Patrick Bade
Der Rosenkavalier

Patrick Bade - Der Rosenkavalier

- Thank you very much, Lauren. Right, before I get to “Der Rosenkavalier,” I want to dispose of two myths, and the first of these myths concerns Richard Strauss himself. People sometimes say to me, “Oh, wonderful composer, Richard Strauss. It’s a pity he was a Nazi.” or “It’s a pity he was a Nazi sympathiser.” So I wish to say, straight away, he was neither. There are many things you can accuse him of, but not that. He never joined the Nazi party, although it would’ve been greatly to his advantage if he had, and if you read his correspondence and you read his diaries, they show that his core values were really bitterly opposed to everything that Nazism was about, and even before Nazism, he was always absolutely opposed to the Deutschnationale, the German nationalists. The height of the First World War, in his correspondence with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, he expresses his exasperation and contempt for the German nationalist. And the other myth I want to touch on, nothing to do with Strauss, but it’s something that that Trudy briefly discussed. It’s this strange myth, where does it come from? That Wagner’s music was played in concentration camps. I mean, I’ve had the great privilege of knowing several survivors, two really quite well, Trude Levi was a very close friend. And I meet Anita Lasker-Wallfisch every week when I’m in London. In fact, last week I had this discussion with her, not for the first time, we’ve discussed it many times.

And both Trude and Anita were very adamant that Wagner was not played in the concentration camps, and both of them also extremely adamant that you have to be absolutely sure of what you are saying. Anything to do with the Holocaust and the concentration camps. You don’t want to give the Holocaust deniers any glimmer of a possibility of saying things that are of denying what happened, and we have all the evidence, we have everything. The Nazis themselves crossed the Ts and dotted the Is. So people who propagate a myth like this are really doing harm, they’re not serving the cause of the survivors. Anyway, to get to the main subject today, “Der Rosenkavalier,” which is the most popular of the 15 operas of Richard Strauss. And in the history of the Metropolitan, it’s the second most performed German opera after “Tristan und Isolde.” Here is Strauss, young man, old man, very, very long career from the early 1880s, active until his death in 1949, one of the longest careers of any great Western composer, starts off as a youthful prodigy, and he ends up as a geriatric prodigy. And the core, the key phase of his career was from 1889, when he composed his tone poem “Don Juan,” up until the opera “Elektra” in 1919, and so in that 20 year period, he was the enfant terrible.

He was really the cutting edge of musical avant garde. And then very quickly, he’s overtaken by Stravinsky and by Schoenberg in the years between “Elektra” and the First World War, and almost overnight, he changes from being a youthful prodigy to the grand old man of European music, and he maintains that role up until his death in 1949. Now, the operas, ‘cause “Der Rosenkavalier is actually the pivotal moment, it’s the moment of change where he begins to look backwards rather than forwards. Most of the operas belong to the second half of his career. I think, in the earlier part of his career, he was intimidated by the looming shadow of Wagner behind him. His first attempt at an opera, "Guntram,” was really a pastiche Wagner, and was a failure, and his first major operatic success that really took off internationally was “Salome,” in 1905, and that attracted the attention of the Austrian poet and man of letters, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This is a silhouette of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, and this was the most important creative partnership of his life. Altogether, they wrote six operas together, and “Der Rosenkavalier” premiered in 1911, was the second of these operas. Now after “Salome” and “Elektra,” both which are very incredibly dark operas, Strauss was very keen for a change of mood, and he badgered Hofmannsthal for what he called a Mozart opera.

