Die schweigsame Frau, Staatsoper Unter den Linden, 22 July 2025

Images: Bernd Uhlig

Sir Morosius – Peter Rose
Housekeeper – Iris Vermillion
Barber Schneidebart – Samuel Hasselhorn
Henry Morosus – Siyabonga Maqungo
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Serafina Starke
Carlotta – Rebecka Wallroth
Morbio – Dionysios Averginos
Vanuzzi – Manuel Winckhler
Farfallo – Friedrich Hamel

Director – Jan Philipp Gloger
Set designs – Ben Baur
Costumes – Justina Klimczyk
Lighting – Tobias Krauß
Video – Leonard Wölfl
Choreography – Florian Hurler

Staatsopernchor Berlin (chorus director: Dani Juris)

Staatskapelle Berlin 

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Christian Thielemann’s first new production as music director at the Staatoper Unter den Linden was always going to be a special event. A declaration of intent, no doubt: of respect for the house’s traditions, whilst subtly extending them. For all his superlative strengths, Daniel Barenboim was not much of a Straussian, at least in the opera house—and I think that points to a more fundamental difference between Thielemann and his predecessor, perhaps to be explored more fully another time. In any case, one might say that that regard for canon and tradition, whilst understanding and indeed aiding its mutability was tailor-made for the art of both Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. So indeed it proved to be. 

Thielemann has been pretty much universally acclaimed for his Strauss—and rightly so. His ability to ‘play’ the orchestra as if it were a keyboard instrument is remarkable, yet equally worthy of note – and of hearing on this occasion – was his Barenboim-like willingness to have the musicians engage in Kammermusik that could be shaped, if needed, into something larger but never greater. The Staatskapelle Berlin, always the jewel in this house’s crown, played not only with perfection but palpable commitment. It could be a Mozart serenade writ large via Wagnerian polyphony; it could be a telling arabesque duet with voice; it could be a sly piece of word painting; it could, just occasionally, be the full orchestra letting its presence felt, but also felt as necessary. Everything felt ‘natural’, however much art there might be in that; everything felt both rehearsed and spontaneous. Most important of all, the orchestra told us what mattered most—to Strauss and, one hopes, to us, at least during those magical hours spent in the theatre. Art is not to be equated to life; it is both less and more. Strauss knew that; so did Thielemann and the orchestra; so, I think, did we. 

For Strauss – Zweig too – is here, as ever, intimately and, yes, beautifully concerned with music and its history, with art more broadly and its history too. The canon is not an immutable thing He can do no other, which is part of the wonder of his aestheticism. The craft from both is astounding, especially when one does not notice it. Everywhere an allusion, everywhere an illusion—all the more so when one barely notices. Some of that is doubtless unconscious; one might say the same of performances and staging too. None of us works, thinks, makes art, or indeed makes society in a vacuum. Is/was Henry and Aminta’s sheltering in another room whilst Sir Morosus finds rest – low D-flat for contrabassoon, organ, and his ‘Dank!’ – an echo of Walther and Eva doing likewise at the close of their second act in Die Meistersinger? It looked and even sounded like it, but may also be a function of genre, of the unconscious, even of chance. We make our own connections, though we are led along the way. Actual quotation is less mistakeable, or is it? How many of us waver over Rossini-Monteverdi here? Presentiments too: how much of Sir Morosus is there in Capriccio’s La Roche, or vice versa? Is he Baron Ochs partly wiser, even transfigured, or is that to partake in the cardinal sin of sentimentality? Perhaps it is all, as the Marschallin would counsel, a farce, no more but also no less. Yet what knowing irony there is in that claim, as Straussians will know all too well. 

