THE SONGBIRD: Christine Schäfer was born in Frankfurt in 1965. She studied in Berlin with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and had classes with Arleen Augér and Sena Jurinac. After graduating in 1992, Schäfer began singing at the opera house in Innsbruck and in 1993 made her U.S. debut as Sophie in San Francisco. In 1995, she was Lulu at Salzburg, a role she also performed at Glyndebourne in 1996 and at The Met in 2001. Other roles at The Met were Gretel, Gilda, Sophie, and Cherubino. Schäfer starred in a variety of productions around the world: Alcina in Drottningholm, Donna Anna and Violetta in Paris, Zdenka in Houston, Fiorilla in Berlin, Lucia in Frankfurt, Partenope in Vienna, and Gilda in a BBC production at Covent Garden. Schäfer earned a reputation as a top flight recitalist and made many solo discs of arias, art songs, and lieder. Her disc of Schumann lieder released in 1996 won top prize from Gramophone Magazine that year. In 2014, she announced she was taking a sabbatical and is now a professor of singing.

THE MUSIC: Richard Strauss's opera "Ariadne auf Naxos" premiered twice. The first was in 1912 in Stuttgart where it was conceived as a short opera to accompany a new adaption of Moliere's play, "Le Bourgeois gentilhomme." This version was performed in other cities over the next year (Zurich, Munich, Prague, and London), but the play/opera hybrid concept proved ineffective (and way too long at over six hours). Working with his librettist/partner Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Strauss refashioned the opera as a stand-alone work with a newly added prologue, which premiered in this new form to success in Vienna in 1916. This version of the opera was quickly embraced by critics, artists, and the public -- it has since been recorded commercially many times and is performed regularly around the world. Only rarely have there been staged or even concert productions of the earlier 1912 version and there is only one commercial recording. "Ariadne" is one of my absolute favorite operas -- I love its witty libretto, its satiric character archetypes, its intriguing themes about art, and Strauss's simply astounding music. Zerbinetta's grand aria "Grossmächtige Prinzessin" is arguably the most daunting coloratura showpiece ever written -- incomprehensibly so in the longer, higher 1912 version, but still insane in the 1916 version. It's not just long at nearly 12 minutes; it doesn't merely contain a full armada of coloratura vocal acrobatics (trills, cadenzas, scales, filigree, high notes, wide leaps, and so on); it's not only the freewheeling harmonic structures -- no, this scene demands a level of virtuosic musicianship and theatrical flair that is simply unmatched. Zerbinetta is a coloratura soubrette on steroids! In this scene and role, Strauss invented an entirely new musical language to exploit the unique glories of the coloratura soprano voice. He revisited this proprietary mode of highly gymnastic vocalism a few other times afterwards: in the art song "Amor" (1918), with Fiakermilli in "Arabella" (1933), and for Aminta in "Die schweigsame Frau" (1935).

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