A Little Song for Ariadne
- Lucy Cheung
- 14 hours ago
- 6 min read
I didn’t leave Glyndebourne thinking about love. It seemed an odd response to Ariadne auf Naxos, an opera that ends with one of Richard Strauss’s grandest celebrations of love. Walking back across the Sussex lawns—already turned yellow after weeks without rain—I found myself replaying neither Ariadne’s transfiguration nor Bacchus’s blazing arrival. Instead, I kept thinking about two members of the comic troupe. One dazzled us with impossible coloratura. The other sang a little song.
When I had last visited Glyndebourne, for Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo a month earlier, the countryside was still unmistakably English—green, damp, almost impossibly lush. Returning in late July, the landscape had changed completely. The prolonged heat had bleached the Sussex lawns into the colour of dry straw. It was difficult not to think that Ariadne herself might have recognised this island, where the sun seemed to have suspended time.
There was something equally suspended about Strauss’s opening pages. Before anyone sings of abandonment, death or redemption, the Prologue is already in motion. Servants hurry across the stage carrying chairs. Musicians quarrel. A rehearsal threatens to fall apart. The score slips effortlessly from one harmonic colour to another, never settling for long, its restless modulations mirroring the nervous choreography unfolding before us. Long before the Greek myth begins, the opera has already announced its true subject: not Ariadne, but performance.
Ariadne auf Naxos has always felt surprisingly modern to me because it never lets us forget that we are watching theatre. Tragedy collides with comedy, mythology with backstage reality, artistic idealism with theatrical necessity. Rather than diminishing opera, Strauss and Hofmannsthal expose its mechanisms with extraordinary confidence, trusting that self-awareness will deepen rather than weaken the illusion.
Yet for all its dazzling theatrical intelligence, the evening’s first profound moment arrives almost unexpectedly. Like everyone else, I had been waiting for Zerbinetta. Alina Wunderlin’s Großmächtige Prinzessin is one of those moments in opera that audiences await almost as if they were watching an athletic event. One impossible phrase follows another, each seeming to raise the stakes still higher. Wunderlin dispatched every challenge with astonishing assurance, making extraordinary technique appear almost effortless. The ovation that followed came as no surprise.
Then, somewhere during the aria, I realised I had stopped listening to the coloratura. I was listening to her words.
It is surprisingly easy to misunderstand Zerbinetta. Beside Ariadne’s monumental grief, she can seem almost frivolous, a comic interruption designed to puncture the seriousness of myth. But Hofmannsthal has written something altogether more subtle. Zerbinetta never mocks love, nor does she dismiss heartbreak. She simply refuses to believe that love can exist without change. People change. Love changes because people do. To love again is not to betray the past; it is to acknowledge the movement of life itself. Her philosophy is neither cynical nor carefree. It is compassionate precisely because it accepts what Ariadne cannot: that survival often means allowing oneself to become someone different from the person grief first created.
The coloratura, I realised, is not the point. It is Strauss’s way of persuading us to listen. Again and again, Ariadne auf Naxos relocates wisdom to the places where we least expect to find it. Characters who appear to exist merely for diversion reveal themselves to possess the clearest understanding of human nature.
Nowhere is that clearer than in the scene that follows. Seeing that Ariadne has surrendered completely to the thought of death, Zerbinetta turns gently to the others.
“Then let someone sing her a little song.”
That someone is Harlequin. In the world of the commedia dell’arte, Harlequin is hardly the figure one expects to carry an opera’s deepest truths. He is the trickster, the comic servant, the perpetual interrupter. If Ariadne belongs to the elevated world of opera seria, Harlequin belongs somewhere else entirely—a theatrical tradition that delights in puncturing solemnity before it hardens into self-importance. Yet Strauss and Hofmannsthal entrust him with the opera’s gentlest moment.
Harlequin does not argue with Ariadne. He never tells her that grief is excessive, nor does he promise that another love will replace the last. Unlike Zerbinetta, he offers no philosophy of love. He sings of life instead. As long as one can still love, still hate, still hope, still fear, life has not stopped moving. Listening to him, Ariadne was no longer simply the abandoned princess
of Crete waiting for a god to redeem her; she had become someone who could no longer imagine tomorrow. Harlequin’s song does not promise that tomorrow will become brighter. It merely reminds her that tomorrow still exists.
That quiet song carried greater emotional weight for me than the magnificent final duet between Ariadne and Bacchus. Rachel Willis-Sørensen and David Butt Philip sang with tremendous generosity, allowing Strauss’s vast orchestral architecture to unfold in all its blazing splendour. Yet myth offers one kind of consolation; the comedians offer another. The gods offer transcendence, but Harlequin offers something more modest and, perhaps for that very reason, more humane: companionship.
Another detail stayed with me. Harlequin sings not with Strauss’s full orchestra, but with only a piano beside him. After such orchestral richness, the sudden intimacy is startling. The theatre seems to contract; the distance between stage and audience quietly disappears. For a brief moment, opera gives way to song.
Listening in Glyndebourne, I found myself thinking of Schubert—not because Strauss imitates his musical language, but because he briefly rediscovers the same faith that lies at the heart of the German Lied: that music need not overwhelm us to speak with extraordinary intimacy.
Harlequin does not rescue Ariadne. He simply keeps her company. Looking back, I realised that both he and Zerbinetta had quietly overturned my expectations. They arrive as entertainers, yet they understand life more clearly than the tragic figures they interrupt. One teaches Ariadne that love changes because people change. The other reminds her that before life can change, it must first continue.
One of Laurent Pelly’s most revealing decisions is to keep the Composer onstage for much of the second half. Samantha Hankey’s presence is almost silent, yet it quietly transforms the entire production. She stands at the edge of her own creation, watching the tragedy she imagined gradually reshaped by comedians, practical compromises and theatrical necessity. There is little she can do except to watch it happen. Watching her, I found myself thinking that every work of art eventually reaches this moment. Once it enters the world, it no longer belongs entirely to its creator. It belongs equally to performers, audiences, accidents and time. In Pelly’s hands, the Composer becomes more than a character. She becomes the opera’s conscience, and perhaps ours as well. We watch someone watching her own work becoming something she never intended, only to discover that this transformation is not a failure but the very condition of theatre.
I have often wondered why Ariadne auf Naxos continues to feel so contemporary. Perhaps it is because the opera refuses to mistake seriousness for wisdom. Zerbinetta dazzles us until we begin listening to her words. Harlequin appears to sing a simple little song, only to reveal that it contains the emotional heart of the entire evening.
As I walked back across the Sussex lawns that night, it was not Strauss’s blazing conclusion that accompanied me home. I found myself hearing Harlequin’s little song again and again. Perhaps that is all great art can do. It cannot spare us from grief, nor promise redemption. It can remain beside us for a while, reminding us—gently—that as long as we are still capable of loving, hating, hoping and fearing, life itself has not stopped moving. The opera ends with gods. I left thinking about a little song.
Ariadne auf Naxos first appeared at Glyndebourne on 24 June 1953. Laurent Pelly’s new production, which premiered on 19 July 2026, marks the opera’s 114th performance at the festival. The same cast will reunite for a concert performance at the BBC Proms on 19 August 2026.
