# "As Specialized As Opera Can Get"



## Xavier (Jun 7, 2012)

Here is a list of commentaries (some are funny) by operagoers who aren't terribly fond of Strauss's final opera _Capriccio_.

*1)* I think it is a work that is given far too much importance by those who would weave more into it than it demands or deserves. Though I am a Richard Strauss girl all the way, I will never understand the appeal of this work which I find dreadfully boring. A few inspired, gorgeous pages, YES, but it's intermingled with all those dry stretches and appalling longueurs.

*-Cecily C.*

*2)* If you are thinking of trying opera for the first time by going to one of the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD at the Met performances at a movie theater near you, that's a good idea. If you are thinking of trying Richard Strauss's Capriccio as your first opera, I would have to say that's probably *not* a good idea. I had been looking forward to this one all season, probably because Renee Fleming looked so beautiful in the previews, and the setting looked glamorous, and I had seen Ms. Fleming in another Richard Strauss opera in 2009, Der Rosenkavalier, which was melodic and entertaining. But Even the Enchanting Renee Fleming Can't Save This Yawner. This opera is boring: very loquacious and almost no arias, and Ms. Fleming just preens when she was onstage.

Ms. Fleming may be "the people's diva," as she has been dubbed. But Capriccio is not "the people's opera."

*-Evelyn Lynn*

*3)* I have been to what I believe is the most boring opera ever. Last month, I went to Australian Opera's Capriccio. OH. MY. GOD. I wanted to run screaming after the first few minutes (right after the beautiful Sextet introduction) but I persisted because I wasted a hundred bucks on the ticket. I can't figure for the life of me that this dull, plodding "opera" is in repertory everywhere. There's no plot, the premise is ludicrous, the characters lifeless and it did not help that they all adopted styles of 1920s and over grimaced their parts. I wanted to strangle whoever played the poet or the brother. The countess was played by one expressionless statue and her singing was equally monotonous. The other singers are all forgettable.

I guess I will never get the late operas of Strauss. I could hear now and then a few beautiful phrases but the music seem to *overturn on itself* and destroy its own occasional potential. Most of the time it is also incongruous, you hear loud brash phrases and expect to see Teutonic armies marching down and find yourself watching somebody scratching their beard. The most unbearable part of the opera is that the solitary contemplative moments are too few and far in between and the action for the most part is slapstick of the most jejune kind. Der Rosenkavalier was plagued by this too though it had a decent enough premise. It's third act silliness would be an insult to a school play. But the slapstick here goes beyond unfunny and puerile, it's incomprehensibly amateurish. I have heard great things said about the librettist Krauss but he doesn't know how to pull off comedy. He has no wit and his attempts are bloated and labored and insufferably dull. After this experience, I shall avoid Strauss like the plague. To think, some people on this list complain about Meyerbeer!!

*-Opera lover*

*4)* Strauss's Capriccio is not the best theatre. It's too dry and verbose to please a multitude, though it begins promisingly with a graceful string sextet in period style and ends with the characteristic radiant Straussian soprano in the Countess' closing scene. Capriccio sounds as if Strauss had traded words for music almost the entire way. It is as specialized as opera can get.

*-Ethan Mordden*

*5)* After some 45 years of playing with the damned thing, trying to look and listen from every angle, hitting it with a wrench, applying every technique I can think of, I have to report that I still really don't get Capriccio - the idyllic, romantic, Mozartian obverse of Elektra.

*-Rebecca Trepsi*

*6)* Honestly, though, while a lot of the music is lovely, this has to be my Least Favorite Opera Ever. It just seemed endless. That there's even MORE of it than was performed last night boggles the mind. I think I need to admit that post-Ariadne Strauss and I just aren't meant to be.

*-Pelleas fanatic*

*7)* I confess that I often struggle to keep my attention focused on Strauss; the music is unquestionably splendid moment by moment, and yet the totality can become (dare I say it?) tedious. This is particularly a danger in the opera Capriccio, and Rene Fleming fails to avoid it.

*-Matthew Simt*

*8)* A work that is rarely given because of its odd, conversational style and lack of drama in the usual sense, this one-act debate about the relative importance of words, music and staging in opera is something you seem either to love or hate. For me, it is a trite, tedious, self-indulgent and musically unremarkable opera.

