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by Richard Strauss, directed by Tim Albery

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

October 5-28, 2017

“A Fine New Addition to the COC’s Repertory”

The Canadian Opera Company has just presented the company premiere of Richard Strauss’s 1933 opera Arabella.  The opera, Strauss’s final collaboration with his favourite librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), is not as often performed as Salome (1905), Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911) or Ariadne auf Naxos (1912) – the last three all with libretti by Hofmannsthal – but the insightful direction of Tim Albery and the glorious music-making of the cast and orchestra make the best possible case for including the opera in the standard repertory.

Compared with Salome or Elektra with their sources in the Bible and Greek mythology, Arabella has an insubstantial plot that seems more suited to operetta than opera.  Set in Vienna in the 1860s Count Waldner and his family find themselves in the dire straits that afflicted many aristocratic families in the 19th century.  They have a title and position to maintain in society but no money.  The reason for their poverty is that the Count has gambled it all away.  The Count and Countess therefore have pinned all their hopes of salvation on their elder daughter Arabella finding a wealthy husband.  Arabella has three noblemen and one poor soldier, Matteo, pursuing her.  She keeps their hopes alive but privately she is waiting for Der Richtige (“the right one”) to come along and she is certain she will know him the instant he appears. 

Meanwhile, the family has raised Arabella’s younger sister Zdenka as a boy, “Zdenko”, because it is too poor to bring out two debutantes in society.  Zdenka is content, but she has fallen in love with Matteo and has been keeping up a correspondence with him pretending to be Arabella.  Events reach a turning point when Arabella meets Mandryka, the nephew of an immensely wealthy friend of the Count’s, and thinks that he may be Der Richtige.  Mandryka proposes, Arabella accepts and all seems well, except that these events have driven Matteo to the brink of suicide.  To save him Zdenka gives Matteo the key to Arabella’s bedroom and says that Arabella (in reality Zdenka) will be waiting for him there.  Mandryka overhears this, is outraged and what seemed a certain happy ending is cast in doubt.

The word that seems to dog criticism of Arabella is that the work is “flawed”.  The main reason for this is that Hofmannsthal died before he was able to revise the libretto for the final two acts of the three-act opera.  Strauss, as a tribute to his friend, set the unrevised two acts as Hofmannsthal left them.  This included re-explanations of the plot that Hofmannsthal, as in his earlier libretti, would surely have cut if he had had the chance.  Fortunately, over time a tradition of cuts has developed to solve this problem as it has with overwritten sections of operas by Handel and Verdi.

The secondary reason for viewing Arabella as “flawed” is the seeming disconnect between the apparently trivial plot and the lush profundity of the music.  Here, critics have not viewed Arabella in the context of Strauss’s other operas.  In Ariadne auf Naxos, Strauss and Hofmannsthal deliberately mix high and low in the same work by the artifice of having commedia dell’arte actors play their comedy at the same time as the mythological tragedy of the title is sung.  The impudent commentary of the low characters on the high creates a delicious irony that does not negate the high characters’ drama but serves as a foil to set it off. 

Something similar is happening in Arabella where the project of Strauss and Hofmannsthal is to uncover profundity in the seemingly trivial.  The Count has wasted the family fortune by trusting his luck to cards.  But we first meet the Countess consulting a fortune-teller, who uses cards as her divining tool, to find out what the future has in store and then rewards the fortune-teller with her last jewel.  Both Count and Countess lose their last iota of wealth to card-players of different kinds and seem to trust more in fortune rather than any concrete action to save their family. 

Besides this, Hofmannsthal has deliberately made the day of the action Shrove Tuesday, the last day of Karnival in Vienna before Lent begins.  After Karnival restraint and seriousness begin.  It is symbolically fitting, therefore, that on that day Arabella should accept a proposal of marriage which includes lying side by side with her future husband in the grave, and should then go off to dance to celebrate her farewell to youth.  It is also symbolically fitting that Zdenka should choose that day simultaneously to cast off her virginity and to cast off her disguise as a boy. 

The overall mood of Arabella is very much like that of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, set on the night before Epiphany when the excess of Christmas celebrations must give way to a more profound way of viewing the world.  Twelfth Night also features a girl dressed as a boy who falls in love with a man while in that disguise and while serving as a go-between.  That man, Orsino, like Matteo in Strauss, is confronted with the strange case of agreeing to marry a girl he had previously esteemed as a boy and his best friend.

The form thus suits the function. It is therefore completely appropriate that an opera libretto about giving up flirtation and deception for the sober reality of marriage should take the superficially trivial form of an operetta libretto and yet contain the seeds of profundity that will grow out of the action.  Arabella’s great final aria, often called the “Staircase Aria”, is about a glass of water.  “What could be more insignificant?” you might wonder.  Yet, if you have been listening carefully (or reading the surtitles) when in Act 2 Mandryka describes how a peasant girl pledges herself to her future husband, Arabella’s seemingly insignificant action takes on the greatest profundity.  One of the projects of Modernism, as in the works of James Joyce or Virginia Woolf, was to discover the universal in the everyday.  That is exactly what is happening in Arabella when Strauss’s fantastically rich music accompanies the seemingly ordinary conversation of the characters on stage.

