Arabella

It’s Carnival in Vienna, but these are the anxious 1860s and the aristocratic Waldner family has fallen on hard times. They can only afford to send one daughter to the ball, so Arabella dances through the night in search of an advantageous marriage, while her younger sister Zdenka stays at home dressed as a boy (it’s cheaper). But the season is almost over, and unless Arabella meets Mr Right very soon indeed, she is going to have to marry for money rather than love. Still, this is Vienna, and fairy tales sometimes do come true—just not always in the way that is expected… Arabella (1933) was the last opera that Richard Strauss created with his long-term collaborator Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who died before completing the libretto, leaving much to be fine-tuned and polished. But what survived (and what Strauss embraced) was a story with a big heart: a tale of true love in a troubled world, sprinkled with the comedy of Viennese operetta and whirled along by the same bittersweet waltz-time nostalgia that drove Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s masterpiece Der Rosenkavalier. With great singers in the roles of Arabella and her beloved Mandryka, Arabella is both a sad, sweet portrait of a vanished era, and a profoundly touching hymn to the magic of youth, hope and—above all—love.