He wanted to write something with the lightness and the humour and the humanity in particular, I think “The Marriage of Figaro” was what he wanted. And so on the 11th of February 1909, Hofmannsthal wrote a letter to Strauss and he said, “I think I’ve got what you want. It’s an opera with a lighthearted burlesque flavour to it, in plot; it has possibility for lyrical passages, and there will be two main parts for a graceful girl dressed as a boy, and for a baritone.” Now on the left, we see Strauss with Hofmannsthal on one of their rare occasions that they actually met. Their intense collaboration over two decades was almost entirely carried on by letter, and that is lucky for us, that the Strauss-Hofmannsthal correspondence is, I think, one of the most fascinating insights into the creative process. Everything was discussed by letter. Now, it’s said, and I think you can detect that from the letters that Strauss and Hofmannsthal rarely met in person, because Hofmannsthal couldn’t stand Strauss’s wife, Paulina. So we’ve got Strauss here, with really the two most important people in his life, his librettist and his wife. And that photograph on the right hand side, where I think it quite well conveys the nature and the balance of their relationship. She was a notoriously bossy and rude woman. People were appalled by the way she talked to Strauss in public. But it was a very loving and apparently, a very successful marriage over many, many decades. So yes, this letter, he says, he puts the emphasis on two characters, the baritone who’s later going to become Baron Ochs, and the graceful girl dressed as a boy, which is going to be Octavian, the Rosenkavalier actually of the title, the Knight of the Rose, and in the letter, he says he’s thinking of this role, he’s thinking of two singers to be a model for the character, and they are the American soprano, Geraldine Farrar, who you see on the left hand side, and the Scottish Soprano Mary Garden.

And they were very beautiful women, and they were particularly famous for playing trouser roles. Now, trouser roles, of course, the model for all later trouser roles is Cherubino, in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro,” but trouser roles were very popular all the way through the 19th century, I think mainly because it was sort of titillating and exciting. Women’s legs were a well-kept secret in the 19th century, underneath those crinolines and those skirts, there were very few opportunities that men never had, except in a very intimate situation, to see that women had legs, but these trouser roles, of course, women’s legs are on display. And I don’t think that Hofmannsthal in particular and Bobby Strauss were indifferent to that kind of titillation. So “Der Rosenkavalier,” like most of Strauss’s operas, was premiered in Dresden in January, 1911. And the reason that he chose Dresden was that he had a whole, he could gather there a whole team. I mean, Strauss is very influenced by this Wagnerian idea that opera is a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, that every ingredient has to come together, the dramatic side and the visual side, as well as the musical side. And here you have the team that created the first production of “Der Rosenkavalier:” Strauss, sitting in the centre on the sofa. Immediately behind him is Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and to his right is the great theatre director, Max Reinhardt. I know that Trudy is planning to talk more about him after Christmas.

He was really Mr. Theatre in the German-speaking world, and the tall bearded man to the left of, or to my right, but to his left of Hugo von Hofmannsthal is the artist designer Alfred Roller, who created the most stunning and gorgeous designs for the first production, and this was considered such success, designs are so gorgeous. They actually published a book of colour illustrations of all the costume designs and designs. And they insisted that every production of “Rosenkavalier,” all the new premieres around the world should use the same mise en scene, and the same designs, and that, in fact, continued right up to Second World War. Here you see the costumes for Sophie on the left, and for the Marschallin in on the right. Here is the first Marschallin, in Margarethe Siems. And she was really a phenomenal singer. She’d already sung Chrysothemis in the premiere of “Elektra,” but what today, amongst record collectors, she’s particularly revered, actually, for her absolutely extraordinary coloratura skills. So nobody, no singer today who can sing Chrysothemis or the Marschallin would also sing Lucia di Lammermoor and all the things that Margarethe Siems sang. And in fact, in my collection, one of the most, my most treasured items in my collection is a letter that Margarethe Siems wrote shortly after Strauss’s death, in which she describes a conversation which she had with him. She went to visit him when he was dying. And in that letter, which I actually have my Paris flat, she describes what he said to her on that occasion.

So, in the first letters, as I said, the emphasis is on Octavian and Baron Ochs, but as the correspondence develops, it becomes clear that the character who engaged Hofmannsthal and Strauss most was that of the Marschallin. Marschallin, she’s the wife of a field marshall. She’s meant to be, I think, 32 years old, certainly in her early thirties. And she’s an unhappy, bored, neglected wife, and she takes a teenage lover, why not, called Octavian. So they’re, apart from the baritone, three main roles in this opera are all female roles, and they can all be sung by sopranos, although sometimes Octavian is sung by a mezzo. So the singer who became most associated with this opera was the great Lotte Lehmann. I will be playing some of her recordings to you later. And she’s one of a handful of singers who, at different times in her career, actually sang all three roles. The beginning of her career, she sang the sort of soubrette role of Sophie. She moved on to our Octavian and became most famous as the greatest of all Marschallins. And it’s quite a short role, actually. She doesn’t appear at all in act two, and in the third act, she only comes in in the second half of the act. So it’s not a long role; it’s actually, in terms of stamina and range, it’s not a difficult role, but it’s an extremely demanding role in terms of the interpretation. Other famous Marschallins include, of course, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Renee Fleming, in recent years. Well, for quite a long time, she pretty well made the role her own in major theatres like the Met and Covent Garden.

