Patrick Bade
Richard Strauss: Arabella – Farewell to Vienna

Patrick Bade - Richard Strauss: Arabella - Farewell to Vienna

- Now, today is officially the last of the 24 lectures I will have given connected to the Habsburg Empire. So and probably there’s some people already, I see there are questions there, who are saying, “Well why are you talking about Richard Strauss "in this context?” Because he was never a citizen of the Habsburg Empire he was very Bavarian. There are reasons why I’m talking about “Arabella” today and I’ll explain in a minute. But in the meantime, I’m going to confuse you even further by telling you a story about Oscar’s Strauss, who’s the one on the right hand side. It’s Johann Strauss II on the left, Richard in the middle, and Oscar Strauss, he was a citizen of the Habsburg Empire and he was a citizen of Austria right up till 1938 when he was forced to flee. And he went to America where he did okay actually because MGM wanted to make a movie of his operator “The Chocolate Soldier” with Risë Stevens and Nelson Eddy. So he went out to Hollywood and he was entertained by one of the big Hollywood moguls who wanted to hear him play the piano. And he asked Oscar Strauss, “Well will you play me your "Blue Danube Waltz” please?“ So this is from a biography of Oscar Strauss. Oscar played, and the producers seemed enthusiastic. "Sure it’s fine, a fine show, Mr. Strauss.” “Yes it is,” agreed Oscar, “such a pity it’s not mine.” “Not yours?” The film king was slightly disconcerted. “Oh, I see there are so many of you Strauss aren’t there? "Then play me the Radetzky march.” So Oscar played the producer and he listened patiently and then said, “Oh quite something that you must be mighty proud of "having written that.” “Well I wish I had,” said Oscar, “but I didn’t.” “The great man was baffled but soon recovered. "Ah, yes, I know who you are, "play your great hit, "you know the one that goes,” Oscar was quite enjoying the situation.

He played again, the “Rosenkavalier Waltz”, which you may not have recognised from my rendition. And then he said, regretfully, “Now please don’t be angry with me, "but I must confess I didn’t write that one either.” So the mogul says, “Are you the great Strauss or aren’t you? "Oscar paused for a second and then began quietly. "I am not the great Strauss, my dear sir, "but perhaps I am one of the great Strausses. "I did not write the Blue Danube but I did write this.” And then he played his own waltz dream. So, “Arabella”, why “Arabella”? Well, “Arabella”, it’s the second of the two operas by Strauss and Hoffmannsthal. Hoffmannsthal of course was Viennese, that is set in Vienna after the “Der Rosenkavalier”. It’s the last of the six operas that Strauss wrote to Loreti of Von Hoffmannsthal. The image you see on the screen shows one of the very rare occasions where they actually met. Their collaboration was almost entirely by correspondence which is very fascinating for us because we can really follow all the ins and outs of how they put these operas together. It’s usually said that they didn’t meet because Hoffmannsthal couldn’t stand Strauss’s rather obnoxious wife, but I’m not a hundred percent sure that that’s true. So it’s an opera. It seemed to me what, to finish with the Habsburg Empire, it’s an opera that has a valedictory quality to it, a nostalgic quality.

I mean, they’re looking back to their earlier great success of “Der Rosenkavalier.” But when Hoffmannsthal proposed the subject to Strauss, he was at pains to point out that the Vienna of “Arabella” is very different from the Vienna of “Der Rosenkavalier”. “Der Rosenkavalier” is 18th century, it’s Maria Thereza. Whereas “Arabella” is set in the Ringstrasse Period, it’s set in 1866. And he says, “The atmosphere of Arabella "is quite close to our own time, more ordinary. "These figures are tangled up with a rather dubious Vienna. "Everyone lives on tick.” And he stresses also the contrast between this new great urban centre of Vienna in the Ringstrasse Period and the character of the hero Mandryka who’s a landowner from the the Slavic eastern part of the Habsburg Empire, and he’s a man of open air, and woods, and fields. He’s a very kind of earthy character. So tragically Hoffmannsthal died while still working on the Loreta. His son committed suicide in 1929. You think, what was it about Vienna, this plague of suicides? And Hoffmannsthal was so overcome with grief that he had a heart attack and died on the way to his son’s funeral. But Strauss was also absolutely overcome with grief at the death of Hoffmannsthal.