Let us leave that on one side for the moment to consider Jan Phillip Gloger’s production. Thielemann and Gloger have collaborated at Bayreuth and in Dresden, so again this might offer a harbinger of sorts. I had my doubts at points yet ultimately was won around by Gloger’s concept, not least since it developed so finely in collaboration with musicians onstage and in the pit—what opera is or should be, and be about. There is none of Ben Jonson’s London here, though predicaments that faces Londoners still more than Berliners – yes, I know the latter will protest, but they should try living here – come to the fore: initially, the housing crisis, but increasingly that of loneliness and how society treats the elderly in an age of generational conflict in which the latter may seem to hold too many of the cards. (They do not, of course, or not straightforwardly; it is a useful culture-war camouflage for capital. But enough of that for now.) As the opera begins, we see increasingly desperate ‘refreshing’ of a screen by someone attempting to find city accommodation – many of us have been there – followed by the stage revelation of a wealthy, single, older person living in an expansive apartment to himself, attended to by housekeeper and barber (here, more general ‘wellness’ consultant). Yet we are also confronted – I can see, even hear, the raised eyebrows – with statistics before the second and third acts, that is on the curtain during the intervals, that challenge our preconceptions, for instance how many older people who might wish to move to smaller accommodation might end up paying more in rent if they do so (and they might not be able to).

That, however, becomes ever more a context than concept. More fundamentally, the tale is one of conflict and reconciliation, furthered by understanding and willingness to accept the new. A trick, in many ways quite horrible, is played on Sir Morosus. The characters relish it in some ways, yet are also not without guilt, faithfully following Zweig and Strauss. One may or may not like the garish way in which Sir Morosus is married to his apparently ‘silent’ woman, Timida/Aminta, but it makes its dramatic point. Perhaps some of the metadramatic interventions are, like the statistics, a bit crass, but they do no real harm. Holding up a sign saying ‘Regietheater’ both alerts some, less receptive in the audience, to what might be happening not only onstage but to the stage that has been enacted onstage, and may even remind them that all this is not nearly so new as some would have them believe. No one, after all, was a greater practitioner of the cause they excoriate than Richard Wagner, whose Hans Sachs, one of Morosus’s many progenitors, reminds us: ‘Es klangt so alt und war doch so neu!’ 

Reconciliation is arguably more problematical in Die Meistersinger than here, the world of what is ‘deutsch und echt’ notable by its absence (which may, admittedly, prove to some still more problematic). For the time being, though, we can share in the old man’s joy in true acquaintance with, perhaps even growing love for his nephew and adoptive son and his wife, their troupe, and even a little of the music he once so detested. We can share in theirs for him too, heartwarmingly portrayed – for once, I mean no irony, and Strauss appears not to do so either – in the closing display of a Morosus Community, in which none need be silent and, just as important, none need be alone. One can be, of course, and Morosus is grateful for time on his own, for peace and quiet, for the music to have stopped, but as a free choice rather than faute de mieux. Solitude, as any Romantic will tell you, can be a good or bad thing; it depends very much on context and will. 

Stage performances were outstanding. As Sir Morosus, Peter Rose was everything would have hoped for, placing the character somewhere justly between Ochs and La Roche – I have been treated to the former, though not yet to the latter – but above all creating an individual human being of his own, whose ‘difficulty’ we increasingly understood and sympathised with, coming to know a somewhat different person than the one we had assumed he was. His way with Zweig’s German was second to none. Siyabonga Maqungo presented an ardent, lovelorn, equally human Henry, well matched to Brenda Rae’s Aminta. Rae played that role in a very different production (Barrie Kosky’s) the only other time I have seen the opera in the theatre. Here, her vocal glitter and precision were matched, indeed exceeded only by her humanity. The animating presence of Samuel Hasselhorn as the barber Schneidebart was a joy from start to finish, as finely conceived theatrically as it was musically. It was a similar, if more fleeting joy, to welcome Iris Vermillion back to the Berlin stage as Morosus’s housekeeper. There was the finest sense of company from all concerned, not least a chorus superbly trained by Dani Juris, which reciprocated the ensemble favour in appearing very much as a cast of individuals brought together. 

This proved, then, an excellent and deeply moving evening. Strauss and Zweig’s Schweigsame Frau sang in and for itself; but also for music; for opera; for Berlin; and, I like to think, for this exiled Berliner back in town for all of twenty-two hours, a good few of them, like those of Sir Morosus, spent asleep before returning to the city in which the opera ‘should’ be set and in which Jonson’s Volpone not only is set but was first performed. These three-and-a-half hours, though, proved more than worth the journey, a reminder less of the horrendous world around us – though that made its presence softly, touchingly felt – than of what, if we can make it a little horrendous, we might actually live for. That is, it reminded us what Strauss and his aestheticism are ultimately concerned with and why this work from the 1930s, derived from and transforming an English comedy of more than three centuries earlier, might yet matter to us in 2025.

