If part of the purpose of videos and now CDV—the library function, if you like—is to preserve outstanding performances for posterity, then this is the ideal candidate. Otto Schenk's Munich Der Rosenkavalier, long famous, is caught here in its pristine state. It was filmed for television in May 1979 by Karlheinz Hundorf who preserves the essentials of the stage action with easy, unobtrusive camera work, establishing each stage picture clearly, then exploring narrative detail to good purpose with a preponderance of medium shots and close ups. The best of it is that this is a real, live stage performance: when singers turn upstage, then their voices turn upstage as well, and you really feel you are at a performance in the Nationaltheater, albeit in an unusually privileged seat with built-in magnifying lenses. The picture quality is brilliantly clear, and the sound exceptionally well defined, certainly up to the standard of a well-engineered, live digital recording.
In the face of so much visual interest, it may seem perverse to remark that perhaps the most attractive feature of the set is the musical performance. Carlos Kleiber's interpretation is one of the best to have been committed to video or any other kind of disc or tape, one to set beside his father, Erich's, classic Decca mono version (nla). Together with his superb Bavarian players, who have this music in their bones, he delivers a lithe, sinewy account of the score, one that is throughout admirably clear in texture and blessedly free of standard Strauss mush of the bad old school. Above all, he keeps the piece on the move, never falling into the frequent traps so often tempting other conductors into gluey over-sentimentalization. The whole Onkel Greifenklau passage is a case in point, and only in the final trio does one notice that his speed is on the slow side; this, though, is a long-established tradition that it is going to be hard to break. The musical performance is so strong that one regrets even more the swingeing cuts—especially in the Third Act, whose balance is thrown dangerously out of kilter.
The cast could hardly be bettered in the post-war period. Brigitte Fassbaender's Octavian, so incredibly boyish in demeanour (her lovely long legs are a great help), is caught at the very height of her powers: the voice is at its freshest, characteristically resinous in tone, beautifully easy at the top. Her sure feel for character never allows her to go over the top as Mariandel. And there are few post-war Ochen to match Manfred Jungwirth. In close up he does, admittedly, look too old for the part (he should be the Marschallin's coeval—late thirties, say), but his impersonation is spot on, free from any hint of grotesquerie. This Ochs is plainly an awfully nice chap, one with whom any girl who didn't happen to be a boy would be happy to take a tumble, and one who summons up unsuspected reserves of dignity and probity in the last act—which is what gives the piece its bitter rather than just bitter-sweet edge. He has a worthy antagonist in Gwyneth Jones's Marschallin, surely one of her best roles—inward, restrained, vocally secure, and uncomfortably tough with her honorary cousin in the final shoot-out.
For the rest, we have a solid phalanx of Bavarian State Opera (and Kleiber/Schenk) stalwarts: Lucia Popp, as Sophie, singing exquisitely, the veteran Benno Kusche treading with a certain vocal caution as her father, Norbert Orth an outstanding Landlord, Albrecht Peter a duly authoritative Police Commissioner. Francisco Araiza is a good Italian tenor.
As suggested, Schenk's production is exemplary: unfussy, to the point, fully aware of the work's darker side. There is only one miscalculation, possibly a one-off occurrence on the evening in question. Little Mohammed comes running on at the end before Sophie and Octavian have exited. How does he know what he's come for? Or is he exhibiting the second sight he so nearly showed at the end of Act 1? Either way, an insignificant detail in one of the best opera films in any mechanical medium that has come my way.'