Strauss’s 'Ariadne auf Naxos' by Curtis Opera

The prologue is essential, however, because the chief terms of debate are set out in it. The principal character here is the Composer (Lauren Eberwein, in a travesty role), who has written a work on the tragic theme of Ariadne, the mythological heroine cast off and abandoned by her lover, the adventurer Theseus. As he tells us, his purpose is to examine human solitude and despair, but he is interrupted by a troupe of comic players who have also been hired by the host of the evening, in whose luxurious home the performances will take place. The Composer is outraged that his tragedy is to be trivialized by being set against a bawdy farce, and he is even more indignant when Zerbinetta (Ashley Milanese), the star of the troupe, suggests that the two plots be fused.

How to handle love?

Strauss is having fun here with the philistine culture of prewar bourgeois Vienna, but the serious question is whether tragedy or comedy is the best genre for expressing the dilemmas of love; and the answer (for in the figure of the Composer he is also poking fun at himself) is, of course, both. We may remind ourselves that the ancient Greeks themselves always followed their tragedies with a satyr play, but to combine them in the same work? A paradoxical, not to say a heroic task, achieved only by the very greatest artists — Cervantes, Shakespeare, Mozart — and one, perhaps, achievable only in certain epochs.

Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, were determined to have at it, however, even in the not particularly propitious climate of late bourgeois society. Oh, deconstructing romantic love was feasible enough; Herr Freud, after all, was a contemporary resident of Vienna. But to show it in a genuinely tragic guise at the same time — to believe, in fact, that such a phenomenon could exist, outside the crime pages of the tabloid press — that was the true challenge.

No laughing matter

Behind this problem lurked a larger one, musically speaking: the problem of Wagner. In Tristan und Isolde, he had instated tragic love as the central subject of Romanticism and married it to death as its ultimate consummation. This might invite parody, but it precluded comedy. Romeo and Juliet might have lived happily ever after except for a mix-up in timing, but Tristan and Isolde are goners from the get-go, and nothing can keep them from the grave of each other’s arms. You can find most anything in Wagner, including bouts of Homeric laughter and at least a Germanic species of wit; but love isn’t funny business in his Cornwall or where the Rhine maidens play. And that not only leaves out half the fun, but also half the woe, for love is often at its most painful when it is most comic.

Strauss, like everyone else, had been heavily indebted to Wagner, and his first two operas, Guntram and Feuersnot, had been lost in Wagnerian mists. He broke savagely out of the trap with his two Expressionist operas, Salome and Elektra, but they were not native to his true idiom, and in Der Rosenkavalier he had experimented with going back to a Mozartean style. This experiment was continued in Ariadne, with the tableaux format of Baroque opera mixed in.

Inevitably, the result was pastiche, a problem Strauss faces head-on in the prologue, where his Zerbinetta proposes mixing tragedy and comedy more or less indiscriminately. Thus, although the music of Ariadne eschews Expressionism, in a sense it is more deeply Modernist than either Salome or Elektra. Stravinsky, who also had an Expressionist phase, would similarly suggest that a revived classicism was the proper mode of Modernism, and he would also come to this by a return to Greek themes. But that’s another story, or maybe a book.

The flighty and the faithful

Zerbinetta, dressed to the nines in punk fashion (and then faux-ballroom attire) by the excellently inventive Jacob A. Climer, represents love at its most fickle, moving experimentally from one attractive body to another and savoring each not a moment too long. Her wisdom is that of comedy, in which the pleasures of life present themselves unproblematically for the tasting, with no hard feelings left behind. She also gets the most brilliant and hilarious aria of the opera, which Ashley Milanese knocked out of the park.

Ariadne is, of course, steadfastness personified. The fact that Theseus has left her alone but for three female choristers on a rocky island (actually, an unfair knock at Naxos, which is quite fertile) is not the problem; Ariadne isn’t waiting for a passing sailor to pick her up but for her lover’s return. In her desolation she implores Death, for no lesser solution will do, and when he arrives in the highly ambiguous figure of Bacchus (Kevin Ray), the drama, such as it is, comes to its crux. Ariadne and Bacchus find a kind of resolution in each other, as Strauss and Hofmannsthal brilliantly deploy the Greek device of the deus ex machina to send up the Wagnerian love-death motif, all to music gorgeous even by the standards of Strauss’s palette.

Note must also be taken of the wordless trio of the choristers, which rises to heights of truly Mozartean expressiveness. Mozart and Wagner, successfully adapted in the same work? Yes, it has to be a pastiche; but how adroitly and delightfully Strauss and Hofmannsthal pull it off. And all praise to the Curtis Opera Theatre production, from top to bottom excellent — mise-en-scène, direction, singing and acting, orchestral performance. No, Ariadne auf Naxos isn’t going to replace Der Rosenkavalier on the world’s opera stages. But it is a deeply civilized pleasure and a triumph of Richard Strauss’s art.