Despite the disdain with which most opera plots are regarded, occasionally, an opera composer and librettist form a winning partnership where each member of the team complements the skills of the other to create a masterpiece of musical and dramatic integrity. Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte come immediately to mind, as do Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito. In the last century, composer Richard Strauss and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal found a kinship and mutual understanding that produced a series of successful operas starting in 1908 with Elektra.

Following the success of that grim and bloody piece, Strauss was searching for a Figaro-style comedy. In response, von Hofmannsthal came up with a totally new type of libretto, an amalgam of various French eighteenth-century farces. In a note to the compose he wrote: “I have...worked out a complete and entirely new scenario for a grand opera with downright comic figures and situations, and action as colorful and almost as obvious as a pantomime.”

The result was the immensely successful Der Rosenkavalier, premiered in 1911. Set in the eighteenth-century Vienna of Empress Maria Theresa, the extravagantly complicated plot involves the youth Octavian, who has been sexually initiated by the Marschallin, the neglected young wife of an elderly field marshal. When her bumbling old cousin Baron Ochs barges in on the couple to announce to her his intention to rectify his finances by marrying Sophie, daughter of a successful merchant with pretensions, Octavian – nearly caught in flagrante delicto – is forced to dress as a chambermaid to hide his identity. As he flirts with the disguised Octavian, Ochs states his intention to woo Sophie by presenting her with a silver rose from the hand of an aristocratic emissary. After more comic business, the Marschallin entrusts Octavian with Ochs’s silver rose and its mission. At a grand ball, Octavian presents the rose to Sophie, at which point both, of course, succumb to love at first sight. Then it’s more classic comic intrigue to extricate the young heroine from her elderly fiancé. Finally, Ochs is outwitted and the Marschallin, a gracious dea ex machina, relinquishes Octavian to Sophie.

Strauss laced Der Rosenkavalier with waltz tunes at the request of his librettist – in spite of the fact that at the time of the action the waltz didn’t even exist in aristocratic ballrooms. Strauss himself extracted from the opera two Walzerfolgen (waltz sequences). The Rosenkavalier Suite, Op. 59 which appeared in 1945, was probably not assembled by Strauss, but by Polish conductor Artur Rodzinski, then conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

Program notes by:
Joseph & Elizabeth Kahn
Wordpros@mindspring.com
www.wordprosmusic.com