details and to entrench them in the overall work. In my opinion, it is not the conductor’s job to rub the audience’s nose in something, with a wagging finger, as if to say: listen, he is playing a baroque passage, over there is a classical, and there a high romantic passage. It is wiser not to play the head teacher. al You conducted Ariadne in Zurich. Are you using the same score for this new production in Vienna? fwm Yes. al Can you disengage yourself from earlier approaches to interpretation? How free are you to try out a new approach? fwm In the course of time, everyone undergoes a certain evolution, and everything you do automatically affects everything that you will do later. Artistic life and life in general are mosaics with new pieces added all the time. Since I conducted Ariadne the last time, I have conducted new productions of the Da Ponte cycle, a new Magic Flute, our Arabella, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Wagner premières, and I have conducted much of the symphonic repertoire of Strauss. These engagements leave their mark, so that one approaches works that one has done in the past differently. al Are there trends that mark this as “different”? fwm You concentrate more, you grow closer to the true quintessence – a sign of growing older, of maturing. When you are young, you are generally
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ARIADNE AUF NAXOS THRIVES ON ITS SUBTLETIES
full of energy; you think you know a lot, although in truth you don’t know much. And the older you grow, the more you understand humility, and the more knowledge you acquire, the more
you realise that there is a great deal yet to be learned. It’s like peeling an onion: you keep trying to get to the heart of things and waste much less energy in the process. The interview took place in 2012.
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DIRECTOR SVEN-ERIC BECHTOLF TALKS TO OLIVER LÁNG
THEATRE NEEDS VITALITY, THE IRRATIONAL AND THE CONTRADICTORY ol To what extent can the two versions of this opera be compared with one another? seb Although the two versions have many similarities, they are nevertheless very different. They are rather like two very different, but extremely attractive sisters. ol In many works, it is easy to distinguish a central sympathetic figure. Is this also the case with Ariadne on Naxos? Is there such a figure here too? seb I do believe that the opera has a hero and a heroine, a protagonist and an antagonist: the Composer and Zerbinetta. And during the course of the action we naturally also warm up to Ariadne, too. But regardless of the lack or otherwise of positive role models, the opera Ariadne auf Naxos is a bit of an artifice that has been through the production mill too often, and is not dramaturgically balanced. In any case, I cannot rid myself of the feeling that the structure of the 1916 version
in particular is rather askew. But that doesn’t matter at all! One simply has to consider how to deal with it – and we shall still be doing so in a hundred years’ time. ol Does the dramaturgical skew result from the two different parts of the evening? seb Amongst other things, yes. The prologue and the opera are not consistently interwoven with one another, and one would be justified in asking: “What is this all about, actually?” As a member of the audience, you are sent off on a false trail: you think you are going to experience chaos on the stage in the second part, when the two elements “opera seria” and “opera buffa” collide. But it never really comes to this. It certainly starts off as a parody, with a look behind the scenes at the vanities, the divas, the eccentricities of the artists and their patron. But this potentially seminal conflict is not sustained either dramaturgically or musically: the focus shifts instead to the
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problems of Ariadne. Max Reinhardt’s dramaturgist, Arthur Kahane, asserted in his Diary of a Man of the Theatre that drama and theatre initially have absolutely nothing to do with one another. Theatre wants different things from drama, which stimulates intellectual debate. Theatre, on the other hand, is dominated by a desire to please and a yearning for imagery that is not dependent on words. Kahane formulates the comparison that bringing drama to theatre is the same as entrusting a “whore” with the “Holiest of Holies”. However, he also states that both partners have enormous advantages from this mésalliance. That is clever! For if it is to interest audiences at all, theatre needs to be full of blood and vitality, needs the irrational and the contradictory. Ariadne auf Naxos nevertheless brings these far-flung ends of the theatre together, and if one were to put it kindly, one could postulate the following: paradoxically, it is only if both come together – even wrongly – that the right thing happens. ol To what extent do you allow these two worlds – the first part and the second part – to come into contact with one another? seb I attempt to establish more cross-connections in order to then disrupt that part of the opera a bit. It is precisely this experiment that is the constituent humour of the work. Or at least it should be. If the serious music does not meet the entertainment music, then there is something wrong... ol Ariadne on Naxos is dominated by the theme of transformation… seb Hofmannsthal very cannily wrote to Strauss: life forces us to trans-
form ourselves, but never without retrospection, but rather always mindful of what and who we were. It is our duty to open up to life anew time and time again – but always recognising what has gone before. Ariadne involves more than just mourning widows, or deserted and betrayed spouses. It involves transformation in general, the elimination of concretions in art and in one’s own personal life. Those of us who are older are familiar with this challenge. ol I should like to come back once more to The Composer and Zerbinetta as sympathetic characters. To what extent are these two a pair of opposites? seb With the exception of a couple of “moralin-addicted” contemporaries, Zerbinetta does not give us any reason not to like her. She is amusing, exceptionally gifted, and also a little bit sad. The Composer, on the other hand, is a youthful, naive genius. And there are no really unsympathetic figures in the piece. The dressing-room tenor may take bit of getting used to, but as Bacchus he is absolutely captivating. ol Ariadne auf Naxos is of course also an homage to the theatre. However, in contrast to Capriccio, which was written very much later, it is less serene. But is the opera really only theatre within the theatre? seb It is more than that for this very reason! By its mere existence, the theatre raises the question as to the binding nature of that which we call reality. We go to the theatre or to the cinema and experience events which we know are not “real.” But our empathy – or perhaps some mirror neurons or other – ensure that we regard it as reality – at least for
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a few seconds. Still, this process calls for more in-depth considerations… ol The Composer with his belief in the sacred nature of art: to what extent is this lost during the course of an artist’s life? seb You need to have a cause. And you should champion this cause with passion. But you should not neglect the theatre in the process. Brecht once said: one should initially get a man with gallstones interested in the Mer
chant of Venice. And that is so true! In order to be effective, an evening must be able to do something beyond his cause. The theatre must result in transformation, for the written word on the paper must be brought back to life – or perhaps instilled into it in the first place. In such cases one cannot be too dogmatic, or think too narrowly! If theatre is successful, then it is through generosity and contrariness, and not through linear exclusivity. The situation in real life is no different, either. The interview took place in 2012.