So, I’ve already indicated the elements of the plot, which is a love affair between a woman, who I suppose in the 18th century, if you are 32, you are hovering on the brink of middle age, and she’s certainly tremendously aware of the ageing process, and her young lover. This photograph on the right hand side reminds me, the very first time I saw Rosenkavalier was actually in a wonderful film version, film of a Salzburg production, and I was in my mid-teens. I was already crazy about Strauss, and I nagged and nagged and nagged until my mother took me to the festival hall to see a screening of this film. And when it started and the curtain goes up and you see these two voluptuous ladies heavily made up with lipstick, apparently making love, I mean, my mother was actually horrified. She thought, “What an Earth have I brought my children to see?” But in fact, the naughtiest bit is really even before the curtain goes up. The prelude to act one of “Der Rosenkavalier” is probably the most detailed, an explicit musical description of lovemaking, certainly, in the history of opera. It begins with a kind of whooping motif on the horns. I’d say describe it almost as priaphic, which is associated with the character of the teenage lover Octavian, immediately followed by a kind of sighing motif associated with the Marschallin. And then we have this really frenzied music.

I mean, we know exactly really how Octavian is making love. He’s very ardent, very impassioned, possibly a little bit inexperienced. And it builds up very, very rapidly to a great climax of whooping horns. And then, the music subsides, and we have these lovely sort of post-coital sighs from the Marschallin, and it quietens down. And then eventually, I’m not going to be able to play all of this, 'cause for lack of time today. But towards the end of this prelude, we hear the dawn chorus in the distance. Now the curtain goes up to reveal them in bed, and they swap endearments with one another. And the Marschallin says to Octavian, I remember that was another thing that actually shocked my mother, who didn’t actually understand a word of German, but she thought that sounded, whatever it meant, it sounded rude. So then their endearments are interrupted by the entry of the Marschallin’s black slave, a servant wearing a turban. Hofmannsthal got this idea from a painting of Hogarth, and I’ll be saying more about that shortly. I suppose today, this is problematic, how this is presented, but the little boy brings in the breakfast and serves and just departs, and the Marschallin, then she notices that, in his ardour, and ripping off his clothes and getting into bed, Octavian has carelessly left his sword on display, so she ticks him off quite sharply, as you can see, “Scatterbrain, how careless you are. Hadn’t you got better manners?” He’s a bit bolshy about this. He’s rather petulant: “Oh, well, if I’m too boorish for you, why I don’t see what you see in me.” And then she, of course, immediately melts, and she turns and she says, “Don’t philosophise about this darling,” and this, oh, the German language, I do so love it. Now we’ll be breakfasted. You know how you can, this wonderful way in German, you can take a noun and you can turn it into a verb.

And then they continue their endearments, and they have pet names for one another. Her real name is Marie Torres. But he calls her Bichette, and she calls him Quinquin. Now, in the last bit of that, you’ll have noticed a striking change of musical style that, after she says we go into kind of pastiche Mozart. And one of the things that critics really attacked Strauss over when the opera was first performed was this rather, the changes of musical style in the opera, the eclecticism. That one minute, it’s in the full Straussian post-Wagnerian, late Romantic idiom. And then it suddenly goes into this sort of slightly dinky pseudo-Mozart. And then as we shall see later, he introduces very anachronistic Viennese waltzes. I think for us, it’s all part of the great charm of this opera, but certainly, some of the early critics were very disapproving of all of this. Now, their endearments are interrupted when they hear offstage, outside the bedroom, the voice of a man trying to make his way into the Marschallin’s bedroom. The Marschallin, of course, has a brief moment of panic, 'cause she thinks, “Oh my god, it’s my husband come back unexpectedly from his hunting trip.” But then, she says, “This voice, oh, it’s not my husband’s voice, it’s the voice,” and they’re calling him Baron, and then she realises it’s her obnoxious country cousin, Baron Ochs. Though I’m going to play you this passage in the historic recording with Lotte Lehmann, because there is no other singer who does this kind of very conversational passage quite as well. I think every singer who wants to sing the Marschallin really needs to study this, it’s actually very, very difficult to do, almost impossible, I think, for a non-native German speaker to get the right kind of lightness and conversational naturalness, while remaining remaining musical.

