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Podcast: Classical Music Discoveries
Episode: 15047 R Strauss: Daphne
Description: Considered by many to be the greatest of ALL Strauss operas that you've never heard of.
Although Strauss described Daphne as a "bucolic tragedy," based on Greek myth, it is not an opera about loss, as is Orpheus, or about retribution, as in Elektra, but rather something else altogether. Daphne, a child of nature, embodies both chaste purity and bewitching glamour, rejects two suitors, and, through metamorphosis, turns into a tree, becoming for all time a part of the natural world she ardently loves. In Strauss's drama, the greater weight is placed on the bucolic, the pastoral, and on humanity's...