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KS STEPHEN GOULD as BACCHUS
ARTHUR KAHANE
HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL It is an awfully long time ago – positively back in the dark ages – and I am almost embarrassed to name the date: 1890. We had had a couple of decades to just about get used to railways; telephones had only just started to ruin our domestic bliss; the motor car was still rattling around in the brain of its inventor; the rubber-wheeled fiacre was breaking stunning records; capitalism appeared an attractive way to run the world, not least because it was a new concept; the little abbreviation of “k.k.” that the Austrians used to denote everything official in the Austrian Empire dealt with any problems relating to free will; and the idea of discussing the differences between the sexes had not yet had the temerity to appear in public. But we all thought we were experiencing incredibly modern times, at the very end of history. We did not think of today as today but as the day after tomorrow: there was nothing new that had not already been thought of. I had just left school and was working on the leadership skills appropriate to that time. I was recognised as the leader of an eclectic bunch of youngsters, some still at school. They included (rather weirdly!) voluntary students from the veterinary college; some Serbo-Croatian students (Vienna suited their conspiracies so well. As far as I recall, they were nearly all called Raditsch and are now ministers in the Yugoslav government.); some shy seed-
lings of the movement for women’s emancipation; a number of revolutionary musicians; and some young people who were absolutely determined to be famous authors but had nothing other than this burning ambition. We were all Social Democrats, but well out to the left. We had an absolutely complete and definitive view of the world. Not one that covered lots of things but everything. It was structured such that it could infallibly deal with every conceivable problem from whichever sphere. So there were no secrets for us because we had the key that could open every secret: the Marxist view of history. And so there was nothing more that could happen to us. At the time revolution was breaking out in Berlin but, of course, only in literature. The shock waves reached as far as Vienna but, by the time they reached there, they had lessened considerably. Erotic literature was the only field where we had a clear lead. A little book came out at the time called Gestern (Yesterday), a play written in verse by a certain Theophil Morren. Except that this Theophil Morren was actually called Loris. In fact he was not called Loris either but Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This was because he was still at an academic secondary school and the rules at the time in Austria meant that he was not allowed to write under his own name. But, as there was a way around every rule in
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HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
Austria, he just carried on writing any way. His material just had to appear under a pseudonym. His professors had no objections. In fact they were proud of their student bringing so much honour to the school that his name even appeared in the Neue Freie Presse – the highest rung of the ladder of human endeavour at the time in Vienna. As a result the entire academic secondary school began to write poetry. But these first Hoffmannsthal poems were more beautiful than anything we had read before and made us happier than any other writer had succeeded in doing. The strange thing was that none of the ideas that were filling our heads to bursting point at that time appeared in these verses. Instead there were completely different ideas that had absolutely nothing to do with that time – timeless ideas that nevertheless revealed us and our most secret desires better than any of the latest steamy books appearing. Then modern magazines started to publish poems by him. Not many but each one a perfect jewel that one could only picture bedded in the softest satin. Intellectually deep and yet in form of a heavenly lightness reminiscent of Mozart’s music – images of a rich and wistful soul. And then came the prose essays, using magnificent, Goethelike, extremely carefully sculpted language, about a distinguished poet or little known psychologist. And all of this, for all its culture and tradition, was completely new, surprising, in its quiet way made exciting by its tone and content. They were intellectually top-notch, far-removed from standard literature and day-to-day reality, and only written in our peculiarly Austrian manner at the same time as addressing
our peculiarly Austrian ways. That is when we knew that we had been given a new literary Dauphin in this lad Loris; and Hermann Bahr was the first to recognise and welcome him. I was eighteen when I met the sixteen-year old. It was in Vienna, so inevitably in a café. In the legendary Café Griensteidl in case any of my readers have heard of it. As soon as we met, we found somewhere we could sit on our own as we instantly recognised that we had something to say to each other. “Nothing worthwhile ever develops unless you are talking with one other person. Other people always get in the way,” was Hofmannsthal’s view. I felt roughly the same as the Marquis of Posa before his critical encounter with the King – even though I was miles older and knew all there was to know about life; that I was facing the untrodden fantasy land of a genius. But I had no lesser goal in our first conversation with him than to win over this new literary prince straightaway to the cause of socialism, the proletariat and the revolution. What a catch that would have been! “A true brother-inarms for the group,” I imagined, unlike anything Hofmannsthal would have thought. I have to tell you straightaway: I did not succeed. For it turned out that he was not at all uncoversant with socialism as a science; but that he simply viewed it from an intellectual viewpoint, neither taking sides for or against; and that he found other things more important. These other things included: books, pictures, ideas, people; and form and content; and the beauty of the times and of the individual soul; and finally major personalities. Does that not amount to much?
