Tribute to Strauss at Beijing festival

Updated: 2014-10-21 14:25

By Chen Jie(China Daily USA)

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The Beijing Music Festival presents quality operas that are rarely seen in the capital. This year, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, two of the composer's major operas, Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) and Elektra (1909), will premiere in China.

Strauss and the Austrian dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal initially wrote an opera in one act to be performed after Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentillhomme. But the premiere in Stuttgart in 1912 showed that the combination of a play and an opera was not practical for most theaters. Strauss and von Hofmannsthal therefore created a prologue in place of Moliere's play to present before the one-act opera. That version premiered in 1916, and has been successful to this day.

The story begins at the home of the richest man in Vienna, where preparations for a musical festivity are underway. An opera company will present the serious work Ariadne by a young composer, while another group, led by the saucy comedienne Zerbinetta, is asked to entertain the guests with a less-tragic sequel. In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of Minos, the king of Crete and the son of Zeus and Pasiphae, who was the daughter of the sun god Helios.

 Tribute to Strauss at Beijing festival

Ariadne auf Naxos, one of Richard Strauss' major operas, will premiere in China as part of the Beijing Music Festival this month. Provided to China Daily

The drama, which ends its run at Poly Theater on Monday, is a co-production by Leipzig Opera House and China Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of Matthias Foremny and featuring a group of leading vocalists from Europe.

"The opera is actually an opera about opera, about art itself," says director Karoline Gruber, "However it does not theoretically reflect on its ingredients, but displays them in sumptuous sensuality by presenting the artificial figures as well as the human characters."

"This opera is theater within theater, comedy meets tragedy and serious opera fights against funny entertainment," says conductor Foremny, who says Strauss knew the nature of audiences well.

"On the one hand there are the intellectuals, who are always looking for a deeper sense in a work, and on the other hand there are people who only want to enjoy the performance," he says.

The prologue contains a lot of humor. You can find all these characters during a chaotic preparation for a festival. Every protagonist is fighting for his own truth. It is an extreme situation with passionate and nerve-racking moments. Finally the artists and audiences are united under the grand rhythms of Strauss' music.

It's a great challenge to present Strauss' operas in China, according to Yu Long, the Beijing festival's founder and music director.

"Chinese people are not familiar with Richard Strauss, which means there is no market. But as President Xi Jinping said at a symposium in Beijing last week, artists should not lose themselves in the market economy and become its slaves," Yu says.

Tribute to Strauss at Beijing festival

Yu points out that Chinese fans of Western opera have had the chance to see hundreds of performances of Carmen, Turandot and La Traviata. "They are all good operas but we should open their vision and introduce a variety of productions. Artists should not only please the audience, but inspire and educate them as well," says Yu, whose festival has presented 17 operas including Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle and Parsifal, Alban Berg's Lulu and Strauss' The Knight of the Rose since it started in 1998. Most of those productions debuted in China.

According to Tu Song, the festival's program director, dozens of Strauss fans will fly from Shanghai, Tianjin and Hangzhou for the performances. The second Strauss opera, Elektra, will be performed at Poly Theater on Oct 24. Maestro Charles Dutoit will conduct the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra that night.

chenjie@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily USA 10/20/2014 page11)

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