And to the Waldners, the most significant of the secondary characters. We meet the Missus, Adelaide, first, in the scene with the Fortune Teller that opens the show. It’s not easy. There’s no melodic lure to bring the audience into the scene (I’ll write below on the excess of parlando in this score), and in the comic potential of the characters lies the inclination to caricature, which must be resisted. For real effect in the playing, there should be a marked contrast in the vocal types. The Fortune Teller is a soprano (one of my teachers, Thelma Votipka, a lyric soprano though often cast otherwise, took the role in the Met production of the ’50s), and Adelaide is designated mezzo-soprano—in another casting fantasy, the creators pondered approaching Maria Olszewska for the part, which would have made Adelaide two things: a major role and a contralto. In this season’s performances, we had two more voices, those of Eve Gigliotti and Karen Cargill, that were virtually indistinguishable. (Cargill is listed as a mezzo, but there is nothing in her sound to suggest anything other than a middleweight soprano. Ten or twelve years back, Stephanie Blythe would have been the logical casting choice, given a strong  directorial hand.) They played and sang through the scene with good spirit, and Cargill handled the rest of her role adequately, but the desired element in the vocal distribution, with all its implications for how her role is perceived, was missing. Adelaide’s husband, Graf Theodor Waldner, winds up with far more stage time and dramatic importance than Adelaide, and is also given some comic shtick that musn’t turn him into a buffoon. Since so much of his music is conversational, he must be a real singer, and since he holds the low end of the distribution on the male side, as his wife does on the female, and must carry with him the tone of authority that Waldner, despite his present circumstances, has always assumed, his role should be taken by a true bass of quality. I thought that Brindley Sherratt played and sang well. But the shaved-head look conveys a wrong impression—give the man a rug, and perhaps some period-fashioned facial hair.

Altogether, the evening was far from disastrous. But its big, emotionally compelling scenes were consummated on just a high-professional workaday level, and its long stretches of word-oriented writing, made tolerable only by an extreme specificity of dramatic intent, fell short sometimes through lack of such specificity, and nearly always by the fact that they were rendered by the same voices that couldn’t transcend in the great singing passages. The sense in which Arabella did become a modern opera is not in its harmonic and orchestrational idiom (in those respects, Salome and Elektra, or Strauss’s tone poems, sound more “modern”), but in its resemblance to a spoken play with musical interludes. Hofmannsthal was in the lead here, providing extended passages of dialogue that read very well, but push the composer in the parlando direction, the catch being that unlike the old recitativo accompagnato, and despite the composer’s vigilance with regard to voice/orchestra balance, this is still Strauss’s orchestra, with all its ingenuity and elaboration, while the voice is left to pump out strings of wordnotes. Mandryka suffers the most from this, notably in his tirade late in Act 2, but in Act 1 as well, wherein after his mannerly introduction, his eloquent tribute to Arabella’s portrait (“Wenn aber das die Folge wär gewesen,” etc.), and his magisterial assertion of his land-holding status (“Mein sind die Wälder, mein sind die Dörfer“), he launches into the high-energy speech, presto, that relates his lucrative sale of a wood to raise funds for his dreamt-of marriage (“Kommen meine Verwalter,” etc.). It is a fine speech, easy to imagine in recitation by one of the great German stage rhetoricians (Kainz, or Reinhardt’s star Moissi), but which when set to music make us wonder if even the cultivated gentlemen of German-Austria were not prone to outbursts of field-sergeant fury, regardless of the emotional intent of their words. And also to wonder, with the stipulation that both men were geniuses, whether or not by this point the Strauss/Hofmannsthal version of modernity was leading opera in a fruitful direction.