The opera DER ROSENKAVALIER leads into the bedroom of a princess and straight into the intimate conversation with her youthful lover. Inspired by the ancient tragedy ELEKTRA, Richard Strauss and the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal envisioned something entirely new: a comedy for music. Cheerful, light, and elegant, conciliatory yet profound in its emotions and thoughts – and, of course, Austrian in its burlesque wit while at the same time touched by melancholy reflection. Thus the authors created the famous figure of the Field Marshal’s wife, Princess Werdenberg who bears the first name Marie-Thérèse for good reason and entrusted her with the leading role in the opera DER ROSENKAVALIER, premiered in 1911.

The Marschallin alone knows that everything is subject to time and transience. “Time, it is a strange thing. When one simply lives along, it is nothing at all. But then, all of a sudden, one feels nothing but it. It is around us, and it is within us as well.” Neither Octavian, the lover who will soon belong to the past, can follow these thoughts, nor the uncouth cousin Baron Ochs, whose unscrupulous attempt to arrange a marriage with the young Sophie the Marschallin deftly thwarts through intrigue. She appoints Octavian as the protagonist of this scheme: not only does he deliver the ceremonial marriage proposal to Sophie as the Rosenkavalier, but disguised as the maid Mariandel he also thoroughly turns the Baron’s head. Since Strauss wrote the role of Octavian as a “trouser role” for mezzo-soprano, we witness a woman playing a man who plays a woman.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal explicitly draw on LE NOZZE DI FIGARO and, at the beginning of the twentieth century, unfold an impressive panorama of life and the human soul set in an imagined eighteenth century, using stylized language and enchanting sound effects from Strauss’s masterful modernism. Even the waltzes fit perfectly, although they do not actually belong to the period depicted. Thus the layers of time shift within this almost enchanted opera, which tells us that although nothing can be held on to forever, perhaps everything can ultimately be guided toward a happy resolution.

The musical direction of the grand opening production at the opera house will be taken by General Music Director Andrés Orozco-Estrada. The production marks the Cologne debut of the prominent French director Marie-Ève Signeyrole, who stages both films and operas internationally and offers a fresh perspective to Strauss’s and Hofmannsthal’s celebrated masterpiece.