Fun 'Ariadne' is still a gamble

Utah Opera will be taking a calculated risk when it presents "Ariadne auf Naxos" for a run that begins next Saturday.

Richard Strauss' opera, his first after the enormously popular "Der Rosenkavalier," is a radical departure from its predecessor (as was "Der Rosenkavalier" from Strauss' previous operas, "Elektra" and "Salome").

"Ariadne" isn't easily categorized. It's partly a satire on the musical establishment (and indirectly of itself), partly a love story, partly a harlequinade, and wholly witty and delectably entertaining.

Utah Opera debuts its new production of "Ariadne auf Naxos" on Saturday in the Capitol Theatre. The opera, which is finally receiving its Utah premiere, runs through Jan. 21.

Unlike most of Strauss' other operas, "Ariadne" had a rather convoluted genesis. It was originally based on Moliere's play "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme" and was intended to be performed at the end of the play.

Monsieur Jourdain, the main character in Moliere's play, and a cultural illiterate, wants to please everybody at his dinner party, so he decides that the elements of a tragic opera and a harlequinade should be combined into one work. At the end of Ariadne's emotional lament at being abandoned by Theseus, a group of entertainers appears on the island (Naxos) and tries to bring her good spirits back.

In this form, "Ariadne" was produced in 1912 to a lukewarm reception, certainly not the kind of reaction Strauss was accustomed to receiving. The work's main problem was the awkwardness of having both a play and an opera, albeit a short opera, performed together.

Four years after its premiere, and after Strauss completed "Die Frau ohne Schatten," he set to work revising it.

The new version debuted in 1916 and is the one that is most commonly performed today. It differs radically in places from the original. In lieu of Moliere's play, there is a new prologue, which takes the audience behind the scenes shortly before the opera itself is to be performed.

A new character is introduced, the young and temperamental composer of the opera, who is quickly disillusioned when he is forced to make cuts at the last minute and allow the harlequinade to be interpolated in the middle of his great "opera seria."

It's easy to see how these drastic changes in the opera mirror the difficulties Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal faced in finding the right solution for "Ariadne."