Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier featuring Renée Fleming: Here's To You, Mrs. Marschallin

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WQXR & The Metropolitan Opera

Music Interviews, Music Commentary, Aria, Music, Arts, Metropolitan, Performing Arts, Code, Wqxr, Opera, Wnyc, Studios

4.8 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2019

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s not easy to accept the changes that come with time and age. For Richard Strauss’s Marschallin, the trick is simply learning to let go. When the curtain comes up on Der Rosenkavalier, she is having an affair with the young Count Octavian, but she quickly comes to realize that she will one day lose him to a woman his own age. Throughout Act I, she reflects on her lost youth, her desire to stop all the clocks, and on the fleeting nature of beauty and love.

In this episode, host Rhiannon Giddens and her guests ruminate on the passage of time as the Marschallin learns to let go of her younger lover, and her younger self. At the end of the show, soprano Renée Fleming sings, “Da geht er hin” from the Metropolitan Opera stage.

The Guests

Soprano Renée Fleming made the Marschallin one of her signature roles. Over the years, she explored many facets of this complex character, from her youthful impetuousness to her world-weariness. In her final performance of the Marschallin at the Met in 2017, Fleming expected to feel sadness, but instead, she was overcome with joy and gratitude.

Writer Paul Thomason is currently writing a book on the music of Richard Strauss. He is in love with the music in Der Rosenkavalier, calling it “deep soul music.”

Wendy Doniger is a writer and retired professor from the University of Chicago who shared a special love of opera with her mother. In fact, opera was more or less their form of religion, and Der Rosenkavalier was a particular favorite.

Dara Poznar is a life coach with her own story to tell about a relationship with a younger man, as well as her process of coming to terms with their age difference. In writing about this experience, she received an outpouring of camaraderie and support from other women who were also asking themselves the same questions about how their age would affect their relationships.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Why did God do that? Why didn't He just make us get older and not realize what was going on?
0:10.5	It's not so much getting older. It's that we see the passage of time.
0:18.4	From WQXR in the Metropolitan Opera, this is Ariaco. I'm Rianne Gimmons.
0:24.8	She's then thinking of the deeper changes and that sets off this solulically on the nature of time and aging and change.
0:34.4	Every episode pulls back the curtain on a single area so you can see what's behind the scenes.
0:39.6	Today it's DaGatehien, the Marshallins monologue from Der Rosen Cavalier, Barri Hartstrows.
0:46.0	In more recent years, I played her more connected to these larger philosophical problems of the passing of time, of how to be gracious about it.
1:06.4	There's a lot of pressure on women to just stop aging.
1:10.0	You know, to hide or even put the breaks on the natural process of getting older.
1:15.0	We're not supposed to have gray hair or wrinkles or even laugh lines.
1:19.6	And it's depressing to me because there's a double standard at play here.
1:23.3	Women are supposed to be forever young while men can actually improve with age like a fine wine.
1:29.8	I mean, look no further than Hollywood for a thousand examples of how women are tossed aside when the bloom comes off the rows.
1:36.2	Or actually, look at Opera.
1:38.7	No character in all of Opera sings about this more beautifully than the Marshallin, the wonderfully complex woman at the heart of Der Rosen Cavalier by Rehardsstrows.
1:48.8	She's a princess, married to the field Marshall, but it's not exactly a happy marriage, so she's keeping busy with the lover, the Count Octavian.
1:58.0	Octavian 17 and the Marshallins in her early 30s. Good for her.
2:05.0	So when the opera begins, the lovers are in bed together, but they're interrupted by the Marshallin's cousin, Baron Ox.
2:11.4	He's engaged to the very young, very beautiful and very rich Sophie, and he's pretty open about the fact that he's only after her family's wealth.
2:20.7	Baron Ox is searching for a Rosen Cavalier.
2:23.9	Someone to deliver the traditional silver rose to his bride to be Sophie.
2:29.0	The Marshallin playfully puts her young lover Octavian up to the task, kicks everyone out of her bedroom, and finally has some time to reflect.
	...

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