Thanks to the vagaries of PBS’s summer schedule, I finally achieved, in a manner of speaking, one of my long-time goals: I saw a staged performance of Capriccio, Richard Strauss’s last opera, written in 1941. I became aware of Capriccio about 1951. At that time, I was an avid seventeen-year-old record collector with a major concentration on the later operas of Richard Wagner. But in my Wagnerolatry I had room for Strauss as well. Born in 1864, Strauss, after all, had been dubbed “Richard the Second” by critics even before the turn of the century.1 In the late 1940s, I had been immensely taken by Dimitri Mitropoulos’s hair-raising New York Philharmonic broadcast of Strauss’s Elektra (1906-8), with Astrid Varnay in the title role....

 
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