So this is Baron Ochs, who eventually forces a way into the Marschallin’s bedroom. As I said, he’s her country cousin, and he is an impoverished provincial aristocrat, very full of his, very self-entitled, very entitled, with his aristocratic privileges. And he’s an obnoxious character, at least, the Marschallin certainly thinks he’s obnoxious, though I think that Strauss and Hofmannsthal intended him to have a certain roughish charm. I think that it’s a very, very difficult thing to bring off, particularly today, with modern attitudes. He just comes across as, he can just come across as a real gross sex pest. This role was actually conceived for a particular singer, the Austrian Richard Mayr, although he didn’t actually sing in the premiere, because the Vienna Opera wouldn’t release him, but he put his stamp on the role in the way that Lehmann did on the role of the Marschallin, if only because he had the perfect accent. You want a very specific type of German accent for this role, which is that of a provincial Austrian aristocrat. And so we’re very, very lucky, I think, to have this, although it’s an abridged recording of “Der Rosenkavalier” with Lehmann and with with Richard Mayr, who again, is somebody that anybody wanting to undertake this role really needs to listen to. So he has come to the Marschallin because he’s roused to marry money. He wants a very typical thing in the 18th century, of course, get that in Hogarth’s “Marriage A-La-Mode,” of an impoverished aristocrat wanting to renew their fortune by marrying into the wealthy new rich bourgeoisie.

And apparently, the custom is that his proposal has to be made by a young aristocrat, who will present a silver rose. So he’s come to the Marschallin to ask her help to find the right kind of young man who can do this for him. But as soon as he comes in, we see what kind of man he is. He’s fat, middle-aged, gross. And he’s one of those men who wants to touch up every female who comes near him. So while the Marschallin was chattering away there, Octavian disappears, and he dresses in the clothes of her maid. So he comes out dressed, it’s very complicated this, 'cause you’ve got a woman singer initially dressed as a man, but then pretending to be, yes, a man dressed as a woman, so, kind of double. And I think this is all part of this rather intentional, slightly sleazy charm of the opera. So he comes out and obviously, Ochs is taken in, and he immediately bumps into her, accidentally on purpose, and tries to touch her up as she, or he, is escaping from the bedroom. Wonderful, fruity voice of Richard Mayr. Now we have the Marschallin’s levee, And I’m sure you know that royalty and aristocracy, they had no kind of privacy. I mean, I can’t imagine anything worse than the life of, say, Louis the XIVth. You wake up in the morning, and all the court assembles in your bedroom and watches you getting dressed, and your ablutions, not that the 14th ever washed, but everything that happened to you is observed and politely applaused.

And with the greater aristocracy, it was the same kind of thing, on a smaller scale. So, this is a photograph of the Berlin premiere of “Der Rosenkavalier,” which had a different cast, but it had identical costumes and mise en scene. So you see the Marschallin at her dressing table, you see Baron Ochs on the left-hand side. Somewhere or other, oh yes, you can see the French hairdresser arranging her hair, and you can see, in the background, a man with a flute. And he’s to accompany a singer to entertain the Marschallin. And it’s very clear that all these elements in this scene were drawn from this painting by Hogarth, or “The Marriage A-La-Mode” in the National Gallery in London. So I think Hofmannsthal, you could see, knew London, he would’ve known that picture, but they could also have based it on engravings, popular engravings after this picture. So many elements in the opera, the page boy, the black page boy with the turban, the singer accompanied by the flute, the hairdresser and so on, are based on this picture. And this is a traditional production, where all these elements are kept. And we’re now going to the Italian singer, in fact, for the premiere, Strauss and Hofmannsthal would very much like to have imported Enrico Caruso, but that, his fee was too high, so they had to make do with a local German tenor, and it’s a gorgeous piece that is quite often done in concert or on CD, separate from the operas. Lies very high, the tessitura for a tenor, it’s not easy to sing, 'cause Strauss and Hofmannsthal were actually very snobby about Italian opera, they didn’t really rate it very highly, and particularly the silliness of the words in a lot of Italian opera.

