Love Potion Opus 60: Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos at Tanglewood, August 2, 2010, by Seth Lachterman
Opera in One Act with a Prologue by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Music by Richard Strauss, Opus 60
1916 Version
Tanglewood Music Center Vocal Fellows
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
Christoph von Dohnányi, conductor,
Keitaro Harada (TMC Conducting Fellow), conductor, August 4
Ira Siff, director
Eduardo Sicangco, set and costume designer
Matthew McCarthy, lighting designer
The Major-Domo, Hans Pieter Herman (spoken)
The Music Master/Harlekin, Elliot Madore, baritone
A Lackey, Shea Owens, baritone
An Officer, Javier Bernardo, baritone
The Composer, Cecelia Hall, mezzo-soprano
Bacchus/The Tenor, Ta’u Pupu’a, tenor
Wigmaker, Justin Welsh, baritone
Zerbinetta, Audrey Elizabeth Luna, soprano
Ariadne/The Prima Donna, Emalie Savoy, soprano
The Dancing Master, Patrick Jang, tenor
Brighella, Lawrence Jones, tenor
Scaramuccio, Martin Bakari, tenor
Truffaldino, David Salsbery Fry, bass
Najade, Deanna Breiwick, soprano
Dryade, Kristin Hoff, mezzo-soprano
Echo, Emily Duncan-Brown, soprano
Strauss was never more the musical conjurer than he was inAriadne auf Naxos. With an ensemble of thirty-seven instruments, including harmonium, celesta, piano, harps and percussion, a shimmering and transparent opera emerges and asserts its lean clarity against a perceived Wagnerian monumentalism. Even when Strauss wants his cake after eating it, and strives for a Tristan-like blossom in the second half (the one and only “Act” of this work, the first half being a Prologue), one cannot fault the ensemble for sounding a bit threadbare in its overreaching to the Bayreuth master. After all, this textural contrast of light and heavy is all in line with the clever libretto of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, which is an ironic comment on Love the Ideal and what we know as reality in our all-too-human relationships. Our fleeting romantic encounters, part of the everydayness of our sexual selves, are contrasted with Love, that mysterious and eternal bond that poets extol as our raison d’être. The cabaret characters in the play (Zerbinetta and the clowns) seem bound to the temporal and ephemeral love – an elucidation that Strauss takes for the correlative of the chamber element of this work; Ariadne and Bacchus, as visions of a poet (The Composer role in the opera) are symbols of the seemingly immortal qualities of love as a transforming force in life, imbuing mortals with the lasting values of selflessness, sacrifice, care, and, most of all, constancy. Yet, in the intertextual world of von Hofmannsthal’s play, Ariadne and Bacchus are both human performers and avatars of The Composer’s imagination. At some point, between the silliness and contrivances of the Prologue and the Opera-cum-Commedia dell'arte-within-an-opera of the second half, the pejoratives of casual encounter and the trivial banter of the sexes are transfigured musically to the sublime in Strauss’s score. Strauss, in an almost unparalleled way, is able to balance the light and fancy of his harlequins’ cabaret music, the coloratura-infused bel canto à la Rossini for Zerbinetta, with the convincing grandeur and heart-rending sweep of a late Romantic.
