Saw the Met's newish production of the old warhorse "Der Rosenkavalier" last night, and, despite a rare and wonderful appearance of Simon Rattle at the helm and a brilliant cast (why hasn't Camilla Nylund sung at the Met before?) went from charmed to bemused to incensed by what director Robert Carsen has done to it. It is of course a rather decadent story to start with - a decadence I'm susceptible to thanks to having spent impressionable formative years in Vienna - but Carsen's vision (first developed for the Salzburg Festival in 2004) is cynical.Setting the story in the year the opera was created, a few years before the outbreak of World War 1, offers many pleasures, but I object to enjoying them at the expense of Strauss and Hofmannsthal, as if they cluelessly thought life in Imperial Vienna was fine and dandy and not in profound ways morally rotten. They couldn't know how awful the impending war would be - nobody did - but they knew the world they described was on its last legs. The old Met production offered a sentimental fantasy of olde Europe (isn't that what seeing klunkers at the Met is usually about?) but the Marschallin's 18th century Vienna was already dead, Strauss' Vienna living on its fumes: everyone knew.
Carsen assumes we don't know that so he has to kill it for us. His production ends with the opulent set, which has had the same triangular form in all three acts, opening up like a jaw. As Octavian and Sophie get it on in a brothel bed (!!!), oblivious, we see a void in the distance, then a line of soldiers collapsing, presumably shot dead in Flanders Fields. Breaking open the set this way ruptures any bond we may have had with the characters or, it is implied, the creators of the "Rosenkavalier": we know too much to believe, as they apparently did, in the fantasy of pure love or the innocence of farce. But the Marschallin knows that the ceremony of the knight of the roses is an illusion. Strauss and Hofmannsthal achieve something transcendent because the opera starts with this awareness, rather than ending with it.
