Five Reasons to Hear Daphne in Concert

by Jonathan Dean

With Daphne In Concert, two performances only on January 16 & 18, Seattle Opera offers another unique live musical experience, building on the success of our 2023 Samson & Delilah and 2025 Les Troyens. At an opera in concert, the full orchestra is onstage, with the singers pushed all the way downstage, so their voices are even closer to you. Although the show doesn’t feature scenery or costumes, the music, with a little help from lighting design & supertitles, will create the story directly inside your imagination. It’s a great way to experience incredible music like Daphne. And for a miraculous story like this one—where the heroine ((SPOILER ALERT!!!)) is transformed into a tree at the end—your imagination is the most powerful collaborator of all.

Apollo and Daphne, a marble sculpture made by Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini, executed in 1622–1625. © Wikimedia Commons

Here are five great reasons to join us for Daphne:

Glorious Orchestra. Daphne is one of the final masterpieces in the mighty tradition of German Romantic opera. The challenges posed by Beethoven’s Fidelio, Wagner’s Ring, or Strauss’s other mega-orchestra operas (Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier) keep the players of our fantastic Seattle Symphony at the top of their game. From the opening duet for oboe and basset horn, which (along with the alphorn) introduce Daphne’s “bucolic tragedy;” to the wild dances for the Feast of Dionysus midway through; to astonishing musical images of sunrise, sunset, moonlight, and the play of light and breeze on the transformed Daphne’s branches, twigs, and leaves, Daphne is a spectacular story-told-by-orchestra. This music is by turns enchanting, surprising, thrilling, heartbreaking, and rapturous as anything in opera. It’s short, as operas go; only one act, less than two hours. But thanks to our terrific players, your ears are in for a hugely satisfying feast of sound.

Mezzo-soprano J'Nai Bridges as Delilah from our January 2023 concert presentation of Samson and Delilah. © Sunny Martini

Spectacular Voices. All the world knows and loves Richard Strauss’s music for orchestra, including the famous “Mountain Sunrise” from Also Sprach Zarathustra (think 2001: A Space Odyssey). But the composer himself loved voices more than all other instruments. He wrote dozens of operas and songs and even married an opera singer. Seattle Opera has some of today’s most exciting singers coming to town for Daphne, including four major house debuts: soprano Heidi Stober as Daphne; tenors David Butt Philip and Miles Mykkanen as her two suitors; and bass Matthew Rose as Daphne’s father. (We eagerly welcome back Melody Wilson as Daphne’s mother.) And we’ll hear several fine voices in supporting roles, plus the men of the Seattle Opera Chorus.

A Green Alternative to Turandot. If Daphne is so great (it is!), how come it’s not better known? Historically, Germany in 1938 was not a great time or place to introduce a gorgeous new opera. Actually, both the German and Italian Romantic opera traditions hit brick walls with the rise of Fascism. Going back fifty years, Verdi and Wagner had helped create the modern nations of Italy and Germany with their operas. But Puccini, following Verdi, and Richard Strauss, following Wagner, were composing Italian and German operas as Mussolini seized power in Italy and Hitler in Germany.

Puccini’s final masterpiece, Turandot, depicts a nightmarish world in which human life is monstrously devalued: the eponymous ice princess kills any man who desires her, and the plot turns on the sacrificial suicide-martyrdom of a slave girl nobody even noticed. Puccini couldn’t figure out how to make Turandot work, and when he died, in 1924, that opera was incomplete. (And stillborn: Turandot didn’t become popular until the 1960s.)

Our 2012 production of Turandot. © Elise Bakketun

A few years later, Richard Strauss was unable to collaborate on Daphne with his librettist of choice, Stefan Zweig. That terrific Viennese writer was Jewish; in 1938 he had already fled the Nazis, who forbade even the printing of his name on posters and programs for operas he’d written with Strauss. Zweig would commit suicide a few years later, in Brazil. Strauss spoke out against Nazi anti-Semitism, which he considered “a disgrace to German honor, as evidence of incompetence—the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.” Needless to say that attitude failed to win him friends among the Third Reich. They couldn’t kill him; he was a national treasure. But they did their best to silence him, or at least make sure people tuned him out.

In her opera Daphne, like Turandot, is pestered by the unwanted attentions of men. But whereas Turandot responds by transforming her world into an unholy death-factory, Daphne transforms into a tree, becoming one with nature and embracing, not the love of arrogant men, but a different kind of love—the love connecting river and earth, sun and shade, breeze and leaves. Following in the footsteps of the Wagner who created the Ring, Strauss gave us in Daphne one of of the world’s most potent Green operas.

© Adobe Stock

The voice of Richard Strauss, matured. Strauss first made a name for himself, in opera, with the outrageous shockers Salome and Elektra. In his youth he was the most avant-garde of composers, leading the charge in terms of newfangled, nervous, neurotic, “modern” music. But he made an about-face once Schoenberg & co. started championing atonality and the twelve-tone system. The operas Strauss created around the time of World War One—Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos—are beloved for their sweetly human comedy, seductive melody, and nostalgic fantasy. Daphne, composed much later, introduced the final period of Strauss’s career: music of compassion, wisdom, and beautiful peace. To this period belong the unspeakably beautiful Four Last Songs and Metamorphosen. Daphne, which concerns an unwed young lady beset by lovesick tenors, may look like a rom-com. But don’t forget: this song is sung by an old man, looking back and remembering how he figured out what he really valued in life.

The song at the end. When asked why she always bought a cheap standing-room ticket and stood through 4 ½ hours of Tristan und Isolde at the Old Met, an opera-lover on a tight budget once explained, “I like that song at the end.” Isolde’s “Liebestod” can indeed change your life—but so can the final scene in Daphne, modeled on Isolde’s astonishing transfiguration into a new and better life. Daphne opens her opera singing about how much happier she is among the trees and flowers, kissed by the breeze and embraced by sunlight’s warmth, than with the dull and uncouth men she knows. So when her opera concludes, a wish she never made is granted: she joins the trees, and sings about what it’s like to feel the sap flowing up into her roots, to feel her branches reaching up and out toward heaven, her leaves tickled by the wind, her spirit forever wed to the sun. And thanks to Strauss’s magical music of transformation, we get to share that experience with her.

Richard Strauss's Daphne in Concert is on stage January 16 & 18, 2026 at McCaw Hall.
For tickets and information, visit seattleopera.org/daphne.