Daphne

When Daphne is alienated by a society she cannot understand, she turns, instead, to nature. Strauss’ ‘bucolic tragedy’, inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Euripides’ The Bacchae, is the story of a free spirit, an elusive stranger and a remarkable and cruel transformation. Rarely performed, largely because the libretto requires the heroine to be gradually transformed into a laurel tree, this one-act work is nevertheless one of the most spirited of [Strauss]’s late operas. Better still, it contains some of his most ravishing writing, not least in the exhilarating tenor roles of the two men in love with Daphne.Sung in German with English supertitles