Strauss’ ‘Capriccio’ is an ideal vocal and acting vehicle for Renée Fleming
John Cox’s production of Richard Strauss’ Capriccio was revived this season at the Metropolitan Opera for the first time since its premiere in 1998—the first time the Met had ever performed it. Updated from the 18th-century to the 1920s, it supplied Renée Fleming with an ideal vocal and acting vehicle.
Joseph Kaiser & Renée Fleming in Capriccio / Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera
Strauss’ librettists were indispensable to him, contributing intellectual heft that was able to mute the temptation to vulgarity and overkill that could diminish his music’s magnificence. For Capriccio, Strauss’s final opera, (first performed in 1942), Clemens Krauss took a joint literary credit with the composer himself as he revised a scenario that had been beset with vicissitudes. In the opera, aesthetes, social pillars and theatrical folk debate at length the relative virtues of ingredients in the theatrical enterprise—most particularly, words versus music.
Capriccio’s libretto also derives much from the drawing room comedies of the two decades preceding its creation. These often offered their heroines options for self-actualization at the expense of societal convention, opportunities for social integration that did not mean conforming to received norms–or rather, took advantage of the radically changed norms of the post-World War I era
Responding to criticism of orchestral engorgement that swamped the singers’ voices, Strauss downsized the sonics and gave a chamber music sound to much of the opera. His characteristically surging, swooning orchestral washes happen here almost entirely as instrumental-only interludes. Most of what transpires in Capriccio is a kind of sung dialogue that would suggest a different type of acting than that prompted by the delivery of set piece arias. There, the lyrics and sentiments repeat poetically; here we have sparkling repartee.
Fleming is Madeleine, the Countess who plays hostess to a salon full of colorful guests. The soprano’s stage business and by-play, her postures, her walk all demonstrate an apparent study of theatrical movement of the period between the two World Wars. On the live stage, actresses had a way of both acknowledging and expanding the confined space behind the proscenium arch. They were not only slinky but a little floppy, as if ready to ricochet off something, thus making mobile what was in fact architecturally obdurate. You can see this in the occasional films made by stage stars of the time, and you can see their movement vocabulary perpetuated, as well as remade, by the actresses who worked primarily on the screen.
Drawing room comedies sometimes, still rather daringly, permitted a woman to reject her suitors and go off on her own. Something similar happens here in Capriccio’s long final scene. The Countess dominates the empty stage.
She ruminates on the inevitable interdependence of words and music, while also considering their champions in the person of her two competing suitors. The debate is all left wonderfully open-ended. But she appears to have come to the decision that she can no more select one man than she could privilege one type of expression. This is the soprano’s only extended solo passage in the opera. Fleming knows how to ride these waves of sound, when to couch the voice, when to open it out all the way. And her lower registers are fuller than is sometimes the case with Strauss sopranos. We hear this when she simulates accompanying herself on the harp as she sings a sonnet that is the joint product of her two rival suitors–poet Oliver and composer Flamand. Then, lying on a piece of furniture downstage and teasing her face with a rose, she seems to be quoting Garbo’s similar fingering of a stem of grapes in Queen Christina.
But Fleming spends most of the final scene standing downstage facing the audience. Soprano and stage direction seem fully cognizant of the potency of this particular positioning as a device for airing a character’s internal deliberations. The performer can seem to be confiding directly to the audience, or she can establish them as a kind of mirror that allows her a dialogue with her own reflection. Or, most meditatively, the performer can seem to be allowing the audience to virtually eavesdrop on her thoughts.
For all her stage sophistication, earlier this month Fleming hadn’t yet entirely solved the challenge of this scene. She relied too much on an almost-ingénue-like ebullience, thus slighting the meditative factor, which is essential; the Countess, is, after all, a recent widow. Fleming, like most performers, continues to evolve her performances over the span of a run. So it will be interesting to see how she delivered the scene at last Saturday afternoon’s performance, the final Capriccio of the season. It was projected live in movie theaters via high definition transmission, and I’ll watch it when it’s telecast.
For more by Joel Lobenthal, visit Lobenthal.com
