Composed 1911/1945; Duration: 22 minutes

First BPO Performance: February 5 & 7, 1961 (Josef Krips, conductor)

Last BPO Performance: October 5-6, 2019 (JoAnn Falletta, conductor)

The mature era of Romanticism gave us the great feud between the faction of futurists like Liszt and Wagner with their dramatic tone poems and operas, and the traditional symphonists led by Brahms. The generation to inherit these quarrels was much more amicable, and operatic Richard Strauss and his friend, the symphonic Gustav Mahler, focused their energies on their careers as conductors, gaining a new level of understanding of the orchestral idiom. For Strauss, it began with his narrative-driven tone poems, as one success led to another. Don Juan, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Ein Heldenleben, and several more pushed the bounds of harmony and orchestration. Ultimately, their scale limited Strauss.

Strauss’ first successful opera came in 1905 with the groundbreaking and massively popular Salome. Challenging the limits of tonality and good taste, he followed his success with Elektra, but perhaps its mixed reaction led him toward more light-hearted avenues, such as with his Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose). That work’s success only bolstered Strauss’ celebrity. He maintained his notoriety as a composer and conductor throughout his life and was productive even in his final years, producing more than a dozen operas, some of the most performed in the repertoire.

The farcical Der Rosenkavalier is not a forgettable slapstick comedy, but an intellectual satire, filled with irony and even some challenging themes of romantic morality. The 18th-century period comedy features a complex web of relationships: the boorish Baron Ochs (as in “Ox”) fails to woo the young and wealthy Sophie as a bride in favor of Octavian, and changes his attention to an older married aristocrat, Marschallin (who already had an affair with Octavian). The characters thwart Ochs in this hilarious predicament dreamt up by Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. 

In 1945, Strauss gave permission for an orchestral suite of music from his opera to be performed by the New York Philharmonic. The suite’s opening mirrors the opera’s: Octavian’s lovemaking is scored with boisterous horns. For a time, the score continues to follow the narrative, highlighting scenes of nobility and intimacy, but a selection of anachronistic waltzes from throughout Der Rosenkavalier recall the Viennese golden era of the 1740s, even though the waltz didn’t exist at the time! Of course, Strauss knew this, but he was writing for the audience, not the critics. And audiences rewarded Strauss. Der Rosenkavalier was enormously popular and remains so, and its suite is a memorable summary of Strauss’ score.