9231 Strauss chamber-BL2 v1.qxd
23/3/11
13:44
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9231 Strauss chamber-BL2 v1.qxd
23/3/11
13:45
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Richard Strauss: Complete Chamber Music Richard Strauss was supremely a composer for the orchestra, and of opera and songs. Once he was into his maturity he wrote very little chamber music, but in his early years he cultivated the genres of chamber and solo instrumental music, encouraged by the reactionary tastes of his horn-player father, Franz Strauss. The young Strauss worshipped Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms; it was only later that he fell under the spell of Wagner and struck out on the path of programme music and music drama that would be the focus of his astonishing international success. However, even many of his early orchestral works were issued in versions for piano or piano duet, to facilitate their circulation among the general public, even in domestic settings; and these versions in their turn enlarged Strauss’s output in the chamber and instrumental genres, as we see in some of the works on these discs. Surprisingly, as the son of a horn-player, the young Strauss wrote comparatively few works for his father’s instrument, but these include a capable and diverting Introduction, Theme and Variations in E flat for natural horn (Waldhorn) and piano, written in 1878, and the tenderly melodic Andante in F for horn and piano, composed in 1888 for his parents’ silver wedding anniversary: this was intended as the slow movement of a Horn Sonata in C major that was never finished. The larger, more ambitious works here chart Strauss’s gradual rise to mastery and individuality, from the pleasantly Mendelssohnian Piano Trios in A and D, composed when he was 13 and 14 respectively. After a somewhat more interesting Quartet Movement in E flat from 1879 there followed, in the same year, the mellifluous String Quartet in A Op.2, of 1879, some of whose themes are modelled on Mozart, and which was premiered by the quartet led by the violinist Benno Walter, who had been Strauss’s teacher for several years. Schumann begins to appear as an influence in the Klavierstücke Op.3 of 1880–81 and is even more apparent in the Piano Sonata in B minor Op.5 from the same period (actually the third such sonata Strauss had written). In the autumn of 1882 he composed the ambitious and rather Brahmsian Cello Sonata in F Op.6, dedicated to the cellist Hans Wihan, and then in 1883–4 the impressive Piano Quartet in C minor Op.13, an even more Brahmsian piece which he dedicated to Prince George II of Sachsen-Meiningen and which won a competition organized by the Berlin Tonkünstler Verein. Strauss went on to write two diptychs of miniatures for piano quartet, the Zwei Stücke of 1884 and 1893 respectively. The Fugue for piano (1884), part of an Improvisation and Fugue on an original theme dedicated to von Bülow, demonstrates Strauss’s increasing command of intricate counterpoint. His last major chamber work was the Violin Sonata in E flat Op.18, dedicated to the composer’s cousin Robert Pschorr and composed in 1887–8. Here (after the symphonic poem Aus Italien, and about to compose Don Juan) we find the mature Strauss almost in being, especially in the vaunting and ebullient opening movement. While these chamber works were being written Strauss had simultaneously begun to attract attention with works for larger ensembles, notably the Serenade in E flat Op.7 for wind instruments, probably composed in 1882, which so impressed the great and influential conductor Hans von Bülow that he requested Strauss to compose a more substantial piece in a similar vein, which became the Suite in B flat Op.4. (Both of those
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works are heard here in versions for solo piano.) Strauss subsequently became von Bülow’s assistant at the court orchestra in Meiningen. He had already begun a series of works for solo instrument and orchestra with a Romance in E flat for clarinet in 1879, which includes a 6-voice fugue; another, a Romance in F for cello, followed in 1883. Strauss’s teacher Benno Walter was the dedicatee and first performer of the scintillating Violin Concerto in D minor Op.8 of 1881–2, but the concerto with which Strauss really first made his mark was the Horn Concerto No.1 in E flat Op.11, composed in 1882–3 and introduced by Hans von Bülow at Meiningen in 1885 with the hornist Gustav Leinhos. The Concerto was actually first performed with piano in 1883 by Bruno Hoyer, a pupil of Strauss’s father, in Munch. Its unity and concision, and its freedom from traditional formal constraints, are the clearest sign that had yet appeared of Strauss’s compositional genius. The ambitious Symphony in F minor Op.12 of 1883–4, (Strauss had already composed an earlier Symphony in D minor) was actually premiered in New York, conducted by Theodore Thomas – an index of how far and how rapidly the 19-year-old Strauss’s reputation was spreading – but did not win the approval of Brahms when he heard it played. Strauss himself was by this time ready to renounce the classical symphonic and sonata-based forms. An extended holiday in Italy fortuitously inspired the first of his symphonic poems, composed in 1886 – the four-movement ‘orchestral fantasy’ Aus Italien Op.16, which with its quasi-symphonic organization he regarded as the link between his early works and his mature achievements. Both the symphony and Aus Italien were issued in versions for piano duet. Strauss also contributed to the once-popular genre of melodrama, the marriage of music with the speaking voice. While Das Schloss am Meere, setting a poem by Ludwig Uhland, is a comparatively short example, dating from 1899, but Enoch Arden, a substantial treatment of the poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, dates from 1897 and is considerably more ambitious. Strauss wrote both pieces to cement his good relations with the actor Ernst von Possart, a powerful and well-connected figure who had helped Strauss to obtain the prestigious post of conductor at the Munich Opera. Strauss and Possart toured widely with Enoch Arden as a performing duo. The other instrumental pieces on these discs are relatively miniatures. The Gavotte ‘An alter Zeit’ is an essay in the old style, for piano, written at the age of 14. The set of Variations on ‘Das Dirndl is harb auf mi’ – a Bavarian-dialect folk song – for string trio was written in 1882 and shows Strauss in humorous mood. The swaggering Four Marches are piano arrangements of two Militärmarche and two Parademarsche written in 1907 for full orchestra and dedicated to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Hochzeitspräludium, originally for harmonium, was composed for the wedding of the composer’s son, Franz Strauss, in 1924. The unaccompanied Daphne-Etude (1945), written for a 13-year-old violinist, is a doodle on the final vocalise from Strauss’s eponymous opera. But the Allegretto in E major for violin and piano, written on 5 August 1948 (just before he went on to the last of the Four Last Songs, ‘September’) is a charming piece of cod-Mozart spiced with the odd Straussian sideslip. The Daphne-Etude is not the only chamber work to be derived from a Strauss opera, however: the delightful Dances from Capriccio constitute a miniature divertimento on his last opera, Capriccio, which he thought of as a ‘conversation piece’ on the rival claims of words and music in the operatic genre. Needless to say, the music wins. © Malcolm MacDonald, 2011 3