Ariadne in the spiral of time‍

text by Giovanni Gavazzeni

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The third fruit of the extraordinary artistic collaboration between Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss arose as a consequence of the previous play for music, the famous Der Rosenkavalier (Knight of the Rose). The Austrian poet-dramatist proposed to the Bavarian musician an idea that had been on his mind from some time: to write a small piece "à la Molière." The occasion was propitiated by the fact that it would be the ideal way to thank Max Reinhardt, the dominator of the theater scene at the time, who had saved the premiere of the Knight of the Rose to Dresden by lavishing himself without wishing to appear on the playbill, where he was credited with the Hoftheater's permanent director, Georg Toller ("You can't believe how much he helps us, tireless, all day, from 10 in the morning to 11 at night, first on stage, then in the dressing rooms, cautious, silent, almost invisible, yet as effective as a magician.").

It should not be forgotten that Reinhardt was the director who had brought to Germany the all-Austrian taste for stagings that were the result of a refined interplay of fairy-tale and imaginative temporal "messes," and he had already staged the texts that gave rise to the librettos of Strauss's first two operatic masterpieces, Oscar Wilde's Salome and Hofmannsthal's own Elektra .

In his letter of March 20, 1911, Hofmannsthal proposed to Strauss to write a work in which "heroic-mythological figures in eighteenth-century clothing, with crinolines and ostrich plumes, and figures from the Commedia dell'Arte, Harlequins and Scaramucci, who introduce a buffoonish component always intertwined with the heroic component, are interwoven. I think it can become something very graceful, a new genre that is apparently to one of the past, because every development takes place to spiral" (italics ours).

The original idea was an interlude with musical numbers from inserted into a play by Molière-the Bourgeois gentilhomme in the German version Der Bürger als Edelmann. Hofmannsthal would adapt it for Reinhardt's company, that of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, in a daring mixture of genres (prose, music and ballet), following the practice of what was done in Molière's time, which ended Bourgeois with the great Ballet of Nations set to music from Lully.

The project of the to Reinhardt tribute, as the not-to-be-forgotten Germanist and great Straussian Franco Serpa has pointed out, "had been enlarged and happily complicated, and further complicated, when Hofmannsthal, drastically shortening the text, with the elimination of secondary actions, the Turkish ceremony and the finale with dances, came up with the melodramatic conclusion, theAriadne precisely. And already in the first draft sent to Strauss everything (except the name of a few of the masks) is conceived as we know it: the soliloquies of abandoned Ariadne, the jokes of the Italian comedians, the dialogue-contrast between Ariadne and Zerbinetta, the arrival of Bacchus and the apotheosis."

The composer's dubious responses caused the two artists to almost reach a breaking point: Strauss found the first part - Molière - fascinating, but the idea ofopera meager. He posed the practical objection that it was impossible for leading singers to act as prose actors. He had grave doubts as to how one could transition from Bürger to Ariadne, although Hofmannsthal reassured him that there would be a spoken transition between the Ballet Master and the Composer while staging to view the scene of'opera performed after the dinner in the presence of Monsieur Jourdain.
In the Bürger als Edelmann, reduced from Hofmannsthal into two acts and quickened, the bourgeois Monsieur Jourdain thought of concluding his grand reception with a performance d'opera seria followed from a farce, but then, alarmed by the length of the whole, he reconsiders and orders, ignorant and bizarre as he is, to mix as it were melodrama and comic action. For the very happy idea, which is lacking in Molière, Hofmannsthal laid out a graceful connecting scene between the Bürger and Ariadne, between comedy andopera, all of his own invention.
The clouds between the two creators dissipated, after the poet-dramatist wrote a wonderful Letter-Lesson, July 19, 1912, to the composer, clarifying the fundamental knot ofopera, the theme of metamorphosis, of transformation, illuminating the relationship between the world of Ariadne and Bacchus and that of Zerbinetta and the masks of the Commedia dell'Arte: "Metamorphosis is the life of Life, it is like talking about the mystery of Nature caught in its creative act; everything that persists in itself becomes numb and dies. Those who want to live must pass beyond themselves and metamorphose: they must forget. Therefore: all human dignity is linked to the perseverance of the identical, to the refusal of forgetting, to fidelity. (...) Ariadne, too, nurtures the hope and madness of giving herself death; then her boat wrecks and she goes on to other seas. Here is the metamorphosis, prodigy among prodigies, authentic mystery of Love. (...) Ariadne had died, and here she is restored to life; her soul in truth has metamorphosed - it is truth at a very high degree of initiatory experience: how could it coincide with the truth of Zerbinetta and her people? These common masks of life do not see in the events experienced from Ariadne that which they are capable of understanding: the alternation of lovers, the new driving out the old. Thus in the finale the two worlds to which these souls belong are united ironically, the only possible way they can be united is in misunderstanding."

