Richard Strauss’s operatic swansong Capriccio made an elegant and untaxing conclusion to the Royal Opera’s season. It was done in concert, but there was a fair amount of acting, more from some of the participants than others. Renée Fleming as the Countess, who feels she has to choose between a poet and a composer, wrung her hands, strode around as much as her fabulous silver and black gown allowed, and in the final scene smote her brow in best distraught Joan Crawford manner; the others huffed and flounced and strode off into the wings, and there was, as much as there can be in this strange opera, a sense of people interacting rather than just singers doing their thing.
It’s odd that Strauss, who could, when he put his mind to it, characterise with brevity and precision, here not only chooses to have a large cast, but also leaves most of them in a more or less undifferentiated state, floating on a medium-sized lake of generalised semi-melody. Capriccio is more or less the musical equivalent of a Peacock novel, without the occasional depth that he managed to insinuate. For the alleged discussion of the relative importance of words and music in opera never gets very far and, though the Countess makes a meal of her indecision, it’s clear, one way and another, that Flamand the composer is going to win. The amiable sonnet by Ronsard, that is allegedly written by the poet Olivier, is recited, spoken or sung, at various stages of the piece, but it is the Countess’s singing of it in her glorious final scene that is utterly captivating. The last minutes of the opera, which supposedly dramatise her vacillation, actually show, touchingly, that Strauss knew this was to be his final opera and couldn’t bring himself to end it.
The Royal Opera assembled a formidable cast, of which Fleming was perhaps the least satisfactory member, though she made beautiful sounds and rose well to the rare climaxes. But her diction was for the most part so vague that there were long stretches where not one syllable was distinct; and passages where she was underpowered, letting her gestures do most of what her voice should have been doing. The Count her brother was the imposing Bo Skovhus, always a commanding presence and mostly in fine vocal form; it’s not his fault that his character remains a blur. The two suitors were the strongest casting: Andrew Staples, surely the most gifted and promising English tenor for at least a generation, sang Flamand with impeccable style and with ardour, while his rival Olivier was Christian Gerhaher, for whom one could have wished a much larger role.
The most difficult part is that of the theatre director La Roche, who has a monologue of Wotanesque proportions but not a lot of content, while Strauss’s inspiration wasn’t at its peak — he and his co-librettist Clemens Krauss had differing views about the nature and point of the role, and seem to have compromised by making it rambling and inconclusive. La Roche is, nevertheless, an important ingredient in the confection, and Peter Rose combined authority and tact brilliantly, only tiring towards the end of the tirade. The temperamental actress Clairon was brilliantly characterised by Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, a name to remember if you can; and the two Italian singers, who have preposterous music to sing, were the wonderful, physically diminutive but vocally ardent Mary Plazas and Barry Banks.
Andrew Davis made sure that the orchestra never swamped the singers, and sought out every wisp of melody; and when we reached the Moonlight Interlude, he elicited playing of ravishing beauty from them. Every tempo, every transition was perfectly judged. Really nothing was lost by leaving the piece unstaged, whatever La Roche might have thought. If it had been, presumably it would have been set at the time of its composition, 1942, and Strauss and Krauss criticised for escapism and inattention to fearful contemporary realities. But the only obligation an artist has is to do what he does best, and does anyone suggest that Strauss was, or would have been, an effective creative commentator on the state of Germany in the second world war? His nearest approach to a meditation on the world as it had become is the great tone-poem ‘Metamorphosen’, and that is a lament for a lost culture, not a political statement.
The only thing one should concentrate on in Capriccio is what is to be seen and heard there, and any attempt to subject it to critique for its lack of concern with its ‘context’ merely reveals that the critic has no grasp of what is relevant in artistic appraisal — which means, I’m afraid, that he is likely to be a promising candidate for a job as an operatic director: if Strauss had conceived of such a monster, it would have been great to hear how he set La Roche’s denunciations of him.
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