Trivial pursuits | 7 June 2018

‘Is there an end [to this opera] that is not trivial?’ asks the Countess in her final bars of Richard Strauss’s last opera Capriccio. Given the previous two and a half hours, the answer would seem to be a decided no. It is a frothy confection even by the standards of his later operas, the better parts reminiscent of the Prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos and some of Arabella. One thing to be said in its defence is that Strauss’s writing it in 1941–2 is no criticism of him or of the work. People make a fuss about that, but do they think he should have produced an heroic piece — something he had already done, unfortunately — or another work in favour of peace, like the disastrous Friedenstag of 1938? Capriccio is the kind of thing he was best at, charming, inconsequential, chatty with occasional outbursts of orchestral sumptuousness, though surely, at nearly two and a half hours, too long.