Her tones are midsummer light and light, softly melancholy resonates, a little farewell: Diana Damrau sings the leading role in Richard Strauss’ last opera in Munich’s Prinzregententheater, “Capriccio”, which also premiered in Munich in 1942 in the middle of the war, a two-and-a-half-hour prosapetitesse of everyday life that skittishly discusses opera aesthetic questions in a French aristocratic salon in 1775, but even hints at world war , Holocaust and oppression (1942!): “If we come too close to reality in our world of appearances,” sings Damrau’s Countess, “art is in danger of burning its wings.” But she also knows: “The stage reveals to us the secret of reality…The theater is the poignant symbol of life.” Is that a contradiction?
“Capriccio” means mood, the most famous capricci/caprichos were composed by the devil’s violinist Paganini, and the social critic Goya etched them. The almost 80-year-old Strauss is aware of their radicalism in his “Capriccio” far away. He is very serious about his opera aesthetics as a symbol of life and as cheerful entertainment theatre. This is not a contradiction for him, but dialectic. Their parlando, bordering on triviality, in “Capriccio” is not easy to endure, especially not since another war is raging in the immediate vicinity, the plague flares up again and intolerance is increasing worldwide.
The grandiose Diana Damrau as the Countess in Munich’s “Capriccio”, together with the Count of Michael Nagy.
(Photo: W. Hoesl/Bavarian State Opera)
The director David Marton but succeeds in Munich – he showed this version ten years ago in Lyon and in Brussels in 2016 – the feat of preserving the difficult Strauss dialectic without stumbling into the trap of shallowness. Marton was born in Budapest in 1975, is a trained musician and unconventional as a director. He got away from Christian Friedlander have an opera house placed on the stage in longitudinal section, in which the eighteen fabulous singers act out their everyday lives, preparations for a private theater festival, love affairs, jealousies, restrained feelings. Not only Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Michael Nagy sing beautifully! So is the music, is the text more important in opera? The dispute is old and pointless because both are necessary. So Damrau’s Countess, an aging intellectual with an understanding of art, can’t choose either the composer or the poet when it comes to love. The logical consequence (Christopher Street Day was at the weekend) would be a ménage à trois, which was livable in France during the Enlightenment, but not in Hitler’s Germany. So Strauss only hints violently and Marton leaves it at that, especially since the tenor of Pavol Bresnik (musician) and the baritone of Vito Priante (poet) mix wonderfully harmoniously with Damrau’s enchanting soprano to form the trio.
As a romantic, Richard Strauss placed art and opera far above social reality
Director Marton subtly spices up the evil reality in the play’s aesthetic banter by turning the prompter, Strauss’s sleepy buffo, into an informer who measures skulls and not only sends the three dancers to the concentration camp. Recently the spy has increased ninefold, his clones are among us as murderers. Marton’s intervention thus saves the credibility of this piece, which is always viewed with a certain mistrust. For Strauss, who was a Nazi sympathizer for a while, his art was central, he concentrated on interpersonal relationships, on portraits of women in moments of crisis. As an initial avant-gardist, he soon had nothing left for the avant-garde, but saved the major-minor tonality throughout the world wars. In doing so, he gained a radiance that is otherwise not heard in this way and, as a good dialectician, composed slight disturbing moments that saved his scores from torpor and epigonism up to the last songs and the “Metamorphoses”, all of them reflexes on the depression after 1945 .
Conductor Lothar Koenigs and the State Orchestra calmly conjure up this tonal duality. They abandon themselves to the surging of the sounds, they preserve the ingenious manipulation of the score. Strauss, that is unmistakable, was an intellectual of sensuality, a hedonist of thought. The latest “Capriccio” describes this special position. But in the end it’s not about the primacy of music or poetry. As a romantic, Strauss placed art and opera far above social reality. This attitude is consistently proud, but it is not only difficult to bear in times of war. This caveat has been attached to the “Capriccio” for 80 years as an often-named mortgage. He can be whitewashed by the fabulous singers in Munich, named by David Marton. But he will never disappear.