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HUGO VON HOFMANNSTHAL
Is that a sign of the narrowminded aesthete? The things that mattered to him certainly did not include politics or forming parties. This cultivated lad had a place outside – above – parties and politics: and he dragged me up to his level. The attractive way he spoke, which alternated between first rapid and then stumbling and leaping ahead from the need to express so much at once, was fascinating. He already had the rather careless intonation typical of a young Austrian aristocrat and displayed a certain nervousness with the jerky movements of his hands, especially when his slim long fingers stroked the moustache that had yet to appear. The same grace and charm was on display in his youthfulness and the way he spoke as in what he said: “Just tell me everything that you want,” he would insist, and I asked him about an unusual book, on which he had recently written a very fine review: the Jour nal Intime by Amiel from Switzerland, the most refined and intransigent piece of self-analysis since Kierkegaard. He told me what had led him to it and gave the real name of an author: “you know,” he said in an aside, “a man who can’t do much but who knows a lot, and those are the people who can give you a great deal as long as you don’t demand too much of them.” Then he spoke about the book. It was as if it had been made to become the bible of egotism, as the art of introspection and selfawareness was known then, and came dangerously close to the culte du moi which was very popular in Vienna at the time. But Hofmannsthal talked about it in a completely different way: utterly free of politics, in strictly technical terms, rather as one might speak of a good landscape painter, whose
landscapes simply reflect the human soul. Only at the end did he say, “You must just avoid thinking you are such a person. That is when books like this one represent a risk and take on an ugly, dangerously all too familiar edge. But the less you feel like this person, the more you can learn about yourself. And that can never do any harm!” We spoke about Austria. For him it was not an agglomeration of nations but a much loved union that had to be sustained and which he staunchly defended against my internationalism. We spoke about Grillparzer, that most Austrian of Austrians. And finally we came to the Burgtheater. Like all of our age then, he was also a member of an anti-Burgtheater faction. “If only they would play the great French tragedies instead of these endless dull comedies! But, you know, that’s the result of our schools. There is something contagious about an academic secondary school. I believe the great French playwrights are considerably better than our much revered teachers suspect and, if I am not very much mistaken, you’ll find in them more of the good old Greeks than in the whole of the Laocoon.” And that brought us to the subject of the academic secondary school, an inexhaustible topic, both for those who were still students and for those had just survived it. Regardless of cultural level and populism. I was very happy after this first discussion. As I was after all of the many conversations I was privileged to have with Hofmannsthal over the course of many years. Of all of the people I have met, I do not know one to whom I owe more for a closer understanding of art’s secrets. But then Loris already had an inkling of much of what Hofmannsthal knew!
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RACHEL FRENKEL as COMPOSER ERIN MORLEY as ZERBINETTA
MYTHOLOGY OF ARIADNE In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of Minor, king of Crete and son of Zeus, and Pasiphaë, who was the daughter of the sun god Helios. When the hero Theseus set out to kill the man-eating Minotaur that lived in the Labyrinth in Crete, he fell in love with Minotaur’s half-sister, Ariadne. She helped Theseus by giving him a ball of thread so that he could find his way out of the Labyrinth after killing the Minotaur. Together with Theseus, Ariadne fled from Crete to Athens, but was left behind as she slept on the island of Naxos, and fell into despair. There
she found the god of fertility, Dionysus (Bacchus), a son of Zeus. Dionysus, called the twice-born, was conceived by his father with Persephone. However, when he was torn apart by the Titans at the behest of Hera, Zeus swallowed his heart in order to save him. Together with Semele he fathered his son a second time, and saved him again when his mother died by fire at the instigation of Hera. Zeus sewed the unborn child into his thigh and gave birth to him later. Dionysus fell in love with Ariadne on Naxos and married her. As his wife, Ariadne gave birth to four sons.