One reason for Ariadne 's evergreen originality lies in the overlapping of those worlds, that is, theatrical perspectives in a fascinating play of mirrors and theater squared.

"(...) On the double image of theater, on the interlocking of first and second fictions, symbolically stands one of the ideal values of poetry and therefore of music, that of the relationship between the truth of life and the fiction of art, between drama and comedy, so that one "scene" is mirrored and changed in the other and the truth of one becomes the illusion in the other. Bourgeois and actors, Zerbinetta and Ariadne, the feeling of today and the expectation of the future, betrayal and eternal love... exits from one scene and enters the other, and in order to be himself, faithful to his own character or destiny, he accepts, with glee or with pain, the transformation, the unexpected god who obliges to cross a threshold, accepts infidelity to his feeling of yesterday in the name of a fidelity superior to life."

Another of the most novelty-laden inventions in Strauss's score is the reduction of the musicians' personnel to that of an orchestra from chamber. In addition to respecting the balances of a "small opera in ancient taste," Hofmannsthal's annoyance with the dominance of music over speech experienced in previous collaborations, Elektra and Knight of the Rose, may not have been unrelated to the choice to reduce the ensemble.

Strauss for Ariadne envisions a sui generis ensemble, which we might call baroque-modern: a from chamber orchestra with swanky anachronisms such as the use of the piano in the manner of a modern harpsichord. The effect achieved is a magical one: the listener feels no reduction; rather, he hears "the orchestra of the future" playing, the one that in the musician's words does not stifle voices and respects the utmost clarity of the text.

Even so dried numerically, it soon became clear that the Deutsches Theater in Berlin could not contain all the required musicians. At the same time, the large theaters in Munich, Dresden, and Berlin that were to give the Straussian "premiere" rejected the idea that their singers could share the limelight with the actors in Reinhardt's company.

So Strauss opted to christen the 'opera at the Kleines Haus of the Königliches Hoftheater in Stuttgart (Oct. 25, 1912), calling for big-name artists, Emmy Destinn, Frida Hempel, Karl Erb, to be cast. Strauss conducted the first two performances, relinquishing the podium to the third to Max von Schillings; he obtained staging from to Reinhardt and his longtime collaborator, the Romanian-German set designer Ernst Stern, creator of sets and costumes in keeping with the climate of poetic preciousness cherished to all collaborators on the project. Eventually, the young future star Mizzi "Maria" Jeritza (Ariadne), taken from the Vienna company, Margarethe Siems (Zerbinetta), from Dresden, and tenor Hermann Jadlowker (Bacchus) from Berlin, were cast for the principal roles. In the interval between the Bürger and Ariadne, the host, Württemberg's "bourgeois" King Wilhelm II, gave a banquet in honor of the performers that lasted almost an hour, resulting in much tiring of the audience; who, as Strauss said, if they had come for Moliere/ Hofmannsthal's prose were not interested in listening to Hofmannsthal/ Strauss'opera and vice versa.

