my rosenkavalier moment

I’ve loved Der Rosenkavalier since I first became acquainted with it during my undergraduate music history courses. What’s not to love? Great melodies, a classic love triangle, and the Vienna Philharmonic!

My favorite moment comes from the mind-blowing trio that concludes the opera (but not the cobble together suite that we’re playing this weekend) – where each of the three main characters express their differing kinds of love for each other, and engage in simultaneous soliloquies about their innermost thoughts and feelings about those forms of love. It’s a tour de force moment in opera composition, and it has few parallels, except perhaps the sextet from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

So, the trio features as the high point of the entire opera, and the suite which we are playing this weekend at the OSO concerts. Solo strings double the vocal parts (since there are no vocalists in the suite) and there is a suspension that just happens to occur in the second viola solo part (which happens to be played by me) that I (humbly) suggest just might be the most painfully sublime note in the entire suite (except perhaps the high D that principal trumpeter Jeffrey Work is so gorgeously playing at the final climax of the trio) – you be the judge: the note happens right about 51 seconds into this minute-long clip.

[audio:rosenkavalier.mp3]

Since we don’t have the advantage of voices in the suite version of the opera, I thought it might be fun to give the actual excerpt that you just heard in the form in which it’s heard in the actual opera:

[audio:rosenkavalier2.mp3]

To give credit where credit is due:

The first excerpt is from a performance of the suite by the Vienna Philharmonic under the direction of Andre Previn.

The second excerpt is also the Vienna Philharmonic, this time conducted by Herbert von Karajan.  The singers are Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Agnes Baltsa and Janet Perry.