Equivocal masterpiece

Der Rosenkavalier
Royal Opera House

Der Rosenkavalier is the most self-conscious of comedies, as well as being largely concerned with self-consciousness. It has two kinds of joke: one, the broad practical jokes indulged in at enormous length at Baron Ochs’s expense; the other, the sophisticated humour of youthful illusions being dashed, while others rapidly spring up to replace them. Rosenkavalier is subtle enough, just, to have counterpoises to these deflationary devices. So Ochs, though an impoverished randy aristocratic lout, also has genuine dignity, moments of thoughtfulness where the thoughts aren’t about how irresistible he is to young girls. Octavian, though ashamed of the rapidity with which his vows of eternal love for the Marschallin with which she launches the opera, producing a Tristan-parody of dialectics about ‘I’ and ‘You’ to follow up the more blatant one of the raunchy prelude, has enough poise and grace to be a movingly chastened figure, a fitting contributor to the glorious trio near the end of the opera. And Sophie, though the apt object of one of the greatest put-downs in opera, the Marschallin’s ‘Don’t talk so much, you are quite pretty enough’, also rises to some sense of what she isn’t and what the Marschallin is, saying that there is something about the older woman that leaves her frightened and bewildered.

The work’s own self-consciousness is part of Hofmannsthal’s positively maniacal obsession with having every detail sorted out, prepared for and explained. Failing to realise that he had to leave some work for the composer to do, and that music is the art in which preparations and explanations are de trop, everything is raked over before it’s happened, takes ages when it does happen, and then is investigated at length.