Music: 30- Year Sleeper

Richard Strauss, composer of 15 operas, once called Ariadne auf Naxos his favorite. Until last week New York had never seen it performed professionally. For 30 years in Europe, Ariadne has been a connoisseur’s opera, esteemed by musicians and performers, but not by the public, which preferred Strauss’s erotic Salome and his opulent Rosenkavalier. Last week in Manhattan, after the 28th curtain call for the New York City Opera Company’s first performance of Ariadne, a friend of 82-year-old Composer Strauss cabled him in

Switzerland: “Ariadne has become a popular opera at last.”

It is doubtful whether Strauss ever expected Ariadne to be a box-office hit. A small-scaled “chamber opera” without a chorus, it uses an orchestra of only 37 instruments, one of them an organ. A confused story-within-a-story and a stage-within-a-stage set mix Grecian mythology with Mozartian opera bouffe. The three leading roles, all sopranos, are among the most difficult to sing in all opera.

For the title role of Ariadne, Manhattan’s up-&-coming City Opera Company cast tall, stately, 38-year-old Ella Flesch, a Hungarian exile who had once been Composer Strauss’s own choice for the part. A soprano prodigy (“In my cradle I had tones”) she sang Aïda at the Vienna State Opera Company when she was 18. Four years later Strauss heard her sing Rosenkavalier. He put her into the leads in Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and

Arabella. Says Ella: “Strauss loved my musicality. I used to go to his house. He liked to play poker, but I never play with him because he win very much.” Last month a New York Times critic called her Tosca “The most completely satisfactory Tosca . . . this city has heard in recent years.”

She rehearsed Ariadne from a score annotated for her by Strauss 15 years ago. But Manhattan critics, busy passing out bravos all around for the City Opera’s Ariadne, were generally cool to Ella. Said the New York Herald Tribune’s waspish Virgil Thomson: “She mostly stood around looking like the Statue of Liberty and sang flat.” The critics’ enthusiasm went to the opera itself, and to the singing of two younger sopranos: 30-year-old Polyna Stoska, who sang the tricky role of the boy composer, and tiny Virginia Mac-Watters, 26, protegee of Lotte Lehmann, who darted through her coloratura notes with birdlike accuracy. The City Opera, which had planned only two performances of Ariadne, hastily scheduled more.