The Composer is horrified. His opera is being disrespected. Totally unreasonable, the Prima Donna complains. “Hey, you’re professionals,” replies the Major-domo. “Make it work.” Tempers flair. It’s a mishmash. The Composer scrambles to shorten the score. He explains the cuts to the star singers, who are mutually jealous. Relax, the soprano’s losing her arias, he tells the tenor. Don’t worry, it’s the tenor’s part that’s being chopped, he tells the soprano.

Enter flirtatious Zerbinetta from the comedy act. The Composer explains the opera’s classic story: Ariadne confuses her true love, Theseus, for Death, then yields to the god Bacchus. Zerbinetta translates this to Harlekin and the three other clowns in the troupe. This story sounds pretty dull, she says. The audience will be bored to tears.

Despite the critique, the Composer is momentarily charmed with the vivacious Zerbinetta and she with him. She blows him a kiss. He responds with an ecstatic aria, praising music as the greatest art. Then, seeing the Comedians, he realizes they’ve sabotaged his sacred work but there’s nothing he can do because time’s up and the opera must begin.

Act II, The Opera

(In the Greek myth, Prince Theseus of Athens finds his way into the Labyrinth, where he kills the Minotaur, a fearsome, flesh-eating monster. He escapes from the complex maze because he’s tethered to a thread supplied by Ariadne, the daughter of the king of Crete. In love with Theseus, she sails with him for Athens but he abandons her on the island of Naxos. The Opera picks up the story with Ariadne on the remote island. The Comedians improvise as the serious performance proceeds.)

The Nymphs, Echo, Naiad and Dryad, watch over the woebegone Ariadne. With Theseus gone, she feels she has nothing to live for. She can only despair. She’s overwhelmed with sorrow, “weeping in her sleep,” the Nymphs say.

Zerbinetta and Harlekin, watching from the sidelines, think Ariadne’s seriously depressed and should lighten up. The Comedians offer some cheer and Zerbinetta, in a tour de force aria, gives Ariadne practical advice.“You think you’re the only woman who’s been dumped? You could find another man but believe me, men are the pits. That’s why I’ve deceived every man in my life.”

Ahoy! It’s Bacchus, son of Zeus, arriving on a ship after escaping from the witch, Circe, on another island. Obsessed with the idea of dying, Ariadne falls for Bacchus, thinking he’s Hermes, the messenger of Death who will take her to the Underworld. She then briefly mistakes him for Theseus. The confusion deepens as Bacchus takes Ariadne for someone as evil as Circe.

Gradually, their real personalities emerge. Bacchus introduces himself as a god and declares his love, saying he would rather the stars disappear than lose her. Ariadne’s pain is replaced with joy, and the two, in a lovely duet, pledge eternal love. Wouldn’t you know it, Zerbinetta observes. A handsome god shows up and women swoon. It never ends.

- Performance notes by Eugene Carlson

Strauss’ composing output was prodigious and demonstrably creative. He drew on literary sources — Cervantes, Shakespeare and Nietzsche — translating their ideas into symphonic poems. Also sprach Zarathustra achieved a life of its own as the theme music from the Stanley Kubrick movie “2001”. Til Eulenspiegel, Ein Heldenleben and Don Juan remain staples of the orchestral repertoire.

He wrote hundreds of art songs. He loved the human voice and singers, especially sopranos, adored him in return. Fifteen operas were the happy result. Four of the most notable — Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau ohne Schatten — produced in a genius partnership with the librettist Hugo von Hofmannstahl.

As conductor, he led Germany’s two great opera companies, in Munich and Berlin. In Austria, he was principal conductor of the Vienna State Opera and co-founded the annual summer Salzburg Festival. To cap it off, in 1933 he was named principal conductor of the Bayreuth Festival, the Holy Mother Church for all things Wagner. It was a problematic post since he succeeded Arturo Toscanini, who resigned in protest to the ominous rise of the Nazi party. Strauss’ accommodation to life under the Nazis remains a cloud over his otherwise stellar career.

Strauss’ father was a domineering and abrasive personality, conservative in all things. He inflicted on his son his love of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and his loathing of Wagner. It didn’t take. Richard fell hard for Wagner’s music at an early age. He saw Lohengrin and Tannhäuser at age 10 and at 15, heard the complete Ring cycle.

At age 21, Strauss acquired a Wagner mentor, a violinist named Alexander Ritter, who was married to Wagner’s niece. Ritter introduced Strauss to the writings of Schopenhauer, the foundation of Wagner’s world view. “His influence on me was in the nature of the storm wind,” Strauss wrote. “New ideas must search for new forms…(this) became henceforward the guiding principle for my own symphonic work.”

He directed and composed and his fame grew. At age 39, he conducted a Strauss Festival in London and received an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University. Two years later, his third opera, Salome, debuted in Dresden. Inspired by an Oscar Wilde play, it retold in one act the biblical story of Salome who demanded from King Herod the head of John the Baptist. In the opera, the head is handed to Salome on a serving platter and in a shocking moment of bloody verismo, she gives it a passionate kiss. All to a starkly modern orchestral score of exotic percussion and eerie strings.

German audiences went wild for this powerful new work and it played throughout the country. Not so in New York where the Metropolitan Opera cancelled the Salome run after one performance. The influential daughter of financial titan J. Pierpont Morgan called it “loathsome.” It was banned outright in Vienna, notwithstanding the praise of Gustav Mahler. “A work of genius…one of the greatest masterpieces of our time,” Mahler wrote.

The brouhaha only elevated Strauss’ international celebrity status and the money rolled in. The German Kaiser commented that he liked Strauss personally “but Salome will do him a lot of damage.” Strauss dryly replied years later in his memoirs that “the damage enabled me to build the villa in Garmisch.”