‘Wie schön ist doch der Musik!’ And just perhaps, as Morosus continues, ‘aber wie schön ist, wenn sie vorbei ist!‘ The music was indeed beautiful, and there was unquestionably something poignant, even painful in the beauty of its fleetingness, of its passing. That it cannot be grasped is worth our grasping; in that way and in reflection both upon it and upon its passing, it will often remain with us all the longer. As ever, at least in a performance worth its salt, one does not want the Straussian epilogue to end, but it does and it must, and we are better for it. And with that, both my opera season and that of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden draw to a close. The latter’s next will open with Dmitri Tcherniakov’s Ring, conducted by Christian Thielemann.

Munich Opera Festival (1) - Die schweigsame Frau, Bavarian State Opera, 5 July 2015

Nationaltheater, Munich

Sir Morosus – Franz Hawlata

Housekeeper – Okka von der Damerau
Barber – Nikolay Borchev
Henry Morosus – Peter Sonn
Aminta – Brenda Rae
Isotta – Elsa Benoit
Carlotta – Tara Erraught
Morbio – Christian Rieger
Vanuzzi – Christoph Stephinger
Farfallo – Tareq Nazmi
Papagei – Airton Feuchter-Dantas

Barrie Kosky (director)

Esther Bialas (designs)
Benedikt Zehm (lighting)
Olaf A. Schmitt (dramaturgy)

Bavarian State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Sören Eckhoff)
Bavarian State Orchestra
Pedro Halffter (conductor)

If Strauss’s operas of the 1920s receive far too little performing attention, especially in the Anglosphere, those of the 1930s seem to fare worse still. Quite why is anyone’s guess; no one, I assume, would declare Die schweigsame Frau a greater work than Elektra, but it is clearly a better work than so many that continue to hold the stage. German theatres are different, of course, not least those associated with Strauss personally, so to see Strauss’s collaboration with Stefan Zweig and, at one remove, Ben Jonson, a visit to the Munich Opera Festival seemed like a good idea.

And so it was. One could not reasonably have hoped to hear Strauss in better hands. Not only could I find no grounds to fault Bavarian State Orchestra – not that, in imitation of the third act’s divorce proceedings, I was attempting to find such grounds – the orchestra reaffirmed its credentials as a Strauss orchestra to be spoken of in the same breath as Dresden and Vienna, and arguably more reliable than either, certainly more so than the latter. Precision and warmth – though not too much – were very much the hallmark of this performance, wisely guided by Pedro Halffter, who seemed keen to impart to his account a sense of, if not quite Neue Sachlichkeit, then at least of something that made Strauss’s writing here particular rather than generalised. Pacing was impeccable, quasi-autonomous musical structures coming fruitfully into contact with verbal demands: the sort of thing one longs for, generally in vain, in Rossini. The Straussian orchestral phantasmagoria is never far away, of course, but there is perhaps less overt dazzle in much of the score than in, say, Rosenkavalier or Elektra; Halffter and the orchestra appreciated its subtleties and responded to them in equally subtle yet undoubtedly sure fashion.  

I doubt that Brenda Rae’s Aminta could be bettered in any theatre today (although how would one know?) Just as sure of note and line as the orchestra and with greater, contrasting warmth, especially at those wonderful revelations, through the disguise of Timidia, of the fundamental humanity of Aminta, this was a performance to savour. Much the same could be said of her partner in crime – and love – Peter Sonn’s splendidly lyrical, often imploring Henry. Franz Hawlata’s Morosus was very much a character portrayal: too many notes, as it were, lacked a little when it came to the demands of intonation. But such was Hawlata’s identification with and communication of the role, it would be churlish to complain unduly; the audience responded warmly, and it was right to have done so. The quicksilver vocal and dramatic qualities of Nikolay Borchev’s Barber – despite the hideous green tracksuit he initially had to wear – were rightly appreciated by the Munich audience too. Okka von der Damerau captured to near-perfection the disapproving, ultimately amusing qualities of the Housekeeper. There was depth in the casting too: splendid rivalry to Timidia came from Tara Erraught (with, insofar as I could tell, a fine line in Bavarian dialect) and Elsa Benoit. There was indeed an excellent sense of company: no one disappointed and almost everyone shone.

