MUSIC
Rosenkavalier has always had a cachet of its own, and apparently attracts an audience which better and worse operas leave cold. It would be interesting to know the reason, which I suspect would be found to have very little to do with the music. Certainly no modern role was such a perfect incarnation as Richard Mayr's Ochs, and memories of him and Lotte Lehmann certainly accounted for a pro- portion of Tuesday's audience at Covent Garden. Strauss himself wrote most of Ochs's music so that the words should be largely unin- telligible—a mere flow of scabrous garrulity richly helped out with gesture and mimicked in the orchestra. David Franklin accepted this, but his repertory of gesture, his power of innuendo—in fact his quality as an actor pure and simple—was too thin and stereotyped to give any idea of the fruity ,corruption of Ochs. That he was tall and thin inevitably tells against him to those who remember Mayr, and he is certainly far too young-looking ; but these difficulties are not insuper- able in themselves, and a more accomplished actor could get over them. Doris Doree seemed to me very badly dressed for the Marschallin—like a servant in Act a and Mme. Dubarry in a musical comedy in Act 3—but her voice was pleasant and she had a real feeling for the pathos of her part. Like all the singers she was defeated by the sheer noise of Strauss's orchestra on a good many occasions.
Octavian is a thankless part, like all travesti roles, but Victoria Sladen made a very good thing of it. She was at her best in Act 2, where the voice of Sophie (Virginia MacWatters) blended more happily with hers than Doris Doree's had done in Act I. As in Manon, Virginia MacWatters seemed to me too sophisticated in manner as well as in appearance, but she sang her part beautifully and was the only wholly successful piece of casting from a musical point of view. Rosenkavalier is really a tour de force, a period piece, an elegant reconstruction of late eighteenth-century corruption for a sophisticated audience, and, like all works whose attraction lies fundamentally elsewhere than in the music, it needs superlative per- formance. Covent Garden have made a bold shot at it. Robin
Ironside's sets were too discreetly exquisite and hardly bold enough for the stage, though Act 2 gave an admirable impression of space and provided an excellent background for the ceremony of the pre- sentation of the rose.
* With Victor de Sabata performing all the Beethoven symphonies and the Busch Quartet all the Beethoven quartets, it is tempting to try once again to take Beethoven out of his frame, or off his pedestal, and see his music objectively. With no other musician of the first rank, except perhaps Wagner, is this so difficult ; for almost all of us were brought up to accept Beethoven unquestioningly as " the greatest musician who ever lived" and have spent the rest of our lives verifying or reacting violently against this. I will try my hand
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