Le Bourgeois gentilhomme

One had the impression, however, that with Electra the composer had reached the end of a path.

he could hardly repeat himself with impunity along similar lines a turn of the road or something similar must come next unless strauss's achievements were to run up against a stone wall or lead him into a blind alley this was not fated to happen what the pair were now to achieve was what was to prove their most abiding triumph der rosenkavalier of all the operas of richard strauss the most lastingly popular and if not the indisputable best at all events the most loved and peradventure the most viable and if you will the healthiest if the piece is in some respects sprawling and overwritten it does contain a piece of moving character drawing which stands with the most memorable things the literature of musical drama affords in her musical and dramatic lineaments the aristocratic marchalaine whose common sense leads her on the threshold of middle age to renounce the calf-love of the seventeen-year-old rose-bearer octavian offers one of the finest and most convincing figures to be found in modern opera a creation not unworthy to stand by the side of wagner's hans the baron ox an outright bulgarian if the music accorded him does not lie is a figure who might have stepped out of the pages of rabelais sophie faninal and all the rest of the characters who enlivened this canvas inhabited by almost photographic types of eighteenth-century vienna add up to a truly memorable gallery with which hofmannsthal and strauss have brought to life an era and a culture strauss's score has indisputable prolixities and commonplaces but these traits may pass as defects of the opera's qualities and as such they can take their place in the vastly colorful pageant of hofmannsthal's comedy of manners It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that a peace as earthy as de Rosenkavalier should pass without provoking dissent.

the german kaiser who had small use for strauss's operas yielded to the urging of the crown prince so far as to attend a performance then left the theatre with the words dat is keen muzik for me that's no muzik for me to spare the feelings of the strait-laced kaiserin it was arranged to place the marshalin's bed in an adjoining alcove instead of in high visibility on the stage when the curtain rose nor were these the only objections and of course there were the usual exclamations about the length of the piece no end of suggestions were advanced about the best ways to shorten the work strauss in protest against some of the cuts von schuch had practised in dresden once insisted he had overlooked one of the most important possible abbreviations why not omit the trio in the last act which only holds up the action it should be explained that the great trio is the brightest gem of the act perhaps indeed the lyric climax of the whole score as for the various waltzes which fill so many pages of the third act and to some degree of the second it may be admitted that for all the skill of their instrumentation they are by no means the highest melodic flights of strauss's fancy some of them being merely successions of rather trifling sequences It was assumed after Der Rosenkavalier that the success of the opera indicated that the composer, in a mood for concessions, had tried to meet the public halfway and had renounced the violence, the cacophonies and the dissonances and sensational traits supposed to be his stock in trade.

The comedy was assumed to be a proof of this.

The real truth was that Strauss had not changed his ideals and methods in the least.

it was rather that the public converted by force of habit was itself catching up with strauss and that the idiom of the composer was quickly becoming the musical language of the hour sometimes it took even a few idiosyncrasies of the musician for granted one did not always inquire too closely into just what he meant there is one case when strauss even went to the length of writing music to the words diskret vertraulich discreetly confidentially when hoffmannsthal had written them as stage directions to be followed not as a part of a text to be sung all the same strauss usually kept an eagle eye on the dramatic action he composed with regard to the libretto of der rosenkavalier he wrote to the poet the first act is excellent the second lacks certain essential contrasts which it is impossible to put off till the third with only a feeble success for the second act the opera is doomed Be this as it may, Der Rosenkavalier was anything but doomed.

It was, in point of fact, the work which Strauss had in mind when, at the close of the first Elektra performance, he remarked to some friends, Now I intend to write a Mozart opera.

Whether or not Der Rosenkavalier really meets the prescriptions of a Mozart opera, we feel rather more certain that his next work, Ariadne auf Noxus, comes closer to filling that bill.

It's mostly depicting the king and servants and people from upper class and whatever.

Anyway, there is one, I'll say it in French, I don't know really how it's translated in English, which is called le bourgeois gentilhomme, which basically means the upper class who wanted to be part of the king's people.

King's men, okay, yeah.

Very poorly translated.