WHO WAS

Southland Times, Issue 21265, 11 December 1930, Page 6

WHO WAS

BARON OCHS? In Strauss’ opera, “Der Rosenkavalier,” which contains many beautiful waltz tunes, you will come upon a formidable and most unbeautiful personage, by name Baron Ochs von Lerchenau, which might be translated as Squire Bull of Larksmead. Though a far more unprepossessing figure than Sir John Falstaff, Baron Ochs does bear a marked resemblance to the English knight. Like him, he is a walking mountain of sensuality, but he has little of Sir John’s redeeming humour, while his pompousness and conceit are of simply unique dimensions. One is horrifed, at the outset of the story', to learn that this gross clod is proposing to bestow the inestimable (to his way of thinking) gift of his hand and heart upon a sweet young thing just out of a convent. As might be expected, his coarse addresses fill the maiden wtih nothing but disgust, and she falls in love, instead, with the handsome young Octavian, whom the baron had selected to bear the silver rose, the token of love, to his future wife. In the end, the Baron is shown in his true colours, as a gross libertine; and, thoroughly discomfited, he loses his bride and the last vestiges of his dignity and reputation at one fell swoop. Von Hofmannsthal, the dramatist, was imbued with a Hagarthian spirit of satire when he conceived this very brutal portrait of a gentleman by birth who has entirely lost any real claim to that title.