Music: Operas Revisited

The Munich Opera House has long rested much of its reputation on those two sturdy musical pillars, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Strauss. Last week, as if to say that anything these two composed is worth audition, Munich opened its summer opera festival with two of the lamest and most persistently neglected of Mozart’s and Strauss’s works: Thames, King of Egypt, which Mozart composed at a precocious 17, and Der Friedenstag, written when Strauss was a world-weary 71.

Thames was not even Mozart’s idea. Conceived by a wealthy dilettante named Tobias Philipp von Gebler and scored by an obscure schoolmaster, the thing was such a botch that Gebler, taking a friend’s advice, paid Mozart to write a new score. The composer did considerably better than the librettist. On Gebler’s flimsy plot—the love of a young Pharaoh for a temple virgin—Mozart draped 22 minutes of delightful music that almost compensated for 81 minutes of unrelievedly boring talk. Nevertheless, Thames talked itself to death, closed shortly after its premiere in Vienna in 1774. In last week’s revival, Conductor Joseph Keilberth and a fine singing cast demonstrated again that although Thames may have a tenuous right to hold the stage, its music has a legitimate claim to the affection of all loyal Mozartians.

Munich’s other resurrection, Strauss’s Der Friedenstag, also suffered from a weak book—as did all of Strauss’s operas after the death of Librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss had wanted Novelist Stefan Zweig as his librettist, but he was advised—i.e., ordered—by the Nazis to find a text writer of pure Aryan stock. His choice was Library Director Joseph Gregor, whose first draft was so hopeless (“Your dialogue between the two commanders is all wrong,” wrote Strauss furiously; “it reads like two school teachers”) that Zweig secretly rewrote the whole thing. Acclaiming the day in 1648 that the Westphalian Peace Treaty ended the Thirty Years’ War, Der Friedenstag was denounced at its 1938 premiere as Strauss’s surrender to Naziism. More than two dec ades later, its political message is blurred, and the music’s obligation to earlier Strauss works, notably Also Sprach Zarathustra and Don Juan, still cripples its effectiveness. Nonetheless, Der Friedenstag contains evidence of Strauss’s power, even at 71.