to Stuttgart the daring project(Bürger/Ariadne) was a failure always regretted by its authors; revivals had mixed results to Zurich, Prague, Berlin, Munich (conductor Bruno Walter, with Maude Fay as Ariadne and Hermine Bosetti, Zerbinetta; performance called "appalling" from Strauss), Amsterdam, Dresden, London (in Somerset Maugham's English translation, conductor Thomas Beecham with Eva von der Osten and the Bosetti), Berlin ("marvelous staging" for Strauss, conductor Leo Blech with Louise Halgren-Waag, the Bosetti and Jadlowker). To remedy the rejected marriage between prose and opera, the Authors prepared a new version that became the one current today (Vienna, Oct. 4, 1916, conductor Franz Schalk, with the Jeritza, Ariadne and none other than Lotte Lehman in the new part of the Composer and coloratura nightingale Selma Kurz, Zerbinetta), in which the Bürger disappeared and a new Prologue appeared. Set in the home of a wealthy and anonymous patron, the action pitted a company of fatuous singers d'opera against a group of brilliant Italian comedians, forced by the master to stage a paradoxical spectacle, the tragic story of abandoned Ariadne to Naxos along with the burlesque interlude the infidel Zerbinetta. The despair of the mistreated Composer, who lashes out at Butler, is gradually tempered by the experience of the Master of Music and the Master of Dance, and, in the end, stimulated to new creativity by the vital Zerbinetta.

The version presented by the Spoleto Festival imagines, in place of the 1916 Prologue, the danced Bourgeois Gentleman, employing as its musical material the Suite op. 60 that Strauss derived in 1920 from the splendid stage music of the Bürger. It consists of nine musical numbers in which the German composer grafts the eighteenth-century chamber orchestra into the modern language with prodigious freshness, playing with some of Lully's themes and introducing ironic self-quotations among the courses of Mons. Jordain's Supper, elements that perfectly render that atmosphere of refined pastiche, which can be summed up in Hofmannsthal's concept of "stylistic spiral."

The spiral as "the evolution of one art to another (...) from the bare word, then alternating to instrumental pieces, clothed in music, interspersed with dances, finally materialized in a fully sung staging, theopera, understood as a genre, the summa of all the representative arts."
The spiral that achieves an 'opera admirable where genre distinctions become superfluous, because the forms of living theater, merging one into the other, create a different genre.
Just as Hofmannsthal sublimates Ovid and Catullus, Baroque Arianne and myth in all its scholarly appearances, including Fifteenth- and Seventeenth-century painting, in the same way Strauss "plays" with the materials and forms of the past. The model is the Austrian Mozart's Così fan tutte, which harmonizes Germany and Italy and leads the 'opera to its perfect equilibrium: a "play" that touches a paroxysmal apex in the great scene (Recitativo-Aria e Rondò) of Zerbinetta, who intends to alleviate Ariadne's woes by exhorting her to the pleasures of life. In doing so "the comic character takes possession of the high register (...) giving rise to a number - of spectacular breadth and difficulty - in which three centuries of singing history converge. Eighteenth-century virtuosities are transformed into nineteenth-century coloraturas and put into a twentieth-century harmonic-instrumental context."

After mirrors and spirals, it only remained for the Authors to take the listener to the final encounter between Ariadne and Bacchus, to the apotheosis of transformation, where the Chosen Ones meet "their Destiny-being by not recognizing themselves: but precisely in this not recognizing themselves resides that which allows one to give oneself entirely to the other, to trust in another living being, to unite in him entirely by giving oneself al-beyond oneself, detached as before death (....) With the entrance of Bacchus the cardboard wings must disappear, the backdrop of Jourdain's hall must go up between the trellis, the night must envelop Bacchus and Ariadne and the stars shine in the firmament: no more theater in the theater: Monsieur Jourdain, his guests, the lackeys, the mansion, everything must disappear, forgotten; and the spectator must remember everything as a man who has had a deep dream remembers his own bed...."