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OPERA REVIEW
October 25, 2005
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By Robert Commanday
Richard Strauss' Daphne is one of those rare operatic blooms that are greatly admired, seldom performed. Short for a full evening yet best done by itself, vocally difficult for the four principal roles, and terribly demanding on the orchestra, the opera is a challenge to program. A concert performance is one solution and that's the way audiences in three eastern cities experienced the work last week, as performed by the West German Radio Orchestra of Cologne, Semyon Bychkov conducting, with Renée Fleming in the title. They had recently recorded the opera.
Daphne was as rich and enveloping as I had remembered from a Munich performance, although the acoustically over-live Concert Hall of Washington D.C.'s Kennedy Center, last Tuesday, put it at a disadvantage. Fleming prevailed, her voice at its purest, soaring in the extended ecstatic scenes for Daphne. Bychkov led his forces to produce a performance bursting with the energies, colors, and rhapsodic melody of Strauss at his peak, high style. First performed in 1938, this was the 13th of his 15 operas, and he freely drew on this life experience and, further, dipped more deliberately and less selfconsciously into Wagner than ever. The duet of Apollo and Daphne was an unabashed continuation of the Tristan/Isolde coupling, except here broken off by the determinedly chaste nature girl's resistance. The role of her mother, Gaea, earth goddess in disguise, seems like Erda reborn, without the mystery. It takes the contralto into the baritone range, to low E flat and the Swedish contralto, Anna Larsson, performed prodigies with it.
In Joseph Gregor's libretto, Daphne is self-described in an expansive paean as a girl wholly enraptured with nature, “O bleib, geliebter Tag.” Being frightened of sex, she rejects first her playmate and companion since childhood, the shepherd Leukippos, and then Apollo, on realizing that his impassioned advances were not the embrace of a “brother.” Apollo, on arriving at the shepherd's festival to Dioynsus in disguise, had fallen instantly in love with Daphne. Confronted and challenged by Leukippos, Apollo kills the shepherd. Deeply moved by Daphne's remorse and grieving, he calls on his fellow gods to receive Leukippos as Dionysus' flutist on Olympus, and on Zeus to accomplish Daphne's transformation into the laurel whose leaves will henceforth crown heroes.
Daphne's scenes reflect Strauss' lifelong love affair with the high soprano voice. In such writing he was inspired to a lyric release unmatched by any other composer. Fleming's singing seemed to take wing, her voice like a free air current, sweeping to the top B flat, B, and C and carrying the listener on its flow. There are sopranos with more “inwardness” in Strauss Lieder, but precious few who have such ease at that elevation. The final great scene of remorse and the Daphne's embrace of her apotheosis were touching. The Heldentenor role of Apollo is no less demanding, again in long episodes more like scenes than arias. Jon Frederic West sustained this heroically through all the punishingly high tessitura. If he did not achieve the sweep and ease that would be ideal for the long rhapsodic line, the concentrated truth of the tone was enough. He sustained and fulfilled the crucial moment, Apollo's great final scene when, moved by Daphne's remorse and the purity of the heart of humankind it represents, he is humbled as a god and makes her immortal. That West doesn't look the part, being short, stocky and balding, is one thing that can be put aside; but his insistence on drinking water frequently, even during rests within an aria, like a boxer retiring to his corner for swig, was a stretch. Roberto Saccà sang the high lyric tenor role of Leukippos smoothly, effortlessly, his voice clear and finely produced. It was a most synmpathetic interpretation. The role of Peneios, Daphne's father, a village elder, was sung in a grand, deep bass-baritone by Robert Holl. Two fine sopranos, Julia Kleiter and Susanne Bernhard, sang the Rhinemaiden-like roles of the two village maidens. There were four good male singers for the solo shepherds and an excellent male chorus from the West German Radio Chorus Cologne for shepherds, singing mostly in unison and octaves, sounding initially like the Gibichung vassals in Götterdämmerung. Theirs is an important role, for dramatic punctuation and in setting the village context.
Bychkov led an eloquent account of this rich score, a Strauss tapestry as deeply textured and colored as any he wrote. The novel, unexpected harmonic relations or chord changes are even more frequent than were customary for Strauss, and there's much musical illustration of the text. It was as though he were letting it all out in his style. The chief problem, mentioned earlier, was that the deep, high-ceilinged “shoebox” that is the Kennedy Center Concert Hall, in the brightness of its response, distances the listener from the music. The clarity that this opulent musical texture wants is not there. Compounding the problem of the incomprehensibility of the sung words in as wordy an opera as Strauss ever wrote, the 29-page libretto provided was printed in 8-point type, about this size. Then, with great considerateness, management turned the house lights fully down. If you held the text six inches from your nose, you could possibly just make it out. That was hardly an option for the later arrivals, $80 ticket holders, who were asked to share a libretto. Fortunately, the music and its performance were grand enough to carry all..
(Robert P. Commanday was the music critic of The San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)
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Semyon Bychkov
Renée Fleming
