Der Rosenkavalier, Suite

Program notes

About the Work

Der Rosenkavalier was the opera with which Richard Strauss followed Salome and Elektra, and it could hardly be less like them. He wrote it with the Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, finished the score in September 1910, and saw it staged in Dresden on 26 January 1911 under Ernst von Schuch. It was a triumph from the first night and became the most popular of his operas in his lifetime.

The story is set in Vienna in the 1740s. The Marschallin, the wife of a field marshal, has a lover half her age, the seventeen-year-old Count Octavian. Her boorish country cousin, Baron Ochs, is about to marry Sophie, the daughter of a newly rich army contractor, and needs a young nobleman to deliver the customary silver rose to his bride. The Marschallin proposes Octavian. He and Sophie fall in love at first sight, Ochs is tricked into disgrace, and the Marschallin, who has seen this coming, gives the young man up. The custom of the silver rose was Hofmannsthal’s invention. So, in a sense, was the music’s Vienna: the opera is full of waltzes, a dance that did not conquer the city until the following century. Strauss knew this and used them anyway, as a shorthand for a vanished elegance.

Music from the opera reached the concert hall almost immediately in arrangements of every kind. Strauss himself assembled two sequences of waltzes, and in the 1920s he adapted the score for a silent film. The suite played here is a later and more comprehensive selection. Its score names no arranger. It is generally attributed to the conductor Artur Rodziński, who led the first performance with the New York Philharmonic in October 1944. Strauss seems to have had no hand in making it, but he allowed it to be published in 1945, at a time when he badly needed the income.

The suite lasts between twenty and twenty-five minutes and is played without a break. It follows the order of the opera for most of its length, moves its biggest waltz to the end, and gives the voice parts to instruments, so that nothing essential in the tunes is lost. It asks for a large orchestra with triple woodwind, two harps and celesta.

For the Vienna Philharmonic this is home ground, and the tour is built around that idea. The concerts in Luxembourg on 19 April, at the Kölner Philharmonie on 20 April and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on 21 April pair the suite with the Sinfonietta of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a Viennese prodigy whom Strauss admired, and whose piece this orchestra was the first to play.

What to Listen For

The opening. The suite begins exactly as the opera does, with whooping horns answered by surging strings. The curtain has not yet risen: this is the night the Marschallin and Octavian have just spent together, and Strauss leaves little to the imagination. The music then relaxes into the tenderness of the morning after.

The Presentation of the Rose. The scene changes to the second act. Octavian arrives to hand Sophie the rose, and the rose itself is heard as a chain of glittering chords on flutes, solo violins, harps and celesta. The melody around them is one of the most rapt in the opera, and the hesitant conversation of the two young people follows.

Ochs and his waltz. A burst of agitated music marks the moment the Baron grasps what is going on. Then comes the best-known waltz in the score, the one to which he assures Sophie that with him no night will be too long.

Trio and duet. The suite now leaps to the end of the opera. In the trio the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie each sing their own thoughts at the same moment as she gives him up; here the lines pass to the orchestra and build to the emotional summit of the piece. The quieter music that follows is the final duet of the two lovers.

The last waltz. Here the suite leaves the opera’s order of events. The arranger reaches back for one more of the Baron’s waltzes, the exuberant one in which he congratulates himself on his luck, and turns it into a full-orchestra finish.