When the difficult entrance, retraced by none before, Was found with the aid of the maiden by means of thread gathered up again, Immediately the son of Aegeus, carrying away the daughter of Minos, Sets sail for Naxos, and cruelly deserts his companion On those shores. Her, thus deserted and greatly lamenting, Bacchus embraces and aids; and that she may for ever Be famed by a lasting Constellation, he takes the crown From her head and hurls it up. It flies through the air; And see, as it flies its jewels are suddenly changed into sparks, And they settle in their places, the shape of the crown still remaining, Between the Constellation resting on his knee and that which holds the serpents. From Book VIII of Metamorphoses by Ovid
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LISE DAVIDSEN as ARIADNE
ANDREAS LÁNG
THE ORIGINS OF ARIADNE Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal laid the first indirect clues to Ariadne auf Naxos – albeit unwittingly – in the first act of Rosenkavalier. It is found, in the aria of the singer to be precise, sung during the Feldmarschallin’s levée. The corresponding lines of verse were taken from Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, which, as we know, abridged and adapted, preceded the original version of Ariadne. In his search for material for his next opera after Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal seized upon another Molière piece, the comedy La Comtesse d’Escarbagnas, which then he began to adapt as the basis for the opera. However, after some to-ing and fro-ing – Max Reinhardt was supposed to receive an adaptation of Molière – Hofmannsthal dropped the Comtesse and reverted to Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme again. Now Ariadne was to become an opera performance incorporated into the action of the play, and at the same time bringing it to a close. It was to be presented as a sort of gift to the invited guests of Monsieur Jourdain, a wealthy businessman. What Hofmannsthal dealt with in his libretto was, as he put it, nothing less than “one of life’s simple and massive problems: fidelity” and the conflicting attitudes towards it. On the one hand, Zerbinetta, who regards a change of lover as “quotidian”, and on the other Ariadne, who can only be “one man’s wife or lover”, and eventually gives herself to the god whom she takes to be death. (A biographical and textual parallel is interesting in this context. A short time beforehand, Hofmannsthal had established a friendship documented by extensive correspondence with the young
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THE ORIGINS OF ARIADNE
widow Ottonie von Degenfeld, who had fallen into a deep depression and crisis following the death of her husband. Like Bacchus, who rescues Ariadne from her reclusive daze, Hofmannsthal successfully managed to give the young Degenfeld her life back again.) But as attached as Hofmannsthal was to his material for Ari adne, Strauss’s interest in it was initially anything but inordinate. He read the handwritten draft of the text only very superficially, failing to grasp the deep complexity of its content. Overall he therefore regarded the project solely as a minor transitional work, a sort of by-product, as it were. Deeply hurt by a noncommittal letter from Richard Strauss on the quality of the libretto, in a now famous letter penned in mid July 1911, Hofmannsthal was prompted to explain the deeper meaning of the plot to the composer. Thus inspired, even Strauss now began to take a liking to Ariadne. A year later, the score was finished, and the première took place a few months after that, on 25 October 1912. Not, as originally planned, at Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater in Berlin, but in the small premises of Stuttgart Court Theatre. A large number of actors and singers – including Maria Jeritza as Ariadne – took part in a première lasting a total of six hours. Not a few of them regarded this performance as a first-rate funeral. As keen as Strauss was on the original combination of play and opera, a revision was the logical consequence. Hofmannsthal completed the so-called prologue as early as June 1913. With the exception of the Majordomo, not a single speaking part remained – and even the original title figure of Jourdain had also become fictitious. However once again, Hofmannsthal had to wait before Strauss was ready to return once again to his Ariadne workshop. In the version generally performed today, the prologue replaces the piece by Molière. This version of the opera was premièred in the middle of the First World War, on 4 October 1916 at the Vienna Court Opera, today’s Wiener Staatsoper.
Next pages: KS KRASSIMIRA STOYANOVA as ARIADNE
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M IC H A E L WA LT E R
“EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT EMOTION MUST FADE INTO THE BACKGROUND” MUSICAL QUOTATIONS IN STRAUSS’S ARIADNE AUF NAXOS “I am just finishing Le Bourgeois Gentil homme by Molière, which my dear assistant Hugo von Hofmannsthal has reduced to two acts. […] Instead of the little ballet at the end, there is a little opera, for which we have high hopes. The music calls for psychology to keep it moving gently, and everything that is not emotion must fade into the background.” Richard Strauss made this statement in an interview with René Delange published in January 1912 in the French magazine Musica. The first part of this quote once again included a remark that made Hofmannsthal furious. He saw the relationship between himself and Strauss exactly the other way around, i.e. he saw the composer as the assistant to the poet. For Hofmannsthal, the text – especially in Ariadne auf Naxos – was the central and aesthetically potent element of the works he had created together with Strauss. By contrast, for Strauss the most important part of their joint work was the music.
It was only with music that Hofmannsthal’s libretti became operas, and it was the composer who was responsible for the core of their aesthetic effect. The two views collided during the creation of Ariadne, leading to a serious rift between Strauss and Hofmannsthal, not least because in the media Ariadne was normally described as a work by Strauss and Hofmannsthal was only mentioned peripherally. However, the eminent music critic Paul Bekker was not alone in his opinion when he wrote in 1912, after the première of the work: “Roughly speaking, one could say: the plan of copying the old opera has succeeded beyond the authors’ intentions, in that Ariadne shares the fate of most operas of having a poor libretto and good music.” According to Bekker, the piece would nonetheless prevail on the stage, because Strauss had infused it with “so much humanity and intrinsic warmth.” In 1912, Bekker saw only the opera and not the prologue composed later
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MUSICAL QUOTATIONS IN STRAUSS’S ARIADNE
