What Mozart is to Salzburg and Wagner is to Bayreuth, so, once upon a time, was Richard Strauss to Munich. The composer was born in the Bavarian capital, where his father was a horn player in the State Orchestra. Even though only two of his operas, Friedenstag (Day of Peace, an optimistic title for 1938) and Capriccio (1942), were first performed there, Munich has always ranked with Dresden and Vienna as one of the Strauss cities par excellence.

Before the fall of the Berlin wall, the reunification of Germany and the new accessibility of Dresden, Munich was the most convenient place of pilgrimage, halfway between Bayreuth and Salzburg, for festival-going Straussians. With its multiplicity of opera houses — the 540-seat rococo jewel of the Cuvilliés, the 1,030- seat “mini Bayreuth” Prince Regent and the grand 2,100-seat National Theatre — at its disposal, the Munich (Bavarian State) Opera was, and is, ideally furnished to stage Strauss’s big “symphonic” operas (Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Die Frau ohne Schatten), as well as his more intimate, chamber-like pieces (Ariadne auf Naxos, Intermezzo, Capriccio).

In recent years, however, Munich has lost some of its Straussian lustre. Its former intendant (general and artistic director), Peter Jonas, who led English National Opera from 1985 to 1993, during the company’s celebrated Powerhouse era, made little secret of his lukewarm enthusiasm for Strauss. It is significant that, during his 13-year regime in Munich (1993-2006), he programmed nine new productions of operas by Handel, but only three by Strauss. He also allowed the comprehensive Strauss repertoire built up by his predecessor, Wolfgang Sawallisch — who presided over an extraordinary cycle of all 15 of his operas in 1988 — to dwindle to a handful of works.

Under the new management of the general music director, Kent Nagano, and the incoming intendant, Nikolaus Bachler, steps are afoot to restore Munich’s Straussian credentials. For the first time in many years, the opera festival felt emboldened to offer its patrons a Richard Strauss week, comprising a new production of Ariadne auf Naxos, revivals of the classic but elderly 1972 Rosenkavalier staging by Otto Schenk and Jürgen Rose, and three more recent additions to the repertoire: Arabella (2001), Elektra (1997) and Salome, Nagano’s first production at the helm of the Staatsorchester in 2006.

The Strauss week also included an orchestral concert, conducted by Nagano, and a song recital in the Prince Regent by the rising Munich-born tenor Jonas Kaufmann, of which the second half consisted entirely of lieder by Strauss. He was in ringing voice, possibly a touch operatic, but always sensitive to dynamics and words. The first half consisted of a grippingly narrated account of Schubert’s 16-minute Schiller ballad Die Bürgschaft and Britten’s Sonnets of Michelangelo, delivered with gloriously Italianate style — something I have never experienced with British interpreters. A real ear-opener.

Of the operas I saw, Ariadne, Arabella and Elektra, the two revivals demonstrated the routine, endemic in Munich’s repertoire system, of offering the public a large variety of works, often with minimal or no rehearsal. Munich’s Elektra, a bloodless, abstract staging by the late Herbert Wernicke, relies on veteran names to pull the public: the not so golden oldies Gabriele Schnaut, in the title role, Agnes Baltsa, as Klytämnestra, and Reiner Goldberg, as Aegisth.

Of the three, Baltsa was the most collectable. Still a beautiful woman, she eschewed the cliché of presenting Mycenae’s murderous queen as a raddled old hag, but her once penetrating, luminous mezzo is a ghost of what it was — an acceptable top, almost no middle to speak of and rasping low notes. The voice was probably always too small for the part, but Baltsa was riveting to watch nonetheless: proud and neurotic, but strangely touching.

Schnaut’s vocal state is parlous — loud, ugly tone hurled at the notes; when she nails them, it seems more a matter of luck than technique and good judgment — but she has the authority and presence to wow the audience. My reaction was akin to Strauss’s observation about Maria Jeritza’s Salome: “As long as you don’t look at the score, she’s a pure genius.”

At least Elektra is a great work. Arabella sank in a laboured “concept” production by Andreas Homoki on a single set comprising a pile of Count Waldner’s unpaid bills, with the walls of the Viennese hotel subsiding at an angle into the ground. The audience booed poor Pamela Armstrong’s dowdy-looking Arabella and cheered the veteran Mandryka of Wolfgang Brendel, who still manages the music with panache and vocal allure, though he looks far from the widower “of no more than 35” envisaged by the authors. Arabella remains a problematic work. In a less than ideal performance, it seems flimsy, inconsequential and musically second-rate.

Ariadne auf Naxos, by contrast, is surely one of Strauss’s imperishable masterpieces, and Munich could hardly fail with the superbly cast ladies of Robert Carsen’s new production: Adrianne Pieczonka’s lyrical, brightly gleaming Prima Donna, Diana Damrau’s dazzlingly sung Zerbinetta, and Daniela Sindram’s painfully introverted but rapturously soaring Composer.

Carsen’s production — controversially played without a break, with the Composer watching “his” opera from the stalls and earning a triumphant ovation from the performers on stage at the end — is a characteristically stylish, modern-dress affair. In a black-box set, with Pina Bausch-style dancers serving as Ariadne and Bacchus doppelgängers, Zerbinetta’s star turn — fabulously sung by Damrau — was turned into a Madonna-style routine, with half-naked men mauling her and lifting her aloft. Only the final Bacchus-Ariadne duet defeated the Canadian director, who reverted to stand-and- deliver mode while the black box opened to reveal dazzling white light.

Still, it was wonderful to hear this score — superbly conducted and played by Nagano and the State Orchestra — in the Prince Regent, for which the 1916 version of Ariadne might have been written. The production remains in the smaller auditorium next season, but will eventually transfer to the National. Straussians will need to move fast to see it in this perfect location.

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