The Rosenkavalier

"Time is a strange thing ..." In Richard Strauss' and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 1911 comedy for music, the epochs sound mixed up: in the middle of a fictitious rococo of seventeen hundred something that never existed, waltz melodies from late Kakania drift by. A half-dreamed, half-imagined Vienna of Empress Maria Theresa is home to figures of the fin de siècle, and under the cheerful mask of melancholy, all opposites are united in a world theater that is captivating in its complicated simplicity. The Marschallin, a woman in her middle dreage, has the much younger Octavian as her lover. On a melancholy whim, she sends him as the "Rosenkavalier" to a daughter from a wealthy family who is promised to the bankrupt and unsympathetic old cousin Ochs. The two young people fall in love, the marriage breaks up, the old people have to make do, the young people are right - for now.

This is how the plot of Der Rosenkavalier could be summarized in a few words. But there is a whole world behind the cheerful surface: a dense web of literary allusions, philosophical insights and profound life wisdom - a study of the transience of youth, hope and dreams - a masquerade at the fairground of life, where the characters play out their roles somewhere between yesterday, today and tomorrow. Above them is the motto: "You have to be light." Those who look back are frozen by time.