Hildegard Rütgers 1963. Between 1963 and 1965 she performed at the Salzburg Festival, the part of "Die Vertraute" (Her confidante) in a production of "Elektra" by Richard Strauss, conducted by Herbert von Karajan, alongside Astrid Varnay in the title role, and Martha Mödl, Hildegard Hillebrecht, James King and Eberhard Waechter in leading parts. The production of Mozart's "Die Zauberflöte" at the Salzburg Festival, with Rütgers as the Third Boy, was filmed and released as a made-for-television-movie in 1964. She appeared alongside Walter Kreppel as Sarastro, Roberta Peters as the Queen of the Night, Pilar Lorengar and Waldemar Kmentt as Pamina and Tamino,
Agrippina (opera) hypocritical; Claudius is pompous, complacent, and something of a buffoon, while Poppaea, the first of Handel's sex kittens, is also a liar and a flirt. The freedmen Pallas and Narcissus are self-serving and salacious. All, however, have some redeeming features, and all have arias that express genuine emotion. The situations in which they find themselves are sometimes comic, but never farcical—like Mozart in the Da Ponte operas, Handel avoids laughing at his characters. In "Agrippina" the "da capo" aria is the musical form used to illustrate character in the context of the opera. The first four arias of the work