I don’t do this very often. In fact, I can’t remember having done it before. Here is a live recording of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, with the part of the Countess sung by Lisa dell Casa in her prime, This opera is most famous for its final scene, but the whole opera is wonderful, and the conducting is also wonderful. I realize that this is a bit long for a blog post, but, if you have the time, it is worth it. Also below, you will find a translation of the whole opera.
Capriccio is Richard Strauss’s last commissioned opera. He didn’t call it an opera, he called it a “conversation piece”. It premiered in 1942.
Capriccio owed it origins, in Strauss’s mind, to the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942). Strauss was provided with a libretto by Clemens Krauss, to whom the work is dedicated. The story, set in 1777 in a rococo château near Paris, is simple. A young, beautiful, and very cultivated widowed Countess and her equally cultivated brother are celebrating her birthday by entertaining a group of artists and actors. The company includes: Olivier, a poet, and Flamand, a composer, who are each in love with the Countess; Clairon, a famous actress with whom the Countess’s brother, the Count, is having a liaison; La Roche, a great theater director; and two Italian singers. The opera is about the relative importance of music and words: drawing upon the title of a 1786 opera by Salieri, Prima la musica e poi le parole (“First the music and then the words”), Strauss turns first this way then that; the question must have obsessed him all his working life. The poet writes a sonnet for his beloved Countess. She finds it beautiful, but then when she hears it set to music by the composer, she finds it still more affecting. The actress and her aristocratic lover add a welcome touch of cynicism to the proceedings. The masterful theater director, modeled on the famous Max Reinhardt (who had directed the stage premières of both Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos and who, with Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl, had founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920), holds up the integrity of what Wagner called the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total art work), words and music held together and intensified by theater.
At the end, the Countess, having set her heart on an opera written for her by her two competing lovers, still cannot make up her mind about which is more important, words or music. But as the opera, being an opera, ends with music, not words, Capriccio, in its final moments, does provide the answer, and it is Salieri’s: Prima la musica, e poi le parole. The goal of the opera is not triumph, but only art and beauty.
Words and music, the subject of the opera, are of course the stuff of opera itself; the personal relationships—between Countess and Count, between poet and composer, between poet, composer, and theater director—lovingly parallel the conflict, and the mutual attraction and dependency, of words and music.
Richard Strauss, Capriccio
Salburger Festspiele
August 12, 1950
Karl Böhm, conductor
Lisa della Casa, Willi Wolff, Anton Dermota, Hans Braun, Paul Schöffler, Elisabeth Höngren
Capriccio, Op.85, 1950 Salburger Festspiel, K. Böhm (c)
The link shown here will provide a downloadable copy of the translation; or, you can read the translation as embedded in wordpress post below.