Opera Ireland's version of Strauss's stubbornly impressionistic 'Ariadne auf Naxos' transplants the action to a 1980s house party, expressing the characters' idiosyncrasies through music, costumes, props - and even shoes, writes Arminta Wallace.
'THERE'S ONE character who looks like Elvis Presley in his later years. And there's somebody who's a flight attendant, very pretty, and still in her uniform - so you can presume that the rich patron has just met her on his private jet and invited her to his party. Then we've got somebody who looks as though she has been to many, many Woodstock concerts and never quite came back."
If you want to get swept up in enthusiasm for the operas of Richard Strauss, and in particular for Ariadne auf Naxos, just spend a little time with Walter Kobéra and Stefanie Pasterkamp who are, respectively, conductor and designer for the production, which opens at the Gaiety Theatre this Sunday as part of the Opera Ireland spring season.
Talking to these two is like finding yourself shrunk to quark size, then zoomed into the midst of a 3-D duet featuring two contrasting voices: Kobéra's slow-moving, legato, and barely audible, Pasterkamp's extrovert, staccato, and accompanied by the flamboyant gestures of a dancer. It's immediately obvious, however, that they're united in their admiration for Strauss and for Ariadne auf Naxos, which they describe as "a work of genius", "virtuoso operatic writing", "sublime". High praise for a work that, in dictionaries of opera, seems to attract slightly iffy praise from critics who get bogged down in its unconventional structure.
SO LET'S do the structure bit first. The work comes in two parts. Prologue: a party in the house of a Viennese businessman who has commissioned an opera and a play as part of the after-dinner entertainment. Act two: the after-dinner entertainment.
So far, so straightforward - until the businessman, anxious to get the evening sewn up in time for a spectacular fireworks display planned for 9pm, decides he wants the opera and the play to be mashed together and served up simultaneously.
This propels the already strung-out composer into nervous-breakdown mode as he tries to figure out how to get the streetwise actor Zerbinetta and her troupe of tatty comedians into his high-flown tragedy about Ariadne, the Greek princess rescued from the Minotaur by Theseus and now abandoned, lovelorn and suicidal, on the island of Naxos. It's like trying to blend EastEnders and Sophocles.
The double storyline allows Strauss to explore some complex themes - from the position of art in society to the question of what, exactly, constitutes love - a situation that the current staging aims to portray, in spades, by putting everyone in fancy dress. Together with director Dieter Kaegi, Pasterkamp came up with the idea of styling the production as a 1980s house party. But not just any old house party. "In those days, people didn't go to clubs and restaurants the way they do now," says Pasterkamp. "They invited friends to their homes and had a themed evening, showing the pictures from last year's holiday in Greece, say, and dressing up and eating Greek food.
"But then we said, 'Well, these are not just ordinary people - they're people who make things happen, who commission operas and plays, not Henry from next door'. So we found a book about Andy Warhol's 1980s events parties. And that was pretty much it." Hence the unabashed wackiness of the guest list. "We looked at every single one of the characters and gave each of them a history," says Pasterkamp. This applies even to those who have only a few lines to sing - or who don't sing at all.
"At the beginning of rehearsals we spent a lot of time explaining to the singers what they were wearing, and why. We also had to do a lot of explaining to the props department as to why we needed a big ring here, or red platform shoes there."
This emphasis on individuality is, as Kobéra makes clear, directly rooted in Strauss's score. "It's 19th-century music, really," he says. "It's written very much in a post-Wagnerian style. The music offers a constantly changing kaleidoscope of colours, and Strauss uses tempo to convey emotion in a very subtle way. As someone's mood fluctuates, the tempo may change - only for two bars - and then it's off somewhere else. And there are changing harmonies like you can't believe. For example, one of the minor characters, a very excitable guy, only has a few sentences to sing - but his high notes are not on the beat, which gives him a totally idiosyncratic style."
