RICHARD Strauss’s Daphne, which draws upon Ancient Greek myth and drama, is a fascinating work from the 20th-century operatic canon. It is also,…
RICHARD Strauss’s Daphne, which draws upon Ancient Greek myth and drama, is a fascinating work from the 20th-century operatic canon. It is also, due to its provenance in Nazi Germany , a piece with a vexed history.
Temperamentally at odds with the sensual excesses of the festival of Dionysus , Daphne refuses to don the ceremonial dress of the Bacchanalian celebrations. Nevertheless, she finds herself assailed by both the temporal and the divine.Her parents oppose her dedication to chastity, and Leukippos uses the festival of Dionysus as a means of disguising himself and getting closer to Daphne.
It is a complex story, which, like so many Ancient Greek myths, combines the metaphysical with very human concerns. As Jenkins tells me, it is also a tale that speaks to us down the ages.She will, she explains, be bringing Strauss’s opera into the tempestuous period in German history in which it was written and first performed. Her staging will be set across the 1930s and early 1940s, taking into account the last days of Weimar Germany and the rise to power of the Nazis.
The director sees the forces represented in the classical tale echoed in both the debauchery of the Weimar cabarets and the violent moral degradation of Nazism. The German figure who, for her, emerges as the innocent, victimised Daphne is the anti-fascist martyr Sophie Scholl. “It also comes from Daphne’s parents, as well as the society around her. But she stays true to her beliefs and, of course, she dies for it.”
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