Review – Rosenkavalier in Salzburg: Back to the Stars | News and criticism | BR CLASSIC
Criticism – Rosenkavalier in Salzburg
Back to the Stars
02.10.2022 by Peter Jungblut
This love is not of this world, but intergalactic: director Roland Schwab shows Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier” as a parable of transience on a universal scale. It was of archaic force and poetic power.
Image source: Anna-Maria Loeffelberger/Salzburger Landestheater
Wouldn’t have been surprised if Joni Mitchell’s legendary Woodstock anthem had been played at some point during these four hours: “We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year old carbon”. In fact, we are all made of stardust from the golden firmament, carbon compounds that are billions of years old. And in no time we’ll be back in the universe, crumbled to the dust that makes us who we are. It shouldn’t matter to time, which inexorably lets the galaxies rise and fall.
Cosmic staging by Roland Schwab
Cupid under the firmament | Image source: Anna-Maria Loeffelberger/Salzburger Landestheater
In this respect, director Roland Schwab, who was just staged and acclaimed at the Bayreuth Festival “Tristan und Isolde”, had an obvious idea for his interpretation of “Rosenkavalier” in the Salzburg Felsenreitschule, where the local state theater is currently stopping for renovation work. He didn’t bother with Viennese rococo, saved himself the confectionery ornaments of the Maria Theresa era, in which Richard Strauss had his comedy played in three acts. Instead, Schwab ignited some kind of rocket and took off with the audience in orbit around love. The whole thing is totally cosmic, and much closer to the Milky Way than the Ringstrasse, along which Vienna’s sights are known to jostle. Sure, “Rosenkavalier” is about the biggest scandal that people have to endure: their finiteness. The field marshal is actually in her mid-thirties, but her lover Octavian is only 17. That can’t go well, at least that’s what the lyricist Hugo von Hofmannsthal thought, and makes the woman become melancholy and despair of her age. That’s how it was back in 1911.
Outfitter Piero Vinciguerra creates powerful images
Ochs von Lerchenau is tormented | Image source: Anna-Maria Loeffelberger/Landestheater Salzburg
Nowadays, people feel old much later and the gender ratio has also changed fundamentally, but unfortunately there is nothing to avoid decay. Decorator Piero Vinciguerra created archaic, powerful images for this: golden balls of different sizes lie in front of the alleged starry sky on a dark night. Some resemble gymnastic balls as a seat, others are a real stumbling block, and three rotating spheres boast a gigantic format. If you want, you can be reminded of the famous opening scene of “Alien”, where astronauts discover spooky eggs in wafts of fog in a distant world. It continues so allusively and profoundly: Three stylized, blood-red female genitals open up, in which fauns with oversized penises dance. Becoming and going, wherever you look. A not particularly courageous and experimental, but very plausible and poetic concept that does not collapse under the melancholy of the music, but stands firm and points far beyond “earthly love” into “heavenly” love, which IS also addressed in the text. And somehow comforting that human problems on this scale shrink to nothing. Cupid, the god of love, dashes around in a golden space suit, letting time whirl around a little faster until his glass helmet turns milky in the heat of battle.
Leslie Suganandarajah conducts at a relaxed pace
The problem with “Rosenkavalier” is the opulent, often overloaded and indecisive score, which oscillates between comedy and self-pity. Conducting both equally is extremely difficult, especially since vast amounts of text have to be worked through, sometimes in dialect. Little of it was understandable. The conductor Leslie Suganandarajah, who was born in Sri Lanka, clearly opted for the melancholic side, for a rather slow tempo and pathetic volume. This fits perfectly with the staging, but also makes the “Rosenkavalier” cosmically difficult. Still, there was laughter here and there.
The soloists
Among the soloists was Magdalena Anna Hofmann, a surprising youthful marshal with a rather easy-going charisma, and Martin Summer as the carefree Ochs von Lerchenau, a very easy-going womanizer who would also pass for Super-Daddy. Both role portraits were also vocally of kitsch-free freshness. Sophie Harmsen in the trouser role of the title character Octavian turned out to be a shadowed lover according to the typical teenage motto: Bonjour, Tristesse! Elizabeth Sutphen as the smitten Sophie was also quite mournful.
All in all, a sentimental journey through the vastness of space, towards the black hole of existence. But beyond the physically explainable, as we know, love is just beginning.
Broadcast: “Allegro” on October 4th from 6:05 a.m. on BR-KLASSIK