The Rose Cavalier

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 333, 9 November 1945, Page 9

The Rose Cavalier

HE Kobbé opera guide has it that the ‘" libretto of Rasenkavalier has been repeatedly attacked on the grounds of immorality. This may well be so, although few listeners bother about it nowadays; opera gets away with a great deal that would not pass the Hays Office in the case of a film. The cast contains as nasty a collection of characters as exists anywhere; even the sweet Sophia, the only virtuous person in the play, is not. so celestial as would appear, since she makes no demur at accepting as her future husband a man who has just discarded a married woman as his mistress without the slightest reason except that she is getting old. This hero is the Count Octavian, about whom the opera-lover is further bewildered by the fact that the role is taken by a woman singer. It is obvious, then, that the operatic mezzosoprano who plays this role must be even more versatile than the boy-actors who used to play Shakespeare’s heroines, since she must suggest, while clothed in her natural garb of frills and

furbelows, that she is in reality a man disguised as a woman. The plot. is further complicated by the addition of spies, apparitions, police, trapdoors, false windows; and really the whole thing is so incredibly silly that no pass-ing-off of the work as a "comedy for music" will justify the foolishness of the libretto, Humour dates as easily as clothes and these are not the things at which we laugh nowadays. With such stuff to work on, it is amazing that Strauss produced such a delightful opera as Rosenkavalier actually is. The lovescenes of the two young people are wrapped in the most delicate and beautiful music imaginable, and the whole thing has a charming atmosphere which makes the question of the morals of the characters a minor consideration.