Pointing and clicking around the New York Met list of recordings online, and looking to fill in some gaps. Fact is, I’d like to see all the Strausses, before I render any more negative opinions, so it’s kind of a life list thing. Fair enough, let’s familiarize with this rarely-seen offering, Arabella.

Oh, no. Did he get paid for this? I hope not. This thing is so difficult to watch, you have to be working on some kind of life list, to get all the way to the end. R Strauss cranks out another time sink for you. Good Lord.

First off (and this is a small point), I’m new at this, and I’ve already had more than enough of operas set in ancient dreary mansions of the rich and elderly, with fine tapestries, huge pictures, big furniture, and all that gaudy finery. The wrinkly paterfamilias hanging around in the corner, the aging house-help respectfully hauling tea, you know the drill. We’re so old and so wealthy, we have nothing to do except stand here in our museum. Dying soon, we hope, because this kind of household décor got boring about 200 years ago.

And then they start to sing. Similar to singing, I guess, except it’s very hard to listen to. Strauss likes to make each person, in turn, lilt out a short phrase, using some meager tonality, not speech, and then stop. Then someone else has their turn. Occasionally, one person (Arabella or her suitor – this is far too old-fashioned to use the word “boyfriend”) does several of these song fragments in a row, uninterrupted.

But if you are me, you wish somebody would interrupt, perhaps by becoming lost on the isle of Naxos, or discovering that their wife has no shadow, or by walking in with John the Baptist’s head on a plate. Anything. A speech by Zarathustra, even.

These short little bursts go on and on, for many hundreds of lines, and nearly three hours, while the story develops weakly, and eventually you begin to grasp what tiresome issues are discomforting the characters. (The Germans mark this opera as a “comedy”. Okay then. No space for jokes here.)

What you won’t get in Arabella is:

• A song

• A chorus

• Characters you like

• Characters you dislike

• Emotion above the very tepid

• Hearty soldiers with armor, and swords in the air

• A terrible mad scene on the staircase

• Witty banter between the stage and the orchestra’s conductor

How do the singers memorize their lines? It’s a puzzle, because it’s all in German, and nothing ties these snippets together. Also, huge amounts of dialog are secondary to the simple plot. You could do well enough to skip way to the end. Actually, that’s a good idea – skip to the end, because the ending is way kinkier than the two women playing on the bed in Rosenkavalier.

But first.

I saw the video from New York in 1994, and I’ll just say that the young Kiri Te Kanawa is just as aristocratic and mannerly as she needs to be, and the even younger Natalie Dessay shows completely off in a small role listed as “coloratura soprano”. Please note once again the appearance of Charles Workman (who looks familiar), here singing Elemer, the guy who keeps showing up with his sleigh. Women always fall for man with a sleigh, Elemer.

The only cool person here is Arabella’s sister or brother, known as Zdenka, because that does not reveal whether this is a boy or a girl. Interesting! Zdenka even stands in as Arabella, composing touching letters to Matteo (a fellow who pines for Arabella,) just to keep poor Matteo in the loop.

The crazy ending is where Zdenka stands in again, in pitch dark, revealing herself to be a woman for sure, with Matteo thinking this is Arabella he’s entangled with. No! It’s Zdenka, and sending in the wrong person for this kind of encounter is known as the “bed trick”. Now we’re awake, Richard Strauss.

“That was fun!” says the exhausted Matteo, “and I’ll go with Zdenka, because he or she is quite a woman, I can attest to that.”

Help me here: where else in opera do they have offstage sex and come out smiling? Cosi fan Tutti. Tannhäuser, maybe, with Venus? Anything else? I don’t count the undercurrent in Don Giovanni and Coronation of Poppea, because that’s just what those people do, we understand, and it isn’t a specific part of the story. Not that popular a plot element, I guess.

Anyway, Richard S., this just isn’t working out for me, and at this point, I can’t imagine how much money someone would have to offer, to persuade me to sit through Elektra or Capriccio, or the Frau. Maybe let’s call it quits. 

Okay, maybe there could be some fun in the very early works, say, Der Kampf mit dem Drachen (Strauss was 12), or Guntram (already 28).  Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, Rossini, these young composers all came out swinging with some very acceptable early hits, even if two of them drifted out into the Modern Era pretty quickly, and were lost.

So until I find a YouTube Guntram, with English, that’s about it for Strauss.  Unless somebody tells me that Elektra or Capriccio ends with some bizarre perversion even more intriguing than the “bed trick”.