Der Rosenkavalier: Swooning romance from a pioneer of the genre
Strauss helped create the romantic soundtrack with this opera about royals gone rogue.
Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin
★★★★☆
Such is the grandeur of the world of Richard Strauss’s comic opera, even the architecture looks bigger. We see the interiors of a palace adorned with gigantic exaggerated volutes, extending across walls and ceilings like vines, in an 18th century Austria where exquisite taste has clearly been allowed to grow wild.
Behind the tall canopy of a four-poster bed, the slumbering empress Marie Thérèse is having an affair while her military husband is away. The young man, the count Octavian, dives behind a dresser when her servants arrive with breakfast. Both look smitten with each other at the table. What a thing to have a good romance and keep it from the world.