Capriccio, Royal Opera House, review

Richard Strauss's last opera was a delectable end-of-season treat, says Rupert Christiansen.

Capriccio: Renee Fleming as the Countess looked stunning in Vivienne Westwood
Capriccio: Renee Fleming as the Countess looked stunning in Vivienne Westwood Credit: Photo: www.roh.org.uk

“I am the composer of Der Rosenkavalier,” pleaded Richard Strauss in mitigation when American troops rolled up menacingly outside his front door in 1945. The same remark could serve as the epigraph for his last opera Capriccio.

Composed while Germany plummeted into the moral abyss of Nazism, it harks back to a la-la-land of ancien regime hierarchy and rococo elegance, re-treading Rosenkavalier territory like a superannuated circus horse sclerotically trotting out its favourite tricks one last time.

There’s too much padding and too much witter, and the passages of lonely elevated emotion seem unconnected to the drawing-room comedy and aesthetic debate that frames them. I take the dim view that is a bad and dishonest work of art.

However, having got that off my chest, I confess that the quality of the Royal Opera’s concert performance makes the best possible case for the score’s slickly seductive efficiency. It certainly took my mind off the nasty world outside, so many thanks for that.

Andrew Davis is a master Straussian, conducting with unassertive ease and stroking the requisite velvet out of the strings. His singers seemed a happy, relaxed crew, relishing both the grateful vocal writing and the chance to act freely without interference from a pesky producer.

How vivid were their characterisations and how lovely the sounds they made. Christian Gerhaher as the splenetic poet Olivier, Peter Rose as the pompous impresario, Bo Skovhus as the dashing Count, infatuated with Tanja Ariane Baumgartner’s sumptuous Clairon - all of them first-class.

Special praise is also due to Barry Banks and Mary Plazas as the farcical Italian singers, and to Andrew Staples, a late substitute as the composer Flamand, who projected rich honeyed tone in music where Strauss finally makes amends for his long feud with tenors.

Then there was Renee Fleming as the Countess. Looking stunning in Vivienne Westwood and radiating Park Avenue glamour, she was clearly enjoying herself in a role that she knows intimately.

So much of her singing was gorgeously beguiling that it seems ungrateful to point out that the text sometimes became needlessly hazy in her upper reaches (lower down, her German was excellent) and that in the final meditation on art and love, the tonal sheen became glassy rather than golden as she tired a little and over-acted to compensate.

Capriccio may not be an opera I shall ever love or revere, but this was a delectable end-of-season treat.

Until Sunday, July 21. Tickets: 0207 304 4000; www.roh.org.uk