The opera’s themes of transformation and the acceptance of life's changes are brilliantly illuminated by Strauss's orchestral mastery as performed by the American Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leon Botstein.
Danae is grand opera, and it revisits the core themes of the composer’s Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, and Arabella: love and the terrifying yet inspiring constraint of human mortality. The opera’s explicit moral lesson requires little explanation. The inhabitants of Danae’s world do not earn their money the old-fashioned way like 19th-century industrialists, nor do they inherit it like the landed aristocracy. They acquire it through magic. Gold is magical—as inexplicable, to many of us, as hedge fund management and investment banking. And just as today, when the “Midas touch” may be the click of a mouse, the spontaneous accumulation of great wealth reduces all values to measurement in terms of the marketplace. - Leon Botstein - Conductor
Age Guidance: 15
Show Notes: 1 Intermission
Audience Advisory:
Performance presented via Bard Summerscape Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
Performance Schedule:
STREAM ON DEMAND ANYTIME
Music
Richard Strauss
Book
Joseph Gregor, after a scenario by Hugo von Hofmannsthal
Director
Kevin Newbury, Leon Botstein - conductor
Choreography
Ken Roht