The Dresden Semperoper (photograph by Sebastian Terfloth, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)
Following up on Tuesday’s article, it turns out that Profil has another series with a “Dresden connection” that also includes music by Richard Strauss. This series is called Semperoper Edition. Thus far there have been at least eleven releases, but the volume numbers have not been in numerical order. Thus, the most recent release, a live recording of the performance of Richard Strauss’ one-act opera “Daphne,” has been numbered as Volume 4. The series is named after the building (named, in turn, after the architect Gottfried Semper) that contains both the opera house of the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden (Saxon State Opera) and the concert hall of the Staatskapelle Dresden, the orchestra that Strauss called his “beloved Dresdeners.”
As operas go, “Daphne” is a bit of an oddity. Indeed, when I was writing (in May of last year) about the opera recordings that Karl Böhm made for Deutsche Grammophon (DG), I mentioned it only in passing. It was part of the collection but one of two operas “that tend not to receive very much attention.” One reason is that staging it is a bit of a challenge, since it concludes with the title character being transformed into a tree after having rejected the advances of Apollo. This is basically the story as it appeared in Ovid’s Metamorphoses; but the libretto by Joseph Gregor also draws upon Euripides’ play “The Bacchae” by having the shepherd Leukippos disguising himself in Daphne’s dress in order to be able to dance with her during a festival honoring Dionysos. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had his own variation on this sort of cross-dressing in his libretto for Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier. However, what was comic for Hofmannsthal is far grimmer for Gregor. Daphne gets off with becoming a tree; Leukippos ends up dead (as did Pentheus in “The Bacchae”).
The opera was first performed at the Semperoper on October 15, 1938 with Böhm conducting. Böhm also seems to have been responsible for the first recording of the opera, but this was made in 1944 at the Vienna State Opera. As far as I have been able to tell, the Semperoper Edition releases are all taken from performances that were given following the end of World War II. The “Daphne” recording was made in conjunction with a live radio broadcast of a performance given on June 11, 1950, for which the conductor was Rudolph Kempe.
The release consists of two CDs. However, by the end of the first CD, only about an hour of material remains to complete the opera. The remainder of the second CD includes three excerpts based on the premiere performance with Böhm conducting soloists Torsten Ralf (Apollo) and Margarete Teschemacher (Daphne). In both the 1938 and 1950 versions, the final transformation scene is the high point of the whole affair. As a result, the second CD concludes with an instrumental arrangement (conducted by Kempe) that was made (probably by Strauss) for concert performance.
Böhm’s DG recording was made in 1964. According to the Wikipedia author of the “Daphne” page, there are cuts in Böhm’s recording. If there are cuts in the Kempe recording, I have yet to find them. (To be fair, however, I have not yet tried to follow the entire opera with a score.) While the Kempe recording is clearly more “vintage,” the remastering runs the gamut from satisfactory to impressive. Nevertheless, it is hard to avoid thinking that Strauss recycled a fair amount of his rhetoric while preparing the score for this opera. (The flute music in the Dionysian round dance owes just about everything to the Rosenkavalier hairdresser.) This is the sort of opera that is most likely to appeal to those with encyclopedic tastes; and, from that point of view, Kempe’s “vintage” account may be more satisfying than the technological advantages enjoyed by the Böhm recording.
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