Giving it both barrels

In Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, the ageing Emperor Franz Joseph regrets the drab field-grey that has replaced his army’s once-colourful uniforms, seeing in it a premonition of an empire — a world — soon to be defeated and broken up. Franz Joseph is present in Act One of Robert Carsen’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier, right there in the Marschallin’s boudoir: I counted at least four portraits of the old man, gazing phlegmatically down on the sexually charged capers below. And the men in grey are there too. In Carsen’s conception, Baron Ochs and his yobbish retinue are cavalry officers, plotting on one side of the room, while on the other gorgeously dressed fashion models resembling drawings by Erté parade and pose. It’s 1911, the year of the opera’s première, and we all know — as Richard Strauss and his co-creator Hugo von Hofmannsthal did not — what happens next. It’s a point elegantly made.

Then in Act Two Carsen makes it again, with all the subtlety of a howitzer. Two howitzers, in fact: hulking great Skoda siege-guns. Paul Steinberg’s designs place Sophie’s betrothal ceremony in a Wiener Moderne armaments showroom, a mere adjunct to her father Faninal’s latest sales pitch. Got the message yet? Carsen’s worried you haven’t. At the end of the opera, he doesn’t so much subvert Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s graceful pay-off as violate it. If you found the ending of Blackadder Goes Forth moving and powerful and not at all cheap, manipulative and crass, you might enjoy Carsen’s closing gambit.

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By then we’d already seen the chambre séparée where Ochs attempts his seduction transformed into a high-end brothel complete with nudity and a transvestite maître d’, and Octavian — at this point, in Hofmannsthal’s Mozart-inspired scenario, pretending to be a timid chambermaid —attempting to fellate him in a basque and an Eddie Izzard wig.