And so much so that even though the Loreta was by far from being finished, they were only halfway through their normal backwards and forwards process of Hoffmannsthal proposing something, Strauss saying, “Yes that’s very good, "but can we do it slightly differently?” It was a big two-way traffic between them. But with Hoffmannsthal dead, Strauss felt that he couldn’t make any changes to the text as it was at that point and that caused problems with the second act, as I shall come to you a bit later. So it wasn’t finished and ready for premier till 1933. So of course we’re into the Nazi period by July, 1933. At this point, it was still possible, as you can see from the original poster for the Dresden Opera for Hoffmannsthal name to, even though it’s very small, it does appear. It says lyrical comedy in three acts by Hugo van Hoffmannsthal, despite the fact that was for the Nazis, Hoffmannsthal was what they called , a half Jew. Here is Strauss with the original cast in Dresden in 1933. That’s the Romanian soprano the Viorica Ursuleac on the left hand side, and the baritone Alfred Jerger. There is a recording in good sound actually of a complete performance with the two of them but I’m not keen on either and I’m not going to inflict that on you. So here is Vienna in the Ringstrasse Period, the setting of “Arabella”. And I’ve talked at length about all of this. But this is interesting, I dunno how well you can see at the bottom of this. This is an image of the Stephansdom and we can date it very precisely to the mid 1860s because of the women’s dresses.

You can see they’re wearing these enormous crinolines and that is relevant to the plot of the opera, these crinoline are, they use enormous amounts of material, they’re effectively a kind of tent draped over a parrot’s cage. And it was very expensive to dress a woman fashionably in the 1860s, it required considerable financial investment. And that, sorry there’s somebody at my door who I’m just going to ignore. That impacts on the plot because the Arabella’s family are impoverished aristocrats who are living a very hand to mouth existence in a hotel. And they have two daughters and all their hopes are invested in the older daughter who’s very beautiful and they want her to marry well to save the finance of the family. They can’t afford to dress both their daughters in crinolines. So the younger daughter, Zdenka, although she’s a teenager, is still being dressed as a boy. Oh, here’s a better detail and you can see the typical crinoline dresses of the 1860s, enormous affairs really with acres of material draped over the structure of the crinoline. So act one opens, it’s in this slightly seedy hotel where the Waldners are living and there’s a very brief orchestral prelude, we’re plunged straight into a scene where Arabella’s mother is having her cards read by a fortune teller.

And so I’ll play just a little bit of this ‘cause it’s very typical of Strauss’s pictorial use of the orchestra, he always boasted Strauss and said, “If I want to, "I can describe a teaspoon with the orchestra.” He said he could describe the colour of a woman’s hair. And we’re certainly in this little scene, we can hear the shuffling of the cards. And while this card reading is going on, Zdenka, the younger daughter who’s dressed as a boy is constantly having to go to the door and answer it and tell creditors that no unfortunately her mother can’t see them that day she’s got a migraine. So the first important vocal scene is between Zdenka and one of Arabella’s suitors. He’s a young soldier called Matteo. So Arabella is a very beautiful girl and she has lots and lots of suitors and she has to make up her mind which one she wants. And Matteo, he’s completely taken in by Zdenka’s disguise. He doesn’t realise at all that she’s actually a girl and she’s in love with him. But he is a rather hysterical character and he uses emotional blackmail. He threatens Zdenka that if she doesn’t help him with Arabella, that he is going to kill himself, he’s going to shoot himself. So this is actually a nice role for a tenor 'cause it’s a cliche with Strauss that he writes wonderfully for the soprano voice, he really understands a soprano voice. And we’ve got two lovely soprano roles in this opera. He’s not so good with men and in general, he brings out the worst in German tenors. But I think Matteo is quite a singable role and sung here by the excellent Croatian tenor, Anton Dermota. So next we meet Arabella. This is Ursuleac, how she looked in the world premier in Dresden in 1933. And as I said, I’m not going to play you her even though there are records of her, but I will play you a bit of the singer who sang the Vienna premiere of “Arabella”. This is Lotte Lehmann with Strauss. I mean, as you can see from this photograph she was really too, she was in her mid forties, she was really too old to have taken on this role of a young girl.

