A Cougar Caught in Time’s Trap By DANIEL J. WAKIN

October 11, 2009
Into the Music
A Cougar Caught in Time’s Trap By DANIEL J. WAKIN

RICHARD STRAUSS’S “Rosenkavalier,” to be revived on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Opera, begins with one of the most vivid depictions of sexual ecstasy in music: an orchestral buildup reaching a climax in a brace of whooping French horns.

And then the real action starts.

After that orchestral prelude, the curtain opens on a moving exploration of the passage of time, the nature of love and what it means to be noble, all under the vastly understated subtitle “Comedy for Music.” In fact, the opera was originally to have been called a “burlesque opera.” The uncanny thing is how much of the sublime mixes with the comic business. In that way, it’s downright Mozartean.

Hugo von Hoffmansthal, with an assist from Strauss, produced a subtle and dense libretto. The score is full of invention and recurring themes that match the characters and their moods, allowing the music to reflect the emotional interplay onstage. And together, the words and music create perhaps the greatest portrait of a woman in opera, courtesy of a composer who excelled in the art of writing for the female voice.

At the Met, Renée Fleming will take on that role, the Marschallin. Ms. Fleming has portrayed the Marschallin often in her career, but not for nearly a decade. “Her character is the best-delineated woman in the soprano repertory,” Ms. Fleming said in a recent interview. “To play her is to be in a modern play. It’s just so perfect.”

In the opera’s mid-18th-century Viennese setting, the Marschallin is the wife of an absent general, a woman of a certain age with the regal name Marie Thérèse to match that of the Hapsburg empress. She has taken on a 17-year-old lover, Octavian (Susan Graham). Act I opens with the two in the aftermath of the prelude’s ecstasy.

The plot revolves around the impending marriage of Baron Ochs (Kristinn Sigmundsson), a boorish relative of the Marschallin who gives lechers a good name, to the much younger Sophie (Miah Persson) in another age-challenged romance.

The Baron lusts after Mariandel, a maid of the Marschallin, who is actually Octavian in a dress. (Since Octavian is played by a woman, à la Mozart’s Cherubino, all sorts of complicated readings arise.) The Baron asks the Marschallin to suggest someone to carry out the tradition of presenting a silver rose to his fiancée. Octavian, she answers, mischievously — or maybe not.

Octavian, an impetuous youth oblivious to the subtleties of human relations, and Sophie fall for each other. Octavian and the Baron duel. The Baron is humiliated in a complicated plot (involving scheming commedia dell’arte Italians) that leads to his withdrawal. In a grand act of renunciation, the Marschallin relinquishes Octavian to a younger rival.

The characters evoke Mozartean precedents soaked in lush Viennese Romanticism. Ochs is a crude Don Giovanni, the Marschallin a more rounded Countess, Octavian a more romantically successful Cherubino, Sophie a naïve Susanna. A wistful, nostalgic mist seems to envelop the opera, first performed in 1911, just a few years before World War I would shatter the world in which it was set.

That Octavian will move on is clear from the beginning. An inkling comes early in the first act. When the Marschallin suggests the Rosenkavalier mission, he tells her to be careful. “I know what I’m doing,” she answers, as if foretelling the outcome.

Time, after all, makes it inevitable. The idea is explored in the Marschallin’s famous, heartbreaking monologue at the end of Act I, in which she recalls her youth and bafflement at the workings of time. “I am still the same person,” she ponders. “It is all such a mystery.” The bass clarinet, an instrument often used by Strauss to portray mystery, murmurs.

Time is indeed a strange thing, she muses. “It trickles across our faces. It trickles in the mirror there. It flows around my temples.” Sometimes in the middle of the night, she arises and stops the clocks around the house. “You will leave me for someone else younger and prettier,” she assures Octavian.

Of this section, the musicologist Ernest Newman wrote, “The music breathes the very subtlest essence of wisdom, tenderness and a life’s philosophy.”

Ms. Fleming said the passage of time had caused her to relate even more to the Marschallin’s feelings on aging. “Who of men and women living in modern society can’t relate to that?” she asked.

The next great musical moment comes early in Act II, the stately and otherworldly scene of the presentation of the silver rose. The rose music is almost squeaky, with down-stepping chords played by three violins, three flutes, a celesta and three harps. Here Sophie’s voice soars into the highest vocal realm of the opera’s sound world. The Marschallin is absent from this act, and from the first part of Act III, where many critics have found the extended stage business tiresome.

Until, that is, the Marschallin makes another regal entrance to set the discombobulated world aright. And now time, that relentless pursuer, stops. The three female voices — Octavian, Sophie and the Marschallin — sing the glorious trio that caused a stunned silence in a rehearsal before the premiere, perhaps the most beautiful five minutes in opera. Ms. Fleming said she remembered exactly where she was when she first heard it (an apartment in college).

The Marschallin alone sings the first 12 measures of the trio, which grows into a weaving interplay. In one of the remarkable echoes that fill the work, the opening notes are an elongated version of the tune that accompanies Mariandel when she declines wine offered by an Ochs bent on seduction in a far more prosaic scene.

“Der Rosenkavalier” was a big hit when it opened in Dresden, not Berlin, where it was deemed too licentious. Word traveled fast, ticket booths were set up in downtown Berlin, and special “Rosenkavalier trains” were added to take Berliners to Dresden for performances. No need for that here. The New York subway system should work fine.