When the curtain rose on the second act of the Met’s new production of Richard Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, the audience applauded and cheered for the set. Represented onstage was the circa-1910 palace of a nouveau-riche arms merchant, complete with two giant mortars on wheels, a dozen Josef Hoffmann Kubus chairs and Fledermaus tables, and a black-figure freeze, taller than a man, wrapping around the high grey walls. It was beautifully done. So was the silk and painting-covered palace of the traditional aristocracy in the first act, a set which used three matching pairs of receding double doors (white with gold trim) to create an extraordinary sense of space and depth.
When the production team appeared on stage for their curtain call, after the singers and the conductor had been riotously applauded, they were booed. And since Brigitte Reiffenstuel, who designed pitch-perfect costumes, looked concerned, we should clarify on behalf of the audience: She deserves applause. The set designer, Paul Steinberg, deserves downright adulation. It was only the director, Robert Carsen, who was booed—heavily—and deserved it. His third act took the previously accrued goodwill of an eager audience and blew it all to hell.
There is nothing wrong with changing an opera’s setting from what was originally intended. Just keep in mind that the composer and librettist chose their setting for a particular reason, and changing that setting is like changing the key of the music. Still, it can work. And this particular change—replacing 1740s Vienna with the 1910s Vienna in which the opera originally debuted—is a promising idea. It worked well for two acts and was ruined in the third by raunchy vulgarity of the sort that belongs in Berlin’s Komische Oper. At the Met, it made the comedy grotesque and the audience uncomfortable. Mr. Carsen thinks he was being sophisticated. Maybe he was. But his third act is a cataclysm of bad taste that distracts from the music, ruins the action, and overshadows some of the finest singing performances in recent memory.
Richard Strauss, a serious if humorless composer, loved the female voice. He wrote three out of four of the main roles for soprano or mezzo-soprano, including the rosenkavalier himself: the young male romantic lead is a so-called “breeches role,” in this production sung by Elīna Garanča. The young Latvian mezzo, with her boyish good looks and scrupulously masculine movement, is vastly more convincing than was Alice Coote in the Met’s recent Idomeneo. Her acting is superb and her voice is even better: round, resonant, neither heavy nor light, like burnished copper. When her male character piles into woman’s clothing to escape from her lover’s chambers, the audience laughs without consciously sorting it all out.
The rosenkavalier, or “knight of the rose,” is sent by a boorish noble cousin to present a silver rose to the cousin’s fiancée as a token of betrothal. The boorish noble is the Baron Ochs, German for “ox”, a comically low-class blue-blood. The demanding role is sung by bass Günther Groissböck, whose acting was excellent and whose singing was halfway to excellent. He had great power in the upper register but slid into weak low notes.
His intended fiancée, who of course falls in love with the rosenkavalier at first sight, is sung by Erin Morley, who has a delightful voice perfectly matched to the role and the character. The final love-duet between Miss Morely and Miss Garanča is graceful, beautiful, touching—and once again overshadowed by Robert Carsen’s bright ideas.
And Renée Fleming is here. She plays the grande dame of the story, the young knight’s lover and Field Marshall’s wife. A recent and misleading New York Times headline suggested that Miss Fleming was retiring from the opera. She is not. But she is retiring from this particular role, which she first sang for the Met in 2000. With less power than her younger self, her voice is delectable, textured, and rich. When she closes the first act with her aria on the passing of time and the fickleness of man’s affections, we feel it completely. She turns and walks away through three sets of doors and the audience wants to run after her.
Conductor Sebastian Weigle was not in his finest form on opening night—his orchestra was sloppy in the short overture and for much of the first act. The score is difficult and requires more attention. Especially because the music continues seamlessly through each act. It takes great care to let the audience hear how the music shapes, pushes and pulls the story at each moment. Strauss is somewhere in between Wagner’s linearity (which is like watching a flower bloom—in real time) and Schummann’s more readily consumable phrasing (like eating a box of chocolates). Strauss is a little self-indulgent, like a box of chocolates that eats itself. He is at his best when most strictly on his guard, and the famous closing trio in which the grande dame releases her protégé to pursue his young love, sung by Misses Fleming, Garanča and Morley, is a luscious tour-de-force.
Which makes it even more of a shame that Mr. Carsen put his own semi-artistic urges above the music, the singers and his audience. As things stand, he has two-thirds of a fine production.