So although this piece is gorgeous, it’s actually a little bit of a criticism of, or a sort of caricature of what they thought of Italian opera. So all the hangers-on disperse, and the Marschallin is left alone, and she’s in a very melancholy mood. And she’s disgusted by Ochs and the very idea that he could force himself on a young girl from a wealthy family. And she has this very beautiful monologue. And again, I’m reverting to the great Lotte Lehmann. And she’s so wonderful in the way that she puts across the text. I mean, the bitterness that she says, . She’s got this total contempt for Ochs. Octavian returns, now dressed once again as a young man. And he finds her lost in very melancholy thoughts. And he can’t seem to rouse her out of this state of melancholy. She has a second monologue, where she talks about the passing of time. She’s become very, very aware that time is passing and that she will age, and she talks, she describes how she sometimes gets up in the night to stop the ticking of the clocks. So she hands over the silver rose to Octavian, and he departs, and act one ends with a kind of beautiful dying fall. Act two opens with brilliant festive music. We’re now in the StadtPalais, the Town Palace of the wealthy businessman Faninal. And this is, of course, one of the great spectacular scenes in opera, the presentation of the silver rose. Everything is supposed to be silver and white in scene. And Octavian arrives in this beautiful silver costume, and he presents the rose to Sophie. And the rose is perfumed with a Persian essence.

This is how it looked in the very first production in Dresden, in 1911, and the singer who became most associated with the role, she didn’t sing in Dresden, she sang in the Hamburg premiere, this is Elisabeth Schumann. And for the next 20 years, she was the Sophie of choice and she was a favourite singer of Strauss. And luckily, she’s also on that historic recording, which I’ve used already. And I want to play you the moment where she thanks Octavian for the rose. And she says, “It has a very strong perfume,” and he explains, “Yes, it’s got drops of Persian rose oil.” And then her voice has this wonderful liftoff, very Straussian, of course, this is something that comes back into his writing for the soprano voice at the end of his life, in the famous “Four Last Songs,” that he creates these wonderful arches, a sort of melisma of arching melody, and nobody does this quite so exquisitely as Elisabeth Schumann. Of course, her happiness is, and her illusions are shattered when she lays eyes on the gross, elderly Baron, with his coarse manners, and she and of course, Octavian, have already fallen in love at first sight. And Octavian, in trying to protect Sophie from the gross behaviour of the Baron, actually fights a duel with him, and the the Baron gets a little nick in his arm, and you see him resting after the duel here. And there’s a lot of funny stuff in this act that I must admit I don’t find very funny. I think there are some fairly tedious unfunny passages, but the act ends, it’s an act which starts brilliantly, and it ends brilliantly.

Octavian, via an Italian intriguer called Annina, sends a letter of assignation to the Baron, to lure him into a honey trap, really, in a brothel. And the act ends with famous waltz song, as I said, waltz is very anachronistic in the 18th century. The waltz is a 19th-century dance form. So this is one of the popular highlights of the opera, the song that that Baron sings to himself as the letter is read to him, and the act ends with him going down to a bottom E. I think that’s the same note that Zoroastre’s aria ends on. It’s the lowest note from the human voice that you are ever likely to hear in the theatre. Act three takes place in a house of ill repute. And when the curtain goes up, we see Octavian supervising the honey trap, and he’s going around, setting everything up. And there’s a wonderful moment. I don’t think I’ve got time to play it to you, 'cause I’m running out of time, but do listen to it, on a recording or on YouTube or whatever, when the servants come in and they light all the candles, and each candle being lit and flaring up is described in the orchestra, 'cause Strauss, I think, had a unique capacity, which he was of course very, very proud, of describing things almost visually through instrumentation. He once claimed that he described the colour of Donna Anna’s hair in his tone poem, “Don Juan.” And so, there’s a wonderful musical pictorialism here and also a whole succession of delicious, very catchy waltzes. And then, Octavian arrives, dressed as the maid Marianne. And there’s a scene which you may or may not find funny. It really depends on how successful that the singers are as actors, where she repeatedly, or he repeatedly frustrates the Baron’s attempts to seduce her, him, and she pretends to be drunk, and so on.

