Richard Strauss
DIE LIEBE DER DANAE
On the programme of the Salzburg Festival again 50 years after the world premiere
“You take it lightly, but for me you make it hard”. The words of Hans Sachs as he arrives at the festive meadow could describe the ambivalent perspective from which Richard Strauss is seen on the one hand by the public and on the other by his critics, who regard his late works in particular as problematic, as escapist.
Poetic power and theatrical instinct
We know from a note written by the composer in 1935 that he discussed and negotiated libretti with many major authors, including Gabriele d’Annunzio and Gerhart Hauptmann. But Hugo von Hofmannsthal was the only one who had the poetic power and theatrical instinct to “offer him stage subjects in a form appropriate for being set to music”. However, in a repertoire list he gave to Karl Böhm, Strauss regarded even the operas composed after Hofmannsthal’s death Die schweigsame Frau, Daphne and Die Liebe der Danae as the “greatest works of literature” which were to be fostered in the opera archives.
Lost in the archives
Posterity did not adhere to this obligation so strictly for any opera other than for his penultimate one Die Liebe der Danae. The world premiere planned for Salzburg could not take place because of the proclamation of total war. Only invited guests were able to attend the final dress rehearsal conducted by Clemens Krauss on 16 August 1944. After the first staged performance in Salzburg on 14 August 1952 – also conducted by Krauss and with Annelies Kupper as Danae – the work that even Strauss admirer Rudolf Hartmann regarded as unsuccessful in its dramatic structure was lost in the archives of opera history.
Early mythical antiquity
Already twenty-five years earlier Hugo von Hofmannsthal had proposed the subject to the composer. The poet, in his draft dating from 1919, Danae or the Marriage of Reason, had combined two mythical subjects: the story of Danae, desired by Zeus and visited by him in the form of a shower of golden rain, and that of King Midas, for whom Dionysos had had to fulfil the wish of transforming everything he touched to gold. In two letters, one dating from 2 February and one from 30 April 1920, Hofmannsthal wrote that it was “a draft related to operetta …, early mythical an- tiquity, treated satirically, in the Lucianic sense, as a fairy-tale”. For the staging Hofmannsthal had in mind “antiquity in the style of the Wiener Werkstätte (and not the seriousness of Alfred Roller) or even better a Poiret antiquity”.
Conflict
Strauss did not take up the plan until 1935, after Joseph Gregor – who had allegedly come across the material completely independently – suggested the same subject to him. As they were working on the project it became evident that the ideas of the theatre-wise and pragmatic composer and those of the ambitious librettist were frequently incompatible. Strauss regarded the inclusion of Jupiter in the plot acceptable only on condition that all similarity to Wagner’s divine wanderer should be avoided, and as long as the figure could be “de-Wotanised”. He considered this to be all the more important as the conflict between gold and love is the central motif of Wagner’s tetralogy. After being embraced by Midas, Danae turns into a rigid golden figure but ultimately she decides against the enticing gift of the gods and in favour of Midas, who, because he disobeyed his god, has become a donkey-driver.
Operetta in its finest form
Hofmannsthal wanted to stage the symbolic and meta- physical elements of the opera as an ironically distanced divertissement with a reconciliatory ending, and “operetta in its finest form” was the aim Strauss stipulated to his new collaborator. However, not only the libretto caused a less harmonious blend of farce and pathos than in Ariadne auf Naxos, for instance. It may have been the distance of time that led the composer to resign and take refuge in the beauty of the past and to write music about music. An example of this is not only the opalescent and enchanting euphoric colour of the (unsuccessful) scene of seduction, when Jupiter appears as a golden shower of rain but also the refined and skilful way in which Strauss quotes his own artistic means. Here lie the limits of this work written in old age as well as its fascination: the evocation of a beauty that is no longer possible. This drama of the artist – that of the breakthrough to a new and different expression – was taken at the same time by Thomas Mann as the subject of his artistic saga Doktor Faustus.
Jürgen Kesting
Alfred Hrdlicka,
Joseph's Legend I, 1990
Richard Strauss
Die Liebe der Danae
Sung in German with English supertitles
Conductor Fabio Luisi
Stage director Günter Krämer
Stage design Gisbert Jäkel
Costumes Falk Bauer
Lighting design Reinhard Traub
Chorus master Matthias Brauer
Jupiter Franz Grundheber
Mercury Torsten Kerl
Pollux Janez Lotric
Danae Deborah Voigt
Xanthe Kirsten Blanck
Midas Albert Bonnema
Semele Iride Martinez
Europa Britta Stallmeister
Alkmene Anke Vondung
Leda Annette Jahns
Four kings
Ulfried Haselsteiner Wright Moore
Thomas Mehnert Evert Sooster
Four guards
Matthias Beutlich Martin Schubert
Thomas Müller Mirko Tuma
Staatskapelle Dresden
Choir of Dresden State Opera
Kleines Festspielhaus
New production: 19 August 2002
22, 25 (7 p.m.), 28, 31 August 2002
Performances start at 6.30 p.m. unless otherwise stated
Tickets are available from
the Festival Ticket Office
for the performances on 22, 25, 28
and 31 August in the following categories:
€ 195 (only on 31.8), € 270 and € 315 (not on 25.8.)
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
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