So there's an aristocratic family in hard financial times. They have two daughters, Arabella and Zdenka. However, they've decided that marrying off two daughters would be too expensive, so the parents have raised Zdenka as a boy. As you do. They're desperately trying to get Arabella married off to a rich guy to achieve financial stability, but she can't settle on anyone. She has three Three-Stooges-ish suitors whom she keeps more or less at arm's length, and another suitor, Matteo, in whom she has no interest. Zdenka is secretly in love with Matteo (who thinks she's a man), and she's writing him notes purporting to be from her sister to keep him from committing suicide in despair (seems like a healthy dynamic). Their dad has contacted a rich old friend, sending him a portrait of Arabella; it turns out he's died, but his nephew, Mandryka, got the letter and portrait and from it fell madly in love with her. They meet and fall in love and they're going to be married.
So far so good, but when the actual conflict of the opera starts...it gets a little bit iffy. Zdenka gives Matteo a key allegedly to Arabella's room, and tells him that she wants to see him (I have zero idea how this scenario was meant to work out). Mandryka overhears this and immediately turns into a hysterical douchebag; you know it's a comedy so things are going to work out, but it's really a hacky-sitcom-level conflict, and I found watching it play out to be a bit tedious. I suppose there's not even any point to mentioning Matteo's immediately transferring his affections to Zdenka when he learns the truth, since that's just how these things go, but still. I mean, in the end, the story still sort of worked for me, but--even with Mandryka repenting of his douchebaggery in the most emphatic way possible--it's hard not to have a certain skepticism of how this whole thing's gonna work out in the long term.
Still! The music! My goodness! So, I mean, I haven't seen all of Strauss' operas (though I'd like to!), but am I correct in believing that after Elektra, he just abandoned the whole modernist thing in favor of more traditional sweeping romanticism? Well, I can't say he wasn't good at it. In particular, the duet where Arabella and Mandryka first pledge their troth to one another is one of the most meltingly gorgeous things I've seen in any opera anywhere. We sometimes cavil about how people in operas fall desperately in love implausibly instantaneously, but really, with music this good, who wouldn't?
This was Hugo von Hofmannsthal's last libretto for Strauss (he also wrote Elektra, Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and others). It's a sad story; he died of a stroke at the age of fifty-five two days after his son committed suicide. But the point is, he died soon after completing Arabella's libretto, he didn't have a chance to revise it, and Strauss wouldn't let anyone else touch it, which may explain why it's a bit rough around the edges, but it's still extremely worth seeing. The production I saw...well, I can't exactly find it now. Vienna's State Opera is replaying an opera every day, and this doesn't seem to be online anymore. It updates the action from the 1860s to the 1930s, which creates a few anachronisms that I barely noticed. It was perfectly fine.
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