Time Travellers

The final collaboration between Strauss and von Hofmannsthal was also, in some ways, their least consequential: if Arabella is unquestionably a cut above the average domestic entertainment, it is also ultimately a tidily conceived tale of true love overcoming human foibles, set against the comfortably nostalgic backdrop of 1860s Vienna. While the excellent new production at the Deutsche Oper couldn’t quite elevate the low key drama of the libretto to the level of mythic universality that Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s best work achieves so effortlessly, it nonetheless made a strong argument that, beneath the opera’s period details and comedic misunderstandings are elements that may seem all the more relevant in the twenty-first century.

Director Tobias Kratzer used the stated setting of the opera as his starting point, and the first act…