Strauss was on a roll. In 1909 came the equally raw Elektra, a one-act Greek tragedy of family revenge with an axe murder at the finale. It remains one of the most demanding soprano roles in opera. Bernard Shaw said the work “makes us rejoice in its horror,” but another prominent British critic said “much of the music is as abominably ugly as it is noisy.” Even Ernestine Schumann-Heink, the opera’s first Clytemnestra, said the music “was a horrible din.” Strauss got the message. “Next time I’ll write a Mozart opera,” he said.

And he did. Der Rosenkavalier, which followed Elektra by two years, is the high water mark of romantic opera. It is quiet by comparison with its predecessors, with laughs, waltzes, and three stunning soprano roles in Octavian, Sophie and the Marschallin. Their closing Trio is Strauss at his very best.

No summary of Strauss’ life can ignore his uncomfortably sympathetic relationship with the Nazis. He was president of the Reichsmusikkamer, the state music bureau established by Joseph Goebbels, as Hitler’s National Socialists rose to power. He composed the hymn to open the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin that Hitler used as a propaganda event. When Strauss’ opera Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) debuted in 1935, Hitler sent him an autographed photo: “To the great composer Richard Strauss with deepest veneration.”

Strauss claimed to be apolitical. “He kept his nose in the score and ignored the raised voices in the next room,” says his biographer, Michael Kennedy, in partial defense. The conductor Otto Klemperer acidly noted that when it came to politics, Strauss thought first of his pocketbook since there were 56 royalty-producing opera houses in Germany and only a handful in the United States. Exile wasn’t an option.

Strauss had personal Jewish relationships — his daughter-in-law, his partner Hofmannsthal, his publisher, his librettist Stefan Zweig — and he maneuvered to get them favored treatment. In 1935, Strauss wrote Hitler: “My whole life belongs to German music and to a tireless effort to elevate German culture….I beg you, my Fuhrer, most humbly to receive me for a personal discussion.” Hitler didn’t reply and Strauss received an official questionnaire asking for proof that he was Aryan plus the names of two people who could vouch for his professional credibility. “Mozart and Wagner,” Strauss replied.

His final years produced some solace. In 1948, he was cleared of complicity in the Third Reich by the De-Nazification Board. That year, he composed his last work, the hauntingly beautiful 4 letze Lieder (Four Last Songs). He died Sept 8, 1949, age 85, in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. At his cremation in Munich, three singers he had conducted in performance sang the Trio from Der Rosenkavalier.

- Performance notes by Eugene Carlson

The production was booked with fanfare into a new theater in Stuttgart. Maria Jeritza, a noted Czech soprano, was booked to sing the title role. The innovative Austrian theatrical producer Max Reinhardt signed on to direct.

The production debuted in October 1912 and it flopped, big time. Audiences hated the drama-opera hybrid mix and critics were savage. World War One began and the production was shelved. Eventually, Hofmannsthal suggested scrapping the Molière play and turning the first half of the show into a wicked satirical prologue poking fun at the preparation of the opera itself. To be followed by the previously composed opera. A two-act scramble of opera buffa and opera seria. Two operas in one. Reluctant at first, Strauss agreed.

This Version Two opened on October 4, 1916 in Vienna, four years after the original. Maria Jeritza returned as Ariadne and the famed Lotte Lehmann sang the Composer role. The critical reaction this time was tepid but the work hung on and has won a place in the repertoire.

And for good reason. There’s much to savor in this small masterpiece. The clever plot device of an opera about opera with its comic putdown of the often self-absorbed characters who inhabit the opera world. The bold idea to juice up the tragic Greek myth of Ariadne, the Labyrinth and the Minotaur with the comedy of the saucy Zerbinetta and her band of merry pranksters. And note the Nymphs and the Comedians, who function as an alternate pair of Greek choruses.

The unorthodox format of leading roles features three prominent females: A soprano who doubles as the Prima Donna in Act I and Ariadne in Act II; a coloratura as Zerbinetta with a stratospheric aria in the Opera section; and the Composer, a mezzo singing one of opera’s most famous “trouser” roles, where a woman plays the part of a male character. The actual male lead, Bacchus, a tenor, doesn’t arrive until the end of Act II where he sings a demanding 15-minute duet with Ariadne.

While the Prologue is a clever story, the Act II Opera is a fairy tale — a young woman abandoned by her lover who longs for death but is rescued by a god and restored to life. Soprano Christine Goerke, who sang the Prima Donna/Ariadne role at Houston Grand Opera in 2011, says her character “has to transform into this amazingly regal and tragic figure who has been dumped on an island by her would-be husband and the pain that comes with this. But in the end she realizes that it’s not death she’s longing for, it’s a new start, a new beginning.”

It’s the lighthearted intrusions of the comedians that save this story from the banal and turn the drama into a performance that’s alternately humorous and touching.

If the Opera libretto is borderline simplistic, the music of Ariadne auf Naxos is anything but. It is passionate, complex, as good in moments as anything Strauss composed. Reigning divas have been attracted to the three soprano roles since the show’s debut. “Strauss loved to write for the soprano voice,” says Renée Fleming. “He wrote the most beautiful, the most arching linear music.”

In addition to Jeritza and Lehmann, earlier Ariadne auf Naxos productions starred Agnes Baltsa, Crista Ludwig, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Leonie Rysanek, Evelyn Lear, Gwyneth Jones and Tatiana Troyanos. A very partial list of recent productions includes Jessye Norman, Kathleen Battle, Deborah Voigt, Joyce DiDonato, Natalie Dessay and Lise Davidsen.

A superior all-star soprano lineup would be hard to find.

- Performance notes by Eugene Carlson