Ariadne Auf Naxos - First Version (1912)

First Version (1912)

The opera was originally conceived as a thirty-minute divertissement to be performed at the end of Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Molière's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Besides the opera, Strauss provided incidental music to be performed during the play. In the end, the opera occupied ninety minutes, and the performance of play plus opera occupied over six hours. It was first performed at the Hoftheater, Stuttgart, on 25 October 1912. The director was Max Reinhardt. The combination of the play and opera proved to be unsatisfactory to the audience: those who had come to hear the opera resented having to wait until the play finished.

The first version was produced in Zurich beginning on 5 December 1912 and Prague on 7 December 1912. The Munich premiere followed on 30 January 1913 in the old Residenztheater, a venue which was inferior for the presentation of opera, both acoustically and due to lack of space for the musicians. Hofmannsthal overruled the conductor Bruno Walter's preference for the Hofoper on the grounds that the smaller theatre was more suitable for a work of this kind. The cast included the American Maude Fay as Ariadne, Otto Wolf as Bacchus, and Hermine Bosetti as Zerbinetta. Strauss, being a native son, had a close association with Munich and was held in high regard, but had to miss the performance as he was on a concert tour in Russia. The audience openly expressed its disapproval of the piece by hissing after the first act. For the succeeding performances Walter introduced cuts and moved the production to the Hoftheater, and the attendance began to improve. The 1912 version was also produced in Berlin beginning on 27 February 1913 and in Amsterdam in 1914.

In London the early version was given eight times at His Majesty's Theatre beginning on 27 May 1913. The Hoffmannsthal adaptation of Molière's play was presented in an English translation by Somerset Maugham under the title The Perfect Gentleman. The opera was sung in German with Eva von der Osten, Hermine Bosetti and Otakar Marák, conducted by Thomas Beecham. The reviewer in The Musical Times found the incidental music for the play to be more attractive than that for the opera, which nevertheless had "many strong emotional appeals". However, the orchestration of the opera was thought to be "peculiar", and in the finale, the love-making of Bacchus and Ariadne, tedious.