DIE LIEBE DER DANAE AT BARD

ccSCOOP PICK: DIE LIEBE DER DANAE
AT BARD

William Parker
Director, ccSCOOP

07-28-11 - Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae) is a fascinating, late-period opera in the Richard Strauss canon. Written in 1937 by Viennese librettist Joseph Gregor and based on sketches written by Strauss' long-time librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl, it is his next-to-last opera, assembled against a backdrop of hell (and not performed live until the monsters were dead, in prison or in Argentina).

It is very rarely performed. It didn't premiere in the United States until the mid-sixties. It makes tremendous demands on singers.

In what promises to be the cultural event of the summer season, music director Leon Botstein and The American Symphony Orchestra at Bard SummerScape will be giving us some truly glorious music as they forge the vital connection between the repertoires of both Strauss and Jean Sibelius, the latter composer being the subject of the 21st annual Bard Music Festival in August.

Audiences accustomed to Top 40 classical programming have an opportunity to hear Strauss at his most spectacular, in a fully staged production directed by Kevin Newbury and featuring soprano Meagan Miller as Danae.

PRESS RELEASE

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. –

Bard SummerScape presents the first fully-staged New York production of Richard Strauss’s unjustly neglected opera Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae, 1940), opening Friday, July 29 at the celebrated Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College (five performances through August 7). The production stars soprano Meagan Miller, a grand finals winner of the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, and will be directed by dynamic young opera and theater director Kevin Newbury; both are making their SummerScape debuts. Set designs are by the renowned Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly. The opera’s five performances (July 29 & 31; August 3, 5, & 7) feature the festival’s resident American Symphony Orchestra and music director Leon Botstein, whose 2001 Telarc recording of the work won high praise; Botstein gives a free Opera Talk before the July 31 performance.

Reviving an important but rarely performed opera is one of the ways the Bard SummerScape festival paints a nuanced portrait of the past, and this year’s exploration of “Sibelius and His World,” the subject of the 21st annual Bard Music Festival in August, is no exception. Sibelius (1865-1957) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) were close contemporaries, whose life and work show noteworthy parallels. In selecting Die Liebe der Danae as its operatic centerpiece, Bard aims to investigate those similarities.

Like Sibelius, Strauss excelled at painting nature in sound, and the two manifested greater command of orchestral color than any other composers of the 20th century. Both flirted briefly with atonality in the wake of Schoenberg’s first expressionist experiments: Strauss with Salome and Elektra and Sibelius with his Fourth Symphony and Luonnotar. Both composers, moreover, abandoned it soon afterwards, Strauss re-embracing a more tonal musical language with Der Rosenkavalier and Sibelius with The Oceanides and the Fifth Symphony. In addition, both composers turned to the distant past, and in particular to myth, to deal with issues of their day. For Sibelius, the Kalevala provided the basis of his exploration of national identity and nationhood. And Strauss turned to the Greeks to explore love, human nature, and money.

Both supported each other’s work: it was Strauss who conducted the world premiere in Berlin of Sibelius’s seminal violin concerto in 1905, while, for his part, the great Finn studied Strauss’s music in Germany, where he reported finding Salome’s instrumentation “masterly.

If the two, while each achieving a distinctive and original voice, may be said to have resisted musical modernity, this conservatism extended also to politics: both Strauss and Sibelius, facing different pressures in their respective corners of Europe, made compromising concessions to the Nazis. When Finland allied herself with Germany against the Soviets, Sibelius – championed as a Nordic “Aryan” – became a favorite composer of the Third Reich, and his works received numerous performances. While harboring private doubts about the Nazis’ racial laws and policies, he took no public stand against them, and was assiduous in collecting German royalties.

Strauss, based in Berlin, tried to cooperate with the Nazi regime while maintaining a non-political stance, in order to promote his career and advocate for Jewish friends and relations, who included his daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Although he has often been denounced as a Nazi stooge, in fact Strauss’s role was more complicated; it is telling that he privately considered Goebbels’s “Jew-baiting as a disgrace to German honor,” while the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, in his turn, looked forward to having “no further need of this decadent neurotic.”

Since the opening of the Fisher Center at Bard, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra have been responsible for championing and restoring to the stage a growing number of important but long-neglected operas. All of these presentations and their remarkable stagings have been warmly received by audiences, not least last season’s The Distant Sound (Der ferne Klang). The opera by Franz Schreker was selected as one of New York’s “Top Ten Classical Music Events of 2010”. As the magazine explained, “A hit in 1912, Schreker’s brilliantly florid opera has recently reemerged after a long dormancy and made its U.S. stage debut at Bard last summer in a performance good enough to whet the appetite for a major opera company’s attentions.” The New York Times agreed:

“Mr. Botstein did outstanding work in managing a score of daunting complexity and eloquent nuance. … [Director] Mr. Strassberger’s engagement was evident throughout, helping to underscore the most crucial lesson to be learned from the undertaking: Der ferne Klang is not merely a lavish curiosity worth a sidelong glance but a powerful, provocative work that richly deserves the committed advocacy it received here. All told, this presentation must surely number among Mr. Botstein’s most important achievements.”

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae, 1940)

Libretto: Joseph Gregor

American Symphony Orchestra

Conducted by Leon Botstein, music director

Directed by Kevin Newbury

Set design by Rafael Viñoly

Danae: Meagan Miller

Jupiter: Carsten Wittmoser

Merkur: Jud Perry

Pollux: Dennis Petersen

Xanthe: Sarah Jane McMahon