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    Review: Lise Davidsen Achieves Strauss’s Ideal in ‘Salome’

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    Strauss had seemingly impossible standards for a soprano in “Salome.” But Davidsen, making her role debut in Paris, is exactly what he intended.Richard Strauss’s criteria for the ideal interpreter of his opera “Salome” have haunted the piece for the better part of a century: a “16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde.”As oxymorons go, it’s the operatic equivalent to Noam Chomsky’s famous syntactic puzzle “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Clear, simple, impossible. And yet here is the 37-year-old Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in the middle of her role debut as Salome in Paris, launching her voice like a rocket that opens into a parachute in the cavern of the Opéra Bastille.With a teenager’s sly mockery of her parents and a blooming sexual awakening, Davidsen’s young Judean princess, seen on Wednesday, gradually matured in color and volume. But when she reached the determined outburst of “Gib mir den Kopf des Jochanaan!” (“Give me the head of John the Baptist!”), her top voice detonated with a force that sent shock waves of youthful, shimmery sound reverberating equally in all directions. She stepped into her 16-year-old Isolde, and held the audience rapt for 20 more minutes of epiphanic sumptuousness.I had never made the connection between Salome’s final scene and Isolde’s climactic Liebestod in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Usually, they don’t sound alike. Opera fans sometimes reach for Strauss’s one-liner to describe a soprano with some mix of the role’s beauty, lyricism, youth and power, but there is an implicit compromise, a sense that “this is as close as it gets.” As Davidsen unleashed huge arcs of exalting tone, though, her voice was soft and heavy like thickly piled velvet; she reveled in Salome’s obsessive love to music of apotheosizing grandeur and purified her desire of its murderous origins.This revival of Lydia Steier’s disturbingly powerful production gave Davidsen a profound context to explore her interpretation. Steier’s militarized hellscape felt both primitive and postapocalyptic. Violent orgies, stripped of ritual, set the stage for gleeful sadism and recreational murder. King Herod (Gerhard Siegel, a seasoned Wagnerian with technical security and confident point) is styled as a depraved chieftain in black lace, soiled robes and a feathered headdress, and he presides over a ruling class that delights in bludgeoning and asphyxiating sex slaves. Their crimes are visible through a large glass window high above the stage. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a scene of rape. It would all be crass, if it weren’t for the craft of the staging’s detailed movement choreography.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: A New York Philharmonic Staple Outshines a Flashy Premiere

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      Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances was the highlight of a program that also included the New York debut of Bryce Dessner’s evocative Concerto for Two Pianos.On Thursday, the New York Philharmonic gave the New York premiere of a double piano concerto by a pop artist with classical and indie rock credentials. With the composer in attendance, the piece, lovingly crafted to show off the evening’s soloists, Katia and Marielle Labèque, had a strong claim as the evening’s centerpiece.Instead, Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, a repertory staple that the Philharmonic recently performed in 2022, walked off with the night.The fault hardly lies with the piece written by Bryce Dessner, a founding member of the rock band the National, who has a master’s from the Yale School of Music and is a Grammy winner in rock and classical categories. The Labèque sisters’ recording of his Concerto for Two Pianos reveals an evocative, neatly conceived work that uses contrast to build momentum across three movements.Dessner, who closely studied the Labèques’ repertoire, throws all manner of writing at the pianists, who play cascading figures in canon, stuttering syncopations, gently articulated polyrhythms, jabbing chords and twinkling starbursts of notes. The orchestra, mesmerized, follows their lead. The winds copy the arching shape of the piano’s dreamy chord progressions, and the low strings and brasses double the piano’s bass stabs. What the concerto lacks in mystery it makes up for in showmanship and communal impact.On Thursday, the Labèque sisters played with typical precision, carving out figures from the orchestral fabric with a scalpel. They found flair in clarity; long-breathed lines flowed evenly, and the interplay between the piano parts — whether layered atop or responding to one another — had athletic grace. In the second movement, Katia played notes on high like a smooth, confiding whisper, and Marielle lashed out percussively. They make collaboration sound like an instinctive mind meld.The evening’s conductor, Semyon Bychkov, opted for a reduced version of the orchestration that sounded skeletal in live performance. A sequence of whole notes across the orchestral parts in the third movement desperately needed