A little opera tip for the weekend: On Saturday at 1:00 pm Eastern time you can hear that old warhorse Carmen from the Metropolitan Opera, but if you wait an hour, until 2:00 pm, tune in to radio klassik Stephansdom’s Opernabend for a true curiosity: Richard Strauss’s Die Liebe der Danae, in a 1999 performance from the Garsington Opera.
Completed in 1940 but denied a public premiere until 1952 at the Salzburg Festival, the opera is vaguely based on the story of Danae, Midas, and Jupiter. In her review of the Garsington Opera production in The Guardian, Fiona Maddocks said, “Despite its dark undertones, [Strauss] dubbed the work a ‘light mythology,’ made Midas his benign hero and entangled him with the delicious story of Danae, whom Jupiter seduced in a shower of gold, making it all a Freudian bubble bath of the psycho-erotic.” She went on to provide this brief synopsis of the plot:
Joseph Gregor’s libretto, based on an outline by Strauss’s great collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, lacks the latter’s wit or elegance, making Strauss’s transformation of the leaden plot through music all the more remarkable. The bankrupt Pollux’s daughter Danae has gone off men but remains partial to gold, about which she fantasises freely. Fortunately, Midas falls for her and she for him. Unfortunately, Jupiter does likewise, in a jealous rage turning Danae into gold and depriving Midas of his gift.
In the powerful third act, Jupiter returns as a humble old man (looking remarkably like the ageing Strauss in this production), with a reflective monologue depicting the impotence of age. Still she rejects him. With her final word, ‘Midas’, the opera ends.
Rarely performed (most recently here in America at the Bard SummerScape festival in 2011), Strauss’s score nonetheless is said to feature some of his finest music. His biographer Michael Kennedy says, “The treatment of the many themes and motifs is amazingly inventive, the orchestral colours glow and shine – with Greek gold and mediterranean sunlight … Die Liebe der Danae does not deserve its neglect. Its third act alone lifts it into the category of first-rank Strauss.” And Leon Botstein, who conducted the SummerScape production, told The New York Times that the opera was newly relevant in an interview with Peter G. Davis: “Not only is the score a marvel of technical ingenuity and lyrical generosity, but the subject is also completely up to date. What could be more modern in these days of financial crises and deficit spending than a morality tale about Midas’s fabulous golden touch and Danae’s obsession with his riches? There’s a valuable lesson in Danae’s eventual rejection of Jupiter’s tempting offer of divinity and her willing embrace of poverty with Midas, when he loses everything and is reduced to the life of a humble donkey driver.”
The Garsington Opera recording, conducted by Elgar Howarth, features Peter Coleman-Wright as Jupiter, Adrian Thompson as Midas, and Orla Boylan as Danae. Opernabend is hosted by Eva Reinold. So drag down the to brush up on the plot details, then tune in tomorrow, Saturday, January 17, at 2:00 pm Eastern time for that Freudian erotic bubble-bath.
Towels, anyone?
This is not that. It’s fair to be leery of the biographical approach to any writer, and kudos to Bather Woods for admitting it. He has produced a swiftly and gracefully readable book about Schopenhauer which doesn’t stint on explication (though because Schopenhauer wrote for a general public rather than an academic audience there are fewer knotty interpretive problems than you might expect). Divided into ten chapters, the book focuses on the philosopher’s life, then the issues that arise from it: his father’s early death introduces a discussion of Schopenhauer’s attitudes towards suicide; his early travels in Europe provide a ground for explicating Schopenhauer’s approach to madness and punishment; his often misogynistic conception of women is clarified through a survey of Schopenhauer’s relationship with his sister and mother; and the last chapter, of course, focuses on death, from both the biographical and metaphysical stances. I should note here that Bather Woods is especially good on Fichte’s influence on Schopenhauer, and that a chapter on Schopenhauer and photographic portraiture is a new contribution to a consideration of Schopenhauer’s thinking on aesthetics. (I admit I was a little disappointed that Bather Woods gives Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory short shrift, but this is a quibble; certainly that ground has been covered quite comprehensively in the past; aesthetic experience, and especially music, is where the Veil of Maya may be at its thinnest, though, and I would have liked to see Bather Woods’s two cents on this issue.)