Barrie Kosky’s production: well, it was considerably better than his Berlin Figaro. But I cannot help but think that his matching of high camp – the tasteless pink designs of the first part of the third act, splendidly realised on their own terms by Esther Bialas – and custard-pie slapstick is not really a match for Strauss, or for Zweig. The subtle, even sometimes not-so-subtle, æstheticism of both artists may well benefit from deconstruction. But might not a production that takes to heart the circumstances of the opera’s composition – this, after all, was the opera occasioning Strauss’s fateful letter to Zweig, intercepted by the Gestapo, which led to Goebbels having the composer resign from Presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer – offer a more fruitful, deeper (yes, I know, how Teutonic of me!) mode of questioning?  There is no doubting the skill with which Kosky and his production team accomplish their vision; I wish, though, that I could discern more in the vision itself. According to Kosky, quoted in the programme, ‘We have placed our protagonist in a world which swings [schwankt] uncertainly between Mel Brooks, the Muppets, and Vienna’s Josefstadt [Theatre].’ Make of that what you will.

Even for those of us who remained sceptical about the production, however, there was much to enjoy, for which many thanks should go to the Bavarian State Opera. This would surely make an interesting prospect for ENO, whose Strauss record has recently been anything but conspicuous, to bring to London. Now, how about an enterprising company offering us Salieri’s Angiolene, also based (loosely) on Jonson’s Epiocene? Or even a hearing for Mark Lothar’s 1930 Lord Spleen, written for Dresden? (Does anyone know the music of Lothar, a Schreker pupil whom Max Reinhardt enlisted as Music Director for Berlin’s Deutsches Theater in 1933, whether for this or for anything else? I freely admit that I do not.) George Antheil’s Volpone, which apparently owes a good deal to Zweig’s German adaptation of Jonson’s play, also awaits revival. And yes, more Strauss would be much appreciated too: Feuersnot, Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae, etc., etc. Opera houses of the world, unite: you have nothing to lose but Timidia’s timidity!

Some thoughts on Richard Strauss's Capriccio

Capriccio has been much on my mind over the past week. Not only am I part way through writing a chapter concerned with Strauss; I gave a paper at the University of Surrey on Capriccio and also gave a talk at the Peterhouse History Society on Music in the Third Reich (starting with Triumph of the Will and moving via Furtwängler to Strauss). Here are a few thoughts that have arisen (some taken from an earlier Edinburgh Festival review, for which I hope I may be forgiven).


For what it is worth, it seems to me that, if we must confront the 'facts' with which people are so obsessed when it comes to the Third Reich, Strauss acted in a pretty ordinary way: neither ‘great’ nor ‘disgraceful’. Perhaps that in itself is a problem for us: we find it easier to deal with heroism or evil; perhaps we fear that we, with our everyday concerns and fears would actually have acted in too similar a way to Strauss, yet he has no excuse, since he was a Composer – and that should be a force for good in the world. Strauss certainly proved no hero, though there were occasions when he acted well, as in his defence of Stefan Zweig. He was less of a figure of opposition, say, than Furtwängler, whom many consider nevertheless deeply compromised; there is no equivalent to the anger expressed in some of Furtwängler’s wartime performances, though there is some equivalent to that expressed privately in Furtwängler’s notebooks, albeit perhaps more disdain than anger. Sadly – and one can hardly help feeling a certain sadness, if one cares about Strauss’s music – politics were not of interest to him; art was. There were particular personal difficulties: his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren, for instance, whom, with considerable difficulty, he managed to save from being sent to a concentration camp. That seems to have been a reason for accepting the presidency in 1933 of the Reichsmusikkammer – that, and it may be noted, an apparently genuine desire to safeguard the performance of music by Jewish composers, such as Mendelssohn and Mahler. That post came to an end the following year, however, upon the Gestapo’s interception of the letter to Zweig, in which Strauss protested in no uncertain terms about Nazi cultural policy towards Jewish artists. Likewise, Strauss refused to have Zweig’s name as librettist removed from the programme for the premiere of Die schweigsame Frau; Goebbels refused to attend, and the work was soon proscribed. The former is just as one might expect, I might add, for someone who, whatever he believes or does not about anyone else, does believe in art in a way that goes far beyond self-interest. One might well dissent from such a world-view but it is far from cynical.