Unusually for Strauss, whose tone poems feature famously large orchestral forces, the piece is scored for just 35 musicians - which makes its extraordinary finale, in which the soundscape rolls in with the force of a sudden high tide, all the more remarkable. Students of music history may be interested to learn that in the original version of the piece, Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal planned to have not more than six players. "So we can be very happy," declares Kobéra with a broad grin, "that the first performance was a complete disaster."
Premiered just before the first World War, Ariadne auf Naxos was substantially revised in 1916 and, shamefully, has remained unperformed in Dublin until 2008. It's very much a product of turn-of-the-century Vienna - the birthplace of Zionism and Nazism, the place where Freud developed psychoanalysis, where Klimt began the Jungendstil movement in art, Loos introduced his starkly functional style of modern architecture and Schoenberg unravelled the harmonic basis of western music.
VIENNA IS also home to Walter Kobéra, artistic director and general manager of Neue Oper Wien, which, having no home base or regular ensemble - Irish opera companies, take note - specialises in staging contemporary opera in high-energy, lavishly visual and often site-specific productions. Kobéra's passion for new music doesn't, however, blind him to the sumptuous charms of Strauss. "Ariadne is a charter for our times," he says. "Relationships now seem to be always fleeting - temporary. The same goes for jobs. Nobody has a job for life any more. We are told we must change, move, all the time. The global economy is, nowadays, in our private lives."
It's no accident that the women in the opera offer - literally - an A to Z of attitudes to love. Ariadne is the conventional tragic heroine trapped in a Greek dramatic postscript, deserted by her lover Theseus and doing her best to die of a broken heart; Zerbinetta is the modern woman, flitting from one relationship to the next in a heartbeat. Then there's the Composer - the pivotal role in the drama, and one of its most sympathetic characters: poet, idealist, slave to art. And also - because this, don't forget, is the world of Richard Strauss, where nothing is quite as it seems - a woman dressed up as a man. Or, in this case, a woman dressed up as a woman.
Explain, please? Pasterkamp laughs. "It's a trouser role, sung by a mezzo soprano. These were very popular in the 19th century, and familiar to us from Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier and Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro." Derived from the castrato role in 18th-century opera seria - which had to be taken by a woman when the practice of castration eventually died out - these roles exploited the ambiguity of cross-dressing and the frisson of illicit sexuality. Half pantomime dame, half Crying Game.
"It's a matter of disguises, and Strauss loved that," says Pasterkamp. "The female voice was his speciality anyway, and he enjoyed bringing the refinement and nuance of the female voice to a male role. So normally you have this character who is actually a woman playing the part of a man. But in our production everyone is disguised anyhow, at the event party, and we thought it would look odd if the Composer wasn't in disguise too. So our Composer is a woman, dressed as a woman, singing a man." The extra layer of trickery adds an extra helping of spice to the scene in which Zerbinetta - played by the drop-dead gorgeous Japanese mezzo Mari Moriya, winner of last year's Veronica Dunne singing competition - flirts with the Composer in one of the piece's show-stopping musical moments.
But like many of the moments in the opera, both Kobéra and Pasterkamp warn, it's just a moment. Just that. There are no great revelations, no dramatic awakenings, no smoking guns. For all its great wash of seductively familiar Wagnerian sound, Ariadne auf Naxos's approach to storytelling is highly subversive and stubbornly impressionistic. "Strauss has written other operas on this theme - the art of conversation, you might call it," says Pasterkamp. "Things that start off so light, without any pretension. It's nothing. Nothing that can do you any harm. And then suddenly, without warning or preparation, a gap opens up, and . . . whooooom. Wow. You're in another place altogether."
Now that's what I call opera. And it comes with a warning, folks: there are only three performances. Catch it if you can.
Opera Ireland's Ariadne auf Naxos, directed by Dieter Kaegi with design by Stefanie Pasterkamp, is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on Mar 30, Apr 1 and Apr 4 at 8pm. The RTÉ Concert Orchestra will be conducted by Walter Kobéra