*-Australian reviewer*

*9)* There is a peculiar charm and sophistication in Capriccio. And the melodic content often has extraordinary appeal, and in the final scene it rises to great heights. There are also many dead spots in the opera, however. Talk, talk, talk. Very chatty. A little comic relief is provided by the two Italian singers; and the octet of servants toward the end helps break up the prevailing sameness. In short, a flawed opera, but one in which there are extremely moving moments.

*-Harold C. Schonberg*

*10)* There are many moments when Strauss, with music of great beauty, projects all the layers of meaning. Yet for many persons there are moments, too, when the conversation drags wearily on. Though the opera runs 2 and a quarter hours, Strauss intended it to be played without intermission; but unlike Wagner in Das Rheingold, of similar length, he offers no change of scene and only one instead of three orchestral interludes in which the characters are removed from the stage and the audience can rest its eyes. Some producers, therefore, have introduced a break after the first 52 minutes, and some, though fewer, make cuts.

Such an authority as Lord Harewood, the editor of Kobbe, thinks the opera will "gain ground in the repertory as the years go by".

*-George Martin*

*11)* Watching Renée Fleming and friends as they diverted themselves in the overheated drawing room (complete with harpsichord and harp) that forms the set of Richard Strauss' Capriccio, all I could think was: somebody needs to haul these people out to the countryside and make them dig irrigation ditches. There are many things you can say about this remarkable opera but one is that it is a monument--no, a love letter--to the haute bourgoisie that define so much of the art world around the end of the 19th Century. Thin Proust's Paris, Mann's Hanseatic League, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha (the Compsons, remember?), even, by a slight stretch, the Ranevskys in Chekhov's Cherry Orchard. They're civilized (more or less), they're cultivated (somewhat), they are cosseted (more than they know) and they are bored, bored, bored, much more than they want to admit even to themselves.

*-Anonymous blogger*

*12)* Capriccio does end with a remarkable 20-minute monologue for Super-Sopranos like those mentioned, but that did not prevent people from walking out of the cinema-where I saw it in HD-well before we got to it. Not that everyone felt that way. Although I heard criticisms like "boring," "tedious," and even "stupefying dull," I also heard "magnificent" and "reaching sublime philosophical and musical heights." There's nothing more exciting than diametrically opposing reviews in opera. There is much charming back-and-fourth between "importances"- evidently too much and too repetitive for the anti-Capriccio in the audience-but allowing each performer here to strut his or her stuff although never in a clearly defined aria that some in our audience seemed to be demanding. (They seem to forget that Strauss now was composing in an operatic world that had been offered such innovations as Sprechstimme in Berg's Wozzeck, atonal entries like Schoenberg's Moses and Aron or Shostakovich's imaginative Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk. I do hope that this work will finally manage to rise above the notion that it's just caviar for special tastes!

*-Marlies Wolf*

*13)* In spite of a few severely testing evenings, I have only ever fallen asleep at the opera twice. Once was about five years ago, mid-Rodelinda. The second was at Capriccio. The fact that both nights were at the Met and starred Renee Fleming perhaps speaks to the comfort of the Met seating and the soothing qualities of The Beautiful Voice (not to mention my overpacked NY schedule and lingering jetlag) more than the inherent tedium of the performances. But two and half hours without an espresso break is a challenge that several met by simply leaving early. I myself might not have woken until the applause had a neighbor not clambered over me to escape a few minutes before the finish line. By which time Renee had changed frocks, the battle between words and music remained unresolved, and the jolly posh drawing room set was exactly as it was found at curtain up.

From what little I heard, I suspect this is a decent bash at a difficult opera.

*-Intermezzo (bloggress)*

*14)* I love Salome…. I can be enthusiastic or cold about Elektra…. I find Rosenkavalier good to iffy, (and maybe needing a haircut of about 40 minutes)…. Arabella is gorgeous to pretentious…. Ariadne auf Naxos is enchanting…. Die Frau ohne Schatten is immense, puzzling and fascinating.

Capriccio?

Capriccio NEVER warms me. The humor is too sophisticate, the characters too refined, and the final soprano solo -- which is admittedly incredibly beautiful -- a climax to a career and an opera that is almost worth the price of admission. The subject matter -- words versus music -- was probably near and dear to Strauss' heart, but is it really at all dramatic? Not really! I've actually coached Prima la Musica, poi le Parole by Salieri, which covers the same material idea. It's not great music and requires cutting, but in a way it's more successful than Capriccio. The Strauss loses sight of what makes us interested in opera -- drama, great singing, and costumes. (I know, more than that, but those are deep areas.)

