On 27, 28 and 29 June the Mariinsky Theatre’s New Stage will host the first operatic premiere of this year’s Stars of the White Nights summer festival – Ariadne auf Naxos by Richard Strauss. This extravagant composition by the German composer, which has been performed in concert at the Mariinsky Theatre in recent years, will gain a new staging by director Sergey Novikov, who has endeared himself to St Petersburg audiences with his production of Delibes’ Lakmé. The musical director for this production is Valery Gergiev.
Richard Strauss met the opera’s libretto author, the prominent Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in 1899, by which time Strauss was already celebrated as Principal Conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera and renowned for his symphonic poems. Their fruitful collaboration led to the creation of operas such as Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena and Arabella.
Ariadne auf Naxos emerged as a creative experiment by the young librettist and composer. By merging serious opera with comedy, they created a novel operatic-dramatic hybrid that initially received mixed reviews from audiences. Its premiere took place in 1912 at the Small Hall of the Stuttgart Court Theatre as part of Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme with Ariadne auf Naxos integrated into it. Despite the production’s innovative nature, a number of European theatres ventured to stage it, though it did not remain long in the repertoire. Four years later the authors presented a new version of Ariadne auf Naxos, which altered the setting and characters but primarily restructured the work into a full-fledged opera with only one spoken role remaining.
Originally billed as “a play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal with music by Richard Strauss”, we now appreciate Ariadne auf Naxos as a Richard Strauss opera with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. According to director Sergey Novikov, “This is not merely a shuffling of components: these two versions represent completely different entities.”
The 1916 premiere of the revised work at the Vienna Court Opera garnered widespread acclaim and has since been performed on global stages.
For the Mariinsky Theatre Ariadne auf Naxos holds a special place – it was the first Russian theatre to present this opera in 2004. The new production adds to the theatre’s repertoire of Strauss’ masterpieces, which includes Salome, Elektra and Die Frau ohne Schatten.
“The sparkling, enchanting, captivating music of the brilliant composer contrasts with the sometimes-absurd words of the distinguished writer. Our goal is to tell a compelling story while honoring the intentions of the authors. We aim to blend high emotions with mundane changes in relationships, to merge comic circumstances with tragic pathos and to combine in one narrative the heroes of serious opera and commedia dell’arte,” says director Sergey Novikov.
This striking production will depict the home theatre of a wealthy but uneducated gentleman, where, by a twist of fate, everything mixes: the lofty with the mercenary, the serious with the humorous, the genuine with the pretentious. Ariadne auf Naxos is a play within a play, where theatrical passions play out both on stage and behind the scenes.
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