A worldwide hit that originated in Dresden: The Semperoper hosted the world premiere of Richard Strauss’s »Der Rosenkavalier« in January 1911. In this work, the composer and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal welded a sumptuous play on Rococo manners to a melancholic story about the passing of time to create a brilliant »comedy for music«. – The married Feldmarschallin rediscovers her lost youth through her love for the much younger Octavian. Yet she painfully recognises that the march of time cannot be held up. When Octavian is asked to deliver the silver rose on behalf of the dowry hunter Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau, the inevitable happens: The cavalier and the bride-to-be fall in love. The baron is thwarted in his plans by a comic masquerade of Octavian’s devising, and the Feldmarschallin relinquishes her young lover: »I promised to love him rightly«. Uwe Eric Laufenberg’s staging of »Der Rosenkavalier« is a modern homage to the Dresden premiere.