A great performance of Salome can thrill you even when you are repulsed by blood and morbid sexuality. Elektra can be either a great, edge-of-your-seat show or loud. It makes a big difference how much the singers actually project the inner thoughts of the characters. In Capriccio, the characters do so little and TALK SO MUCH that, if the singers get even a little too into "sound" for its own sake, we lose interest. It's like sitting behind a preacher and trying to follow a sermon. Distractions can derail following the gist of the message. So it is with Strauss' last opera.

It may be a great work, but it is perilously close to a noble failure.

*--Anonymous opera conductor*


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

...excuse me - the COMFORT of the Met's seats? :lol: ah, there's an operagoer who is used to tough, tough sledding. I would never have described them as comfortable, and I've sat in enough to be able to tell.

But back to the thread: I didn't love Capriccio, but I was really impressed that such seemingly weak material actually made a darn good opera. I wouldn't go again to the same production - it wasn't THAT good - but seeing it elevated Strauss quite a bit in my thinking. All in error, of course, since he didn't write the libretto, and it was the libretto I enjoyed!


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Xavier said:


> *3)*The most unbearable part of the opera is that the solitary contemplative moments are too few and far in between and *the action for the most part is slapstick of the most jejune kind. Der Rosenkavalier was plagued by this too though it had a decent enough premise. It's third act silliness would be an insult to a school play. But the slapstick here goes beyond unfunny and puerile, it's incomprehensibly amateurish.* I have heard great things said about the librettist Krauss but he doesn't know how to pull off comedy. He has no wit and his attempts are bloated and labored and insufferably dull. After this experience, I shall avoid Strauss like the plague. To think, some people on this list complain about Meyerbeer!!
> 
> *-Opera lover*


this cheerful bird sounds like an authority on humour and wit


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Xavier said:


> *13)* In spite of a few severely testing evenings, I have only ever fallen asleep at the opera twice. Once was about five years ago, mid-Rodelinda.*-Intermezzo (bloggress)*


I can see that. I've seen the version with Fleming, Daniels and Blythe and I may have nodded off too if I didn't have the remote control handy. Really boring plot and languid music, Mr. Handel, and I'm normally very open to women's plight in music. Nice reusage of an exciting bit from Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (can't remember for the life of me which particular bit (I find the entire thing rather exciting), my brain is mixing up with the bit from the same oratorio which gets reused in Agrippina).

err, sorry for the off topic. Let me just say that Capriccio happened to be the first Strauss opera I was exposed to and I found it lovely and clever and the ending gorgeous.


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

deggial said:


> I can see that. I've seen the version with Fleming, Daniels and Blythe and I may have nodded off too if I didn't have the remote control handy. Really boring plot and languid music, Mr. Handel, and I'm normally very open to women's plight in music. Nice reusage of an exciting bit from Il trionfo del tempo e del disinganno (can't remember for the life of me which particular bit (I find the entire thing rather exciting), my brain is mixing up with the bit from the same oratorio which gets reused in Agrippina).
> 
> err, sorry for the off topic. Let me just say that Capriccio happened to be the first Strauss opera I was exposed to and I found it lovely and clever and the ending gorgeous.


Agh! You didn't like Rodelinda? That was the opera that got me thinking there might be something to all this Baroque stuff. I really enjoyed it. Even Renee Fleming, which I almost never do. Anthony Roth Costanzo sang so beautifully - a very small part, but it was wonderful, I thought.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

I didn't... but I'm not saying I would never listen to it again. It's Handel, after all, and I have him in the highest esteem. I don't like La Fleming in anything _but_ Strauss. Have you seen her Armida? oi. But I love her Strauss heroines.


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## Volve (Apr 14, 2013)

Regarding Fleming, she was my first Desdemona, and she made quite an impression on me! The third act of MET's Live in HD of last year was breathtaking, and I hold her responsible for that. However, I never heard her sing anything from Strauss actually


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

^ definitely check her out in Der Rosenkavalier and Capriccio!


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## guythegreg (Jun 15, 2012)

Huh - as for me, the only thing I've seen Fleming in that I REALLY enjoyed was the Eugene Onegin she did with Hvorostovsky. I only saw the DVD - it was in the pre-season Live in HD re-screenings they do for 10 days or so before the season begins - but I thought her voice was lovely in every register, for that performance.


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