Article from the Metropolitan Opera’s web site.
Der Rosenkavalier
Father Owen Lee Discusses Richard
Strauss and Der Rosenkavalier
As Aired on the Metropolitan Opera Broadcast – 2/20/93 – “Opera News on the
Air”
Creative artists often find themselves in predicaments. But there can be few
predicaments so sweetly blended of exhilaration and frustration as the
writer’s, when one of his characters grows assertive, demands a role beyond
that originally conceived for him, or her, and eventually takes over the
imagination of the author completely. Such a character was, for Richard Strauss
and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. The
composer and librettist first conceived their opera as “thoroughly comic, as
bright and obvious as a pantomime.” They decided that there would be two major
roles in their comedy – a “baritone buffo” and a “Cherubino;” Baron Ochs and
young Octavian. But as they set to work, the Marschallin, a character created
merely to define Ochs and Octavian, began to take over their imaginations, and
their pens. She prompted the best lines and the best music. Hofmannsthal all
but invented for her an aristocratic variety of Viennese to speak, and for her
solo scenes Strauss scaled down his vast Wagnerian orchestra to modest
Mozartian proportions. What is more, in asserting her importance, this wise and
gracious lady saw to it that the very nature of the work was changed as well.
No longer was it to be bright and obvious. She both darkened and illumined the
comedy, adding a dimension that was profound if not altogether tragic. Der
Rosenkavalier’s theme became nothing less than the differences effected in
human lives by time, with its inexorable onward flow.
The Marschallin alone among the characters sees the future passing through the
present into the past, and wonders what it means. Philosophers may say that
time is only the measure of change. Poets may say carpe diem – grasp
time while you can. But the Marschallin finds that, in fact, in a human life
one cannot measure or grasp or hold. Each irreversible moment is already gone
in the instant of becoming.
Most of this idea is expressed in three passages we have just heard in Act I.
The Marschallin is left alone on the stage for the first time. She thinks
ruefully that her oaf of a cousin will get himself a pretty young bride, and a
nice fortune besides, and consider these as his by right, and all the time
flatter himself that he is doing everyone a favor. Her mind runs back to the
time, some sixteen years before, when she too – little Resi – was fetched from
a convent school and sent lamblike into a loveless marriage.
Where, the Marschallin wonders, is that little girl now? Where, she quotes as
she peers into her glass, are the snows of yester-year? She has just accused
her hairdresser of making her into an old woman; can this person she sees
mirrored before her be the same that was once little Resi, and before long will
be “die alte Frau, die alte Marchallin – that old woman, the old Field
Marshall’s wife?” Briefly she pictures herself in that bleak future, pointed at
by jostling crowds as she passes in her carriage.
Surely, the Marschallin muses, this is one of the mysteries of life – how one
feels oneself always the same person, yet knows that one is constantly
changing, body and soul. How can God let this happen? If He must let it happen,
why has He given her an understanding of it? Others seem to know nothing of
this. Could He not have hidden it from her? It is too much to bear. And yet,
she says, in how one bears it, “in that ‘how’ lies all the difference.” Here
the orchestra lightly touches on the theme associated with her love for young
Octavian – and hints that for her that all-important “how” – somehow lies in
him.
Then Octavian bursts in on her, and in a few minutes both characters sense
that, suddenly, somehow, everything between them has changed. Octavian is
close, now to anger, now to tears. To convince him that it is not she who is
forsaking him but he who must eventually leave her, the Marschallin sings a
second little aria, and takes us to the heart of the matter, what Der
Rosenkavalier is all about: “Time,” she says, “is a strange thing. When one
lives for the moment, time means nothing at all. And then, of a sudden, one is
aware of nothing else. It is all around us – inside us, even! It shifts in our
faces, swirls in the mirror, flows” she says to him, “in my temples. It courses
between you and me – silent, as in an hourglass. Oh, often I hear it flowing,
irrevocably. Often I get up in the middle of the night and make all, all the
clocks stand still.”
Strauss rises quietly to this wonderful occasion with subtle orchestral
equivalents for his librettist’s images, and a vocal line delicately poised
between aria and recitative. “Die Zeit, die ist ein sonderbar Ding.”
“Time,” says the Marschallin “is a strange thing. But,” she concludes, “one
needn’t be afraid of time. It too is a creation of the Father, who created us
all.” How, we wonder, has she come across that neo-Platonic thought? Has her
confessor given her St. Augustine to read? Octavian understandably complains
that, this morning, she is “talking like a priest.” Because he is hurt and
confused by the strangeness of her words, she explains that, in life, one must
take what one takes lightly, “with light heart and light hands, hold and take,
hold and let go.” Both life and God will have it so. And we come to her third
little aria, in which her resignation is complete: she will go to Church, then
she will visit “Uncle Greifenklau who is old and lame, and eat with him.” The
strings play the musical theme that at the beginning of the act was all
passion, and then accompanied the observation “in the ‘how’ lies all the
difference.” Now that theme floats radiantly over the Marschallin’s words as if
to say, “This is ‘how’ I shall accept the inevitable changes time brings...I
shall let you go. I shall confess, and perform a charitable work, and then a
firm resolve will make my life new."
