Der Rosenkavalier: comedy for music in three acts

Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, one of the most beloved comic operas, inaugurates the Metropolitan Opera Classics Library, a distinguished new series of books published to commemorate the centenary of the Metropolitan Opera and to bring to its readers a greater appreciation of opera as literature.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s magical story, to which Strauss set his music in the first decade of this century, has been specially adapted for this volume by Anthony Burgess. His ‘Cavalier of the Rose’ is a delightful and brilliant adaptation of Hofmannsthal’s witty, satirical and touching libretto about beauty, age and love among the Viennese aristocracy of the mid-eighteenth century.

This scintillating retelling of the opera, combined with both English and German versions of the libretto, an introduction, a critical essay on the composer, cast listings of all European and American productions of the opera, and an excellent selection of illustrations, completes an opera guide which offers an original and fascinating introduction to the very well loved Der Rosenkavalier.