heft. The hairpin dynamics for the brasses, which are meant to flash by like a car’s headlights on a pitch-black night, were barely indicated. Without shape, vignettes blurred together: Prettily fragile passages sounded awfully similar to dissonant ones.The concerto, which never really reached out to grab its audience, deserved a fairer outing, especially as it was sandwiched between two works, Strauss’s “Don Juan” and the Symphonic Dances, that received the high Romantic treatment.The orchestra came out swinging in the Strauss, overshooting the brashness and bravado of the opening phrase and stiffly dispatching moments of mischief. But there was genuine sweep in the romantic climaxes as the orchestra summoned the intoxicating magic of Strauss’s dense score. The Don’s demise at the end was unsentimental and, in its own way, honorable.After intermission the orchestra, sounding reborn, struck a perfect balance between its overheated excitement in the Strauss and its detachment in the Dessner. From the first notes of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, the players, attuned to matters of balance and color, showed a striking confidence and natural expansiveness. The first movement’s extended woodwind chorale, anchored by the rose-gold color of Lino Gomez’s alto saxophone, was luxurious to behold. The strings, piano and harp answered with melancholic optimism.The second movement dispelled any lingering question about the Philharmonic’s dexterity with contrasts. It opened with the wheezing of stopped horns and muted trumpets, which quickly gave way to the liquefaction of legato winds and the oom-pah-pah of plush strings. A waltz of peculiar color, it seemed to waft off the stage and into the hall. It didn’t overwhelm the audience members or recede from them; instead, it invited them into the dance.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      Jascha Heifetz in the Case of the Violinist and the Fanatical Doorman

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      Nothing seemed amiss when a car dropped Jascha Heifetz back at the King David Hotel on April 16, 1953, after a recital at Edison Hall in Jerusalem.Heifetz had played the program, which included Richard Strauss’s E flat violin sonata, to his usual exacting standards and to thunderous applause.A lone doorman greeted his car, sandwiched between two police Jeeps, when it arrived at the hotel just after midnight. Having safely ferried Heifetz and his entourage — his bodyguard, his son, his accompanist — to the King David, the Jeeps drove away.The bodyguard got out of the car first and went through the hotel’s revolving door. Heifetz, carrying his violin case, was next. But before he could enter, the doorman rushed up to him, speaking Hebrew words Heifetz couldn’t understand.This was no doorman. He held an iron bar in his hand and brought the weapon down on Heifetz’s right arm, smashing his hand.Though Heifetz’s violin case deflected the blow, he clutched his hand in pain. As he entered the lobby, his bodyguard ran in pursuit of the attacker but found only the bar, wrapped in newspaper, a few feet from the hotel.Heifetz in Beersheba in April 1953. His next stop was Edison Hall in Jerusalem. A week before the Jerusalem recital, he received a note warning him not to play Strauss.via Getty ImagesSeventy years later, the man who attacked Jascha Heifetz has not been identified. A faction called Han oar Haivri (or Hebrew Youth), later linked to several right-wing extremist groups, took responsibility, but no one has ever been held accountable.Later, one man said he knew the assailant’s identity. This man, a future speaker of the Knesset, had good reason for his knowledge, having direct ties to the underground group that had sent Heifetz a threatening note about his choice of repertoire.An unsolved mystery involving a world-renowned violinist, the State of Israel’s early years, the shadows of collective trauma, and the uneasy mix of art and politics — this story ticked all of my professional and personal boxes.Figuring out what happened — through interviews with historians and those who knew Heifetz, looking at contemporary newspaper accounts and digging in archives — helped me make sense of this historical moment at a time when Israel is once again at a critical inflection point.HEIFETZ WAS ATTACKED because he had dared on this tour to play the sonata by Strauss, a composer then banned in Israel for his Nazi collaborations. In 1953, the State of Israel was just five years old and the Holocaust was still a very live memory. Playing the work of German composers — particularly Wagner — could still provoke extreme emotional reactions.A week before the Jerusalem concert, Heifetz had received a letter from an underground terrorist group: “You ought to know, as we do, that you dared play a Nazi melody in the Holy Land on the eve of Yom Hashoah” — or Holocaust Remembrance Day — “music composed by a partner to the destruction of our people.”The note warned: “Beware and never again repeat this crime.”A compilation of Heifetz’s program lists, which includes the April 16, 1953, concert in Jerusalem.Library of CongressTop government officials implored Heifetz to drop the Strauss from his repertoire. But no one could tell Heifetz, who was born in Vilnius and moved to the United States in 1917, what music