Strauss: Die Liebe Der Danae

Rediscovered masterpiece
Die Liebe der Danae was completed by Strauss in 1940 and had five Librettists-Hofmannsthal,Zweig,Gregor,Krauss and himself.The offical first performance of the opera was at the 1952 Salzburg festival,three years after Strauss's death.Since then there have only been 20 performances.Possibly the libretto was seen as out of touch with the times. Also,Strauss stated about the opera" that he sought not lyricism,not poetry,not sentimentality,but a theatre of reason,full of brains and dry wit"The music is mainly light in texture ,but in the last act Strauss regains the warmth and richness of his last works, Capriccio and the Last four songs,and throughout the opera, looks back at Daphne.Jupiters Renunciation stands alongside his most beautiful pieces he ever wrote.

This opera is right in tune with today. For example, Act one, Scene 1: The throne room of King Pollux. A state crisis:there is no money in the coffers.To soothe his creditors, King Pollux sends his four nephews to King...

GOOD DVD
I partially agree in some points with the previous two reviewers.In a nutshell,this is not a bad DVD and perhaps the only one we're gonna come across of this forgotten opera by a long shot,that is in the commercial market,of course.
Granted,the production is silly,score sheets instead of gold rain,Midas in trenchcoat and shirt and so on. But basically regisseur Kristin Harms respected the main elements of Gregor's libretto and transported the action from mythological times to an undetermined timeframe.That doesn't bother me that much. Even the suspended piano represents for her the state in which art found itself in the time of the composer. This last detail is completely unnecessary,yet not quite frugal.

In terms of the singers: Regarding german soprano Manuela Uhl,I beg to disagree with the previous reviewer.She navigates through the tough role with easiness,and she seems to have learnt from having sung it for many years,i.e. the previous CPO
audio set where she...

lyrically luscious, visually vacuous
Richard Strauss's rarely performed penultimate opera here makes its commercial DVD debut. The true star of this release is Strauss's seamless, rhapsodic score, thrillingly conducted by Andrew Litton with an assist from the sonics, heavily balanced in favor of the orchestra though never drowning out the soloists. Of the 3 principals, Mark Delavan excels as the Wotanesque Jupiter, Matthias Klink's Midas is pleasant to look at & listen to, while Manuela Uhl, who was also the Danae in the opera's 1st commercial CD release (on cpo), is often troubled by a pronounced wobble, even more noticeable in this 2011 performance than on the CD set recorded in 2003.

But it's the staging that makes viewing this CD so disconcerting, the mythical characters in ugly modern dress, principals moving this way & that with no dramatic logic, pages of music score somehow representing both golden rain & a gold hair-clip, other objects referred to in the text but nowhere in sight &, above all (in...

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