On 15 October 2014 the Chicago Lyric Opera splendidly staged Richard Strauss’s Capriccio: A Conversation Piece for Music in One Act (1942). The opera boasted a stellar cast, featuring Renée Fleming as the widowed Countess Madeline, Bo Skovus as her lascivious unnamed amateur thespian brother the Count, William Burden as the music-man Flamand, Audun Iversen as the poet Olivier, Anne Sophie von Otter as the actress Clairon, and David Govertsen who handsomely replaced the ill Peter Rose as the producer La Roche. The community and their other friends sang with varied kinds of excellence and, of almost equal importance for Capriccio, varied kinds of acting skills. The director Peter McClintock wisely cast Fleming as a human island of calm amidst the toing and froing in the rococo salon of her grand chateau outside of Paris. The men, perhaps collegially but certainly vocally, either compete with one another or compete for female flesh. The Count is madly in lust with the actress Clairon who, in turn, has recently concluded an affair with Olivier. She is willing to accept the Count’s attentions–unless she is merely acting, as it were. Strauss adapts the stereotype of the aristocratic man who seeks sexual company as an aspect of his self-definition. The amiably interjected ballerina (that evening Abigail Simon joined by Jeffery Hoven) promptly recognizes this; she flirts by means of a come-hither gesture with remarkably nubile toes.
In contrast, widowed Countess Madeleine is self-contained, elegant, and faced with an artistic and romantic issue: which is the superior art, music or poetry? The aesthetic choice denotes the romantic choice, since whichever art form she selects also becomes the new husband she accepts. The aristocratic patron of the arts would become the aristocratic wife of the arts. Metaphorically, to whom will the Muse of Opera be wed? The Countess, though, occasionally picks up and caresses a photograph, presumably of her dead husband. We admire her the more for keeping him in her heart and providing an emotional bolt-hole: she cannot select a new mate if she still loves the old one. This enduring affection is an aspect of character that shines so movingly in her final solo scene in which she chooses neither living companion. There can only be one choice: the melding of music and words, as indeed the opera has done from the start. The mellow overture-sextet that introduced us to the main figures also introduced us to the Countess’s inner life–romantic, loyal, generous, and intelligent.
This is a major production by a major company, in which Andrew Davis managed the Lyric orchestra characteristically well. I offer only one significant objection that well may be dismissed by today’s audiences. Namely, the staging by John Cox and Peter McClintock is insufficiently cerebral, historical and, if I am correct, insufficiently respectful of what I think Strauss was trying to do during an excruciating time in twentieth-century history. James Cox argues that the opera’s eighteenth-century setting is irrelevant and alienating for modern viewers. He sought to find another period that combines wealth, elegance, powerful social standing, patronage of the arts, and concern with “problems of form.” The 1920s, he says, with its “post-war relaxation in style of social behavior” and emphasis upon elegance and comfort “would seem to look back to the 18th century and forward to our own.” This cleansing of history forgets that World War I ended only on 11 November 1918, just two years earlier than the date Cox selects, and after some 37 million were left dead or wounded. In France alone there were perhaps as many as 1.400.000 military deaths, with a further 4.266.000 wounded in combat, and 340.000 civilian deaths. Many of the young generation of “gentlemen” in France, as indeed throughout Europe, were sacrificed to bullets, artillery, and gas. The handsome young Count probably would have been among them. German forces advanced to about 25-30 miles from Paris and were only stopped at the Marne and its two bloody battles. France suffered serious destruction, as in the cathedral town of Reims, since much of the Western Front was on its territory. It is hard to believe that “Paris in the decade after the First World War had all that was needed” to reflect Capriccio’s focus upon aesthetics, personal and romantic choice, and a secure aristocracy. Strauss chose 1775 as a setting for a reason, even if this reason may not be apparent, or even communicated, to a modern audience.
