5 JUNE 2004, Page 55

What a confusion

Michael Tanner

Arabella Royal Opera House

Arabella has always seemed to me to be Richard Strauss's most uneven opera, in that it contains a handful of scenes that are among the most beautiful, and the most humanly truthful, that he ever wrote; while large tracts of it are competent filling, and some of it seems to be what one might expect from a computer that had been reasonably well programmed with Straussian formulae. I realise, though. that it is possible to take a different and more favourable line, and to see the lengthy stretches of fast-moving conversation as an original and even daring rendering of the squalid context in which the more noble and idealistic figures of Arabella herself, her eventual lover Mandryka, perhaps her failed suitor Matteo, and her transvestite sister Zdenka exist and try to work out their destinies. More successfully even

than in Der Rosenkavalier, Strauss captures a given time and place — Vienna in the 1560s, putting a fairly brave face on the decline that was already starting to seep through the cracks in its glory and gaiety. Much of the music is tense, anxious and restive, reflecting the unease of most of the characters, Arabella's family desperately strapped for cash, her bewildered flock of suitors never sure of what their fate may be, the heroine herself needing to find the Right One, or rather knowing that he will only really be right if he is rich and generous as well as handsome and passionate.

So Strauss, at the last behest of his everaspiring librettist von Hofmannsthal, contrived an idiom which moves between worldly bustle and romantic, not to say fairy-tale elevation, the use of folk melodies, suitably modified, at key emotional moments underlining the huge chasm between the intrigues of her parents and the level on which she hopes to live. Although Mandryrka has the qualities that Arabella is looking for in order to be fulfilled, it is just as important that he is fabulously rich, offering her father, at their first meeting, just as much money as he wants to take — an unlimited supply. So the relationship of the plot to reality soon becomes remote. The authors of the opera knew that there was quite a lot wrong with it, but Hofmannsthal died before he had

managed to improve it in crucial respects, and the result is that there is a lack of focus in both the characters and in the situations into which they are put. Proportions are wrong, important things whizz past, while at least one scene — the sorting out of exactly what has been going on, in Act III — seems to last for ever. Strauss probably wisely set the text as it stood, while clearly lacking confidence in its adequacy.

What are a producer and conductor to do? What they used to do, as we can hear from the recordings released in the 20 years after the second world war, was to cut the opera judiciously; that is no longer regarded as a permissible activity, even with the most blatant longueurs. The new production at the Royal Opera has its own way of dealing with the problems the piece presents: Peter Mussbach, with the collaboration of the designer Erich Wonder, creates such a confusion about where and when we are, and who we are dealing with, that nothing becomes any less plausible than anything else, nothing that a character does seems odd or not. The programme book has lots of photographs of shopping malls, especially of their unappealing escalators; and on stage we see not only one grand staircase but also four stationary escalators, two of them terminating in small platforms high up in the stage, and presumably invisible to the audience sit ting in the upper parts of the house; but the singers spend much of their time on them. The staircase of the hotel where the Waldners live does play a crucial role in the final scene, when Arabella slowly descends it, holding a glass of water, to music of extraordinary purity and beauty. But that's no prompt for Mussbach to have people on stairs the whole time — except of course for the duration of the staircase music itself. There's a lot of Art Deco around, gold walls, costumes from various periods, a bemusing collection of male hairstyles. None of this provides a rationale for anything, or is interesting to look at in itself. It was unveiled two years ago at the Chatelet, too, so once again the Royal Opera has no excuse for its violation of another work it's undertaking to stage responsibly.

As against that, the musical performance is immaculate, with lucid and heartfelt playing from the orchestra under Dohnanyi, and lovely singing from Karita Mattila, Barbara Bonney and Thomas Hampson in the principal roles. But their characterisation is almost wholly indeterminate, and no kind of dramatic experience is conveyed. It should be worth hearing on the radio, though.