For the first time in ten years, the Met is mounting Otto Schenk's Arabella, first seen in 1983. This is one of the Met's classic Strauss productions, more of a piece with Nathaniel Merrill’s Der Rosenkavalier than Herbert Wernicke’s stunning Die Frau ohne Schatten.
Schenk’s Arabella is predictably opulent, fully “period,” almost entirely cast in muddy greens and browns, but at least rather pretty. Even given the Met’s storage technology, it feels its age. The construction of Günter Schneider-Siemssen’s sets is worrying. More than once, the walls shook just a little too much at a slammed door. Our Arabella almost fell foul of what I think was an errant tablecloth. Some of the fabrics now look shabbily worn. In a way, this isn’t inappropriate, given that this is Strauss’s most nostalgic work, and more purely so than the ironic Rosenkavalier or the lost simplicities that Capriccio deals with so subtly. And there is another layer of nostalgia now too, as space and production and work overlap, a longing for a literal and didactic style of opera less accepted now that time has moved on, even in New York.
Stage director Stephen Pickover has done a fine job coordinating what, in Met terms, is an uncommonly European cast. The story is one of Hofmannsthal’s glorious messes, but the bottom line is that, like Così, all ends well in the end. Arabella and the rural lord Mandryka resolve to marry, as do Zdenka (Arabella’s sister, forced to live as “Zdenko”, a boy, as the family is on the financial slide) and an officer, Matteo (who has fallen in love with Arabella through letters mostly written by Zdenka, and who mistakenly sleeps with her rather than Arabella at the start of act three).
It helps Pickover that he has some principals who are able genuinely to act, and a cast that can play a comedy without turning it into the slapstick that would miss the heart of this work. That enables links to emerge with Così and Figaro, other comedies whose humour barely masks class conflict and tense renegotiations of sexual roles. In general, though, the real heart of the work was far too much left to the imagination. One didn’t get a sense that Arabella is supposed to be seen as pure and virtuous until the very last moments, as she descends stairs in the foyer of her hotel, clad all in white and lit in a luminous haze. Partly this was a result of Malin Byström’s flat, two-dimensional portrayal: there was almost no sense, here, of a psychological grappling, of a trajectory that allows her to go from frolicking in a sleigh to very earnestly falling in love. She just seems bought off by Mandryka’s promise of cash. Byström sang, though, with the porcelain tones of Strauss sopranos of old, if not the tortured, veiled dignity.