to play, and the Strauss sonata was a particular favorite. “There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Heifetz told the officials.Audiences had applauded the sonata in Haifa, The New York Times reported, but in Tel Aviv, responded with stony silence.After the threatening note, Heifetz decided the Jerusalem recital would go on as planned but with tightened security. And any whiff of pickets or protests would scuttle the Strauss from the program.THE MAN WHO CLAIMED to know who attacked Heifetz was Dov Shilansky. A Holocaust survivor from Lithuania, he was determined never to let himself, or Israel, forget. In 1989, a year after his election as Knesset speaker, Shilansky urged lawmakers to read the names of each Holocaust victim, as six million felt like an incomprehensible number. “Every Person Has a Name” is now part of Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremonies all across Israel.Shilansky arrived in Israel in 1948 on the Altalena, a ship that sank when Israeli Defense Forces opened fire, killing 19 people. Most on the ship, Shilansky included, were members of Irgun, the right-wing underground resistance group.Shilansky maintained close ties to the group when Irgun morphed into a political party headed by Menachem Begin. In September 1952 the group was concerned with protesting Israel’s intent to receive 3 billion marks (or about $715 million) in reparations from Germany. Israel desperately needed the money to absorb the enormous number of Holocaust refugees.Both the right and left criticized the agreement, but consensus was that reparations could spur Israel forward rather than keep it focusing on an unspeakable atrocities. Shilansky, now 28 and married with a son, could not abide this. “I found no rest,” he wrote in his memoir “Diary of a Hebrew Jail.” “Whatever I did, that fact pierced my brain and pierced it again. I was a citizen of a treasonous nation; my inaction was one endorsement of that treason.”A month after the reparations agreement was signed, Shilansky brought a briefcase containing a device made out of six pounds of explosives to the office of the Israeli Foreign Ministry in Tel Aviv. Police arrested him before the device detonated, and he received a 21-month prison sentence.He was in jail when the agreement went into effect on March 27, 1953 — three weeks before the attack on Heifetz outside the King David Hotel. And he would still be in prison when a dozen members of another extremist group, Malchut Yisrael, were convicted in August of attempting to bomb the Ministry of Education building.“There are only two kinds of music — good music and bad music,” Heifetz told top government officials when they asked him to drop the Strauss from his program.via Getty ImagesHEIFETZ WASN’T SERIOUSLY INJURED in the attack beyond bruising and an eventual scar. Nor did his violin sustain any damage. But his assault seemed to chasten Israel’s media and chattering classes.Before, the Israeli press had seemed almost gleeful in its attacks on Heifetz for daring to play music by a banned composer. But as international papers, including The Times, hotly took notice, the tone became more conciliatory. Even the group that took responsibility for the attack, in a call to the Voice of Israel radio station, said it intended to damage Heifetz’s violin, not him.Heifetz now had to decide: should he continue his tour or leave Israel? His instinct was to flee, enraged, “that music had been made a political pawn,” as his son Robert recalled in a 1988 article for The Strad magazine. But the same officials who had implored Heifetz to nix the Strauss sonata now urged him to carry on. So, too, did David Ben-Gurion, the prime minister.Two days after the assault, over tea, Ben-Gurion apologized to Heifetz on behalf of the nation. As he later wrote in his diary, he asked Heifetz to continue, and “to play Strauss as well.”Heifetz continued. But the Strauss sonata was not on the program of his next concert, a benefit in Rehovot for the Chaim Weizmann Institute. Still, security guards and police filled the concert hall, though the only misadventure was when police noisily tried to break up a band of pigeons cooing on the rooftop.Despite having to hold his bow “rather gingerly between thumb and forefinger,” Heifetz was his usual near-flawless self. The audience applauded enthusiastically. But his bowing hand still hurt, and he canceled his final appearance in Tel Aviv.Three days later, hand still bandaged, Heifetz was back on tour, playing in Italy.DOV SHILANSKY BECAME A LAWYER and started his own firm. When the Likud party swept into power in 1977, making Menachem Begin prime minister, Begin rewarded his longtime friend Shilansky with a deputy minister post.In 1982, Shilansky told the historian Tom Segev that he knew who had attacked Heifetz, but would not say who it was. By then, Shilansky was embroiled in another music-related controversy.At the end of a concert by the Israeli Philharmonic in 1981, the orchestra’s conductor, the Indian-born Zubin Mehta, told the audience that the encore would be by Richard Wagner; anyone who felt uncomfortable was free to leave, he said, and the musicians would not take offense. (A violinist and trombonist, both Holocaust survivors, walked out.)It was the first time Wagner had been played officially in Israel since 