The Knight of the Rose
Comedy in three acts by Richard Strauss
Marguerre-Saal
Composer Richard Strauss requested a comedy from his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The comedic opera that premiered in Dresden in 1911 is an oeuvre that plays with confusion, gender trouble, irony and ambiguity, in its text as well as its music, but above all it’s an oeuvre that discusses love, life and transience in a melancholy yet cheery way.
Getting on in years, the married Marschallin Princess Werdenberg feels the passage of time and is trying to find a way to deal with that. Her philosophy is: Be light-hearted, take light-heartedly and let go light-heartedly. While her lover Octavian, still full of illusions, is looking for his place in life, and her cousin, Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, plans to consolidate his finances by marrying Sophie, the much younger but rich daughter of a bourgeois, the Marschallin pulls the strings between the three of them as she likes.