And what of der Richtige? Peter G. Davis, writing of George London’s Mandryka, accurately described him  as “the very picture of a virile, impulsive, open-hearted man of incorruptible virtue and incapable of guile.”  The creators had the wish-list thought of Chaliapin for the part. But Peter also noted that the role’s range required some adjustments for London’s bass-baritone voice, and therein lies the Catch-22 in the search for the ideal singing actor: if we get the power and color of a voice like London’s, we lose the ease of handling some very demanding phrases at the high end; if we get the ease, we lose the needed sense of an all-embracing, country-bred masculinity—and somehow, this difference in Fach is usually accompanied by an analogous difference in personality and command of the stage. Hofmannsthal was insistent that though Mandryka, a Croatian, has his rough-hewn, provincial side, he is also elegant. The role was created by Alfred Jerger, an operatic man of parts lauded for his imposing presence and acting talent. Lehmann, who sang opposite him in Vienna shortly after the Dresden premiere, called him “a many-faceted actor, a true singing actor in the full sense of those words,” and said that the special qualities of his Mandryka were those of a “gentleman and country squire, honest, ingenuous, generous, but awesome and menacing in his wrath.” Jerger’s recordings (he did not make many, and those he did make did not have wide international circulation) disclose a large, warm, bass-oriented voice, lively temperament, and a clear, resonant word profile. Whether Strauss had him in mind as he wrote I do not know—he sang in Dresden als Gast. And I wonder how well he coped with the repeated Fs, F#/G-flats, and G natural of the setting, and whether some easements were granted for him. In any case, he set the model for the lower voice type in this extraordinary role.

I have already touched on Zdenka. She is presented, in the libretto and in all the critical commentary I have seen, in terms of her sisterly generosity and self-sacrifice, and undoubtedly that is how she must be played. Patrick Smith cites Arabella’s speech of gratitude to her in Act 3 (“Zdenka, du bist die bess’re von uns zweien,”etc.,—”Zdenka, you are the better of the two of us, you have the more love-filled heart,” etc.” as “the key speech of the whole libretto,” and I imagine that for Hofmannsthal it was. Yet to me, it’s another spot where Strauss’s response is strangely neutral; the passage doesn’t entirely fulfill what seems to be there in the libretto. Did Strauss, like me, have difficulty quite believing in it? For don’t we hear the voice of the creators’ Viennese contemporary, Dr. Freud, saying something like “So, this adolescent girl has displaced her crush on the soldier, suppressed by the parents because the father has squandered the family’s birthright, so that they now require that the cute younger sister masquerade a change of sex to clear the way for the older sibling’s marriage; and now the formerly cute younger sister seeks to see her passion acted out through that same older sister, and then, at the ball, by means of a desperate and bizarre deception and subsequent revelation, succeeds in getting exactly what she wanted in the first place, which all along had nothing to do with self-sacrifice?” I’m afraid we do, and it is impossible that by 1929 Strauss and Hofmannsthal had not heard the voice too, and often. They were overlooking it, brushing it aside, to lead us to a more innocent place—”innocent” in that it embraced the values and aesthetics of a pre-Freudian, pre-republican time. Whether or not we can suspend disbelief massively enough to go there with them is, I guess, an individual matter, one certainly dependent in part, but perhaps not in whole, on the persuasions of performance. Zdenka’s vocal line rides higher than Arabella’s, to the top C, and in the Act 1 duet with Arabella must sustain the same arcing legato line. But Zdenka has not the self-control of her sister, and can with her presumably lighter voice sing out on the line more freely. Most of the rest of her writing is chattery, one syllable per note, with short note values at quick tempos, spelled by the occasional sustained phrase in the upper middle. Making the conversational effect, sometimes high in the range, while keeping hold of “support” is the main vocal challenge for a singer who has the right sort of voice to begin with, and playing for the intended youthful charm without turning soubrettish the primary histrionic one.