for the version premièred in 1916, but his opinion shows how successful Strauss was with his focus on the gentle motion of the music and “emotion”. The latter was not meant in the sentimental sense, but also encompassed the jovial. Strauss deliberately wanted to turn away from Wagner: “Your cri de cœur against Wagnerian ’note-spinning’ has deeply touched my heart and has thrust open a door to an entirely new landscape where, guided by Ariadne and in particular the new prologue, I hope to move forward wholly into the realm of un-Wagnerian emotional and human comic opera,” Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal in August 1916. In terms of opera history, Ariadne auf Naxos belongs to a genre that is now generally called “meta-opera.” These are operas about operas, in other words operas where the subject is the art form of opera itself and the conventions of the genesis of the work. They are usually satires, such as L’opera se ria (1769) by Leopold Gassmann and Ranieri de Calzabigi or Le convenienze ed inconvenienze teatrali by Gaetano Donizetti and Domenico Gilardoni. The libretti for these operas make fun of normal opera conventions and their effect on the opera and exaggerate to the point of being grotesque to achieve a comic effect. Composers deal with the usual style elements of opera seria and its performance practice by singers in a similar fashion. In this endeavour, librettists and composers are not in the least subtle but rely on a drastic, sometimes almost sketch-like comedy that prompts an immediate laugh. Strauss could not follow this model for two reasons. For one thing, Hof mannsthal’s text was so artificial that
excessive musical comedy would have contradicted the text. And secondly Strauss’s penchant for subtle irony was counter to the bold use of satirically intended stylistic quotations. Furthermore, the composer was anyway of the opinion that music itself could not be comic. The composers of the 18th and 19th centuries would have disagreed with him. Nonetheless, the usual devices for musical comedy – exaggeration and deliberate form and style violations – were difficult to realise in the early 20th century as they presupposed set conventions in audiences’ listening habits that existed in very few cases. It was not Wagner, but Strauss himself who changed that with Salome and Der Rosenkavalier. Admittedly – and this links Ariadne auf Naxos with the genre of meta-opera – Strauss makes use of the technique of musical quotation and triggering listening habits from the old comic genre, but he uses both in a non-comic fashion. The most striking example is the beginning of Harlequin’s song, “Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen” in which the melody of the first two bars seems to have been taken directly from the Andante grazioso of Mozart’s A major piano sonata K331. On closer examination, however, it turns out that the dotted rhythm arises in Strauss (in contrast to Mozart) from the word declamation and is therefore unevenly distributed between the bars. (It is revealing that the nymph Echo does not take up the dotted rhythm.) The dotted-triplet semiquaver a step up that characterises Mozart’s melody is also missing. The similarity in the melody is therefore limited to the fourth linking the two bars, the repeated notes and
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M IC H A E L WA LT E R
the melodic third structure. This is less a quotation than it is adopting the basic structure of Mozart’s theme stripped back to its quintessential components. It is as if Strauss wanted to show how one could make music from this type of basic structure under early 20th century conditions. The allusion to Mozart is quickly suspended in the harmonisation fluctuating between F major and f minor, and the melancholic sentiment that is only latent in Mozart becomes the dominant musical mood, not only reproducing Harlequin’s disposition but also reflecting Ariadne’s frame of mind. “It is all in vain. I felt it while I was singing,” Harlequin says. On the surface of it, Harlequin is reacting to the situation in the plot, but in musical terms, due to the reinterpreted but not unfamiliar mood of Mozart’s theme, his song evokes in the listener a sense of hopelessness in Ariadne’s emotional situation. The model for the nymphs’ trio “Töne, töne, süße Stimme” is Franz Schubert’s Wiegenlied op. 98,2. Strauss quotes the melody of the first two bars, but then develops it, paraphrasing further and further from the quotation, however retaining Schubert’s cadence in a remarkably intense way. Musically, the Schubert quotation does not come as a surprise, because Bacchus quotes a motif from the fifth bar of Schubert’s song in “ich kann lächeln und ruhn”, in which the melody notes on “ruhn” are a further paraphrase. Strauss singles out this passage by adding the dynamic marking of piano for the singer and reducing the instrumentation to the two harps and a violin. However, in performance practice this piano marking is often ignored, just as the following piano on “tun” (“was war
dein Wille an mir zu tun?”), since the high A is difficult to sing piano. The musical relationships between Bacchus and the nymphs’ song are however obliterated by the lack of meticulous dynamic nuances. After Bacchus’s piano high A, Ariadne enters with her “Es greift durch alle Schmerzen”, marked “very quietly.” The orchestra is reduced to a piano pianissimo through to the end of her passage, the notes of the strings and wind instruments are in a high tessitura, with the result that the orchestra almost fades away. The nymphs’ song begins hardly any louder and is marked as pianissimo and “soft, timid.” For Bacchus’s next entry (“doch da ich unverwandelt”), after the initial forte, the orchestra is immediately scaled back to pianissimo. The scene where Bacchus and Ariadne meet is a musically quiet scene, in which Strauss immediately cuts all loud chords back to piano, emphasising this with the instrumentation. This only changes with a fortissimo outburst in the orchestra before Ariadne’s call of “Theseus.” Strauss was not composing out the “emotion” of the characters, but with the nymph song was evoking the magical, enraptured mood immediately before the actual meeting of Ariadne and Bacchus for the audience. What Strauss meant by “emotion” in the Paris interview was not the externalisation of the emotion of the characters (a concept on which for example the operas of Puccini are based), but the emotional engagement of the audience. However, precisely this was a romantic concept, which is why it is not surprising that for the nymph song in this scene Strauss resorted to Schubert’s song which also creates an
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MUSICAL QUOTATIONS IN STRAUSS’S ARIADNE
enraptured mood. It was not important for the quotation to be recognised (in fact in most cases that would appear not to have been the case). It was enough that with this as the musical heart of the nymphs’ song, the musical repertoire of emotions should be triggered in the audience that had been accumulating since the early 19th century as a collection of musical emotional topoi (and is present to this day). In contrast to his illustrative music, which aimed to allow audiences to understand the meaning of the musical illustration, in Ariadne auf Naxos Strauss took exactly the opposite tack. He aimed at reaching the levels of listening experience that were still accessible in the early 20th century, because although the conditions for modern compositions had changed, it was still safe to assume that audiences as yet possessed unreflected, unconsciously discernible emotions associated with the historic repertoire that was still being performed. That applied even to the use of the piano associated with the commedia dell’arte troupe (whereas the harmonium is used exclusively in the Ariadne opera), because the piano was by no means an unusual instrument in operas at the end of the 19th century. It was used in works with secco recitatives as a substitute for the harpsichord. Due to the repertoire structure at opera houses, these were without exception older comic operas, above all Rossini’s The Barber of Seville. By contrast, around 1900 the harmonium used by Strauss also in Salome and Der Rosenkavalier was typically heard in