1938, and reactions quickly turned ugly. Press attacks brought up all the old arguments, but Shilansky added something new.In a radio interview, he grew angry at Mehta’s chutzpah and suggested that he “go back to India.” He later said his comments had been taken out of context: he’d meant that Mehta should “leave Israelis in peace.”Begin said little publicly, but privately defended Shilansky in a letter to the Israel Philharmonic: “He saw our people in the process of annihilation. He himself was in a Nazi concentration camp.”WAS SHILANSKY RESPONSIBLE for the attack on Heifetz? The time frame doesn’t seem to work; Shilansky wasn’t released from prison until months after the assault. And he didn’t match the assailant’s description: a “tall, dark thug.”But several newspaper reports say that on April 12, Shilansky received a 10-day furlough for his second son’s birth. (That son, Shafir Shilansky, also a lawyer, did not return requests for comment.) Begin was the boy’s godfather. Shilansky would have been free when Heifetz received the blow to his bowing arm.When I brought this up to Segev, he insisted Shilansky wasn’t the attacker, that it wasn’t his style. It “makes absolutely no sense,” Segev said. I’m inclined to agree. A more plausible culprit might be a Malchut Yisrael member convicted in August 1953. Most were minors; their whereabouts at the time could not be definitively established.As Shilansky rose to power, his vociferous criticism of efforts to play German composers, and his passionate arguments that even speaking the German language could cause tremendous harm, never wavered. But whatever he knew about the Heifetz attack he took to the grave.FOR ME, THE ATTACK on Heifetz became less a mystery to solve than a thorny emotional and political journey to the heart of Israel’s founding, a reminder of its contradictions and aspirations. For Heifetz, it was simpler.“He just thought it was a stupid thing this man did,” Ayke Agus, the author of “Heifetz as I Knew Him” and a close friend, said in an interview. “He would tell anybody who called him up for an interview that he didn’t like to mix politics and music.”Anna Lou Dehavenon, the widow of pianist William Kapell, told Heifetz’s biographer John A. Maltese about meeting Heifetz for dinner in Paris during his 1953 tour. “I said to Jascha, ‘What has happened to your hand?’ And, of course, he didn’t want to talk about it.”Heifetz remained an active supporter of Israel. He visited a final time in 1970 for a five-week tour with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky. Upon meeting prime minister Golda Meir, Heifetz handed her a check for about $25,000 and told her “to do with it as she sees fit.”This trip may have been more harmonious because of another decision Heifetz made: Early drafts of his recital programs included a Strauss piece, but he chose not to play it. More

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      The Vienna Philharmonic Tends the Classics With a Perfect Partner

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      Christian Thielemann led the storied orchestra in three concerts at Carnegie Hall, including a revelatory performance of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony.”Sometimes in a concert-going life, preconceived notions are upended, leading to thrilling surprises.Before the Vienna Philharmonic’s three concerts over the weekend at Carnegie Hall, I was primed for this storied orchestra’s dashing Mendelssohn, formidable Brahms and majestic Bruckner.But I had been prepared to reach those works, on Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon, after the hurdle of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” on Friday.“An Alpine Symphony” is something of an ugly duckling in the orchestral repertory — or, given its scale, an ugly elephant. Lasting some 50 minutes, it is Strauss’s final and biggest tone poem, a wall mural in sound depicting a dramatic mountain hike, and requiring both celesta and organ, wind and thunder machines — and cowbell for good measure — as well as woodwind and brass forces that put even Bruckner to shame.The piece gets a bad rap for its indulgent size and fitfully episodic structure, the way it can seem to be spinning its wheels for long stretches between bloated climaxes. It’s considered more than acceptable for people who know a lot about classical music — people who are in classical music — to roll their eyes at it.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.And it’s true: From most orchestras, under most conductors, on most nights, it comes off bombastic, limp and long.Not here. On the podium for the three concerts this weekend was Christian Thielemann, a maestro whose Strauss is able to convert even skeptics. People still talk about the focused splendor he brought to another huge, hard-to-wrangle Strauss score, “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” at the Metropolitan Opera more than 20 years ago.Now 63, Thielemann spends much of his career in the German-speaking world, focusing on a tiny group of eminent ensembles like this one and a small circle of canonical scores. In recent years, he has been almost absent from New York stages; his last visit to Carnegie Hall, with his Staatskapelle Dresden, was in 2013.Believe the hype: Thielemann, whose last appearance at Carnegie Hall