Strangers in a Strange Land, Part 1

Richard Strauss had a fondness the out-of-context inclusion of characters who are pointedly Italian, as is evidenced by the Italian tenor and soprano plunked into the 1942 Capriccio and the Italian singer in the 1911 Der Rosenkavalier. Brought in and then thrust away as peremptorily as are the Marschallin's other strictly for-hire cameo characters, these singers perform their "gigs" in florid Italian; in Capriccio, however, the couple's spoken text is in fluent German. Far more intriguing, in Der Rosenkavalier, is Valzacchi, whose Italian origins are comically given away by his pidgin mutilations of his German text, a brilliant splicing of two languages that yet allows the audience to follow what he is saying. (By the way, by some curious publishing convention, foreign text that differs from the original language of an opera libretto is almost never translated along with the rest; this is the case with many of the examples I have quoted above.)

In Part 2, we'll look at how operatic travelers come to be in other countries than their homeland. Let's finish here meanwhile with another Russian opera that contains international cameos: the merchants' arias in Rimsky-Korsakov's 1898 Sadko. Although none of these songs exceed five minutes in length, like the role of Rosenkavalier's Italian Singer, they are virtuosic showcases for three top-ranking soloists who appear nowhere else in the opera: a bass for the Varangian (Viking) merchant, a baritone for the Venetian, and a tenor for the Indian. Perhaps the geographically evocative music of these three arias is already familiar to you -- but I strongly recommend taking a look at their lyrics, too: all are magnificently worded descriptions of each merchant's native land.

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