Again, I’m going to skip that, 'cause I want to, there are two more pieces of music I want to play you. So, suddenly, all this is interrupted by Annina bursting in with a whole group of children, and she claims to be his wife, and that these are all his children, or his mistress, and they’re all shouting, “Papa, Papa, Papa.” It could be a very Boris Johnson moment, I think. And then the police are called, and then Faninal arrives with Sophie, and of course is absolutely appalled, and shocked to discover the situation. And finally, the Marschallin arrives, and she really takes command of the situation, and she dismisses Ochs, but she quickly takes in that of course, what she most feared, that Octavian has fallen for a younger woman, has actually happened. She sees straight away that Octavian and Sophie have fallen in love with one another, and nobly and graciously, she hands over her lover to the younger woman in this great trio, which is one of the, I would say, one of the most sublime moments in all of opera with these three, you should have three very beautiful soprano voices, or maybe two sopranos and the mezzo, blended together. This is what Strauss did better than any other composer, this always turned him on, when he could have two or more female voices intertwined with one another. That’s where I am freed, I have to stop, 'cause I’ve run out of time, and I’m going to go straight into…

Q&A and Comments:

“I’m a singer and singing teacher. I sing Strauss, but would never sing Wagner, even if I had the rise for it. Not even "The Wesendonck Lieder,” which are lovely.“ Well, that’s a personal choice.

"Which would I consider,” Herbert. I think the greatest opera that Strauss wrote is “Elektra.” I love Rosenkavalier, but I must say, there are parts of it I don’t love. I think it’s uneven. There are parts of act two I’d quite happily lose.

Strauss collaborated with Stefan Zweig to write an opera entitled, “Die Schweigsame Frau.” That’s true, and it’s a very, very interesting story. And I refer you to the quite extraordinary letter that Strauss wrote to Stephan Zweig. It tells you everything about Strauss, everything that was good about him, and everything that was limited and not so good about him. That letter, I don’t have time to go into it now, but I’m sure if you google it, you’ll find the letter that Strauss wrote to Stefan Zweig in 1934, that was intercepted by the Nazis, and of course got Strauss into terrible trouble.

“Heaving bosoms okay, but not legs.” Yes, I know, it’s strange, isn’t it? Well, customs and morals and manners change. Kiri Te Kanawa, gorgeous voice, absolutely heavenly voice, of course. But what she didn’t have, I would say, was the ability to do all that kind of throwaway chatter stuff. Very, very difficult for a non-German to do. You’ve watched Rosenkavalier for the first time today. It was the Garsington production. I will check that out on YouTube myself.

Q: Is there a reason why so many opera singers are overweight?

A: Well, I think you need, you need a certain amount of weight to make the sound, and to overcome the sound of the orchestra.

“Baron Ochs to Verdi’s Falstaff,” that’s interesting. Herbert, thank you you always make such interesting comments, yes. I mean, you could have the same singer singing both. There would be some linguistic problems I suppose, have to be very, very good in German and Italian, for those two roles. But yes, they do have quite a lot in common, of being grotesque and appalling, but actually somehow also having certain grace.

“Mia Persson was the Marschallin in the operas performed this year.” A lovely singer, Mia Persson, I bet she was gorgeous. “Set in the '50s,” hmm, well, I’m not sure about that.

Q: What’s the page boy holding?“

A: In that first image, he was holding breakfast on a tray.

Q: "Do you agree that the song of the rose,” which is the song of the rose, you mean, there’s the song that the tenor sings?

