Music: Strauss’s Last Opera

Salzburg’s great music festival is traditionally dedicated to Mozart. For 30 years, thousands of visitors have flocked each summer to the ancient town which sprawls under its towering 11th Century fortress on the Mönchsberg, to file reverently through the house where Mozart was born, tramp across flag-bedecked Mozart bridge, sip wine in the Mozart cafe, take their clothes to the Mozart laundry.

Visitors this summer even smoked Mozart cigarettes, munched Mozart pumpernickel. There were performances in the Festspielhaus and the open-air Rocky Riding School, not quite up to snuff, of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and The Magic Flute. But last week the first postwar performance of the late Richard Strauss’s last opera edged Mozart momentarily out of the spotlight.

Richard Strauss had finished his Capriccio in 1942. In his 70s, the once-lurid old composer had turned headily intellectual. The basis of his last operatic plot was an argument that had long fascinated him: Which should come first, words or music? With Friend Clemens Krauss, conductor of the Munich Opera, writing the libretto, Strauss had set about transferring the argument to the stage.

What the audience saw last week was a far cry from either Salome or Elektra. As one watching expert, Conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler, described it, Capriccio is “a musician’s opera, composed for the musical gourmet. It has the quality of an old, old sweet wine and contains everything that Strauss knew about music and opera.”

Set in Paris in 1775, Capriccio concerns a poet and a musician, each insistent on his own primary importance. They both court a widowed countess, ask her to make her choice. Her pat decision: she has no right to take either because they belong together.

Visitors who could not catch the fast flow of German words and wit found few arias to cling to. But connoisseurs found some puckish operatic humor to smile over. Sample: when one character asks, “Why not compose an opera on a mythological theme?” the Producer (sung by Bass-Baritone Paul Schoeffler) replies, to a melody from Strauss’s 1912 opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, “But it’s been done.” Smiled Baritone Schoeffler: “The old man had fun when he wrote this one.”

Composer Strauss had had more fun, in fact, than most in the slightly baffled audience. But most critics agreed that Capriccio, though a masterpiece of its kind, was too sophisticated ever to attain the popularity of earlier Strauss works.