Capriccio itself of course originated in an idea from Stefan Zweig, derived from his British Library researches into eighteenth-century opera; taking his cue from a rival of Lorenzo da Ponte, Abbé Giovanni Battista Casti, Zweig had wished to create a new work exploring one of the fundamental issues in operatic creation, namely the relationship between words and music. Upon his flight from Austria, Zweig had hoped that Joseph Gregor would take up the plan for a libretto, but Strauss, always a productively difficult taskmaster in these respects, found Gregor’s proposals wanting, eventually proposing to the conductor, Clemens Krauss, that he take on the task. Krauss and Strauss ended up writing the text in collaboration, though the music was of course entirely Strauss’s own. What arose was a metatheatrical conversation piece, very much in the line of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal Ariadne auf Naxos. Set in the salon of Countess Madeleine outside Paris in 1775, that is at the time of controversy over Gluck’s operatic reforms, we witness disputes between the countess, her brother, the composer Flamand, the poet Olivier, and the theatrical impresario La Roche, over the nature of music, drama, and opera; the Count hits upon the idea that the events arising should themselves be turned into an opera, a collaboration between the artists present. The Countess, at least on the surface, proves as incapable of choosing æsthetically between words and music as she is romantically between poet and composer. Unlike Strauss’s preceding opera, Capriccio received wartime performances, being premiered at the Nationaltheater in Munich on 28 October 1942, and moving on to Dresden and Vienna in 1944.


The opening string sextet – the conceit being that it is itself a new work by the composer, Flamand – had already been performed at the villa of Baldur von Schirach, the Vienna Gauleiter. Schirach would receive twenty years imprisonment in Spandau prison at Nuremberg; he was one of the two defendants, the other being Albert Speer, who spoke against Hitler. Krauss, whom it is probably fair to describe as a skilled careerist, managed to secure the premiere by persuading Goebbels, with whom Strauss was once again out of favour, to assume patronage of the occasion.


What, then, do we make of an opera conceived and first performed in such circumstances? It is hardly a work of protest, though how could it be? In what I am tempted to call its ‘aristocratic’ refinement, both verbally and musically, it stands at one level about as distant from the catastrophe enveloping Europe as one could imagine. Yet when one begins to think about it a little more deeply, all sorts of difficulties, intentional or otherwise, emerge. This might seem facile, but the very setting in France has resonances. Moreover, To have the Countess comparing the musical merits of Rameau vis-à-vis Couperin at this time in Nazi Germany is perhaps more telling than one might think. Such composers were not part of the musical mainstream, even leaving aside matters of nationality; indeed, many composers, let alone others, would not necessarily have been well acquainted with their music, though Strauss certainly was – and showed through his composition that he was, sometimes through direct quotation, for instance the ‘Air italien’ from Rameau’s Les indes galantes, when the composer is mentioned, at other times through allusion. There seems, then, to be an assertion of humanist, perhaps aristocratic, values, lightly done, as it had to be, but which connects very well with his increasing re-immersion in the work of Goethe. The apolitical, especially at times such as this, might actually be read as highly political, whatever the straightforward intention.





Arguably true, perhaps, but the Rococo – or should that be neo-Rococo? – setting cannot help but seem like a refuge, a retreat. (We are back, perhaps to the Rosenkavalier problem, yet intensified, for retreating from harmonic experiment after Elektra is one thing, withdrawing from a world of war and genocide quite another. At least that is how many of us would see it…) Even in eighteenth-century terms, the aristocratic salon with exquisite manners and rarefied æsthetic debate contrasts sharply with what we know was to come after 1789: the alleged ‘truth’ of revolutionary art, exemplified by, the studio of Jacques-Louis David, let alone the Paris of the sans-culottes, seems distant indeed. Once again, masks and games both gratify and haunt us: Straussian detachment and irony.


