“Informal” was the requested attire at a recent event where Ambassadors and their guests gathered one April night. Where formal would usually be the correct choice with both “embassies” and the “opera” in the same invitation, this one had us heading to the Greenbelt 3 MyCinema for a night at the, well, cinema!

Never had a more disruptive move been made to bring opera closer to more people!

The Ambassadors of Austria, Germany and Italy, with the Cultural Center of the Philippines and DAILY TRIBUNE, made the screening of “Met Opera live on HD” possible last 16 April.

With libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, performance conducted was by Simone Young from a recording of the show broadcast on 23 April 2023.

At first, the idea seemed strange — as strange as the words being beautifully sung onscreen to those who did not speak German – but as we watched Der Rosenkavalier (The Knight of the Rose or The Rose-Bearer[1]), Op. 59, unfold, we lost ourselves in the story and performances by the main characters and ensemble.

We met “the aristocratic Marschallin; her 17-year-old lover, Count Octavian Rofrano; her brutish cousin Baron Ochs; and Ochs’s prospective fiancée, Sophie von Faninal, the daughter of a rich bourgeois.” They certainly made the opera’s “weighty themes” such as “infidelity, aging, sexual predation and selflessness in love” more palatable and even enjoyable.