RICHARD Strauss’s Daphne, which draws upon Ancient Greek myth and drama, is a fascinating work from the 20th-century operatic canon. It is also, due to its provenance in Nazi Germany (the opera premiered at the Semperoper in Dresden in 1938), a piece with a vexed history.
Over the next week, Scottish audiences – in Glasgow, Haddington (as part of the splendid Lammermuir Festival) and Edinburgh – will have the opportunity to experience the opera in a concert staged by Scottish Opera. The piece will be directed by acclaimed librettist and opera director Emma Jenkins.
Based loosely upon Ovid’s narrative poem The Metamorphoses and Euripides’s play The Bacchae, the opera tells the story of Daphne, a young woman who eschews the carnal in pursuit of her devotion to nature. Sworn to chastity, Daphne is unable to reciprocate the love interest of her childhood friend Leukippos.
Temperamentally at odds with the sensual excesses of the festival of Dionysus (aka Bacchus, god of wine and fertility), Daphne refuses to don the ceremonial dress of the Bacchanalian celebrations. Nevertheless, she finds herself assailed by both the temporal and the divine.
Her parents oppose her dedication to chastity, and Leukippos uses the festival of Dionysus as a means of disguising himself and getting closer to Daphne. Meanwhile, the god Apollo, with lust aforethought, disguises himself as a herdsman and seeks to have his wicked way with Daphne.
Our heroine, seeing through both the disguises and the carnal intentions of her suitors, rejects the attentions of Leukippos and Apollo. The jealous god rashly kills Leukippos with his bow and arrow.
As Daphne mourns the dying Leukippos, Apollo (in a decidedly weird act of contrition) asks the top god, Zeus, to make our heroine at one with her beloved nature by transforming her into a tree. And, thus, Daphne dies.
It is a complex story, which, like so many Ancient Greek myths, combines the metaphysical with very human concerns. As Jenkins tells me, it is also a tale that speaks to us down the ages.
She will, she explains, be bringing Strauss’s opera into the tempestuous period in German history in which it was written and first performed. Her staging will be set across the 1930s and early 1940s, taking into account the last days of Weimar Germany and the rise to power of the Nazis.
The director draws a direct parallel between the (literally) Bacchanalian excesses of the Dionysus cult in Ancient Greece with the decadence of the cabaret and nightclub scene in Berlin during the period of the Weimar Republic. In particular, she found herself fascinated by the starkly contrasting social forces that characterised Germany in the 1930s.
In the opera, Jenkins says, “you have almost two types of obscenity going on”. In the midst of these forces, she continues, we see “this innocent girl, Daphne”.
The director sees the forces represented in the classical tale echoed in both the debauchery of the Weimar cabarets and the violent moral degradation of Nazism. The German figure who, for her, emerges as the innocent, victimised Daphne is the anti-fascist martyr Sophie Scholl.
Murdered by the Nazis in Munich in 1943 at the age of just 21, Scholl was a member of the non-violent White Rose movement that bravely resisted the Hitler regime in Germany. “I’m basing Daphne on Sophie Scholl,” Jenkins explains.
“She is a pure, innocent person who is beset on all sides by corruption,” says the director.
“I suppose if this opera is about anything, it’s about staying true to your principles in the face of appalling coercion. That coercion is sexual, it’s political and it’s cultural.
“It also comes from Daphne’s parents, as well as the society around her. But she stays true to her beliefs and, of course, she dies for it.”
What she is aiming for with this production is, she says, a “happy middle ground” between a concert and a fully staged operatic performance.
Consequently, audiences can expect a concert in which the stage is dressed as if for Germany in the 1930s. Apollo, although wearing no insignia, will nevertheless be in military attire, drawing parallels between the Greek god and the Nazi top brass.
It is an intelligent and interesting approach to what is, as Jenkins notes, a complex and brilliant opera.
Daphne plays: Theatre Royal, Glasgow, September 5; St Mary’s Church, Haddington, September 7; and Usher Hall, Edinburgh, December 10: scottishopera.org.uk
