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. It may be a reflection on Strauss that he could only produce ‘escapist’ art (though that term needs looking into more than people who bandy it about usually bother to), but until the horrors came to his doorstep and he was impelled to write Metamorphosen, that’s what he did, with masterly skill.

It’s not surprising that a contemporary German director shouldn’t be able to see that, since they all are besotted with the idea of art as commentary on society, in its crudest form. So for the next few years Cologne, which one might think has suffered enough, is going to have to put up with Christian von Götz’s production, which inserts into this piece, set in 1775, as many Nazis and references to them as a perverted education makes possible.