Aunt Simona (Dohnányi) Budapest 2021 Megyesi Schwartz Miksch Sáfár Varga

Ernst von Dohnányi is one of those Hungarian composers whose works are played much less frequently than they deserve to be. The Opera is striving to correct this situation: after our productions of The Tower of the Voivod and The Tenor, next up is our staging of Tante Simona, the first opera that the former general director of Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy of Music ever wrote. The Hungarian von Dohnányi’s German-language comic opera takes places in Italy and follows the story of Aunt Simona, who was abandoned by her sweetheart long ago and, with her bitterness undiminished by the intervening years and now intent on protecting her niece, Beatrice, from the disappointments of love, attempts to shut out any and all men from her life – naturally, without success.

Despite the Italian setting, viewers are justified in perhaps feeling that it is a German work they are watching: instead of the unbridled mirth of Italian comic opera, this work exhibits the more restrained good cheer of a singspiel, with von Dohnányi clearly paying his respects to Wagner and Richard Strauss with the richly composed music. The authors might very well have borrowed the rose motif that runs through the libretto directly from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, which was given its world premiere in Dresden in 1911, two years before the first staging of Tante Simone in that same city.