The opera’s full title, Capriccio: A Conversation Piece for Music in One Act, is both deceptive and instructive: deceptive because the opera is scarcely a free, irregular, improvisational piece; instructive because as a “conversation” it exchanges ideas among different people engaging with one another. The title alludes to an ugly aspect of the opera’s back-story. By 1934 Stefan Zweig, Strauss’s Austrian Jewish novelist, biographer, journalist and librettist friend, had prudently moved to London. While reading in the British Museum (which then housed collections from the current British Library) he came across the Abbé Giovanni Battista Casti’s Prima la musica, e poi le parole. Divertimento teatrale in un atto (1786), set to music by Antonio Salieri. The current British Library catalogue includes only an 1826 printing of that work. Zweig also alerted Strauss to the later-eighteenth-century opera reform principles espoused by the German composer Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87). Among other things, Gluck hoped to limit singers’ desires for the spotlight, better unite music with a simplified plot, and enhance characterization. In the dedication to Alceste (1767), he added that the “overture ought to prepare the audience for the action of the piece, and serve as a kind of argument to it.” Strauss shared these principles, which surely is a key reason why Capriccio’s overture is a mellow, romantic andante from a sextet that the composer Flamand has written to commemorate the Countess’s birthday. Both Flamand and Olivier stand in the salon watching the Countess as the impresario La Roche snoozes in an armchair. The visual metaphor sets much of the plot: poet and composer seek the love and validation of their as yet indifferent but respectful Countess muse; the theatre man prefers Morpheus to romantic music, but when he awakes he will raise a key question that is not resolved until the final scene.
Strauss’s Capriccio proclaims its loyalty to Gluck’s standards of clarity, while also tenderly mocking some aspects of them. The opera, set in the 1775 Paris area, adheres to the three French neoclassical unities of action, space, and time. Its action is united around the issue of whether music or words is the dominant aesthetic value; that action is played out as the composer Flamand and the poet Olivier compete both for aesthetic superiority and for the Countess’s love. All of the action takes place in the salon of her chateau. The opera’s real time and the action’s real time are the same. Strauss originally wanted Capriccio to be performed without an interval, as the Metropolitan Opera cruelly did in 2011.
The allusion to French neoclassical theory is part of Capriccio’s other more broadly symbolic European contexts. The opera premiered in Munich on 28 October 1942. Allied air raids had begun; the German desert war would soon be in retreat; and the siege of Stalingrad was bleeding German armies dry even before the fatal winter. Strauss was no stranger to Nazi evil and, though clearly compromised, sought to preserve what freedom he could for his Jewish colleagues, daughter-in-law and grandchildren. He tried, as well and so far as the situation allowed, to exercise his art rather than his or someone else’s politics. Nevertheless, there are what seem to me to be subtle signs of a covert political message, or at the very least a nostalgic alternative, in Capriccio. The opera’s devices, allusions, and interventions support this hypothesis.
One device of course is the French unities so powerful in eighteenth-century Europe. Others include mention of Rameau, Gluck, and Goldoni, major figures in France, Germany, and Italy. La Roche, a character modelled on Strauss’s Austrian Jewish friend and producer Max Reinhardt (Maximilian Goldmann), inserts an Italian soprano and tenor, insisting they are whom the public wants. Their un-Gluck-like aria bears no relationship to the love/aesthetics plot but is rather beautifully sung nonsense that audiences then, as now, adored. La Roche also invites a ballet duo as a further audience-pleasing event. In 1755 David Garrick imported the great French ballet-reformer Jean-Georges Noverre (1727-1810) to London, where he choreographed dance for the Theatre Royal Drury Lane and in 1756 wrote the seminal Lettres sur la danse et les ballets (Lyon, 1760). In 1775 Marie Antoinette anointed Noverre as Maître de Ballet at the Paris Opéra. For Noverre dance, like arias, needed to be connected to character and action. Surely that is one reason the ballerina flirts with the salacious Count, who responds warmly but finally chooses to pursue the actress Clairon.
Let us summarize these several hints: Gluck’s opera reforms; French 1775 literary and aristocratic culture in a then war-free European world; the possibility of “conversation” among nations as well as among individuals; the reintroduction of unreformed Italian opera; and the introduction of once London-based French reform ballet. In short, these comprise Strauss’s view of a pre-war European world of vibrant flux where the old and the new, words and music, dance, France, Germany, Italy, England, Christian and Jew and, as we shall see, the elevated and the humble, are approximately at home in the secure Countess’s muse-like supportive chateau. Capriccio is Strauss’s Tempest, an aging artist’s mellow attempt at solace and human decency in an increasingly heartless and cruel world.
