Christian Räth

The young composer Max is due to marry Agathe, but before his wedding he must finish his opera on which he has been working for quite some time. Despite all his efforts, Max is plagued by worries that he will fail to complete the piece and so makes almost no progress. Visions and hallucinations haunt him, the boundaries between dream and reality seem to blur and overlap. Caspar tries to persuade him finally to give in to the hidden and dark creative powers within him and so overcome his inability to write; Caspar’s efforts are finally rewarded.

The plot is almost identical to Donizetti’s Don Pasquale except that the “old man” is not a fool here and his relationship with his nephew, Henry, is loving. It is more human and tender but still has bite. All the old man, Sir Morosus, wants is silence. Richard Strauss' Die schweigsame Frau was first presented in 1935; Hitler and Goebbels refused to attend because Stefan Zweig, the librettist, was a Jew and Strauss refused to remove his name from the program after the Nazis had insisted it be excised. It was a great success but was withdrawn for just that political reason after only three performances. Presented here is the complete, with some minor tweeks, uncensored version.