In Act III of Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, Baron Ochs, the boorish and ridiculous suitor, sings in his broad dialect, during a seduction scene that goes horribly wrong: Die Musi geht ins Blut…(“The music gets in your blood”). The irresistible melodies of this great opera, Strauss’s poetic evocation of 18th-century Vienna, were adapted for the concert hall almost immediately after the premiere, and their popularity has only increased in the century since then. The compilers of the present suite are uncredited, although Artur Rodzinski, music director of the New York Philharmonic and his young assistant, Leonard Bernstein, were probably involved in its creation. The first performance was given by Rodzinski and the Philharmonic on October 5, 1944.
The libretto for Der Rosenkavalier was prepared by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the great Austrian poet whose Elektra Strauss had set to music in 1909. The plot, in a nutshell: The Marschallin, or field marshal’s wife, is beginning to face the inevitable passing of her youth (she is about 35). Her young lover, Octavian, who is 18, is selected to be the bearer of a silver rose that the Marschallin’s cousin, Baron Ochs, is sending to the young Sophie von Faninal, whom he intends to marry. During the ceremonial delivery of the rose, Sophie and Octavian fall in love. Octavian manages to outwit his country-bumpkin rival, and the Marschallin resigns herself to losing Octavian to a girl his own age.
The present suite contains some of the best-known excerpts from the opera, along with a few connecting passages freely picked from the score. It begins with the stormy prelude, depicting the Marschallin and Octavian’s love-making that precedes the first scene. Then we jump ahead to the presentation of the silver rose: the excited music accompanying Octavian’s arrival at the Faninal home, the solemnly expressive melody spiced with delicious chromaticism (use of half-tones that don’t belong to the main key). The next major section is Ochs’s great waltz from the end of Act II (“No night with me is too long”), followed by the concluding section of the opera with the lyrical and nostalgic trio of the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie and the almost folksong-like duet of the young lovers. A section adapted from the other Ochs waltz (a parody of the first one in a faster tempo) concludes the suite, evoking the comic pandemonium in Act III where Ochs’s creditors fall upon him all at once. The scene culminates in four little children (specially recruited and trained by two intriguers) who call Ochs “Papa,” thereby delivering the coup de grâce to the hapless Baron’s marriage prospects.