For an audience to see all that is going on beneath the surface in Arabella, the opera needs an director with insight and that is exactly what this production has in Tim Albery.  In his hands the structure of the work is admirably clear, the comedy unforced and the emphasis placed on the psychological struggles unfolding within and among the characters.

Albery has has designer Tobias Hoheisel move the setting forward from the 1860s to the early 20th century.  This change gives the action an added poignancy since it will be not only Arabella and Zdenka who say farewell to youth and frivolity but Europe itself before it heads into World War I.  Hoheisel’s set is composed of three detailed curved walls that can be configured to form the three settings of the opera.  The grey walls of the Waldner’s residence with stains showing where paintings once used to hang neatly convey the family’s past grandeur and present poverty.  Side walls, likely not seen by most of the audience, show architectural designs for the walls, as if to highlight the deliberate theatrical artifice of the set, of the world of the characters and of the opera itself.

Arabella is one of Canadian soprano Erin Wall’s signature roles and she sang the part when Albery directed the current production when it premiered at Santa Fe Opera in 2012.  She has a beautifully creamy tone throughout her whole range and the breath control necessary for some of Strauss’s extremely long phrases.  In terms of acting her Arabella seems rather in a daze all through Act 1 and into Act 2 until she meets Mandryka and finds her destiny fulfilled.  It would be better, however, if she were to make a greater contrast between Arabella before and after meeting Mandryka by showing us Arabella’s pointless flirtatiousness that has kept four suitors in tow for so long and then show her gradually growing into maturity when she realizes that Der Richtige has arrived.

      

Wall is clearly more comfortable as the mature Arabella and breaks off relations with each of noble suitors with great sympathy in her voice.  Her performance of the Staircase Aria is gorgeous and brimming with consciousness of the impact of every word. 

As Zdenka, Canadian soprano Jane Archibald looks and acts convincingly like a dutiful, scholarly boy.  Her voice is a bright and pure as ever and does not lose the quality of its tone even in the highest reaches where Strauss sends it.  Archibald suggests all along that Zdenka is secretly racked with both love and guilt and this side finally comes out in the open in the last act where she plays Zdenka beautifully as an embarrassed child and a blossoming woman all at once.  In the Act 1 aria “Er ist der Richtige nicht für mich!” (“He is not the right one for me!”), when Arabella’s solo becomes a duet, Wall’s and Archibald’s voices blend in so heavenly a way you wish it would never stop.

While a superb Arabella and Zdenka are necessary for any production of the opera to succeed, what really raises this Arabella to a must-see is the fantastic performance of Polish bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny as Mandryka.  He conveys all of Mandryka’s wonderful combination of embarrassment and ardour when he meets the Count and confesses his love for Arabella.  In Act 2 he stands with bowed head, too much in awe even to look at her.  He commands an enormous lushly dark voice that has more than enough agility to express the youthfulness of this nephew of the Count’s friend.  He is convincing in his drunken scene in Act 2 yet even in his anger at Arabella we sense the underlying pain Mandryka feels.  In this production the realism and vitality that Konieczny lends Mandryka is what gives the opera the pulse of life.  I certainly hope he appears with the COC again.

The other casting is rather uneven.  American tenor Michael Brandenburg doesn’t begin to match Konieczny in the power of his singing.  His strangled tone in his lower register does not cut through the orchestra as does the tenor of American Corey Bix as Count Elemer, Arabella’s most importunate suitor.  Brandenburg’s acting does, however, convincingly depict a man in despair and on the brink of suicide.

German mezzo Gundula Hintz, who plays Arabella’s mother, the Countess, overacts and emphasizes the swoops in her vocal lines likely in an attempt to make the character funnier.  Canadian John Fanning as the Count is not always audible over the orchestra but creates a fine comic portrait of a man so addicted to gambling that he listens to people only for the sake of discovering if he will or will not have more funds to wager. 

Claire de Sévigné sings the coloratura role of Fiakermilli, a character who seems like Zerbinetta of Ariadne auf Naxos making a guest appearance in another opera.  Albery ties this seemingly extraneous character to the action by having her satirize Arabella’s past behaviour of teasing many men but committing herself to none.  Sévigné does not have the rich tone of Archibald, also a coloratura soprano, but she does make an impressive display of the sky-high pyrotechnics Strauss has written.  At the other end of the vocal spectrum, Megan Latham is very funny as the mercenary yet oh-so-serious Fortune Teller that the Countess consults.               

German conductor Patrick Lange leads the COC Orchestra in a wildly dramatic account of the score including Strauss’s vivid tone painting of images that occur in the libretto, such as a bear’s attack on Mandryka.  The orchestra presents in its lush colours the roiling depths of emotion and fate that lie beneath the surface of the parlando sections of the music until they break out into the fully fledged arias of the main characters.  Arabella may not be as well known as Richard Strauss’s four most famous operas, but is does repay repeated listening.  Since the present exemplary production is a co-production with Santa Fe Opera and Minneapolis Opera, Toronto should feel itself lucky not only to be able to see Arabella now but to count on seeing it again in the future.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Erin Wall as Arabella and Jane Archibald as Zdenko; Erin Wall as Arabella and Tomasz Konieczny as Mandryka; Claire de Sévigny as Fiakermilli and Tomasz Konieczny as Mandryka, John Fanning as Count Waldner and Gundula Hintz as the Countess with the ensemble. ©2017 Michael Cooper.

For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.