Friday, July 9, 2021

Richard Strauss, Daphne (1938)


Here's Strauss' antepenultimate opera!  You don't get to use that word ever day.  Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that you get to if you really want to, but then you'll always end up having to explain what it means.  Good times!

So you've got Daphne, who isn't interested in love or romance, and rejects the suits of her childhood friend Leukippos.  Later, at a festival, Apollo appears.  He tries in turn to seduce Daphne and is in turn rejected.  This makes him angry, so he murders Leukippos.  Then he gets sad about having done that and asks Zeus that she be turned into a tree.  Because she's really into nature, see, and therefore being a tree is her ultimate dream.  What?  This production doesn't even do a token effort to visualize the "turning into a tree" thing, unless you count her holding our her arms a few times in arguably treelike fashion (as you can see her doing on the DVD case).  It's sort of awkward because there's a lot of music after her transformation, and she just stands there awkwardly.  Anyway, there you have it.

The libretto here was written by Joseph Gregor.  Apparently Strauss was dubious about his writing abilities, but he nonetheless wrote three operas to Gregor libretti: along with this, Friedenstag and Die Liebe der Danae.  If you think this is going to be a zany mythological fanfiction like Danae, I am afraid you are sadly misshapen.  This is more or less just plain ol' mythology.  Not that that's bad, but I kinda prefer the weird version.  I do have to admit, the libretto is a bit unnecessarily confusing.  I do not remember having that problem with Danae.

But Strauss!  His music here is very...Straussian.  If you know what that means, you know what to expect!  Gorgeous stuff, though I really think the libretto undermines the whole.  A bit.  Still, no bad Strauss operas that I've seen so far!  Except possibly Die Frau ohne Schatten.  But that is neither here nor there.

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