Richard Strauss’s opera “Der Rosenkavalier” is about the passage of time. It’s the story of a wealthy married woman, the Marschallin, who is having an affair with a much younger man, and who realizes that she is getting older and that he will sooner or later move on. Her most famous aria, at the end of the first act, is about wanting to stop the clocks. At the end of the opera, to music so full of feeling Strauss wanted it played at his own funeral, she accepts the inevitable and graciously surrenders her lover to a younger woman.
Robert Carsen’s new staging of “Rosenkavalier,” which had its debut in London this winter and opens at the Metropolitan Opera on Thursday, April 13, emphasizes the theme of change and upheaval by moving the setting from 18th-century Vienna to the moment when the piece was written, at the twilight of the Hapsburg Empire and the eve of World War I. It becomes an opera about the end of an era, or even the end of the world.
For Renée Fleming, the superstar soprano who will sing the Marschallin at the Met, and for music, this really is the end of an era: This “Rosenkavalier” may well be her farewell to staged opera. She will sing her final performance on the afternoon of Saturday, May 13.
People who know Ms. Fleming, 58, say that she has been planning this moment for years. The novelist Ann Patchett, who became friends with her after finishing “Bel Canto,” about a diva with many Fleming-like traits, said recently: “For as long as I’ve known Renée, the thing she always talks about is the fact that it’s all going to end. She has always had this feeling: ‘I’m a carton of yogurt with an expiration date stamped on it, and that day will come and I’ll be thrown out.’”
So Ms. Fleming is trying to say goodbye on her own terms. “You don’t want people to be saying, ‘Oh my God, please stop,’” she said in London as she prepared to finish the “Rosenkavalier” run there. “Or, ‘I heard her when.’”
Reply With Quote