Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.King Pollux (here dressed as a Trumpian figure, besieged by angry creditors) resolves to sell his daughter to the highest bidder. Richard Strauss called his second-to-last opera, Die Liebe der Danae (completed in 1940), “a cheerful mythology in three acts” — but is it? The image of Trump has long since ceased to evoke mirth. It is not clear to what extent director Claus Guth’s decision to relocate this new production of the opera — at the Bayerische Staatsoper — to a Trump Tower-analogous office building is an attempt at humour. Nobody laughs.The avarice of New York’s trading class is an obvious choice for an update of the greed attributed to Pollux in Strauss’s retelling of the Greek myth. His librettist, Joseph Gregor, based his work on a sketch by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, but he lacked his predecessor’s brilliance. In Gregor’s version of the myth, Jupiter lends Midas, an impoverished donkey herder, the gift of tactile alchemy as a trick to win the favour of Danae, Pollux’s saleable daughter. Then Jupiter reveals himself. When Danae chooses Midas, once again poor, her renunciation of material wealth profoundly moves the philandering deity.Like his earlier Daphne (1938), Strauss gives a musically lavish treatment to the subject of abnegation. Was this a way of rejecting Nazi values? Or a form of complicity? We can never know for certain; but it was Goebbels’s declaration of “total war” that closed the German theatres and prevented the planned 1944 premiere of Die Liebe der Danae. And it was the Nazis who permitted the first private rendition, a Salzburg dress rehearsal in August that year. Guth gives a nod to the circumstances of the work’s creation by presenting a scene of apocalyptic destruction after the interval; beyond the plate glass window, New York is in flames. The office workers appear trapped and desperate; the 9/11 references are uncomfortable. Lest we should have failed to make the connection ourselves, images of post-second-world-war bombed Munich — including the opera house itself — are projected on to the space where New York had been. To further rub it in, we also see a well-dressed Richard Strauss strolling through his ornate gardens in his Garmisch-Partenkirchen home. How much did the composer really renounce?Though Guth’s production, like so much of his work, is beautifully made, the evening never really takes off. The cast is excellent, from Christopher Maltman’s multi-faceted, Wotan-esque Jupiter and Andreas Schager’s endearing Midas to Sarah Dufresne, Evgeniya Sotnikova, Emily Sierra, and Avery Amereau in a formidably sexy, worldly-wise quartet as Jupiter’s ex-lovers Semele, Europa, Alkmene and Leda. Malin Byström, who was to have sung the title role, was taken ill at the 11th hour. There was really only one woman who could replace her, and luck had it that she was available. Manuela Uhl, who had last performed the role nine years ago, was able to jump in the day before the premiere, and, in a breathtaking achievement of memory and stagecraft, learned Guth’s staging overnight. Such an accomplishment is a miracle in itself; Uhl saved the night, and proved that the part is now embedded in her DNA. It should be in Sebastian Weigle’s DNA too — few conductors are so on top of Strauss. And the orchestra plays for him with force and accuracy, but it is a somewhat brutal listening experience. Weigle seems to have no interest in conveying the delicate filigree enchantment of Strauss’s most magical moments; it is Jupiter’s thunder, not Danae’s affection, that lingers in the ear. There is a thrill to it, but none of the heady intoxication that gives the work its dubious emotional clout. Perhaps that was deliberate. Strauss’s Danae is seldom performed today, and together, Guth and Weigle have showed us why.★★★☆☆To February 22, staatsoper.de
