Trill-seeker.(Zerbinetta in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos)

SO YOU THINK ZERBINETTA'S ARIA IS A KILLER? TRY TAKING A LOOK AT ITS ORIGINAL 1912 VERSION

When Richard Strauss wrote Zerbinetta's show-stopping "Grossmachtige Prinzessin," he created one of the most glorious -- to say nothing of difficult and lengthy -- coloratura scenes in all of opera.

Amazingly, the dazzling piece most often heard today during performances of Ariadne auf Naxos is actually a simplified version of Strauss's original aria. Though it is hard to believe that those eleven-or-so minutes of Zerbinetta's seemingly endless runs, trills, nonstop stratospheric high notes, staccatos, rococo cadenzas and seductive melodies could be topped, the original version of the aria is longer (by several minutes), more difficult, and even higher in places.

Ariadne was first conceived as an adventurous combination of Moliere's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (known in German as Der Burger als Edelmann) and a one-act opera, Ariadne auf Naxos. But it was a troubled experiment from its opening in Stuttgart on October 25, 1912. Many members of the audience who wanted to see the play were not thrilled to have to sit through an opera -- and vice versa; theaters that could adequately meet Strauss's demands for singers were often hard pressed to come up with actors who could do justice to Moliere's style. So when Strauss and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal began reworking their project, to make it a full evening ofopera shorn of Moliere's play, Strauss took the opportunity to tinker a bit with his original opera. Sitting through several different productions of the first version of Ariadne must have convinced the composer that its aria for Zerbinetta was just too virtuosic for most coloratura sopranos, and that in the interest of getting good performances, he needed to simplify it a bit.

Shortly after Hofmannsthal wrote to Strauss proposing the Ariadne project, the composer replied, giving his original ideas of vocal categories and where specific musical numbers might occur. Eventually some of these ideas changed (he originally envisioned Ariadne as a contralto and Bacchus as a lyric tenor), but from the beginning Strauss knew exactly what he wanted with Zerbinetta. "Star role," he wrote. "High coloratura soprano (Kurz, Hempel, Tetrazzini)," and he characterized her main aria as "a piece de resistance."

It is doubtful Tetrazzini was ever a serious contender for the role, but Frieda Hempel, in her autobiography, My Golden Age of Singing, says Strauss told her he wrote Zerbinetta for her, and that during part of the summer of 1912 she worked daily with him on the role. She never sang the part, and the reason most often given is that her commitments to the Met prevented her. But since Ariadne bowed in October, and Hempel did not set sail for New York until mid-December, there is, perhaps, more to the story. (In her book Hempel does not go into it.) Hempel was the Met's (and Berlin's) first Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier. Audiences today may find it odd that a voice that could cope with Zerbinetta's coloratura demands would even attempt the heavier role of the Marschallin, but Selma Kurz, who created the revised Zerbinetta, in 1916, also sang non-coloratura roles such as Butterfly, Tosca, Elisabeth in Tannhauser and Sieglinde.

Even more astonishing is that the singer who had the honor -- and headache -- of singing the unbelievably complex original 1912 version of Zerbinetta was Margarethe Siems, the soprano who had also been the first Marschallin and the first Chrysothemis in Elektra. Siems was an extraordinarily versatile singer who did the Queen of the Night, most of the big bel canto coloratura roles, as well as Verdi's Aida, Amelia, and Leonore in Trovatore, plus Wagnerian roles. She sang Venus and Elisabeth during the same performance of Tannhauser and even performed Isolde. (So much for our modern ideas of Fach.)