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Article: Ariadne auf Naxos.
- Article from:
- The New Leader
- Article date:
- December 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 American Labor Conference on International Affairs. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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On any short list of the greatest operas, room must be made for Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's supreme masterpiece. Even more than their most popular work, Der Rosenkavalier, it is a compelling blend of the serious and the comic, the fondly backward-harking and audaciously innovative, with both variety and concision firmly on its side. Though it doesn't have Rosenkavalier's undercurrent of personal loss, it has a major tenor role and reaches the sublime earlier and more often.
Ariadne is also the rare case of an opera overhauled from a fine but flawed first version into an uncontested summit achievement. The 1912 Ariadne I, our ...