Word: strausses
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...piano), the redoubtable Sir Thomas Beecham and France's crack Loewenguth String Quartet, one performance stood out as loftily as old Edinburgh Castle itself. In King's Theatre, when the curtain went down on the Glyndebourne Opera Company's new and magnificent production of Richard Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos, the audience leaped to their feet, mixed their applause with wave after wave of bravos...
...Richard Strauss had finished his Capriccio in 1942. In his 70s, the once-lurid old composer had turned headily intellectual. The basis of his last operatic plot was an argument that had long fascinated him: Which should come first, words or music? With Friend Clemens Krauss, conductor of the Munich Opera, writing the libretto, Strauss had set about transferring the argument to the stage...
...audience saw last week was a far cry from either Salome or Elektra. As one watching expert, Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, described it, Capriccio is "a musician's opera, composed for the musical gourmet. It has the quality of an old, old sweet wine and contains everything that Strauss knew about music and opera...
...flow of German words and wit found few arias to cling to. But connoisseurs found some puckish operatic humor to smile over. Sample: when one character asks, "Why not compose an opera on a mythological theme?" the Producer (sung by Bass-Baritone Paul Schoeffler) replies, to a melody from Strauss's 1912 opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, "But it's been done." Smiled Baritone Schoeffler: "The old man had fun when he wrote this...
...Composer Strauss had had more fun, in fact, than most in the slightly baffled audience. But most critics agreed that Capriccio, though a masterpiece of its kind, was too sophisticated ever to attain the popularity of earlier Strauss works...