serious operas, such as Massenet’s Thaïs, Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt or Dvořák’s Rusalka. (The instrument was not new in opera: Meyerbeer included one in Dinorah as did Verdi in Don Carlos.) For the most popular serious works, even those by Wagner, transcriptions for harmonium also existed for household use. By using piano and harmonium, Strauss was ensuring that based on his listeners’ experience, they would not only distinguish the different realms of Zerbinetta’s troupe and the opera seria about Ariadne and Bacchus, but would also associate them with the “right” genre. Although in Ariadne auf Naxos Strauss used motifs related to individual characters, he dispenses with a leitmotif structure. As in Wagner’s works or in Elektra, in which Strauss used leitmotifs extensively and in such a way that they were difficult to understand, this structure would have necessitated listeners consciously understanding the leitmotifs. By contrast, Ariadne was an “un-Wagnerian human comic opera” in which everything was marked “with gentle movement” because Strauss used the emotional experience of his audience as a dramatic tool. However, the sensualistic technique used in Ariadne auf Naxos did not signify a basic change in style for Strauss’s operas; rather it united the conceptual contradiction between Elektra and Ariadne auf Naxos in a work that he himself described as a “combination of Elektra and Ari adne.” He was referring to Die Frau ohne Schatten.
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ANDREAS LÁNG
THE GREAT TRANSFORMER METAMORPHOSES AND TRANSFORMATIONS IN THE OPERATIC WORKS OF RICHARD STRAUSS Transformation is in the theatre, transformation happens there, theatre lives through transformation. Changes of scene, mistaken realities (here reality, there immersion in a world of fiction) change of performers, from private individuals into the characters to be played, emotional turmoil for susceptible members of the audience – all these are buzzwords, aspects of the metamorphic institution we call theatre. Those who enter such a place as members of the audience at a performance are aware of this circumstance, and therefore allow themselves to be transformed. Those who enter the theatre by the stage entrance are also aware of this circumstance, and carry out such transformations themselves. Those who have creative functions at the theatre are likewise aware of this circumstance, and create transformations themselves. Richard Strauss the great practitioner of music theatre and even greater creator of music, even
went so far as to make transformation the leitmotif of his œuvre. And so it was not exactly by chance that he wrote his Metamorphosen towards the end of his life as the start of his last new musical approach. It is only when one browses through the operas of Richard Strauss that one is struck by the frequency with which he chose transformation as his theme. At times this was in combination with the ambience of the theatre and its setting. Ariadne auf Naxos, with its theatre within a theatre, is probably the absolute climax in this respect. A fugue of many parts in which the theme of transformation occurs time and time again, sometimes alone, sometimes in parallel, and sometimes restrained. The prima donna is transformed into Ariadne, Ariadne herself becomes transformed, the caricature of a tenor becomes the ideal image of a god, and the casual comedian Zerbinetta becomes a muse. The Composer of the
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THE GREAT TRANSFORMER
prologue undergoes the most extensive metamorphosis, his work simultaneously similar to several. The emphatic upswings in Strauss’s score highlight not only the most important of them, they also initiate them in the listener, and Zerbinetta extols them rather impressively with respect to love. Strauss and Hofmannsthal introduced a very special transformation in Rosenkavalier, the work that preceded Ariadne. It is one that concerns us all, and that probably motivates most people to reflect upon it, since it proceeds steadily, but imperceptibly, at no distinguishable moment in time, and nevertheless it cannot be denied: getting old. “How can that happen? How does dear God do this? And yet I am always the same,” sings the Marschallin in the first act. How contrary this transformation is to that of The Composer in Ariadne. This is outwardly clearly visible, but is not felt by the person concerned. It leaves behind hardly any visible traces, and yet it changes the entire being of the young man. As a result, he may even curiously observe himself in a mirror to see whether his emotional transformation has not after all resulted in a change of his own features too. The most obvious metamorphosis in Strauss’s works of opera is probably to be found in Daphne. This is because here an actual, physical transformation of a person into another state of being – into a (perfect) tree takes place. And this irreversibly. But above all, this transformation happens with the approval – and indeed at the express wish – of the title character. This therefore differs from the opera Ariadne, in which the leading character – though she strives for the transformation of
death – eventually undergoes a change of a very different, vibrant nature (with which she is also very happy). The fact that Strauss created Daphne’s flight and transformation towards the end of his life may at first glance appear to be due to chance. However, it is not surprising for an ageing artist, since the transforming power of love – such as is extolled by Zerbinetta – is more the preserve of younger composers, just like the one in the prologue of Ariadne. Besides Daphne and Ariadne, there were two further instances in which Strauss drew on Greek mythology for the opera stage. In both cases transformations or metamorphoses are factors determining the action of the operas. In Die Liebe der Danae, Jupiter – the eventual loser in love – appears first as golden rain, then in the form of Midas, then as golden rain again, and finally as an old man. Meanwhile Danae – like Jill in the subsequent James Bond film Goldfinger – is condemned to be transformed into a golden statue. In Die ägyptische Helena, on the other hand, the situation is vaguely reminiscent of Hagen’s magic potion in Wagner’s Göt terdämmerung. Menelas’s inner transformations are caused by magic and memory potions so as to eventually bring the story to a happy end. From mythology, it is not far to the fairy tale – to be precise to Die Frau ohne Schatten, where two metamorphoses take place simultaneously. These two metamorphoses happen at one and the same time. The existence of the one must inevitably make the other obsolete, and vice versa – but one of them must take place. Either that of the empress from the spirit world to a human existence (as eventually happens) or that of the emperor from a liv-
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THE GREAT TRANSFORMER
ing person to a petrified, lifeless object. It goes without saying that both possibilities are open to many different interpretations – especially deep psycho logical ones. The situation in Arabella, on the other hand, is much simpler and clearer. A girl is introduced into society as a boy, and is permitted to “transform back” officially and without any metaphysical dimension as a result of her first night of love. Finally, the situation in Capriccio is several degrees more symbolic. A new
opera at another level is created from the almost allegorical figures of Olivier and Flamand, and above all from their affection for the Countess: out of love, the characters transform themselves into a purely idealistic entity – a work of art. Strauss would hardly have been able to make a more beautiful gesture to the art of opera. And so it is that in Capriccio – as in Ariadne before it – Strauss pays his respects to the “world wheel of the stage”, the entire world of the theatre, the great transformer.
