9 January 2010: Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier
Metropolitan Opera HD Live performance. Conducted by Edo de Waart. Marschallin: Renée Fleming; Octavian: Susan Graham; Sophie: Christine Schäfer; A Singer: Eric Cutler; Faninal: Thomas Allen; Baron Ochs: Kristinn Sigmundsson. Production: Nathaniel Merrill; Sets and Costumes: Robert O’Hearn; Stage Director: Robin Guarino; TV director: Barbara Willis Sweete
I came out of this wonderful production asking myself a nagging question: What is this opera about? It appears to be about many things: the inevitability of aging; the marriage habits of Austrian nobility as viewed through the prism of Austria, circa 1910; the so-called, well-known double standard, by which a young marriageable woman is expected to remain a virgin, while the man who woos her is quite acceptably entitled to sow his wild oats, as the saying goes. Extend these ideas in certain directions and you come up with the gross inequalities that typify gender relationships in European society.
Extend them in other directions and you come up with interesting questions having to do with theatrical conventions and their social ramifications. The most interesting of these is the one exemplified by the fact that the young man, Octavian, age seventeen, who has been sowing his wild oats with a beautiful aristocratic woman well into middle-age (the Marschallin, delightfully and sensitively acted and beautifully sung by Renée Fleming) is being sung by a much-into-middle-age mezzo-soprano (Susan Graham, who, she said in a backstage interview at intermission, tried out for the Metropolitan Opera Young Artists competition the same year as Renée Fleming, who is pushing fifty). Much disbelief must be set aside in order to enjoy this frank bit of illusionism. This role, also called a “trouser” or travesty role (the idea is literally “cross-dressing”), is as old as Shakespeare and as recent as the most recent performance of … Der Rosenkavalier. And so, in this context, the opera is about … what? About the music? That is, from the Straussian musical perspective, the plot of this opera is what the plot of any opera is: a framework on which to hang and in fact royally dress out some truly spectacular music.
In particular, you could approach the opera from its opening scene or from its closing scene and get two quite interesting, complementary perspectives on it. From the beginning, it’s about the wild oats story. Octavian is in bed with the Marschallin, and they are having a marvelous, sensuous, yet quite chaste and respectable time of it. Go in from the end, and what you get is a musical trio, sung by the Marschallin, Octavian, and Sophie (the eligible virginal young woman that Octavian falls in love with in the second act). If we haven’t discovered it before, we realize that a very big reason, perhaps the only reason, that Strauss decided to make his seventeen-year-old oats-sower a travesty role was so that he could fashion a truly wonderful, subtle, and magical tri