And this is what Hofmannsthal has to say about the role of Arabella. “She’s not a woman, but a young girl, "a thoroughly mature wide awake young girl, "conscious of her strength and of the hazard she runs. "A thoroughly modern character.” So Lehmann later admitted that she was, quite apart from her age, she was never really temperamentally suited to this role. Lehmann was a a passionate, impulsive character and this always comes across in her singing. Whereas Arabella is a pretty cool, young woman. She’s completely in control of every situation. Nevertheless, I want to play you this excerpt because well, the singing is so beautiful, the voice is so gorgeous, and Lehmann above all singers has this wonderful command of the conversational passages in Strauss. So it’s got to sound completely natural, just like everyday talking. And it’s really difficult for non-German speaking singers to do this. I remember seeing Kiri Te Kanawa in the role at Cotton Garden, and of course Kiri Te Kanawa had the most heavenly voice, the perfect voice for the big arcs of melody that come later in the opera, but she really couldn’t get across this kind of conversational style. I’m going to interrupt the divine Lottie there just as she’s getting into the big tune of this duet because I’m going to introduce you to the perfect Arabella, the singer by whose performance every other performance must be judged. And this is the Swiss soprano Lisa Della Casa.

As you can see, she was a fabulously beautiful woman with film style good looks. Strauss never heard her in the role of Arabella. He heard her at the beginning of her career singing the lesser role of the sister, Zdenka, and he was already very impressed. And he said, “One day that young woman "will be a great Arabella.” And that was the case. And she’s temperamentally, she has a kind of inner calm, a kind of serenity that is absolutely perfect for the role. So we’re going to take up just where we left off, Mr. Right, she’s waiting, she wants Mr. Right. And it’s often said that the plot of a “Arabella” is pure Mills & Boon of, you know the beautiful young woman who has to choose Mr. Right from amongst all her many suitors. So Arabella has been looking out the window of the hotel and in the street she sees a tall, dark, handsome man. It’s winter, there’s snow outside, he’s wearing a fur coat as you can see. And he attracts her attention and something in the back of her mind tells her, “Yes, maybe this man is Mr. Right,” as he actually turns out to be. So the next scene is between Arabella’s feckless father who’s a compulsive gambler, obsessive gambler and has fritted away all the family fortunes. And in desperation, he has come up with the idea of sending his beautiful daughter’s portrait to an old military comrade who’s a very wealthy landowner in the slavonic lands of the Habsburgs. What he doesn’t know is that his old friend has actually died.

So it’s actually his, I think his nephew, yes, his nephew who’s inherited everything and he receives the letter, and he sees the portrait, and he falls in love with the portrait. How many of situations like that are there in operas where people fall in love with portraits before they even met the person? So he turns up and he has this rather strange scene with Waldner and he says, well, you know, “Why, why did you send my uncle "the portrait of this beautiful young woman? "What did you have in mind?” And Waldner says, “Oh, it’s just a joke, just a joke.” And so Mandryka then has this very beautiful scene. I think it’s one of the most beautiful things that Strauss ever wrote for a male voice. As I said, he normally writes his best stuff for the soprano voice. Mandryka, it’s for a baritone. He’s got to be kind of, as I said, rather earthy masculine type. And my good friend Mike in Munich, he said to me, “I do hope you’re going to play Hans Hotter "who’s so wonderful in this scene.” I should have done of course, unfortunately that recording is back in London so I’m not going to play you that, but I’m going to play you a singer who I think does fit the role very well. This is George London. He was an American singer of Russian Jewish background and particularly well known in German roles. His German is excellent and I really like the directness with which he sings this emotional outburst. Now act one ends with Arabella, see, she’s all dressed up with her muff and she’s going up for a sleigh ride with one of her suitors who’s called Elemer and Zdenka, she obviously doesn’t like him and she says, “Oh off you go then with your Elemer.”

And Arabella pauses and she says, “Mine Elemer, how does that sound to me?” And in this very beautiful final solo of Act one, as I said, it’s a very Mills And Boon situation. She’s thinking about all these young men who are all desperately in love with her. Once again, we have the lovely Lisa Della Casa. See right at the end there, she’s again thinking of this strange man she’s seen in the street, she’d like to meet him, she’d like to hear his voice, and of course he is Mandryka and she gets the chance to meet him and hear his voice. In Act two, which is the Opera Ball. Mandryka has asked permission to propose to Arabella and been given that by her father. So here this is a set for the Vienna Premier in 1933 of the Opera Ball. Here is Della Casa again with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and they have an extended duet in the first half of the Act two, which is very beautiful and very touching. Goes through several stages. Starts off rather awkwardly with Mandryka a bit embarrassed, not really knowing how to present himself to her. And Arabella asking the very awkward question of, “How did you come by a picture of me "down there in Slavonia?” Arabella is very aware that, of course, she comes from a rather dubious background, her father with all his debts and his gambling habit and so on. And she actually tries to warn off Mandryka. She says, as you can see, she says “We don’t rank very high in the world. "we muddle along as best we can. "We’re slightly dubious characters.” And Mandryka answers her.

He says, The best chat up line ever. “Your lineage is plain to see in your countenance.” I hope I live long enough to be able to try that one out one of these days. Well, she accepts his proposal and this extended scene of duets between them ends with a very lovely duet, which has a rather hymn like tune and a biblical quality to it. And the words actually echo the words of the Song of Ruth. She says, “He will be her Lord and she will be his subject "and your house will be my house,” et cetera. Now Arabella asked one last favour of him. She says she wants to say goodbye to her girlhood and this rather happy time where she’s been surrounded by suitors. And she says, “Will you allow me this one last time "to dance a dance with all my ex suitors "to say goodbye to them?” And he says, “Yes.” And that happens. But things start to go wrong because Matteo again is threatening suicide and Zdenka, in order to avoid this, she promises to give him the key to Arabella’s room in the hotel. And Mandryka overhears this conversation 'cause he’s absolutely horrified by this. Now, the rest of this act, the musical inspiration up to this point I hope you’ll agree with me, has been Strauss at his best, it’s one gorgeous thing after another. But he suddenly, at this point, seems to really lose it. So I’m afraid that about the last half hour of act two is pretty tedious and I’m not going to play very much of it but there’s a new character introduced, she’s called Fiakermilli, she’s the mascot of the taxi drivers of Paris. And it was obvious that Strauss and Hofmannsthal conceived her really to be a repetition of the character of Zerbinetta in Ariadne auf Naxos, so a role for a coloratura soprano and she’s meant to be lively, and witty, and charming.

But I have to say, Strauss just doesn’t really come up with the goods and it’s really a thankless, it’s a very difficult role to sing with lots of showy coloratura, but it’s not musically interesting. But I have to play you a tiny bit of it because it gives me the opportunity, I know we’ve got lots of South African listeners, and I’m going to play you the role of Fiakermilli here a little bit of it anyway, sung by the South African soprano, Mimi Coertse, who had a very important career in Vienna, was a much loved singer in Vienna in the 1950s and 60s. Well enough already of her. Now act three, and things pick up in act three. There’s some wonderful music in Act three. And I love the prelude to act three, it’s very stormy prelude which is a very explicit musical account of what Matteo is doing to Zdenka, they’re having really frantic sex. Now, as I said, Strauss is a very pictorial composer and there are several occasions in his over where he musically describes the act of sex. All I can say is that they suggest that he was a bit of a wham bam, thank you ma'am. Certainly a pretty, well you can hear for yourselves. I don’t think I need to say more. And so on and so on. Now, having had his evil way with Zdenka under the impression that she is Arabella, presumably they had sex in the dark, Matteo then leaves and as he comes down the staircase he runs into Arabella coming back from the ball, so he is completely astonished to see her fully dressed and coming in the building this woman he thinks he’s just had sex with in her bedroom.

