Richard Strauss’s final opera, Capriccio, has long won the hearts of aficionados, both through Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s 1950s EMI recording with a starry cast, and through many revivals of John Cox’s elegant 1920s staging for Glyndebourne. First it was a vehicle for the great Swedish lyric soprano Elisabeth Söderström, later for Britain’s Felicity Lott, who made it an international calling card in the 1980s.
More recently, productions have become rarer — though there are encouraging signs of a resurgence — as scholars have pondered how Strauss and his co-librettist, the conductor Clemens Krauss, managed to create such a sophisticated “conversation piece for music” in the early 1940s, while the Nazis were reducing their world, the great German cities with their ideal opera houses, to rubble.