Misinterpreting Strauss

For its final operatic offering, this year’s Edinburgh Festival presented what it billed as ‘World première of a new production’ of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. I suppose every new production is a ‘world première’ but they don’t need to say so. Anyway, this turned out to be a dismal affair, part infuriating and part just inadequate, the only redeeming feature being the conducting of Markus Stenz and the playing of the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne. As soon as anyone mentions this inspired product of Strauss’s old age they seem to need to carry on at length about its relation to the time and place in which it was written, Germany in the first two years of the second world war. There are those commentators who feel that a composer in such circumstances should comment on them in some way, as Shostakovich did in writing the ‘Leningrad’ Symphony. But why doesn’t that fearful work show these people the dangers of writing ‘relevant’ music? And Strauss’s genius was so patently unsuited to making statements about contemporary affairs, as the lamentable case of Friedenstag conclusively shows, however you interpret it, that sitting in comparative comfort and writing an opera about the nature of opera was clearly the best use to which he could put his time.