The Knight of the rose
Comedy for music in three acts by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal
4 hours 15 minutes
2 intermissions
Debut performance 1911 - Premiere on 4 April 2006
While the score of the tragedy »Elektra« emerged in 1908/09, Strauss and Hofmannsthal already developed the topic and concept for a new opera, which on the contrary should be a comedy. Strauss had an opera play »in the spirit of Mozart« in mind. Although with an apparently chosen historic topic and its masking as a comedy, Hofmannsthal picked out as a central theme the contemporary mood in the Western bourgeois society shortly before World War I.
The play describes the phenomenon of radical change of times, of » end time« and »new beginning« within the frame of a fictive, cultivated, class oriented and well-regulated, cutely rococoesque Vienna, where the clash of the nobility and the bourgeoisie, which gained strength, demonstrates the transformation and the loss of until then accepted values.
Both authors performed with »The Knight of the Rose« a clear stylistic rebound: as regards content they were turning away from mythic tragedies towards a reality of everyday life, which gained its sharp urgency just because of the estrangement effect of the comedy; and Strauss’ former operas, with their flowery symphonic language were musically followed by a more transparent style and the revival of the classic use of forms.