Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [216]
The juvenile lead was to be sung by a woman dressed as a man. Hosenrolle (trouser parts) for women were a convention which Mozart himself had used for Cherubino but the Hofmannsthal-Strauss concept of Octavian was a rather different matter, not devoid of a desire to titillate. When Strauss’s prelude to the opera describes with characteristic realism the pleasures of the sex act and the curtain rises on the Marschallin and her young lover still in bed, the discovery that both are women was likely to produce in the audience a peculiar sensation of which the authors were certainly aware. The idea was originally Hofmannsthal’s. Strauss later claimed that the device was necessary because no man young enough to sing Octavian would have had the experience necessary to be an accomplished actor. “Besides,” he added more frankly, “writing for three sopranos was a challenge.” He met it, especially when the three sing together in the last act, with exquisite song, In Elektra the men’s parts had been of small account and in Rosenkavalier the only male part was that of a coarse lecher who appears either as unpleasant or ridiculous. Baron Ochs represented the German idea of the comic. As Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal during the composition, he missed “a genuinely comic situation—everything is merely amusing but not comic.” He wanted the audience to laugh; “Laugh! not just smile or grin.”
The inevitable animals made their appearance in the form of a dog, a monkey and a parrot. When Strauss demanded from Hofmannsthal a love scene between Sophie and Octavian to which he could write a duet “much more passionate,… as it reads now it is too tame, too mannered and timid,” Hofmannsthal replied pettishly that these two young creatures “have nothing of the Valkyrie or Tristan and Isolde about them” and he wished to avoid at all costs having them “burst into a kind of Wagnerian erotic screaming.” This was hardly tactful and incompatibilities of temperament between composer and librettist were becoming evident. A touch of Tristan in fact appeared, not to mention some borrowing from Mozart and even from Johann Strauss. With bland anachronism a Viennese waltz, unknown in the Eighteenth Century, was a main theme.
By April, 1910, the full score of Act II was already at the printer before Strauss had received the libretto for Act III. Its situations contrived for the Baron’s embarrassment turned out to have been adapted by von Hofmannsthal from The Merry Wives of Windsor, with the difference that, unlike Falstaff, Ochs remained unrelievedly unlikable. By the end of summer the opera was finished and on January 26, 1911, two years after Elektra, Rosenkavalier had its premier at Dresden. It was rarely to be off the opera stage thereafter. Composer and librettist endowed it with all the shimmer of super-civilized Vienna. It glistened like the silver rose that was its symbol. All Strauss’s skill, resourcefulness and audacity—and his duality—were in the score. His highest gift of musical expressiveness could convey the bustle of an Eighteenth-Century levee, the delicious discovery of young love, the comic terror of the duel, the sweet sadness of the Marschallin’s renunciation, and at the same time be used for coarse jokes and bottom-pinching humor. He gave the world a silver rose, beautiful, glittering and tarnished.
In 1911 Strauss was at the peak of the musical world, the most famous composer alive, “one of those,” wrote a biographer of musicians, Richard Specht, “without