9 minute read
A man of many parts
Richard Strauss in perspective by dr martin ennis
Richard Strauss’ life spans one of the most turbulent periods in German history. Born in 1864, Strauss wrote his first compositions while Germany was still a collection of nation states, and he came of age several years before Wilhelm II was crowned Kaiser. In the course of his long career he saw the Wilhelmine Empire, the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich collapse around him. He even witnessed, a few weeks before his death in 1949, the founding of the German Federal Republic.
Throughout most of his adult life, Strauss was the dominant force in German music. From about the turn of the century, he was widely regarded as both the country’s leading composer and one of its foremost conductors. So when, in 1933, the Nazis set up a Reichsmusikkammer [Reich Music Chamber] to govern the musical activities of the nation, Strauss was the obvious choice to serve as inaugural president. Yet, when Germany’s most important music journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, was relaunched in December 1949 – it was discontinued during World War II – Strauss’ name barely featured. The first issue contained a series of retrospectives, including one on ‘Das musikalische Theater von 1900 bis 1950’ – effectively, a survey of German opera – but Strauss’ contribution is dismissed in one paragraph. Composers, now almost completely forgotten, such as Werner Egk and Heinrich Sutermeister, receive as many column-inches, in flagrant disregard of the fact that Strauss’ operas had, for decades, dominated German stages. Admittedly, Strauss merits a photograph, but even this is placed after a portrait of Hans Pfitzner, a not-quite-sogrand old man of German music who, like Strauss, had died in 1949.
Why such neglect? Was it the irrelevance of a composer in advanced old age? Or was it a post-war attempt to move on, to abandon the figures most closely identified with earlier regimes?
The answer is complex. Strauss was such a protean character that all attempts to pigeon-hole him have proved challenging. As the musicologist Bryan Gilliam once put it, ‘what set Strauss apart from his German contemporaries was a unique musical atheism’. Or, to put it another way, he was a musical chameleon. Precociously gifted, Strauss seems to have learned to read music earlier than he learned to read and write, and by the time he left school he had composed a symphony (performed under the great conductor, Hermann Levi), six overtures, 59 songs, 45 piano pieces, and much more besides. “I wrote too much too soon”, he commented in 1910, and in a note to his son Franz, composed shortly before his death, Strauss stipulated that these early works should not be published. “They are talented copies in Classical vein” – he wrote – “echoes of greater and less great predecessors.”
Strauss started adult life as a representative of the musical establishment, and it’s fitting that he gained his first position in 1885 as a conductor of Brahms’s favourite ensemble, the Meiningen
Court Orchestra. In fact, later the same year, while still only twentyone, Strauss went on to replace the great Brahms admirer, Hans von Bülow, as Meiningen’s Principal Conductor. Strauss’ father, who didn’t share his son’s enthusiasms, described him at the time as “a raging Brahmsian”.
However, as Strauss grew more interested in the ‘progressive’ composers, Wagner and Liszt, he increasingly turned away from Brahms. By November 1889, he was calling the latter “musically deficient”, even a “mediocrity”, and in a letter to Wagner’s widow, Cosima, Strauss went so far as to rail against Brahms’s masterpiece, Ein deutsches Requiem, declaring Berlioz’s Requiem a much greater work. Before long he was shunning the ‘old-fashioned’ symphony for the more ‘advanced’ symphonic poem. With the first of his great tone poems Don Juan – the terms symphonic poem and tone poem are effectively interchangeable – he established himself not only as a brilliant compositional mind but also as a master of dazzling orchestral colour; his dual careers as composer and conductor developed symbiotically during this period.
Don Juan – like its successors Tod und Verklärung and (the reworked) Macbeth – lasts little more than 20 minutes. Before long, however, the scale of Strauss’ orchestral works increased dramatically, and in the years leading up to World War I he completed a series of extremely grandiose compositions, enormous in scale and in the demands they make on orchestral resources. Even today, they are challenging for well-established ensembles, as the collaboration of the Hallé and BBC Philharmonic orchestras in a recent performance of the Alpine Symphony demonstrated. Axel Carpalan, allegedly quoting
Sibelius, surely had works such as these in mind when he referred in 1911 to contemporary Germany “where instrumental music is becoming mere technique, a kind of musical civil-engineering, which tries to disguise its inner emptiness behind an enormous musical apparatus”.
The Alpine Symphony was nonetheless a high-water mark. Over the following years Strauss virtually abandoned pure orchestral composition, turning his attention instead to opera. However, one could say that his operatic career was already entering its third phase. After the limited success of two early operas, Guntram and Feuersnot, which were based in German myth, Strauss found a way round the problem of the all-pervading Wagnerian influence by reinventing himself as an enfant terrible in two starkly modernist operas, Salome and Elektra. Yet, this persona lasted no longer than the previous one, and by 1911 Strauss was presenting himself as a purveyor of up-market Viennese Schmalz, in the form of the immediately and enduringly popular Der Rosenkavalier.
