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Sunday 12 October 2008

Visual fuss

Ariadne auf Naxos
Royal Opera House

The Pilgrim’s Progress
Sadler’s Wells

One of the odd things about the Strauss–Hofmannsthal collaboration is that while the literary half was endlessly aspiring, writing works which might serve the high function which Wagner saw for music–drama, even if Hofmannsthal didn’t much care for Wagner’s works, the musical half was the most perfect embodiment of the homme moyen sensuel in the history of music, most at home when he was at home, astonishingly industrious yet seeming to celebrate above all the virtues of a relaxed domestic existence. Their correspondence shows how ill-suited they were to one another in crucial ways, and it can’t exactly be said that each curbed the other’s excesses. Their highest point of tension may have been Ariadne auf Naxos, yet in that case the results were largely fruitful until the near-disastrous last 20 minutes of high-minded twaddle. The Royal Opera’s programme for its revival of Christof Loy’s 2002 production of Ariadne gives at length one of the poet’s ‘explanations’ to his mundane collaborator, who was no doubt impressed but sceptical. If Rilke had contemplated writing a libretto — a fearful notion — this is the kind of thing that he would have produced.

In effect Ariadne dramatises the discrepancy between the two men, and in each of its parts. In the Prologue we have the idealistic Composer, appalled at the sheer thought of any compromise, let alone the abject one of having his opera mixed in with a low comedy troupe, with the pleasing conceit that the Composer is actually the librettist; while on the other hand we have all the pragmatists, who are fitting partial portraits of Strauss. The opera proper gives us the virtually plotless presentation of Ariadne abbandonata, and then the hectoring dialectics of Bacchus, all pure Hofmannsthal; alternating with the brio of Zerbinetta and her comrades, urging once more that it’s best to get fun where you can find it.

More articles from: Michael Tanner | this section

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