So here’s the subtle lie: a lonely aging woman, in an unhappy marriage, described as beautiful, cannot find an interesting lover. Strauss’s subtle lie is that a wise aging woman will naturally make a staggeringly inappropriate erotic choice, jettisoning the search for love in a desperate burst of sexual eagerness. The lie is that it is only in this form — where the aging woman makes a terrible choice, and then comes to her senses and renounces that choice — that an audience will accept the representation of the sex life and emotions of an aging woman. Aging love always has baggage. For Antony and Cleopatra, love is comic because of its bodily and temporal particularity.

Source: New York Times October 30, 2017 08:48 UTC