The opera is also its own contradiction, which must have been amusingly apparent to anyone who saw and heard it. The question of whether words are better than music or music better than words is silly on the face of it. Immediately after the overture, the performance we hear clearly and necessarily combines words and music. The Countess cannot make up her mind which art form or which putative lover is better, because the Either Or syllogism requires a Neither answer. Opera combines forms, as this opera’s mingling of music, words, ballet, German and Italian opera and neo-classical and romantic approaches makes plain. Strauss knew the importance of narrative-words, since his trusted but then distant Zweig was unable to provide a libretto. Unconvinced by Joseph Gregor, whom Zweig had recommended, Strauss finally collaborated with the opera’s first conductor, Clemens Kraus, to produce the final libretto.
That libretto is especially clever at enlarging options. At first the contest seems to be between Flamand and Olivier, music and poetry. It expands to La Roche and theatrical reality, based on what an audience wishes to see. Strauss gives La Roche the opera’s longest recital up to that point. He sings of the glory of the stage as the living exemplar of living human beings, seeing versions of themselves solving or dissolving into human problems. He ends with “Amen.” This easily can be viewed as self-parody by a man who knows that, however justified, he is puffing himself. Alternatively, it can be taken as the theater become-religion, the mystical world in which one must believe and from which one is comforted. Yet this too soon is undercut as Strauss insists upon the heterogeneity of judgment regarding the creation of art. Near the end of the opera’s second part, a Monsieur Taupe, the mole, appears. He is the theater’s prompter and from his point of view he makes art. If he sleeps the actors do not know what to say. La Roche enthuses about theater’s great eternal laws; he preserves the old while waiting for the new, which he blames the immature artists before him for not yet producing. Monsieur Taupe reverts to the quotidian. All that ‘high falutin’ talk’ is well enough, but the intangible depends upon the tangible, the upper spiritual world depends upon the lower mechanical world; lovely, seen, Clairon requires unlovely, unseen, Taupe. When he is awake the arts are awake. Taupe enhances and expands the opera’s final scene. After the Countess’s glorious final sung-sonnet, the Major Domo announces that dinner is served. The Countess looks briefly in the mirror, flaunts her fan nonchalantly, and returns, alone, to every-day demands. The puzzled Major Domo looks both at her and the mirror, and then, like the plowman and shepherd in Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, who seem wholly unconcerned by the leg falling into the sea behind them, goes about his daily business indifferent to the mighty resolution that had taken place. This mingling of high and low, of the art of words and the art of music, of nation and nation, emotional love and sexual lust, company, conversation, isolation, and the past rendered vibrant in the present, is what Strauss’s uncapricious Capriccio is about.
It is also about solving a vital question and insisting upon the preservation of art as beauty tempered by sadness. La Roche scolds his colleagues for their self-importance and pedantry. He waits patiently for a modern work that is a great play: “where is the masterpiece that speaks to the hearts of the people?” The opera’s final scene provides an answer. The Countess has entered, alone. She is troubled, contemplative, and again picks up and caresses the photograph of her dead husband. We realize that she cannot choose either Flamand or Olivier because, in part, she still loves her dead husband. Moreover, she sings the sonnet presented to her as she accompanies herself on a harp. Strauss, the composer of Ariadne auf Naxos, Elektra, and Die Liebe der Danae, was surely aware of the harp’s association with Wisdom and, as with Apollo’s son Orpheus, the magical ability to charm anyone or anything within hearing. Strauss moves Capriccio from indecision to decision, from ignorance to wisdom, and from the conflicts among men like Flamand, Olivier, and La Roche, to the wisdom of the woman alone in her salon, but not alone in relation to those who have been and can be charmed by her.
Richard Strauss’s Capriccio was on at the Lyric Opera of Chicago between October 6th and October 28th 2014.