A Revelatory Rosenkavalier

The live DVD recording  of last season’s controversial - though I would prefer to say revelatory - new  production of Der Rosenkavalier at  Glyndebourne has been joyfully released.

Whatever its faults, and I have had difficulty finding any that seriously trouble me, they do not lie with Tara  Erraught, the fine young Irish mezzo-soprano who sang the central role of Octavian and was chided by the London critics for being “dumpy,” “stocky,” and - worst of all -  “fat,” a word which, so far as I know, was employed by only one reviewer, and by him (they were all male)  admittedly obliquely. But the damage was done and, after such a tizz, it seems quite brave of Glyndebourne to have issued its two-disc DVD, showing the entire cast in revealing close-up.

And what do we see? No previous Octavian, in my experience, has been attacked so needlessly  for visual  reasons, though occasionally the word “priggish”  or “arrogant” has been used about exponents of the role in Act Two  - I seem to recall that Janet Baker was thus described  when she sang it for Scottish Opera many years ago.

I thought that Baker, on the whole, was an admirable  Octavian, and I believe that, for different reasons, Tara Erraught is even better.  The difficulty about Octavian is that, as conceived by Strauss and Hofmannsthal, the composer and librettist,  he is a seventeen-year-old boy who is played by a girl - one of the opera world’s most famous “trouser” roles - and has to dress up, in Act One and Act Three, as a chamber maid, just like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro.

Again like Cherubino he is an aristocrat, and at the start of the opera he is amorously involved with another of the work’s aristocrats, the Marschallin (or field marshal’s wife)  who is attracted to boys when her husband is away. The story grows farcical when the Marschallin’s country cousin, the raucous Baron Ochs, arrives to marry Sophie, daughter of a nouveau riche Viennese family. It’s an arranged marriage - they have never met before - and Octavian gets inextricably involved in the proceedings when he meets Sophie and falls for her, thus bringing his relationship with the Marschallin to an end.

As operatic tradition goes, most exponents of Der Rosenkavalier are more, sometimes much more, mature than they are meant to be. But, usually  being possessors of fine voices, they get away with it. With an uncommonly youthful cast at his disposal, however, Richard Jones, Glyndebourne’s resourceful director, made a virtue out of the the cast available to him and created portrayals of striking truthfulness, without losing the advantage of expressive voices. When not even the Marschallin is shown to be an older woman  - the whole point of the character is that she is actually quite young - their relationships became all the more sharply defined.  Kate Royal, tall, slim, elegant, and silvery-voiced - was an ideal Marschallin. Tara Erraught’s Octavian was a bright-eyed boy, and the fact that she was smaller than the Marschallin seemed perfectly in keeping. Indeed the latter’s interest in adolescent boys (her black pageboy is clearly going to be her next young lover) is vividly put.

Nor is  Lars Woldt’s active young  Baron in any way the clumsy old lecher of tradition. Rude and irritating, yes; maladroit, no. Teodora Gheorghiu’s Sophie, who so quickly sees her future in Octavian and not the Baron, is spot-on. With young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra making his debut as Glyndebourne’s latest music director, the performance is in the right hands. Richard Jones’s production, apart from placing its big brush-strokes correctly, is alert to all the tiny visual details a good Rosenkavalier requires, including a gratuitous but gloriously apt appearance by Sigmund Freud. Though Act Three, with its Verdian bating of the Baron, so akin to that of Falstaff, as usual has its longueurs, I loved the whole thing and am delighted to recommend it.
14 June 2015