The Love of Danae is one of Richard Strauss masterpieces of the later period. He himself could not participate to the world premier in 1952 at the Salzburg Festival, after the original date in 1944 was cancelled at the same place due to the failed attack of Hitler. The opera in three acts is defined by the composer as a comedy of Greek mythology and consists of fine romantic music, in one big flow, missing arias or characteristic passages. So far, this opera did not achieve similar...

What a happy idea Stéphane Lissner had for his first season in reprising the last (and necessarily melancholy) production by Hugues Gall a little more than 10 years ago, when he left the Paris Opera:there is an implicit homage, and the sign of a desire for continuity in excellence.For the excellence is there, in the prodigious staging by Robert Carsen, perhaps one of his most successful:in this setting, which is an elegant mise en abyme of the Opéra Garnier, the...

The Richard Strauss Tage, a kind of festival of the Semperoper Dresden, is dedicated to the Bavarian composer Richard Strauss, who has worked for several years at the renown opera house and especially colaborated with the Saxonian Staatskapelle. It was here, that his worldwide reputation as a composer has shown his first success. Several of his operas where first performed here, his major symphonic compositions took birth here. So this year within others saw the celebration of the...

What a story, what a character Richard Strauss and his co-genius Hugo von Hoffmannsthal have created here at the beginning of the 20th century. The expressive music and the female wild brutality were shocking and affecting the audience at the same time. Elektra, full of grieve, is seeking for revenge for her beloved father's death, accusing her mother and stepfather, exposing herself in front of the palace as a living monument of self destruction, desire up to mentally defection and...

The creation of Ariadne auf Naxos originally led to a novelty in music history. It was the desire to support the work of their friend Max Reinhardt that Richard Strauss and his genius librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal brought the intention to combine a play with a lyric opera in one piece. So, they brought together the drama by Jean Baptiste Molière Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, enriched with ballett music and the Greek tragic story of the unhappy love of Ariadne, liberated by the god...

"Happy Birthday" Mr Strauss - were the welcoming words of artistic director Brigitte Fassbender of the Garmisch Partenkirchen Festival for his most famous inhabitant, the Bavarian composer Richard Strauss. It is the 26th version of the festival and the150th anniversary of birth of the mostly played composer of the 20th century. This makes it a special edition with a very prestigious programme. The opening was made with a performance (in a concert version) of the very seldom...