The Standard Repertoire: Der Rosenkavalier

Young and Old

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

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A poster for Der Rosenkavalier by Rafal Olbinski

Writing about R. Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (which translates to The Knight of the Rose) is, in a way, a continuation of themes from the previous post about All Fours: the opera features an unhappily married woman who is grappling with the reality of growing older, and who has taken a much younger male lover out of a combination of boredom, melancholy, and affection. She is a sophisticate while he is naive, and at the conclusion of the opera she relinquishes him to his rightful partner, a sweet and innocent woman his own age.

The previous essay I wrote in this series was about another Strauss opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, and so I risk some repetition in my descriptions. Like that other opera, Der Rosenkavalier is a collaboration between Richard Strauss and the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and is a romantic comedy written in the years immediately preceding WWI. It, too, contains knowing nods to operas of the past, operas that its original audience would be expected to be familiar with (in particular, The Marriage of Figaro). It belongs to that final cohort of operas from the Long 19th Century that were really trying to be grand: it has three leisurely acts and an impractically large orchestra, and a setting that calls out for luxury. Musically, it’s lush and plush in a way that was about to go dramatically out of fashion.

Rosenkavalier is also very feminine — the three characters in the primary love triangle (the older woman, the younger man, and the younger woman) are all sung by women, and its most famous and beloved scenes are duets and trios of female voices. Two out of the three acts take place in bedrooms. Masculine voices appear primarily as intrusions, and with the exception of one cameo character, the Italian Tenor with his short aria, they’re given little beauty.

Iris Murdoch used a performance of Der Rosenkavalier as a harbinger of another age gap relationship in her novel The Black Prince. The older Bradley, attending a performance with a much younger woman he’s infatuated with, finds the opera syrupy and sinister. The opening scene, which begins with the lovers in bed, is too much for him:

The two women were conversing in pure sound, their voices circling, replying, blending, creating a trembling silver cage of an almost obscene sweetness. I did not know what language they were singing in, and the words were inaudible anyway, there was no need of words, these were not words but the highest coinage of human speech melted down, became pure song, something vilely almost murderously gorgeous. No doubt she is crying for the inevitable loss of her young lover. The lovely boy protests but his heart is free. Only it has all been changed into a sort of plump luscious heart-piercing cascade of sugary irony. Oh God, not much more of this can be endured.

A page or two later, Bradley rushes from his seat and winds up vomiting in the street.

Rosenkavalier is fundamentally nostalgic. On the surface, it’s nostalgic for 18th century Vienna, the city of Mozart, with powdered wigs and bawdy farces. But the pastiche waltzes that appear throughout Rosenkavalier’s score, evoking that other famous Strauss of “Blue Danube” fame, blur and extend that nostalgia. Those waltzes don’t belong to the 18th century but the 19th. The characters of Rosenkavalier would never have heard anything like them, but R. Strauss would have grown up humming them as a child. Like most works of nostalgia, Rosenkavalier is more about evoking a feeling than calling back a real place. It’s a child’s memory of a beautiful adult world.

Because it is long and plush, because there’s something inherently frivolous and even kitschy about nostalgia and pastiche, and because it represents the culmination of a musical style that was already going out of fashion and was about to be dealt a death blow by WWI, it’s tempting to dismiss Der Rosenkavalier (1911) as decadent. That Richard Strauss wound up serving decades later as the president of the Reichsmusikkammer despite personal distaste for the Nazis doesn’t help matters.¹

So what makes this opera worthwhile? What elevates Der Rosenkavalier above all this into something enduring and great, something with a soul?

Here’s an outline of the story: The Marschallin (she’s referred to by her title, which literally means “the Field-Marshal’s wife”) and her young lover Count Octavian (who is played by a woman) begin the opera cavorting in bed. It’s Octavian’s first love affair, and he’s head-over-heels while the Marschallin is affectionate but ironical. Their fun is interrupted when her cousin, the boorish and lecherous Baron Ochs, arrives from the country. He’s set to marry a young woman, Sophie, a bourgeoise with a rich, social-climbing father. Ochs gloats in his good luck: he’s leveraging his aristocratic title to get a pretty young wife with a fortune attached.

