The Standard Repertoire: Ariadne auf Naxos

A Breakup Opera

This post is part of an ongoing series about the operas of the standard repertoire. The most recent entries: Nixon in China, Rigoletto, Faust. To see them all, check the “opera” tag.

Ariadne, painting by John William Waterhouse.

The story of Ariadne is not especially important to the opera that bears her name, but I’ll repeat it here: she was the daughter of Minos, King of Crete, and presided over the the famous labyrinth where a monster, the minotaur, routinely consumed virginal Athenian victims. Then the hero Theseus appeared, and, betraying her father, Ariadne helped him navigate the labyrinth and slay the minotaur. Once the heroics were accomplished the pair eloped together, but for reasons that differ from version to version, Theseus promptly abandoned her on the island of Naxos.

This is where Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos finds her: deserted and heartbroken, wishing for death, convinced she’ll never know happiness again. But nothing in Ariadne auf Naxos is especially serious, including her pain: another woman appears to comfort her, like the sassy girlfriend in a rom-com, and by the end of the opera she has a new man. Many operas depict heartbreak (death, madness, and/or suicide often result), but few show the heroine moving on with a sexy new lover.

Perhaps this is why I love Ariadne auf Naxos — while it’s unquestionably operatic with many moments of full-throttled sensuality, it shares some DNA with the modern rom-com and is ultimately joyful and affirming. If you read it generously — which I do — it’s one of the least misogynistic of the major operas, a celebration of womanhood and happiness, an opera-length argument that one’s life need not be ruined by a disappointing love affair. With a humanistic libretto by the poet Hugo von Hoffmannstahl, it’s a lighthearted reply to the ultra-serious Tristan und Isolde, where romantic fulfillment is found only in death.

The opera is in two parts. There’s the prologue, supplying a frame narrative which explains the conceit of the opera proper, followed by Ariadne auf Naxos proper. In the prologue, two sets of performers prepare backstage to entertain some wealthy Viennese: the first, a cast of egomaniacal opera performers and the ambitious, self-serious composer of their opera; the second, a comedy troupe led by the saucy Zerbinetta. The opera people are offended at having to share the stage with low comedy; the vaudevillians are worried that the opera will put their audience to sleep and make it tougher to get laughs. Then, an abrupt change of plans is announced: due to time limitations, the evening’s patron insists that the two entertainments must be performed simultaneously. The composer laments the desecration of his masterpiece, while the comedians figure out how to work themselves into the show.

The second part of the opera is the entertainment itself. We start with Ariadne, abandoned and inconsolable on her island, wishing for death. Then the comedians, Fickle Zerbinetta and her Four Suitors, appear to cheer her up. The whole thing culminates in the arrival of Bacchus, come to Ariadne’s rescue, and the two of them sing a swelling, voluptuous love duet.

The Canadian Opera Company’s 2011 performance of Ariadne auf Naxos was documented in a long-form piece in The Walrus by Tom Jokinen, who took a role as a supernumerary (a non-singing extra) in the production. I worked at the company at the time, and I make a brief appearance in the article. The conceit of the piece: a non-opera person, without musical training, wants to see if he can find a way in.

I can live a happy enough life, I figure, never knowing the difference between a bel canto and a Bell Calling Card: the idea of two people singing at each other strikes me as counterintuitive, unless those two people are Sonny and Cher. But now that I’m in my late forties, I wonder about the current of hot Latin running through the depths of the ironic, cranky, slow-moving cool Finnish river, and whether I’m too late to find a connection to great art, or if what I have to do is swim deeper. The truth is, there is a finite number of things that will happen to me before I’m dead. Perhaps I shouldn’t wait to accidentally trip over the sublime but instead seek it out. So my inner Italian sent me to the COC. I sought access, to see how opera is made and if I, without training, could learn to love it, or tolerate it, or at least sit through it—boot camp for the artistically stunted.

Ariadne auf Naxos isn’t really the ideal opera for such a project. As noted in the piece, it was written by opera people for opera people, full of winks and inside references. The final love duet is a nod to Wagnerian excess in more than style and sentiment — it’s not quite as long as the love duet in Siegfried (30 minutes), but it’s an endurance test all the same. It was first performed (in a different version, without the prologue) in 1912, and it flopped. The modified version we know today premiered in 1916. It feels very much like a pre-war opera, the product of a culture where the well-dressed bourgeois in salons might discuss Mozart vs. Wagner, or the fickleness or constancy of woman, over glasses of champagne — the culture described in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. So, not only is Ariadne insider-y and a little pretentious, it’s also deeply frivolous. The fact that R. Strauss, despite his sophisticated and cosmopolitan sensibilities, was not a man of moral courage in the face of the Nazi regime is another strike against the opera.

On the other hand, as an Opera Person with a particular love of Strauss, I’m exactly in the target audience for Ariadne auf Naxos. Most of the great Strauss operas — particularly those on which he collaborated with Hugo von Hoffmannstahl — are ravishing, sensual, intelligent. He clearly loved writing for women, writing many “male” roles (such as the Composer in Ariadne) for female performers and reserving his most beautiful music for them. There’s hardly any important music for male singers in Ariadne auf Naxos.

One of the centerpieces of Ariadne auf Naxos is Großmächtige Prinzessin (“mighty princess”), often simply known as “Zerbinetta’s Aria.” It’s less an aria than an extended argument: Zerbinetta tells Ariadne that she needn’t pine for Theseus, that many women have been abandoned by a lover, and that she herself has been fickle and enjoyed the attentions of many men. Her monologue, and the ribald scene that follows where she entertains and eludes several suitors, are full of difficult coloratura maneuvers that are apt to showcase a sparkling vocal talent but humiliate a mediocre one (the recent heckling incident at the Metropolitan Opera involved Zerbinetta’s Aria).

I appear in Tom Jokinen’s Walrus article saying that opera’s weirdness is part of the deal, and in the end, he’s almost won over by the love duet but not quite:

If language is how we communicate, language is also how we trick each other, lie. But the music, it seems, if I close my eyes, doesn’t lie. They mean it; they are sincere because they sing; it’s the only way they can communicate without deception, intentional or accidental. I try to let the long duet pass without judgment. But I am not “slain in the spirit,” as evangelical Christians call that moment when grace sends them writhing to the floor. I am nudged by the music, the best I can manage given the strangeness of a love scene sung, not spoken. All I can say is that the truth of the moment is not a grown-up’s cool, rational truth, but the truth of a little boy who at eight was the Miami Herald ’s Spirit of Christmas: wonder and weirdness. In my head, I will Bacchus to stop singing and kiss her already, and as starlight sparkles on the floor around them, he does.

Ariadne auf Naxos is a comfort opera for me, for some of the same reasons that Cleo from 5 to 7 is a comfort movie: it tells me that life is beautiful and that things are going to be okay. Ariadne is heartbroken but Zerbinetta is there to tell her that everyone must go through it sometime — and Bacchus is waiting on the horizon.

Some musical highlights:

Ein augenblick ist wenig: this is a Zerbinetta aria that is not “Zerbinetta’s aria.” Zerbinetta gets vulnerable flirts with the composer a little, telling him that she’s misunderstood.

Es gibt ein reich: Ariadne’s lamentation, insisting that only death can bring happiness. Sung here in grand Wagnerian style by the great Jessye Norman.

Zerbinetta’s “best friend” aria, comforting Ariadne and glorying in her own loves:

The last section of the big love duet. It’s written to be overwhelming in grand operatic style, but somehow also sounds a bit like cafe music. Not the less beautiful for it: