Ariadne’s thread

‘They’ve dined well, they’ve drunk their fill, their brains are dull and slow. They’ll sit snoozing in the dark until they hear some applause, and then, out of courtesy, they’ll wake up’. Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s words, not mine. I’ve never bought the notion that Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier somehow predicts the first world war. But what’s screamingly obvious is that their next collaboration, Ariadne auf Naxos, precisely skewers the non-existent (in 1916) world of English country-house opera. A millionaire patron has hired an opera company and a comedy troupe for an evening of champagne-fuelled hospitality, and he wants them both finished in time for the fireworks. Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s big idea is to collide the two artistic worlds, live on stage, and see which wins.

It’s a meta-opera, in other words, and it’s a rare staging that — in the backstage Prologue, at least — can resist updating the action to the present.