COUNT Stop!
Another step and we stand before a
chasm !
We are already face to face with
"opera" . . .
An opera is an absurd thing.
Richard Strauss completed his last opera, Capriccio, in 1941. but the world that he and co-Librettist Clemens Kraus invoked in their "conversation piece for music" was as remote in spirit from the chaos of a Bremen or a Mannheim as Strauss's Bavarian mountain retreat was from the final convulsions of the Third Reich. The subject is opera itself—the relative merits of words and music—and it might just as...