Richard Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier

Analysing Direction in the Final Trio of Der Rosenkavalier

by Janaki Butterworth | February 9, 2021

In his book Studies in Music with Text, David Lewin presents his maxim regarding the performance of operatic music: “no analysis without direction; no direction without analysis.” With this maxim in mind, one may begin to wonder, when watching a particular production, which acting and directorial decisions are motivated by elements of the music deduced through analysis. One may also begin to ask why this symbiotic relationship between direction and analysis is so important. To consider “no analysis without direction,” I have chosen to analyze the relationship between music and staging in the Act III trio from Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, as performed in the Live in HD 2017 Met Production directed by Robert Carson.

Der Rosenkavalier begins with Octavian (Elīna Garanča), a young man of 17, and the Marschallin (Renée Flemming), a married noblewoman in her thirties, enjoying a passionate love affair. After a revelation concerning the Marschallin’s own internal struggles with her age and the unstoppable onslaught of time, she resolves to end the relationship with Octavian, encouraging him to find love with someone his own age. Octavian resists this, but when he serves as the Rosenkavalier for Baron Ochs and his marriage to the young bourgeois Sophie (Erin Morley), he is smitten by the bride-to-be. Octavian therefore cooks up a scheme to break off Sophie’s engagement to the Baron. At the end of Act III, Octavian’s scheme has borne fruit. With some help from the Marschallin, Sophie is freed from what would have been a horrible marriage to the Baron. The entire love triangle now gathered in one place, they must all reckon with their feelings: Octavian loves Sophie, but he struggles with this feeling, knowing that only days before he had been in love with the Marschallin, who is right there; Sophie, who has never been in love before, struggles with these new feelings blossoming inside of her; the Marschallin, who so recently let Octavian go, struggles with seeing him move on so quickly, and struggles within herself to truly move on as well. By the end of the trio, they all arrive at their conclusions: Octavian and Sophie love each other, “ich hab dich lieb,” and the Marschalin, now alone, must move on.

Much of Carson’s staging is motivated by the music, but much of it is also motivated to great effect by the text, so I will discuss such moments, too. Before the trio properly begins, the Marschalin, Sophie, and Octavian are standing together, just left of centre stage. A V7 in the key of Db sounds, and the Marschalin and Sophie turn from Octavian, as if the V7 chord is their cue to move. Thirty seconds in, the upper four notes of the V7 move to neighbouring pitches, creating a moment of sustained dissonance that then resolves back to V7.

The initial “dissonant” chord motivates Octavian and Sophie to face one another. The Marschallin sings most of her short solo to Octavian’s back. The “dissonant” chord suggests oncoming conflict; as we will see, the conflict is the internal problems that the members of the trio must each, individually, solve. The Marschalin then only proceeds downstage after achieving a half cadence on “Weis’,” near to, but not quite at, the end of her first thought. Octavian and Sophie then separate before beginning to sing. Each of their vocal lines are soliloquies in which they talk only to themselves, so having them stand so far apart, to visually indicate that they are all in their own worlds now, is appropriate. Octavian and Sophie’s entrances overlap with the conclusion of the Marschalin’s first thought, and the trio properly takes flight.

The staging then remains static for quite some time. The characters remain in their positions and soliloquize, the Marschalin downstage right, Octavian upstage centre, and Sophie downstage left. (This section begins at approximately 1:28 in the video, and ends around 2:50.) For almost a minute and a half, the characters do not move, aside from relatively small gestures. When Octavian repeats “ich möcht sich fragen,” he turns to the Marschalin, the would-be recipient of the question he wants to ask, for example. This section begins with a modulation into A major, enharmonically bVI of the original key, where it resists cadencing, before returning to Db as Sophie sings “Ich weiss nicht...” Throughout the section, the harmony lingers on dominants and common-tone diminished chords, with only one instance of tonic harmony (a Db chord when the Marschalin sings “wenn man sie”), which occurs in first inversion, rather than in root position. The extensive use of dominant harmony make it feel as though the dominant chords wish to resolve to a cadence but cannot quite do so. The modulation to A, seeing as it is only a semi-tone away from the dominant key of Ab, comes across as a failed attempt to get to Ab. The music therefore sounds lost and stuck, just as the three characters are stuck in their particular locations on the stage, and just as the characters’ thoughts are stuck and must be worked out through their soliloquizing. This entire trio is, really, each character trying to become mentally unstuck – to figure out what is happening inside of themselves and do something about it.

