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“Staging Transformation”
An interview with Stephen Lawless
8/9/2004
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With a final scene that demands the heroine to transform into a tree, Richard Strauss’s opera
Daphne features a range of dramatic and vocal challenges that have kept its performance history
limited. In presenting the New York stage premiere of Strauss’s 1938 masterwork, New York City
Opera has engaged stage director Stephen Lawless to tackle Daphne’s many challenges. An
internationally acclaimed interpreter of Strauss’s work, Lawless returns to the City Opera after
staging the company’s celebrated production of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer in 2001.
YUVAL SHARON: As an opera that comes relatively late in Strauss’s operatic career, how do you
see Daphne fitting into his oeuvre?
STEPHEN LAWLESS: Strauss changes so much throughout the course of his career: the early
Salome and Elektra are clearly written in a certain style, before that style changes for
Rosenkavalier and Ariadne and then returns to an earlier voice with Frau ohne Schatten. He
changes all the way through. Daphne has really been a bit of a revelation for me in regards to all of
this, because however good Rosenkavalier or Arabella or Frau ohne Schatten all are, there’s no
denying that there is a certain amount of musical padding in there. And I think with Daphne, there’s
no padding whatsoever. It’s so succinct and genuinely voiced. From the Strauss operas I’ve
directed, I see Daphne bearing the most resemblance to Salome.
YS: In the sense of its dramatic intensity, in not having any “musical padding,” as you say?
SL: Yes, and I think structurally, Strauss almost uses Salome as a template for Daphne, because
there are so many similarities. The Gaea/Peneios scene, for example, occurs roughly where you
get the Nazarene scene in Salome, and they both have the same feel for me. And of course the
final scenes of Salome and Daphne are so linked: they’re both about how this virgin achieves a
kind of climax without losing her virginity, which is very interesting.
YS: And with two very different results.
SL: Right.
YS: Are there other qualities of his operas that interest you artistically as a director?
SL: Strauss got from [the poet and his frequent collaborator Hugo von] Hoffmanstahl a belief that
myth is the best form of storytelling. Elektra isn’t simply a Sophoclean drama; it’s a post-Freudian
drama. The same can be said of Salome, if you consider it a kind of myth, or Frau ohne Schatten.
It’s linking myth to what is, or what was, contemporary, to the developments in thinking about
ourselves. And that’s clearly true of Daphne.
YS: Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1596 is considered the first opera ever composed—the same story
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YS: Jacopo Peri’s Dafne of 1596 is considered the first opera ever composed—the same story
Strauss and [librettist Joseph] Gregor set four hundred years later. What is it about the Daphne
myth that lends itself so well to an operatic setting?
SL: Mythology can function as an allegory, a story to teach us something, and in telling that story,
you have to find how it works in the context of when it was written. In the case of Strauss, we have
the most self-consciously autobiographical of composers—look at Ein Heldenleben, Intermezzo,
Sinfonia Domestica, and so on—and he asks you to view his works as a response to events
happening around him at the time. So the big question at the time of Daphne is how complicit he
was with what was happening in Germany in the ‘30s. I think I come down on the side that Strauss
was egotistical and foolish as opposed to deliberately scheming. So in Daphne, the first half of the
opera depicting the fading of the light; it’s clearly a metaphor for what Strauss saw happening
around him just before the start of the Second World War. If I was an artist who was largely
apolitical—and I don’t think Strauss was interested in politics at all—how would I respond to what
was happening in my society? And I think the answer is to write an opera called Daphne, which is
ultimately about regeneration. Daphne, turning into a tree at the end, becomes a beacon: within the
darkness, this little seed of something that goes way, way, way, way back slowly begins to grow.
And she is transformed, significantly, into a laurel tree, the image of everything that is best about
art.
YS: So Daphne overcomes the darkening society around her.
SL: Daphne’s the only character who doesn’t want the darkness to fall. That’s what she says in her
opening monologue, “Bleib, geliebter Tag,” “Stay, beloved sun.” Everybody else wants the darkness
to fall in the piece so they can get on with this rather curious off-stage festival to Dionysius. I think it
is a very specifically 20th-century working of the myth, because the piece is not about what we
learn from the gods—which I’m sure is what the Peri piece would be about. It’s about what the gods
would learn from us. And Apollo, that curiously Aryan god—cultured, beautiful, superior—has no
compunction in killing Leukippos; it’s like killing a fly. What he learns from Daphne’s lament over
Leukippos’s body is that most human thing: compassion. And again, that was something
significantly missing in cultural life at the time Strauss was writing this. But that’s why I think it’s
surprising, because it’s kind of a seminal piece, Daphne; it’s as good as any of his other operas.
YS: The most famous part of the opera is the closing “transformation scene,” which is often cited as
the main reason for its rare appearance on the stage. It puts such high demands on a theater’s
stagecraft and a production team’s imagination. Without giving away exactly what you and your
design team are thinking about for the final scene, can you discuss what approach you are taking
to the transformation? What kind of ideas are inspiring your interpretation of the scene?
SL: It goes back to what I was saying about the allegorical quality of the opera. Strauss is not
concerned with a kind of verismo realism. I think if she literally turns into a tree, it’s a bit clunky and
ham-fisted; it’s what that image is about that ultimately matters. And as I’ve said, it’s an image of
rebirth after a catastrophe, whether it is Strauss looking forward to the Second World War or events
three years ago in New York. That’s what the moment is about. The female voice has always
served as a muse for Strauss. That’s the woman holding the torch, the slow seed of something
growing out from the roots laid down by Schubert, Beethoven, and Wagner. And that’s the muse he
uses to inspire this transcendent final moment, where after this huge disaster, there is a
continuation of cultural life.
YS: As Daphne transforms, the last words she sings are a call to be considered as a symbol of
“einzige Liebe,” a single, devotional love. But it’s left ambiguous as to exactly who she means,
whether it’s love to Leukippos, to Apollo, or to something greater than that.
SL: It’s clearly something bigger than literal love. Something that Strauss does all the way through
his career—from the operas Ariadne auf Naxos to Capriccio, and it’s interesting that Daphne falls
right between the two—is that he views the creative act, personally and artistically, as the same.
The story of the opera within Capriccio is generated by the composer’s love for the countess, who
is a muse figure; in Ariadne it’s the same thing. He deliberately confuses these two creative acts,
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is a muse figure; in Ariadne it’s the same thing. He deliberately confuses these two creative acts,
and that is the love that Daphne is talking about at the end: the love of humanity that inspires the
creative act in the first place.
YS: Since we talked about Daphne’s relevance to the first half of the 20th century, what do you
think this opera can say to a 21st century audience? And a New York audience in particular?
SL: All I’m going to say is this: last time I was in New York doing an opera for the City Opera, it was
due to premiere on September 11, 2001. And if this opera is about regeneration—which I believe it
is—I think it will speak rather strongly to this audience today.
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