And since so much of the drama concerns itself with artistic patronage, we can hardly help consider the patronage of Schirach and Goebbels. What then, are we to make of a work in which it is the patroness, the Countess, who insofar as anyone can, resolves dramatic conflicts? Having said that, if, as seems clear, the representation of La Roche takes an affectionate cue from the Jewish impresario, Max Reinhardt, an old and valued collaborator with Strauss from beyond even the foundation of the Salzburg Festival, indeed from the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, then letting La Roche/Reinhardt have his say, above all in his dignified panegyric to the theatre, is not without its importance.



A recent production from the Cologne Opera, which I saw at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, heightened the contrast between political reality and work, and made a powerful case for political reality as part both of the work and our inevitable response to it. That contrasts strongly and tellingly with the San Francisco DVD I have (see above YouTube link) as ‘traditional’ a production as one might conceive, but which one necessarily reads in a different way once one has started to think about these issues. In one of the archetypal operas about the making of an opera, it is more than usually appropriate to add another narrative layer, in which the era of the making of Capriccio itself features. Our first sight, disturbingly set against the beauties of the sextet – some might be tempted to call it the Schirach sextet – was of the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Elysées. The opera therefore remained in France, somewhere outside Paris. The bulk of the action, Capriccio's creation of an opera as opposed to the production's creation of Capriccio, took place in eighteenth-century costume: a final house party, in which the coming of the Gestapo might be put out of mind for a couple of hours. One might have been tempted to wonder: is this perhaps what Strauss himself was doing?


There were from time to time reminders of approaching fate, which grew more numerous as time – a crucially important concept – went on. Every aspect of the production, be it 'political' or 'aesthetic', showed the dichotomy to be false and worked inexorably towards the denouement: the Count's preparation of a cyanide capsule, the last vain attempt to answer or perhaps to evade not only the vexed question of words or music, but arguably to answer or to evade other questions too, and perhaps most chillingly of all, the prompter, Monsieur Taupe, replete with his yellow star, being left behind by the departure of the main party and offered his own carriage ‘home’. In this context, the actress Clairon’s constant refrains that she must depart for Paris sounded differently indeed.


The final scene then depicted the Countess saying farewell. Who knew when or indeed whether she would ever return after being escorted to the railway station? And yet, there was another, equally important side to what was going on. Strauss's music arguably offered some sense of hope, ‘utopian’ in a sense Ernst Bloch might have understood, against this terrible backdrop. Whether the hope were vain or even irresponsible remained unanswered, at least explicitly. Yet just as surely as music always wins out against the words, for the apparently insoluble argument is answered by Strauss in the glory of the closing music set against the banality of the Major-Domo's announcement that supper is served, so perhaps, in Strauss’s very own sense, does art against its surrounding evil. The former certainly does not prevent the other, but nor does it necessarily submit entirely. For the music to the final scene, some of the most heartrending Strauss ever wrote, becomes all the more moving when it confronts rather than retreats from evil. Or at least when, masks or otherwise, it is made to do so. Is the mask slipping, or is it just deployed in a way that utterly convinces the listener? We should not expect – and yet we seem to do so – Strauss necessarily to know himself. Indeed, as Strauss read in Goethe’s Zahme Xenien, which he would consider setting, though instead he wrote Metamorphosen, ‘Niemand wird sich Selber kennen/sich von seinem Selbst-Ich trennen’ (‘No one can know himself/separate himself from his very self.’)

If the beauty – the Mondscheinmusik simply had to begin with a horn solo – of Strauss’s music and, of course, its irony enable us to see more clearly and to ask questions, if he stands as an object of suspicion in the eyes of conventional, whether justified or otherwise, ways of conceiving of music and morality, then we might consider him rather differently. Hans Werner Henze’s accusation that Strauss had never given a thought to the moral function of his work seems untrue; it was, rather, rare for that function to provide the intentional subject matter of his work, quite another matter. Though even that is perhaps untrue: some of the works after all not only delight artistically but are in some senses about artistic delight. For many, Strauss included, that is a moral function – and I should like to think that Henze and other decriers of Strauss would recognise that too.