Thanks to the vagaries of PBS’s summer schedule, I finally achieved, in a manner of speaking, one of my long-time goals: I saw a staged performance of Capriccio, Richard Strauss’s last opera, written in 1941. I became aware of Capriccio about 1951. At that time, I was an avid seventeen-year-old record collector with a major concentration on the later operas of Richard Wagner. But in my Wagnerolatry I had room for Strauss as well. Born in 1864, Strauss, after all, had been dubbed “Richard the Second” by critics even before the turn of the century.¹ In the late 1940s, I had been immensely taken by Dimitri Mitropoulos’s hair-raising New York Philharmonic broadcast of Strauss’s Elektra (1906-8), with Astrid Varnay in the title role. This, I suppose, predisposed me to Strauss’s operatic rather than his orchestral music, and I was fortunate to obtain two Deutsche Grammophon 78s of excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier (1910) by such distinguished Strauss performers as sopranos Tiana Lemnitz and Erna Berger, along with some excerpts led by the composer himself. These were quickly followed in my purchases by a Lemnitz Rosenkavalier LP, recorded pre-1952. There was a marvelous 78 recording too of Ariadne’s Monologue from Ariadne auf Naxos (revised version 1916), sung in 1948 by the short-lived Maria Cebotari.

But all these records were of reasonably well-known material. Less well known was the final scene of Capriccio. The version I had, on 78, was conducted by the great Clemens