Salzburg. (International).(Die Liebe der Danae)(Opera Review)

Last summer, the Salzburg Festival mounted a new production of Richard Strauss's penultimate opera, Die Liebe der Danae, on the fiftieth anniversary of its premiere. To devotees of late Strauss, Danae is a seminal work. To many of the rest of us, it is a difficult piece to warm to. It tells the story of Danae, daughter of Pollux, the bankrupt king of Eos, and her lust for gold. Caught in her father's scheme to settle his debts by marrying her off, Danae struggles to choose between the god Jupiter and Midas, a poor Syrian donkey-driver whom Jupiter has made the King of Gold. Eventually, Jupiter robs Midas of his golden touch, but Danae settles for him anyway, and at the end of the opera, she walks off to begin her simple, fruitful life of mortal love.

Like many of Strauss's works, Danae began life as one thing and wound up as quite another. Strauss had intended it to be a light piece, almost with the flavor of operetta--a "cheerful mythology," in the composer's words. What emerges is something much more cumbersome: ecstatic duets burst out of long dry patches, and the witty, shimmering music Strauss wrote for Pollux and Jupiter's four ex-loves (Semele, Europa, Alkmene and Leda) coexists uneasily with the lyrical effusions of Danae and Midas. We are left with the feeling that Strauss placed far too much weight on a small, fragile idea.

The opera came along at an inopportune moment: Strauss finished it in 1940, and a production did not take shape until four years later. But in the wake of a decree by Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels that all Reich arts festivals be closed, Danae was allowed only a single public dress rehearsal at Salzburg in August 1944. Danae languished until it received a full-scale premiere at Salzburg in 1952.

The Salzburg production (heard August 22) made a fairly compelling case for the opera. Fabio Luisi led a nicely shaped performance that delivered the ...