Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos) is an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
The opera as originally conceived was to be a thirty-minute divertissement to be performed at the end of Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Molière's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. As well as composing the opera, Strauss provided incidental music to be performed during the play. In the end, the opera occupied ninety minutes, and the perf...
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Ariadne auf Naxos (Ariadne on Naxos) is an opera by Richard Strauss with a German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
The opera as originally conceived was to be a thirty-minute divertissement to be performed at the end of Hofmannsthal's adaptation of Molière's play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. As well as composing 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.
After the première, it became apparent that the work as it stood was impractical: it required a company of actors as well as an opera company, and was thus very expensive to mount, and its length was likely to be a problem for audiences. So in 1913 Hofmannsthal proposed to Strauss that the play should be replaced by a prologue which would explain why the opera combines a serious classical...
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