After the Marschallin sings “ich weiss nicht wie” (2:46), she gives way to the two younger characters, both musically and in the staging. The Marschallin briefly bows out of the trio, giving way for Sophie to sing, “denn ich spür', sie gibt mir ihn,” in direct reference to the Marschallin, to whom she turns. Octavian and Sophie, singing a duet (an honor the Marschallin never shares with either of the other two characters), address their words to the now-silent Marschallin. This is the first time in over a minute that the characters move. Sophie first moves towards center stage – towards Octavian – followed by the Marschallin. Octavian is the centre of the love triangle, the object of both Sophie’s and the Marschallin’s affection, and therefore the point at which the characters must converge, which they do. Sophie and the Marschallin face each other, and at the sounding of a V6/4 cross each other again. Yet again, a strongly stated dominant motivates movement, although this one does so with less authority than the V7 that first motivated the characters to move at the piece’s onset (the “dissonant” chord, too, was just an embellished dominant; Ab was still the root). As Sophie and the Marschallin cross, Octavian moves to down-stage center, placing him in a somewhat more authoritative position on stage just as his thoughts are beginning to clarify.

Once Sophie and the Marschallin have switched places, the music begins to build. V7 harmony continues to receive emphasis, and the orchestra is able to commit to a single harmony for much longer periods of time; an entire four-measure stretch is able to stand on the dominant. The harmony moves from V7, then away again, V7, and away again, building anticipation of a cadence that is sure to come soon. The characters continue to stand rooted in their own spots, working through their own thoughts to finally arrive at a conclusion as characters and as people, just as the music struggles to find that concluding cadence.

Four minutes into the trio, the music hits a rather odd climax: the orchestra lands fortissimo on a V6/4/bIII (what might be described as a “common-tone six-four chord”) which it sustains for three measures as the singers soar to their highest heights yet: Octavian wails a high G# before beginning a descent, while Sophie sings a high B, where the Marschallin shortly meets her. What an odd chord to give so much musical emphasis! This dominant, so distant from the dominant we want to hear, arrives as both Sophie and Octavian sing “dich” – you – in reference to one another. This is the first time any of the three characters have sung the same word at the same time, and it is also the moment before we finally reach the V7 that will cadence back to I. This is the moment when Octavian’s and Sophie’s thoughts have finally crystalized – “I want you,” says Octavian; “I want you,” says Sophie – the moment of ecstatic realization, but that thought hasn’t quite completed yet; both Octavian and Sophie still have sentences to finish, so it would be improper to place this climactic moment on a concluding harmony. The movement away from any familiar tonal area also stresses the gravity of the thought, for the two of them, the suddenness of it. Carsen allows this moment to speak for itself; still the characters do not move. Perhaps, only home-key dominants (and their neighbours) are allowed to motivate movement.

For the first time since the Marschallin first sang “hab’ mir’s gelobt,” the music lands on a root-position tonic chord, finally achieving an authentic cadence. This occurs right as Octavian and Sophie finally resolve to be with one another and love one another. But the Marschallin is left hanging; while Octavian and Sophie sing their final word, “lieb,” together, she continues to sustain “verstehn” even after the two young lovers have stopped singing, as shown below.

All is happily resolved for Octavian and Sophie, but less so for the Marschallin. Sophie and Octavian turn to each other, smiling, and the Marschallin steps towards Octavian with her arm outstretched before stopping on an anguished ii6/5. She sings, “in Gottes Namen,” before receiving a concluding cadence of her own, at which point she has already left the stage and Octavian has tried to reach out to her. Her conclusion, both the staging and the music seem to say, is to leave – to move on.

Carson’s staging as well as the singers’ performances reveal that this production paid considerable attention to analysis of the score. Just as the action may inform the music, the music should inform the action, and many of the finer details of how the music informs the action only become apparent through analysis. Music, text, and performance are in a symbiotic relationship on the operatic stage. The combination of the Marschallin’s late cadence, her extended final note, her text not aligning with Octavian and Sophie’s, as well as her departure from the stage, together make that final moment so impactful; all of those elements on their own would pack a much feebler punch. Without direction informing analysis, and analysis informing direction, a scene cannot reach its dramatic potential, failing to capitalize on what makes opera so compelling. Carson’s production of Der Rosenkavalier definitely turns in a profit.