Henceforth she and Octavian will be together only in public. “This afternoon,”
she says (addressing him, not as “you,” but as “he”), “this afternoon, if I go
out, and he so pleases, he will come to the Prater, and ride beside my
carriage.” Gentle but firm words and music of ravishing sweetness define what
their changed relationship must be.
Octavian seems to understand. It is a clear case of noblesse oblige. He
can be her lover no longer. He leaves quickly. Then, of a sudden, she realizes
that she has seen him for the last time on intimate terms, and calls him back.
Too late. He has slipped from her, like any lightly held object caught in the
flux of time. When she sees him again, in Act III, he is utterly changed.
And so, through the rest of its course, is the opera. Nothing that happens
through the next hours can make us forget the Marschallin. We wait, through
much that is marvelous and through occasional longueurs, for her to reappear,
to take the drama in hand, to direct it to its close.
Both Strauss and Hofmannsthal struggled to the end against the Marschallin, as
if resenting the way she took over the drama and guided their pens. Strauss’
comments, made years later – that she had lovers before and after Octavian,
that she should not be sentimentalized, that she was “only annoyed with the
hairdresser” – these remarks seem almost churlish. Surely the composer doth
protest too much to be fully believed, and for almost a century now audiences
have not believed him. As for the librettist, fearing for his comedy, anxious
that we not feel too sorry for the Marschallin, he suggested cuts in what he
called her “perilously long” scene with Octavian. But surely she is the one
character in Der Rosenkavalier that is of a piece with his finest
creations elsewhere: again and again, in Hofmannsthal’s writing, some vision of
eternity brings about a moral and spiritual change in a character and enables
him, or her, to survive a present crisis: face to face with death,
Hofmannsthal’s famous Jedermann accepts the challenge of living, and his
Ariadne accepts mythic transformation, and the husbands and wives in his
Frau ohne Schatten accept their various responsibilities – all with the
realization that to change is to stay alive, to stand still is to die.
If Strauss and Hofmannsthal were like other artists, they were themselves all
too conscious of their immersion in time, and were struggling to defeat it, not
by attempting to forestall the advancing years, but by shaping their lives’
experience into something that would never die. With Der Rosenkavalier,
thanks largely to the Marschallin, they succeeded. It is the most enduring of
their creations, and may well prove the most enduring opera of this century. I
doubt whether any strain from twentieth-century opera has settled so lovingly
on the ear as this one.
So deeply has Der Rosenkavalier passed into our affections that Uncle
Greifenklau, who is never seen and is mentioned only once, is more real to us
than hundreds of characters in other operas. And the Marschallin, whose
Christian names are Maria Theresa, has come to symbolize Vienna itself, both
the earlier Vienna of Mozart’s “Dove Sono” and another Vienna with
waltzes by other Strausses.
What is it that makes the Marschallin one of the great characters in opera?
Surely it is her special awareness – of time. At first she wishes she were not
so aware, through memory, of the past, and, through expectation, of the future.
But with that awareness, she is able to come to terms with herself, and direct
the comedy and the romance to their right conclusions. What enables her to
adapt to change is the very thing she wished she had not been granted – that
consciousness of how the past and the future impinge on the present. And, more
than that, the sense of something that lies beyond time.
It is the purpose of art to show us that something does lie beyond time. Most
of the action in Der Rosenkavalier is synchronous with clock time. But
at the moment near the end when the Marschallin brings order out of chaos, when
three radiant soprano voices rise in the suspended moment of “Heut’ oder
Morgen oder den ubernächsten Tag” – “Today or tomorrow or the day after
tomorrow” – a moment greater than the others has at last been reached. The
action is halted, the three characters stand fixed on stage and, in the
time-honored tradition of opera, the music makes its own time.
Some thoughts lie too deep for words, but not for music. The transcendent trio
of Der Rosenkavalier, the song of three people caught up in the most
important moment of their lives, assures us that this is what makes us human –
we alone among creatures have a consciousness that reaches beyond the present
moment. We are able to conceive, beyond time, some notion of an eternal and
immutable. The still point of the turning world. When the mind reaches to that
eternity, a man, or a woman, can say to the moment, with Goethe’s Faust,
“Linger on, thou art so fair.” In the trio of Der Rosenkavalier we reach
such a moment – a moment beyond time. At a moment like that, when we sense what
lies beyond our ordinary lives, all the clocks really are standing still.
APPLAUSE
END