A: It’s gorgeous; I’m not sure, it wouldn’t be one of the most sublime moments. I think that trio that I played at the end is really the sublime moment, again, an interesting comment, very interesting comment: “Marschallin’s song is like hearing art nouveau in music.” It is very, very Belle Epoque. I think people came to see it almost immediately after the First World War, looking back with nostalgia. That was one of the reasons why people loved “The Rosenkavalier” so much, that it seemed to encapsulate, although it’s set in the 18th century, it seems to encapsulate the values and the charm of the Belle Epoque. I think there’ll be more sense actually, in setting “Rosenkavalier” in that period, at the beginning of the 20th century, than in the 1950s.

“Schwarzkopf and Jurinac, photo of,” actually no, in the photo it was Schwarzkopf and Christa Ludwig, though in the movie, of course, it is Jurinac who’d be my number one favourite Octavian of all time. She’s in the Salzburg movie. Maybe I shared that. I can’t remember.

Thank you Yvonne. Yes, I remember it very well, that Rosenkavalier. It’s not 40 years ago, it’s more like 25 years ago. I remember that very well. “There’s notes that Sophie are singing are now coming, coming up at the end of the opera.”

I’m really sorry I couldn’t play you, I ran out of time to play you the final duet. She can remember hearing the Silver Rose, Roller had made of sterling silver, and was carried by a security guard. That sounds like a publicity stunt to me. “Is Sparafucile’s low note as,” I don’t think it is. I’ll have to check that out, but I don’t think it is quite that note. Schlamperei, I love that word, don’t you? Schlamperei, 'cause there’s that very famous Mahler saying, “Tradition is Schlamperei.”

Q: “You think it’s the weakest part of the opera?”

A: Well, I agree with you about all that funny stuff. I also find it a bit tedious, and not very interesting musically, but I do like all the orchestral introduction of act three, as I said, with the very detailed description of the lighting of the lamps. And I like all those waltz tunes too. We’d love to hear you do a session on Verdi’s Falstaff. I mean, yeah, I could certainly do that at some point. I think I’ve lectured on every single one of the Verdi operas, as I do these regular trips to the Verdi festivals, I’ve even lectured on the most obscure ones.

“Most ravishing of operas.” Yes, it is ravishing, really is. And in parts, very, very moving. Trudy, it’s on your list. Tomowa-Sintow, I think Balzer, and Janet Perry, particularly Tomowa-Sintow and Balzer, I think are really wonderful. Thank you all for your appreciation.

No Callas was not overweight, but there are many people who think, well, she was overweight of course at the beginning of her career. And the many people who think that losing all that weight actually damaged her voice.

Q: Were my parents patrons of the arts?

A: My mother was very, I have to thank her in a way, for introducing me to music and art. Yes I do, I’m appreciative of that. Francine saying it was her husband’s favourite opera. Garsington, there’s another endorsement to the Garsington.

“You wonder if body weight really has anything to do.” It’s very, very controversial. But yes, well, 'cause Edith Piaf, it’s a very different kind of singing. Projection is of course not necessarily to do, whether a singer can really project into a space, that’s not necessarily to do with body weight. Thank you all.

Q: What do I think of Cecilia Bartoli?

A: Oh, that would take me a long time to tell you, mixed feelings. In some ways I admire her very, very much indeed. I think she’s a totally extraordinary artist. But there is some very odd things about her technique. And whenever I’ve seen her live, I’ve been a puddle on the floor. But I’m not so keen on all of her recordings, whereas sometimes I think there’s a sense of artifice almost, in the way that there is with the recordings of Schwarzkopf.

Q: Was Sophie in the repertoire Lisa Della Casa?

A: Lisa Della Casa was the other great singer who sang all three roles. She started off with Sophie, she then became Octavian, and she ended her career singing the Marschallin. And that seems to be the end.

Thank you all very, very much, and I’m sorry I had to leave out a couple of things at the end. There’s always so much to say and unfortunately, things that you have to leave out. So I’m moving into a very different, well actually, still staying in the same 18th century, but in the late 18th century, in the Revolution. We’ll be looking at Andrea Chenier on Sunday. Bye-bye.