They have a very strange sort of conversation at cross purposes what with one another. And then gradually the others come back, her parents and Mandryka come back and there’s the situation looks very, very compromising for Arabella and it looks like it’s heading for tragedy when Mandryka and Matteo are about to fight a duel. And at this point, just as they’re about to fight, Zdenka rushes out of the bedroom in a strait of undress and the truth is revealed. And so of course, Mandryka is mortified and so is Arabella because she’s upset that Mandryka didn’t have faith in her virtue. So she retires to her room without even a backward glance at Mandryka and she says, “Well, I’m going to think it over "and I’ll decide tomorrow what I’m going to do.” Now, earlier in the opera, in Act two, Mandryka has described a custom in his part of the world when there is a betrothal that the bride and the groom drink a glass of water from the same glass, and then they smash the glass. As Arabella retires to her bedroom, she orders from a servant a glass of water and then she disappears. Mandryka’s left behind absolutely distraught thinking he’s completely ruined all his hopes for happiness. But then Arabella reappears from her room with the glass of water on the tray and she says to him, as you can see, it was very good Mandryka that you didn’t go because she’s decided the fact that she does want to marry him and she offers him the glass of water so that they can drink it together. So you see there how wonderfully Strauss writes for the soprano of the voice, the way that the melody lifts the voice in a kind of beautiful bellissima. And so I’m going to repeat the very last words of the opera where they drink from the glass and they smash it, and then, “As you can see, we are betroth and joined in sorrow and joy "in hurting and forgiving.” And he says, “You will remain as you are.” And the last words of Arabella are “I can’t be different.” Right, let’s see what we have.

Q&A and Comments:

“Van Gogh’s birthday,” Margaret says. Well we should raise a glass to him.

I am feeling better Paula, thank you very much. I’m feeling much better.

“What, did they not only share a name, but also splendid.”

Yes, the Strauss is yes interesting was facial hair. Van Gogh’s birthday other people are saying.

“The support for a crinoline was under a lobster pot "rather than a parrot cage.” Well there is this wonderful story about the Empress Ajani sending a crinoline out to the Queen of Tonga and the Queen of the Tonga unpacked it, thought, what the hell is this and she hung it from a palm tree and sat underneath it.

Q: “When and where is Arabella performed?”

A: It’s performed a lot. It’s certainly been done many times at the Met and I’m sure it’s done in other American opera houses too.

Q: This is Myrna, she says she’s 85. “You can remember the return of the crinoline?”

A: Well, I do remember it, yes as a child, the return of the crinoline in the 1950s.

“Lucky well I saw Lisa La Casa and Fischer-Dieskau "at the Royal Opera House. "Thought it wonderful at the time.”

And you said that before I enthused about the wonderful Lisa Della Casa. “Modern version of falling in love with a portrait "is falling in love with a dating site.” Oh dear, what a terrible thought.

“Elemer sounds like the Hungarian name.” Yes, it probably is, probably is Hungarian name. Thank you Jennifer.

The closest, essentially a quote from Martin Luther Yes, I suppose it is. Could be seen as that.

Thank you Ruth and I’m glad you liked her voice too, Nanette.

And that’s it for today. And so we’re on to the Age of Revolutions in a short series starting on Sunday. So see you then. Bye-bye everybody.

• [Judi] Bye-bye, thank you, Patrick. Bye-bye everybody.