was in 2013, gave an enlightening account of Strauss’s “An Alpine Symphony” on Friday.Jennifer TaylorOn Friday, his “Alpine Symphony” was a reminder that the fuss that surrounds him is not hype. Above all, Thielemann conveyed a sense of unaffected fluidity — achieved, paradoxically, by firm control over a score that can sag.The soft but grand dawn opening felt not portentous but natural, building to a sunrise that was shining without blare. Throughout, Thielemann refused to dwell on the climaxes, be they mountaintop vistas or thundering storms, blurring the boundaries between the episodes into an ever-shifting, gorgeously disorienting whole.Sometimes sumptuous, sometimes frosty, sometimes glistening, Vienna’s strings were perhaps at their most impressive when it came to maintaining tension even as a barely audible foundation of the orchestral textures. This helped ensure that material that often feels like filler was continually mesmerizing.More relaxed passages had the poised intimacy of Strauss’s salon-style opera “Ariadne auf Naxos.” And, toward the end, the orchestra luxuriated in the wandering chromatic music that demonstrates Strauss’s debt to Schoenberg, whose “Verklärte Nacht” opened the concert with the same sense of unforced flow that Thielemann brought to “An Alpine Symphony.”That easy flow, though, managed to convey the opposite of ease, making this score sound more mysterious and thorny, and more engrossing, than I’d ever heard it. This was a truly persuasive performance.So was the rendition of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony on Sunday. As in the Strauss, Thielemann conveyed a sense of continuity, of great arches, that pressed intensity through the work’s endless, hypnotic repetitions. (And, as in the Strauss, the strings in particular never let up.) At the start of the Adagio, the melody was properly broad without losing the line, and the Finale was a medieval edifice, looming through fog and in sunshine.The careful control from Thielemann that gave tautness to “An Alpine Symphony” and the Bruckner took away a certain bucolic character in Mendelssohn’s “Hebrides” Overture and Symphony No. 3, which had a weight, even a severity, on Saturday that brought them in line with Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 after intermission.Scattered through the weekend were some quirks — moments of uneasy intonation and tiny flaws, including a hiccup on the opening chord of the Bruckner symphony. But these issues felt tiny next to all the breathtaking things this orchestra does: ends of phrases so elegantly rounded they almost make you sigh; the uncanny matching of tone and texture between horn and strings in the Bruckner Adagio; the silkiness of the start of the Brahms symphony’s finale; and effortlessly idiomatic moments like a delightfully squealing, squelching chord in “An Alpine Symphony.”And there are aspects of sound in which the Viennese remain distinctively themselves: their winds woodsier — darker, somehow damper and more moodily blended, like a forest floor — than you hear from other orchestras, and the brasses in ensemble closer to a bronze shield than a golden spear.A year ago, the Philharmonic’s annual New York visit was not so focused on the music-making. In the lead-up to those concerts in late February, the orchestra and Carnegie came under scrutiny for the decision to collaborate with the conductor Valery Gergiev, a prominent supporter of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. It was only after the invasion of Ukraine began, the day before the first performance, that the orchestra and hall dropped their defenses of Gergiev and replaced him.It was an irruption of politics into an ensemble whose brand has been defined by insulation from all that. Beyond the standard-repertory programs this weekend, the encores, as usual, came from the nostalgic dream world of the Philharmonic’s waltz- and polka-filled New Year’s concerts, which do their best to pretend that the past 150 years never happened.This orchestra is devoted to tending the fire of tradition; in this task, it has in Thielemann perhaps the perfect partner. More

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      Review: ‘The Silent Woman,’ an Opera About Putting on an Opera

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      Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of Richard Strauss’s opera, composed amid the Nazis’ rise to power.ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — “Ha! A silent woman?,” sings the basso buffo Morosus in Richard Strauss’s “Die Schweigsame Frau.” “You’ll only find her in a churchyard under a stone cross.”The casual misogyny of Strauss’s only opera buffa — a work that unfolds like a love letter to Mozart, Rossini and Donizetti — was hardly a point of controversy when it premiered in Dresden in 1935. But controversy there was: The opera’s libretto was written by Stefan Zweig, a Jew, who submitted it two weeks before Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor in 1933.On Friday night, Bard SummerScape unveiled a rare staging of “The Silent Woman” at Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College that went some way toward reconciling the featherlight subject and its fraught historical context. The witty staging, engaging cast and efficiently evocative designs