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KS CAMILLA NYLUND as ARIADNE
OLIVER LÁNG
ARIADNE AND ZERBINETTA EVER TOGETHER IN MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING In his detailed letter from Bad Aussee dated 23 July 1911, Hugo von Hof mannsthal outlined his basic concept for Ariadne and drafted the final scenario: “finally it’s the turn of the clever soubrette (Zerbinetta). She hears the story behind the heroic opera and a careful explanation of Ariadne’s character. And she is told to provide an intermezzo, entering entering this opera with her colleagues as best she can without interrupting it. Zerbinetta immediately sees the point: she considers someone like Ariadne to be either a hypocrite or stupid and promises to do her best, but discreetly, to enter into the action. This gives a perfect opportunity disguised as comedy to demonstrate very clearly the symbolism inherent in having the two women confront each other.” And he demanded that Strauss stress the differences between the two women in his music, although the composer and the writer were not always at one over the character of the second figure. Initially this increasingly involved the “diametrically contrasting nature of the female character” as
the “intellectual central theme of the piece” – but it is not as easy as it might appear at first glance to deal with these differences. This is because the two figures have an effect on each other. They are different from the outset – and the words they speak are written by the same writer, albeit from different angles. Hofmannsthal’s differentiation between the two types is striking and highlighted in his handling of the playwithin-a-play in Ariadne auf Naxos. Ariadne represents tragic opera and Zerbinetta comic opera. This starts off with each of the actual figures – one the serious character from mythology, the other from street theatre – and carries on in the way these two act through to their actual characterisation and the aim behind them. But bringing the two together does not bring about synthesis or an agreement: each remains distinct as the atrical characters. Zerbinetta is, and always remains, Zerbinetta; meanwhile Ariadne sticks to her sphere, even if her sadness undergoes a change. The contradictions between the two start with the origins of the two characters:
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ARIADNE AND ZERBINETTA
Zerbinetta is essentially an artificial figure – at least she is in the actual opera, which represents a particular theatrical genre, the commedia dell’arte. Everything she does, her views on the world, her attitude, actions and interactions all follow a predefined programme, which is not just a cliché but meets specific expectations set by the audience. Hofmannsthal considers her a “simple life mask.” She embodies the tradition of the refined, cunning, young and beautiful lover – a Colombina, who takes fate into her own hands and knows how to deal with men. Her sisters can be found on the opera stage just as much as the theatre stage; and even if it is not at all wrong to describe the character as having certain basic features, it is nevertheless clearly defined. The easy way she copes with men is not her only distinguishing feature; another is the confidential/advisory manner she adopts with Ariadne, supposedly one of her “betters.” This is not far removed from Despina who, in Mozart’s Così fan tutte, gives advice to the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella on what love is about. The very conception means that there is more to Ariadne: she is part of established mythology, more severe, more serious and harder to categorise. The tradition from ancient mythology gives her a broad, multi-faceted personality. Bringing together these two from their different levels is obviously not easy, as tragedy and comedy do not speak the same language. This is shown very clearly when Ariadne does not react in words to the initial calls to her from Zerbinetta but instead withdraws even more into her highly personal element and symbolic place:
the hill on the split island, which – of course – represents the broken and split state of her soul. Ariadne is naturally closer to the writer than Zerbinetta, even if they are both his creations; and naturally there is a streak of loneliness in both of them. Ariadne’s loneliness is obvious: in a way it is a feature of the figure which is clearly shown in a physical remoteness to other people. But, true to the way Hofmannsthal formulates distance “amongst strange dark people,“ Zerbinetta knows all along, despite or precisely because of the shortterm nature of her relationships and pleasures, that she is lost: she says to Ariadne, “Alas, such desert islands are innumerable, even among people, I myself have inhabited several of them.” And again: The writer has her saying in a conversation with the Composer in the prologue, “I seem cheerful, and yet I am sad. I am regarded as sociable and yet I am so lonely.” And the Composer, who symbolises the burning artistic soul, can also give words that are missing from the saucy girl’s buffo repertoire to describe that which she nevertheless feels in her heart: “You speak what I feel”, at the same time as Zerbinetta fears losing the Composer’s attention. It would perhaps be banal to try and see in the changeable nature of Zerbinetta’s love an escape route and fear of loss; that would definitely deny the intended character of the role. But the exchangeable nature of Zerbinetta’s love is hard to overlook, however intense that love is at any one time; so it is easy to find parallels between the two couples, Ariadne/Bacchus and Zerbinetta/Harlequin, but they do not completely match. Zerbinetta’s
