Daphne, review: Ancient Greece meets Nazi Germany – with surprisingly successful results

Richard Strauss’s one act opera Daphne has a deeply problematic provenance. The work – which tells the tragic, Ancient Greek story of the chaste, nature-devoted young woman of the title – had its premiere in Nazi Germany, at the Semperoper in Dresden, in 1938.

Strauss’s relationship with the Third Reich was complex: although it should be said that the composer was cleared of being a willing servant of the regime by a Denazification committee in 1948.

Director Emma Jenkins takes this difficult history as the thematic frame for her highly accomplished concert staging for Scottish Opera. Played on a simple black stage, the action collides two time periods in Germany’s history - that of the Weimar Republic (evoked in the minimalist furniture and art-deco lighting), and Nazi Germany during the Second World War.  

Daphne herself (who is sung splendidly by the South Korean soprano Hye-Youn Lee) is represented as the young, anti-Nazi martyr Sophie Scholl (who was executed in Munich in 1943, aged just 21). This resetting of Strauss’s opera (which is based loosely upon Ovid’s narrative poem The Metamorphoses and Euripides’s play The Bacchae) is remarkably successful in thematic terms.

The virtuous heroine (Daphne/Scholl) is beset by decadence (the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility, represented in the culture of the Weimar club scene). She is also threatened by a powerful, malevolent force (Apollo recast as a leader of the Nazi state in a long leather coat).

All of this is given brilliant expression in 100 minutes of opera that belie the limitations of both resources and rehearsal time that a concert staging entails. The orchestra, playing from the pit at the Theatre Royal, offers Strauss’s beautiful score in all of its colourful variety, from moments of pastoral tranquility to explosions of celestial revelation.

The 15-strong cast (including a chorus of eight Bacchanalian shepherds) is superb. British bass-baritone Dingle Yandell excels, delivering the Dionysian commitment of Peneios (Daphne’s father) with a winning combination of perfect vocal pitch and humorously excessive fervour.

Australian Tenor Brad Cooper is equally impressive as Apollo, singing the role with tremendous power, arrogance and malevolence. Lee’s Daphne is a tour de force, rendering the role with a compelling emotional energy, especially in her final, mournful aria.

This exquisitely constructed, marvellously performed concert staging gets Scottish Opera’s 2023/24 season off to an excellent start.

 At St Mary’s Church, Haddington, September 7, and Usher Hall, Edinburgh, December 10. Tickets:  scottishopera.org.uk