Time is a strange thing. While one is living one’s life away, it is absolutely nothing. Then, suddenly, one is aware of nothing else. It is all around us – inside us, even! It shifts in our faces, swirls in the mirror, flows in my temples. It courses between you and me – silent, as in an hourglass. Oh, often I hear it flowing, irrevocably. Often I get up in the middle of the night and make all, all the clocks stand still.
- Marschallin, Der Rosenkavalier (1911)
These wistful lines are sung by the aristocratic Marschallin near the end of the first act of Richard Strauss’ 1911 comic opera, Der Rosenkavalier. She is addressing her much younger lover, Octavian (played by a mezzo-soprano in the opera), realising that she must let him go. In an act of noblesse oblige, she steps aside to allow Octavian to marry the young Sophie. He leaves quickly and the Marschallin realizes, suddenly, that she has forgotten to kiss him goodbye. She sends footmen after him, but it’s too late. The moment has slipped away. As the curtain falls on Act 1, the Marschallin stares into a hand-held mirror.
Strauss and his librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal intended to write a straightforward comedy. But the character of the Marschallin inserted itself and transformed Der Rosenkavalier into something quite different.
Both men decided that there would be two major roles in their comedy – a “baritone buffo” and a “Cherubino;” Baron Ochs and young Octavian. But as they set to work, the Marschallin, a character created merely to define Ochs and Octavian, began to take over their imaginations, and their pens. She prompted the best lines and the best music. Hofmannsthal all but invented for her an aristocratic variety of Viennese to speak, and for her solo scenes Strauss scaled down his vast Wagnerian orchestra to modest Mozartian proportions.
What is more, in asserting her importance, this wise and gracious lady saw to it that the very nature of the work was changed as well. No longer was it to be bright and obvious. She both darkened and illumined the comedy, adding a dimension that was profound if not altogether tragic. Der Rosenkavalier’s theme became nothing less than the differences effected in human lives by time, with its inexorable onward flow.
The Marschallin alone among the characters sees the future passing through the present into the past, and wonders what it means. Philosophers may say that time is only the measure of change. Poets may say carpe diem – grasp time while you can. But the Marschallin finds that, in fact, in a human life one cannot measure or grasp or hold. Each irreversible moment is already gone in the instant of becoming.
**The Met’s 2017 production starred the iconic Renee Fleming in her final performance in one of her signature roles - the Marschallin. She is pictured here with Elina Garanca as Octavian.
