In the middle of the war, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) presented his last music-dramatic legacy with his opera Capriccio, which premiered at the Munich National Theater on October 28, 1942. The conductor at the time was his friend Clemens Krauss, who had also arranged the libretto of the work. From today's perspective, it is difficult to absolve both artists of the accusation that they benefited from the National Socialist system. And so director Brigitte Fassbaender did not want to resign herself to merely telling the story of a woman between two men - as the libretto envisages - as a symbol, so to speak, of the discussion of two opposing music-theoretical positions: Which is more important - the word or the music?
Fassbaender thus shifts the action, set in Paris, to the 1940s at the time of the German occupation and unceremoniously turns the Countess into a resistance fighter who has to deal with collaborators and like-minded people at her castle. After the premiere on January 14, 2018, the audience and the press were taken with the profound but also extremely humorous production. The Frankfurter Rundschau, for example, reported: "If there is such a thing as a 'model performance,' Brigitte Fassbaender's directing could be apostrophized as such: (...) level-headed, unobtrusive, at the same time intellectually courageous and decisive director's theater."