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OLIVER LÁNG
easy nature (which should incidentally never be confused with that of the Marschallin who takes as easily as she gives!) is both her strength and her fate. Hofmannsthal may have moved away from his original concept for this role and given her more weight than he originally intended. Nevertheless, even if she goes on about how all women understand each other (“Are we not women among ourselves, and does not in every bosom beat an incomprehensible, incomprehensible heart?”), she is made out of different material to Ariadne. In conclusion, “the two spiritual worlds are ironically linked with each other in the only manner they can be – in mutual misunderstanding” (Hofmannsthal). There is little to gain from asking about who is happy at the end of the opera: Zerbinetta will carry on wandering from one lover to the next and each new one will appear to her as a god; meanwhile Ariadne has found her god in Bacchus but it is not clear to what extent this Bacchus is the real one. “Does Ariadne love Bacchus? That is not so easy to answer. She thinks he is someone else: Hermes, the harbinger of death, coming to get her,” wrote Hofmannsthal to Ottonie, Countess Degenfeld, to whom he was intensely attracted and who kept him company in an exchange of letters over the time that Ariadne was coming to life. It is more important to look closely at what Hofmannsthal considered essential, the transformation of life and everything living. “It concerns a simple, and at the same time, immense life problem: fidelity. Pursuing things that are lost, clinging on to them until death; or living, going on, transforming, sacrificing spiritual integrity, yet
not betraying oneself, remaining a human, not descending to the level of an insentient animal,” he wrote to Strauss. Being able to forget without becoming an “insentient animal” was still occupying him years later when he noted in a famous letter: “change is the ultimate form of living, the actual mystery of creative nature; clinging to what is lost is paralysis and death. Those who want to live must get over themselves and change: they have to forget. And yet all of human dignity is linked to clinging to the past, to not forgetting. This is one of those bottomless contradictions, on which existence is built, just like the Delphic temple over its bottomless crevice.” Zerbinetta is ultimately immune to the great changes in life; she has made constant little changes the leading principle of her existence, always switching one for another. In fact, she is subject to this principle. But she remains caught in this littleness: whether Pagliazzo or Mezzetin, they do not signify a transformation of her soul, of her heart, because she remains herself throughout. Change is what occurs with the other couple, with Bacchus and Ariadne: Only through change does he become aware of his divinity, become all Bacchus; only with Ariadne is that completed which Circe started. But the biggest change is made by the opera’s eponymous heroine: by turning away from life and deliberately confronting death; by losing love and so losing her original existence; by denying the possibility of carrying on, the paralysis in suffering mentioned by Hofmannsthal – here, too, a significant parallel to Countess Degenfeld, who the writer persuaded to return to life following the death of her hus-
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ARIADNE AND ZERBINETTA
band – the old Ariadne is extinguished in order to be reborn, transformed, in her new love. Hofmannsthal: “She gives herself up to Bacchus because she takes him to be Death: he is both death and life. He reveals in her the enormous depths of her nature, making her into a magician who has transformed poor little Ariadne, miraculously bringing the other side into this world, retaining her
but transforming her at the same time.” To a certain extent, she will always be Ariadne, completely unchanged in her innermost core and who will only ever love one: “she can only ever be the spouse or lover, the widow or survivor of one man.” And she will always be one who is to be found more in desires and dreams than in reality…
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Next pages: CARLOS OSUNA as SCARAMUCCIO ILJA KAZAKOV as TRUFFALDIN SERENA SÁENZ as ZERBINETTA MICHAEL ARIVONY as HARLEKIN HIROSHI AMAKO as BRIGHELLA
IMPRINT RICHARD STR AUSS
ARIADNE AUF NAXOS SEASON 2023/24 PREMIÈRE OF THE PRODUCTION 19 DECEMBER 2012 Publisher WIENER STAATSOPER GMBH, Opernring 2, 1010 Wien Director DR. BOGDAN ROŠČIĆ Music Director PHILIPPE JORDAN Administrative Director DR. PETRA BOHUSLAV General Editors SERGIO MORABITO, ANDREAS LÁNG, OLIVER LÁNG Design & concept EXEX Layout & typesetting MIWA MEUSBURGER Image concept: MARTIN CONRADS, BERLIN (Cover) All performance photos MICHAEL PÖHN Printed by PRINT ALLIANCE HAV PRODUKTIONS GMBH, BAD VÖSLAU TEXT REFERENCES All texts were taken from the première programme of the Vienna State Opera 2012. COVER IMAGE Chema Madoz, Sin título, 2018 © Bildrecht, Wien 2022. ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS Andrew Smith. Reproduction only with approval of Wiener Staatsoper GmbH / Dramaturgy. Abbreviations are not marked. Holders of rights who were unavailable are requested to make contact regarding retrospect compensation.
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