Tribute to Strauss at Beijing festival

The Beijing Music Festival presents quality operas that are rarely seen in the capital. This year, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of Richard Strauss, two of the composer's major operas, Ariadne auf Naxos (1916) and Elektra (1909), will premiere in China.

Strauss and the Austrian dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal initially wrote an opera in one act to be performed after Moliere's Le Bourgeois Gentillhomme. But the premiere in Stuttgart in 1912 showed that the combination of a play and an opera was not practical for most theaters. Strauss and von Hofmannsthal therefore created a prologue in place of Moliere's play to present before the one-act opera. That version premiered in 1916, and has been successful to this day.

The story begins at the home of the richest man in Vienna, where preparations for a musical festivity are underway. An opera company will present the serious work Ariadne by a young composer, while another group, led by the saucy comedienne Zerbinetta, is asked to entertain the guests with a less-tragic sequel. In Greek mythology, Ariadne was the daughter of Minos, the king of Crete and the son of Zeus and Pasiphae, who was the daughter of the sun god Helios.