WHEN YOU FEEL your eyelids succumbing to a soporific pull and it’s during a work produced by the Metropolitan Opera in New York, it is worrying. Richard Strauss’s Arabella is currently being screened by Ster Kinekor at various film outlets nationally, in South Africa, and it feels like a massive disappointment for the ordinary opera goer.

It’s a lesser-known Strauss work, featuring several Met Opera debuts, including that of the conductor, Nicholas Carter and Louise Alder who plays Zdenka or Zdenko, a young woman who is forced to pretend she is male, to save her parents from financial ruin. Premised on all those old values associated with a young woman ‘coming out’ and being appropriately courted by suitable suitors, it’s one of those cross-dressing works, where even though she is a soprano and is actually heavily pregnant, no one in the work sees the character as anything but male.

But that’s not its flaw. Indeed, Alder lends the work a feisty sense of character and her performance is one of the reasons you should steel yourself to see this work. Her role is small, counterbalanced against that of the eponymous Arabella (performed by Rachel Willis-Sørensen), Zdenko’s elder sister. Arabella is earmarked to remain recognisable as a girl and to try and bag a wealthy husband, to save the parents from the poorhouse. Arabella wears frocks so big they knock the furniture down – in a way that doesn’t feel like an intentional bit of frippery to the work at all.

Strauss completed this opera in 1933, which was when it was first performed. The biographical anecdote behind the work goes along the lines that after the untimely death of his trusted librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in 1929, Strauss became obsessively focused on getting the work finished. It feels odd that a man who created such chilling brilliance that manifested in Salome and Elektra would revert to a benign comedy of manners, however lyrical and internally beautiful it might be.

Culturally, the timeframe saw Europe beset by a frenetic ‘between the wars’ energy that gave voice to radical artists of the ilk of Alban Berg, who completed his opera Wozzeck in 1922, Otto Dix who painted the horrors of war with an unmitigated clarity, and filmmaker Fritz Lang who made his ground-shifting work Metropolis in 1927. Arabella feels like an anachronism. It is sedate in its sense of polite society to the point of blandness and offers a comment on manners that feels at least 100 years old.

The Met’s choice – whatever informs it – to use Otto Schenk’s 1983 production design of this work, now in 2025, also feeds drab. While the old-school style of the piece is splendid in its sense of conventional workmanship – particularly at the intervals where you are given an understanding of the creative labour and accuracy that goes into set changes – the overall thrust of the work is deathly static. It enjoys a bit of life in Act Two where Arabella meets her guy and some narrative drama in Act Three, but nothing to sweep you off your feet, alas.

Indeed, as the work progresses – all four hours of it – you may find yourself imagining how potent the piece would be as a recording, without visuals altogether. This thought rests largely on the male performers on the work. While their voices are wonderful, their stage presences, less so. And it takes vignette-sized appearances by performers such as Julie Roset as Fiakermilli in Act Two to give a sense of life to the whole work, which she does admirably. Effectively saving it.

See this work at your own risk. If you’re not an opera buff, or a Richard Strauss aficionado, this production could turn you away from the glorious medium of great opera, forever.

• Arabella was composed by Richard Strauss, with libretti by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. First performed in 1933, it features the original production by Otto Schenk and design by Günther Schneider-Siemssen (set), Gil Wechsler (lighting) and Milena Canonero (costumes). Conducted by Nicholas Carter, it is performed by a cast headed by Louise Alder, Ben Brady, Pavol Breslik, Karen Cargill, Tomasz Konieczny, Evan LeRoy Johnson, Ricardo José Rivera, Julie Roset, Brindley Sherratt and Rachel Willis-Sørenson. It is screening by Met Opera Live and Ster Kinekor in South Africa, nationally, on 5, 7 and 9 December 2025.