made a good opera feel like a great one.Much has been written about Strauss’s miscalculations with regards to the Nazi regime, his attempts to stay out of politics while currying favor and protecting his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons.He accepted the presidency of the Reich Chamber of Music, a post he later described as a “tiresome honorary office” in a letter that got him into hot water. In his notebooks, he called Nazi antisemitism “a disgrace to German honor.” Ultimately, he underestimated the National Socialist dictatorship as a political fashion, a nuisance affecting his work with Zweig, who was forced to flee the country.Strauss, who once thought his creativity wouldn’t survive the sudden death of his beloved librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, wrote to Zweig: “If you abandon me, too, I’ll have to lead from now on the life of an ailing, unemployed retiree.”According to a letter from Strauss, Joseph Goebbels and Hitler, presumably finding nothing subversive in “Frau,” approved it. After Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name appear on the program book, the propagandist and his boss skipped the premiere. It was only after Strauss expressed his dim view of Nazism in a letter intercepted by the Gestapo that the opera was banned.In 1942, Zweig, under pain of exile in Brazil, took his own life. Strauss, defeated by the bombing of Germany’s opera houses and the collapse of its culture, nonetheless had music left in him, including his Horn Concerto No. 2 and the “Four Last Songs.”From left, Matthew Anchel, Federico DeMichelis, Anya Matanovic, Edward Nelson, David Portillo, Chrystal E. Williams, and members of the Bard Festival Chorale.Stephanie BergerAgainst this backdrop we have “Die Schweigsame Frau,” an opera about the retired admiral Morosus, whose tinnitus makes him a world-class grouch who can’t bear the tolling of church bells or the idea of a nagging spouse. Zweig supplied an Italianate comedy without psychological underpinning, and Strauss was delighted.When Morosus’s nephew Henry shows up with his theater troupe, Morosus, appalled at Henry’s chosen career, disinherits him and insults his wife, Aminta. The troupe teaches him a lesson recognizable from Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”: Aminta, disguised as a demure ingénue, marries Morosus in a sham ceremony and proceeds to throw tantrums and turn his life upside-down until he begs for mercy.For Bard’s delightful production, the director and set designer Christian Räth stages “Frau” as an opera about putting on an opera. Stagehands execute scene changes in full view of the audience, and Morosus’s single-word mantra, “Ruhe” (quiet), glows like an exit sign above the doors of his orderly home.The deception of Morosus becomes a show itself. The theater troupe riffles through clothing racks from other Strauss productions for their costumes. Morosus auditions his three potential brides-to-be on a mini-replica of the stage where “Frau” had its 1935 premiere, presenting the winner with a silver rose straight out of Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier” (and “The Bachelor”).The troupe — and the cast — fully commits to its roles. Harold Wilson commands a sonorous bass as the proud, endearing Morosus. Jana McIntyre (Aminta) and David Portillo (Henry) sing with bright, earnest lyric voices that hint at stridency under Strauss’s demands. Edward Nelson, sounding handsome and polished, turns the Barber into an unusually compelling factotum. Matthew Anchel, a riot as the impresario Vanuzzi, shows an appealingly compact bass with depth of tone. Ariana Lucas (Housekeeper), Chrystal E. Williams (Carlotta) and Anya Matanovic (Isotta) delve zestfully into their characters.Mattie Ullrich’s funny, dazzling costumes transformed the cast, including a male corps de ballet that never missed a chance to shake their platter tutus.Strauss underscored spoken dialogue with arch instrumental commentary, but the orchestra, at times hamstrung by his sumptuous style and parlando vocal lines, shifts its weight like an elephant in ballet shoes. At Bard, the conductor Leon Botstein, deprioritizing tonal grandeur, showed the opera to be light on its feet. The overture’s quirky doodling emerged fast and clean, and the magical duet-turned-trio that ends Act II lilted, with Straussian wafts of pungent woodwinds.Räth, injecting resistance into a work that was politicized despite itself, turned the chaotic wedding scene into a nightmare sequence: Choristers and dancers swarmed the stage with large face masks of real-life personages (including Mozart, Bach, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Maria Cebotari, the first Aminta). Ominously, the masks of Hitler and Goebbels flanked a mask of Strauss and carted him off by the elbows.The opera closes with a reflection far removed from the prevailing mayhem, not unlike the glorious final monologue from Strauss’s last opera, “Capriccio.”As the strings swelled, Wilson’s Morosus stepped forward, offering a glimpse of peace, sung with touching restraint, from an ailing, unemployed retiree at the end of his life. In his hands he held the masks of Strauss and Zweig, forced apart by murderous bigotry, reunited at last.The Silent WomanThrough Sunday at Bard College; fishercenter.bard.edu. More