Richard Strauss’s Arabella is a lyric comedy that portrays hardships and obsessions in a society whose late bourgeois values are crumbling. An addiction to gambling has driven the family of cavalry officer Waldner into financial ruin, and their only hope for salvation lies in marrying off their daughter Arabella into a wealthy family. Strauss’s orchestral opulence, coupled with its period Viennese setting, has seen Arabella perceived as a light-hearted comedy of errors, but Tobias Kratzer’s multi-faceted production also explores the disunity between its characters, spotlighting tensions that connect 19th-century Vienna to the present day.