Although she is surrounded by many admirers, Arabella dreams of finding ‘the one’. Successful, she finds Mandryka, a Croatian landowner. The opera’s story of idealised love was written on the precipice to disaster, dating from a time of deep social insecurity. The operetta-like tone of Strauss’ lyric comedy is strangely fractured. When it premiered in Dresden in 1933, it was instrumentalised by the Nazis for propaganda. Director Robert Carsen doesn’t ignore the socio-political context and relocates the plot to the height of the Third Reich.
