“How good was my competition?” asked the American Symphony Orchestra’s music director Leon Botstein when I told him his ensemble’s concert performance of Richard Strauss’s 1938 Daphne was the highlight of the New York operatic season. With the Metropolitan Opera tottering on the twin crutches of overplayed favorites and contemporary works of questionable artistic merit, it is perhaps only natural that other outlets would fill the void by making more daring choices and reviving valuable operas that can be as instructive as they are enjoyable. Indeed, the Met has never performed Daphne, focusing instead on regular revivals of Strauss’ other one-act operas Salome and Elektra alongside Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, and, less frequently, Die Frau ohne Schatten (Die Ägyptische Helena was staged there in 1928 and 2007 but has never returned). Gotham’s audiences can only conserve a distant memory of a fully staged production of Daphne by the expired version of the New York City Opera in 2004. Renée Fleming led the cast of a Carnegie Hall concert performance in 2005, and the Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst presented another concert performance a decade later at the Lincoln Center Summer Festival.
Yet Daphne is precisely the work that could lend itself to the revitalization of an opera company down on its luck. Drawing from Greek myth, particularly Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Strauss’s opera prizes innocence in a time of chaos, beauty over disorder, and the transcendence of suffering. He conceived of the opera while on a late-life trip to Greece. Thirty years earlier, that ancient land’s mythic past had already inspired Elektra, and Strauss drew upon its myths for Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Ägyptische Helena, as he would again later for Die Liebe der Danae.
The primacy of beauty
All of these operas feature transformative moments for the lead soprano, Strauss’ preferred vocal type, but Daphne’s context was different. By the time Strauss envisioned the opera, the Nazis had thoroughly consolidated power in Germany. Daphne’s premiere, on October 15, 1938, came only a couple of weeks after the Sudeten Crisis, when France and Britain abandoned Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler’s revanchism. Just over three weeks after the premiere, the Nazis launched Kristallnacht, a coordinated nationwide attack on German Jews.
Strauss’s position was precarious. The Nazis had initially hoped to win his cooperation. His opera Arabella had premiered a few months after Hitler came to power in 1933. Stefan Zweig, the librettist of his next opera, Die Schweigsame Frau, was Jewish, however, and his work was proscribed by the regime. Zweig was forced into emigration, where he later committed suicide. The opera premiered with his name removed but was then dropped and not staged again until after World War II. Strauss also endured two unhappy years as the head of the Third Reich’s music chamber, but was removed when investigation of his correspondence uncovered highly critical remarks about Hitler and his regime. To make the situation even worse, Strauss’ daughter-in-law was Jewish. While he was in Greece thinking of Daphne, his half-Jewish grandchildren were violently bullied at school. From then on, much of the composer’s time was spent defending his family from murderous antisemitism.
It may seem surreal, and perhaps even immoral, to compose an opera extolling the primacy of beauty at such a time. But the incongruity contains the logic—if horror and evil seem irresistible all over the world, combatting them through art is not merely permissible but essential. Composed to a libretto by Josef Gregor but based on Zweig’s sketches, Strauss completed what he called a “bucolic tragedy.” Daphne’s beauty is so natural, and indeed so perfect, that she cannot endure the vulgar everyday world of men. On the eve of a feast to honor Apollo, she refuses to attend and declines the romantic advances of her childhood friend Leukippos. Apollo appears in disguise and, revealing himself, pronounces to Daphne that she is made for greater things. When Leukippos tries to interfere, the god kills him, leaving Daphne to regret not only the tragedy but her role in setting it in motion.
Apollo knows it is more than she can bear, so he transforms her into a laurel tree. Her fate is not an apotheosis, but a transfiguration from the realm of mortality to the unadulterated beauty of nature. In the opera’s finale, its most celebrated music, she sings over silvery, shimmering strings as her words fade into a formless yodel and end in her silence. In difficult times, it is a reassuring reminder that love, purity, and beauty can survive, even if it does leave directors with the burdensome dilemma of staging the leading soprano’s transformation into a tree.
While composing the opera, Strauss had difficulty settling on the finale. He revisited the ending several years after the premiere, and Gregor, in consultation with Zweig, suggested a choral scene to praise the transfigured Daphne. Naturally, this would have taken attention away from her centrality to the work, so Strauss vetoed the idea and proceeded with the solo scene. In 1942, however, possibly as a result of Zweig’s suicide that year, he composed a simulacrum of the originally proposed ending. It took the form of a 16-minute a cappella piece titled “An den Baum Daphne” and was billed as a “choral epilogue” to the opera.
The piece is almost never performed and is remarkably difficult because it lacks instrumentation and leaves the large chorus to maintain harmony on its own. As Botstein pointed out in a pre-performance lecture, this is practically impossible unless every chorus member is blessed with perfect pitch. But he programmed it nevertheless, as a curatorial curiosity to impart some detail of the opera’s history. Under James Bagwell’s direction, the Bard Festival Chorus did a credible job, though the text is far inferior to the opera’s actual ending and left one with little desire ever to hear the innovation again.
After an intermission, Botstein led a well studied performance of the full opera. It, too, is far from easy to perform. The title role demands a high-energy Strauss soprano who, like Elektra, must be on stage virtually the entire time. From the time of Daphne’s premiere in 1938, its performance and recording histories have featured only top-tier talent. The young soprano Jana McIntyre has worked with Botstein before, in Die Schweigsame Frau at last summer’s Bard Festival. The voice is appealing and possessed of a technique solid enough to sustain the necessary stamina. Her entrance monologue and finale reached moving heights, though sometimes her ascents revealed a touch of strain.
Daphne’s suitors are both set in the heavy tenor range, requiring voices suitable for Wagner. Aaron Blake fit the bill as Leukippos, with a strong, rich tone. Kyle van Schoonhoven’s Apollo radiated rather more strongly, handling the opera’s complicated chromatism with stentorian power. The talented bass Stefan Egerstrom gave a gorgeous, charcoal account of Daphne’s father Peneios. Ronnita Miller, billed as a mezzo-soprano, hit beautiful low contralto notes singing Gaea, Daphne’s mother. Marlen Nahhas and Ashley Dixon sang well as maids. Bagwell’s choruses are limited but resounded with beauty and atmosphere.
