Daphne is one of Richard Strauss’s most cheerful operas considering it was created in the midst of the gloomiest period of the national-socialist dictatorship, between 1936 and 1937. Strauss was widely reproached for failing to categorically distance himself from the regime that kept even him under continuous surveillance. He remained loyal to his favourite librettist, Stefan Zweig, to the very end. Despite all his pleas, Zweig voluntarily declined to keep working together, recommending a young literary man, Joseph Gregor, in his lieu. Initially, however, Strauss had serious reservations about him, so the libretto for his previous opera, Friedenstag (Peace Day), was co-written by Zweig and Gregor, and subsequently Daphne by Gregor alone, based on his own ideas. Gregor slightly “improved” Ovid’s original story in an effort to add passion to the narrative which had turned out to be slightly lacking in drama in the one-act Friedenstag. The divine Apollo, initially in the form of a herdsman, seeks to steal the fair Daphne from her sweetheart, Leukippos who, in turn, tries to approach the girl dressed as a woman. Apollo, however, discovers the ruse, acts like a flesh-and-blood man and kills his rival. Daphne, however, still rejects Apollo who pleads with Zeus that he should transform Daphne into a bay tree, giving back to Nature the Child of Nature. “Could not Daphne represent the human embodiment of nature itself, touched upon by the two divinities Apollo and Dionysus, the contrasting elements of art? She has a premonition of them but cannot comprehend them; only through death does she become a symbol of the eternal work of art, the bay tree,” the composer asked Gregor in a letter dated 8 March 1936. Strauss was inspired mainly by works of art in the creation of the character of Daphne, in particular Bernini’s sculpture Apollo and Daphne (in the Villa Borghese in Rome), as well as Botticelli’s painting Spring (in the Uffizi in Florence); while Gregor’s imagination is thought to have been influenced by a romantic lithograph by Theodor Chasseriau.
Daphne’s “transformation music” is one of Strauss’s most harmonious works, brimming with joyous, witty, lyrical elements. Strauss borrowed an art term, “claire obscure”, to describe the style he had created specifically for Daphne, in an effort to, “by placing his heroine in this half-darkness, express the character’s fateful attraction to nature, and her failure in the world of human relationships.”
It is also perhaps no accident that the maestro completed the score in Taormina, just a few miles from where another Greek mythological triangle, Händel’s Acis and Galatea is set.