Ochs’s undeserved pride makes the Marschallin reflect on her own life: she herself was rushed while very young into a loveless political marriage, and though in some ways she still feels like that innocent girl, she knows she’s growing inexorably older.

When Octavian returns, the two quarrel. She tells him, with deep affection, that their thing will, sooner or later, come to an end: one day he will find a woman his own age, and she’s already prepared herself emotionally for that eventuality. Octavian is hurt; he’s in love and doesn’t want to imagine any end to their affair.

But, over the course of the next two acts, that’s exactly what happens: Octavian meets Sophie, is immediately infatuated with her, and becomes determined to save her from forced marriage to the oafish Baron Ochs. In the end, Ochs is humiliated and dispatched back to the country, Octavian and Sophie are united, and the Marschallin sadly but nobly gives her lover up, just as she promised she would.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal originally conceived the opera as a love triangle between Ochs, Sophie, and Octavian, with a “young vs. old” comic theme. The character of the Marschallin was an afterthought. But as they developed the text, they realized that that she was in fact the most complex and sympathetic character, and the opera wouldn’t work without her. Rosenkavalier expanded to make room for her. And, truthfully, it shows some strain from this shift — it’s far too long, even for a devotee like me, and the scenes with Ochs in particular drag interminably.

She represents a very specific kind of feminine ideal: not chaste, not maternal, but intelligent, ironic, knowing, and kind. She certainly also represents a nostalgic view of the aristocracy; her noblesse comes with a generous helping of oblige. Her nobility, and her generous relinquishment of love, acts as a kind of cleansing force at the opera’s end. I’m not quite sure how the trick works — that the presence of an idealized, self-sacrificing, aristocratic figure cuts the sweetness rather than curdling it, elevates rather than cheapens the sentimentality. But it works. Without her, this opera would be soulless.

I recently saw der Rosenkavalier at the Santa Fe opera, and discussed with that production’s Marschallin, Rachel Willis-Sorensen, the meaning of her bittersweet final line. It comes in the middle of a duet between Octavian and Sophie, united at last, singing about how their love will last for all eternity. Sophie’s father turns to the Marschallin and comments: That’s how they are, the young people. Her reply: Ja, ja (yes, yes).

Somehow this ja, ja carries an enormous amount of weight. My sense has always been that the Marschallin is reflecting that only the young can believe in eternal love, while she is old enough to understand the temporariness of everything. Willis-Sorensen had her own take: that Sophie’s father, in speaking to her as a peer about “the young people,” is inadvertently confirming to her that she is no longer among the young, that she now belongs to the old. In context, I find it heartbreakingly poignant. Find it at the bottom of the musical highlights section below.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal may have been thinking of a “young vs. old” theme, with the opera coming out (as romantic comedies usually do) on the side of the young. But the opera found itself among the old almost as soon as it premiered: after WWI it definitively belonged to an old world. Strauss, having begun his career as an enfant terrible, was now considered conservative. Robert Carsen’s production for the Metropolitan Opera (easily one of the highlights of my opera-going life) ended with a tableau of the Field-Marshall, the absent husband, getting gunned down along with a row of soldiers in Austrian uniforms. Der Rosenkavalier, like the Marschallin’s affair, lingers on a precipice; the grim future is coming for them all.

Musical highlights:

The orchestral opening is meant to evoke lovers in bed, and it’s not very subtle: someone is climaxing at around 0:46.

The Marschallin’s only aria, where she reflects on the inevitability of aging.

The Presentation of the Rose, Octavian and Sophie’s first meeting. Each is struck by the other:

Baron Ochs’s waltz, which recurs at several points:

The famous trio, one of the most beautiful moments in the operatic repertoire. The Marschallin laments that she knew she would have to give up Octavian, but didn’t think it would be so soon, while the young lovers are in awe of her.

Octavian and Sophie’s final duet. Baron Faninal’s comment about young people and the Marschallin’s answering Ja, ja comes at 2:27.

1. He was ultimately fired after insisting on performing work by banned composers and collaborating on operas with his Jewish friend Stefan Zweig.