Though Der Rosenkavalier is often portrayed as a retreat from high modernism – its composer was reviled by many as a revisionist, even a backslider – with the benefit of hindsight we can see that Strauss was setting the points for a new stylistic direction. Der Rosenkavalier is an early example of the neo-Classicism that would mark the next phase of Strauss’ career, sweeping across the musical world in the wake of World War I. On hearing Strauss’ next opera Ariadne auf Naxos in 1912, Princesse de Polignac, one of the most important patrons of early twentieth-century music, concluded that “the days of large
orchestras were over”. With no idea, presumably, that Strauss was already at work on the Alpine Symphony, she promptly commissioned Stravinsky to write his one-act opera-ballet Renard, a work that uses only about a dozen players.
According to most critics, Ariadne and the bulk of Strauss’ remaining ten operas espouse a clear neoClassical aesthetic. The same label has frequently been applied to most of the orchestral works performed this season by the SCO. In some cases, the label is entirely appropriate; after all, both the Suite from Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1917) and Capriccio (1942), as well as several works in between, are built on material by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers. However, the term should be used with caution. Strauss’ brand of neo-Classicism was quite different from that practised by others. Unlike Stravinsky, he had little interest in placing Classical material under a distorting mirror; even in his theatrical works he avoids the Verfremdungseffekte [alienation effects] associated with Brecht. Strauss’ achievement in his last decades was to forge a new, non-ironic style that, in terms of referenced material, lies somewhere between neoClassicism and neo-Romanticism. The two most enduring works of the post-1945 period, Metamorphosen and the Four
le Bourgeois gentilhomme is performed by the sCO in st Andrews, edinburgh and glasgow |12-14 October 2016
Last Songs, seem to many the quintessence of Romanticism, albeit written long après la lettre; on the other hand, the Oboe Concerto and the Duet-Concertino, both performed during the coming season, draw more obviously on Classical models. What unites them all is the composer’s uniquely captivating blend of eighteenthcentury melody and nineteenthcentury harmony.
Strauss once claimed that “the human soul was first revealed to humanity in Mozart’s melodies”, and the works heard during the coming season reveal a constant striving after the easy elegance of Mozart’s operatic arias. At the same time, Strauss never quite abandons the richness of harmonic language he inherited from Wagner, even if this particular style has long since been purged of its extreme chromaticism and its power to shock. It is as though Strauss, chameleon-like, can switch between styles at will.
According to Theodor Adorno, one of the most profound thinkers on twentieth-century music, Strauss chose in his later years “to abandon himself to unmitigated exteriority”. In similar vein, the philosopher Ernst Bloch detected “a brilliant superficiality” in his music. There’s no doubt that the sense of a composer hiding behind stylistic masks contributed to the neglect Strauss suffered in the decades after World War II. It’s no coincidence that the concept of historical inevitability – the idea of constant, ineluctable musical progress that was propagated with feverish intensity by Schoenberg – reached its peak in the 1950s. For many, Strauss’ willingness to swap styles was simply at odds with this dominant historical imperative.
Even well-disposed critics argued that he had outlived his own time, suggesting that if Strauss had died around the time of the First World War – like Mahler and Debussy – he would have remained an icon for modernists. Norman del Mar, one of the composer’s principal apologists and the author of a three-volume study, went further, claiming that Strauss’ long life resulted in his taking over Brahms’ “cloak of end-figure”; “the unusual circumstance that [Strauss] continued to wear this cloak while still living on for some thirty years seemed at times to reduce it to a thread-bare condition”, he added. Strauss’ chequered history during the Third Reich doubtless also played a role in his neglect. In some quarters his early identification with the Nazi regime wasn’t easily forgotten, even though Strauss’ post as President of the Reichsmusikkammer was terminated by the Nazis as early as 1935 – as a direct result of his engagement with non-Aryan figures. What’s more, many of those who chose to ignore Strauss after World War II didn’t realise that his dealings with the Nazi regime were over-shadowed by attempts to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren. Accounts of a fruitless visit to Theresienstadt to plead for the release of relatives came to general public awareness only long after the composer’s death.
No-one can deny that Strauss’ career was a turbulent one, or that his oeuvre contains work of many different stamps. Today, however, with polystylism almost de rigueur in certain quarters, we’re fortunate in being able to approach Strauss’ music with an open mind and, free from misleading prejudices, we can appreciate the works showcased in the SCO’s 2016-17 programme on their own terms. Prepare to be surprised and delighted in equal measure!
Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme 12-14 October 2016 St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow
