See/Hear

Composed in 1939, Capriccio was Strauss’ final opera. It is subtitled “A Conversation Piece for Music.” Despite the events unfolding around the composer and throughout Europe, Capriccio is another charming piece that deals with its subject matter in an almost trivial way. Alex Ross writes,

“While the German Blitzkrieg was moving through Poland, in 1939, [Strauss] conceived the peculiarly irrelevant notion of writing a short chamber piece about the art of opera itself, with the action or lack thereof set in the Paris of the ancien regime. It was eventually given the title Capriccio… A sophisticated, ambivalent, fascinating woman is at the center of the action. The countess Madeleine has commissioned an opera from the poet Olivier and the composer Flamand. The two men compete for her favor, and so, too, do the arts of poetry and music – which is more central to the drama?

At the end, the countess looks into a mirror, asking, “Can you help me to find the ending, the ending for their opera? Is there one that is not trivial?” At this moment, her majordomo walks in to say, “Countess, dinner is served.” A lovely irony colors Strauss’ setting of that line… It is at once touching and unsettling to picture Strauss immersed in the artifice of Capriccio in the early months of 1941, when German forces were gearing up for the invasion of Russia and Heydrich’s Einsatzgruppen were set to slaughter Jews and Slavs in their wake. Touching, because one can sense Strauss’ need to disappear into a realm of tones. Unsettling, because his work was so at odds with the surrounding reality. On August 3, 1941, the day that Capriccio was finished, 682 Jews were killed in Chernovtsy, Romania; 1,500 in Jelgava, Latvia; and several hundred in Stanislaw, Ukraine [previously Poland]. On October 28, 1942, the day of the opera’s premiere in Munich, the first convoy of Jews from Theresienstadt arrived at Auschwitz­ and Birkenau, and 90 percent of them were sent to the gas chamber.”

The opening string sextet is often performed as a standalone piece, a tradition that dates back to six months before the official premiere of the opera. Dr. Richard E. Rodda writes that, “The Sextet brings Strauss’ opulent harmonic palette and rich instrumental textures to his stylized recreation of elegant Rococo chamber music. In the opera, the music begins before the stage is revealed. As it continues, the curtain rises to show the characters listening to the music played by an off-stage ensemble as the musician Flamand’s birthday offering to the Countess.” And Michael Kennedy’s description of the full opera works just as well for the opening sextet: “Capriccio is Strauss’ most enchanting opera. It is also the nearest he came to unflawed perfection in a work of art. It is an anthology or synthesis of all that he did best, and it is as if he put his creative process into a crucible, refining away coarseness, bombast and excess of vitality.”