Ariadne auf Naxos

About This Event

The premise is practically a satire of bad patrons: a wealthy Vienna arts sponsor has hired both a serious opera (Ariadne, abandoned by her lover on the island of Naxos) and a comedy troupe for the same evening, and at the last minute decides he wants them performed simultaneously, on the same stage, since he needs everything wrapped up before his fireworks display at nine sharp. The tragic heroine and the clowns end up sharing the show neither wanted to share.

Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal didn't get there cleanly. The 1912 original paired the opera with an actual full staging of Molière's Le Bourgeois gentilhomme as a prologue, and it flopped at its Stuttgart premiere — theatergoers who'd come for Molière were bored sitting through an opera tacked onto the end, and opera fans were annoyed they had to sit through an entire play first. Hofmannsthal's fix, which Strauss resisted before relenting in 1916, was to scrap the Molière half and replace it with a new sung Prologue set backstage before the two shows collide — that's the version everyone performs now, premiered in Vienna in October 1916.

This production is sung in German with projected titles, with tenor Russell Thomas and baritone Zachary Nelson leading a cast built for the score's demanding, high-octane vocal writing.