Rarely produced, yet considered one of Strauss’s finest operas, Danae received a landmark production in SummerScape 2011 by director Kevin Newbury (his first Bard engagement) in collaboration with renowned architect Rafael Viñoly.
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
