Herbert F. Peyser

“ If people were horrified by the racket and cacophony of the battle scene they were no less disposed to irritation at the cackling sounds with which Strauss pilloried his benighted foes who resented his aims and accomplishments. ”

“ Especially Schumann and Mendelssohn were rather colorlessly reflected in the products the youth fashioned. Even considering his father’s poisonous detestation of Wagner it still remains hard to grasp how weak was the pressure the creator of Tristan and Meistersinger exercised on the son precisely when the Wagnerian idiom was beginning to permeate the language of music. More than that, it took time for the boy Strauss to rid his system of the ludicrous prejudices he parroted for a while. ”

“ More than a decade was to elapse before Strauss was to concern himself again with problems of symphonic music. Opera and ballet were to be the chief business of those activities which one may look upon as the middle period of his creative life. One may be permitted a short backward glance to account for some of his previous creations. Songs (a number of the best of them) , an “Enoch Arden” setting (declamation with piano accompaniment) occupy the late years of the 19th Century and the dawn of the 20th, not to mention the choral ballad for mixed chorus and orchestra Taillefer. ”

“ There is one case when Strauss even went to the length of writing music to the words “diskret, vertraulich” (“discreetly, confidentially”) when Hofmannsthal had written them as stage 37 directions to be followed not as part of a text to be sung! All the same Strauss usually kept an eagle eye on the dramatic action he composed. With regard to the libretto of Der Rosenkavalier he wrote to the poet “the first act is excellent, the second lacks certain essential contrasts which it is impossible to put off till the third. With only a feeble success for the second act, the opera is doomed.” ”

“ The question of motherhood lies at the root of the opera. Hofmannsthal saw in his poem a “kind of continuation of The Magic Flute. On one hand we have the superterrestrial worlds, on another the realistic scenes of the human world bound together by the demonic 42 figure of the Nurse. And a new element is to be sensed in the score—the powerful, hymn-like character of the music overpoweringly disclosed in the music, a new feature in Strauss’s compositions.” ”

“ Young Strauss was not idling. The products of his energetic young manhood if they do not bulk large in his exploits indicate clearly how carefully he was striving to learn his craft without, at the same time, seeking to blaze trails. One finds him turning out in 1881 five piano pieces as well as the string quartet just mentioned; a piano sonata, a sonata for cello and piano, a concerto for violin and orchestra, Mood Pictures for piano, a concerto for horn and orchestra, and a symphony in F minor. ”

“ Slowly as Strauss labored over the three acts of Guntram he spent no such time on the tone poems which now began to follow in rapid succession. After the ill-fated opera and a quantity of fine new Lieder, superbly diversified in expressive scope and lyric moods, there followed the tone poem which, apart from Don Juan continues even in the present age to address itself most warmly to the public heart—Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Analysts of one sort and another have provided the work with a program, which has long been accepted as standard. ”

“ At the same time the texture of the score and the character of the orchestral treatment has a transparency and a delicate charm which Strauss rarely equalled, even if the melodic invention and the instrumentation suggest a kind of chamber music on a large scale. As in Ariadne auf Naxos the composer does not hesitate to make use of a florid soprano to introduce scintillating samples of ornate vocalism. One feels, however, that Arabella is a semi-finished product. The second half of the work does not sustain the level of the first. ”

“ It may be questioned whether Strauss was truly content with the bloodless symbolism which fills The Woman Without a Shadow. In any case at this juncture he began to long for something new. Somehow Hofmannsthal did not at that moment appear to be reacting sympathetically to the dramatic demands which just then seemed to be filling Strauss’s mind. He informed Hofmannsthal that he longed for something to compose like Schnitzler’s Liebelei or Scribe’s Glass of Water. He asked for “characters inviting composition—characters like the Marschallin, Ochs or Barak (in Die Frau ohne Schatten) .” ”

“ It has been pointed out that if the masculine element is idealized in Strauss’s tone poems it is rather the feminine which he gives precedence in his operas. Something of an exception to this is exemplified in the next purely orchestral work, the tone poem Thus Spake Zarathustra, which followed less than a year later and was produced under its composer’s direction at one of the Museum concerts in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, November 27, 1896. The score is described as “freely after Nietzsche”. At once there arose protests that Strauss had tried to set Nietzschean philosophy to music! ”

“ His Munich friend, the tenor Heinrich Zeller, who had coached Wagner roles with him, had settled there, and a young soprano, Pauline de Ahna, the daughter of a Bavarian general with strong musical 18 enthusiasms, soon followed him. In proper course she was to become Richard Strauss’s wife. A high-spirited, outspoken lady, never disposed to mince words, a source of innumerable yarns and witticisms, and who saw to it that her celebrated husband carefully toed the mark, Pauline Strauss was in every way a chapter by herself. ”

“ The staging was a pictorial triumph which, though the ballet was several times performed elsewhere, appears never to have been anything like the visual feast it was at its first showing. The score seems to have missed fire and has 40 never been reckoned among the composer’s major exploits. None the less the effect of the music in its proper frame and context is compelling. What if much of it sounds like discarded leavings from “Salome”? Strauss confessed that from the first the pious Joseph bored him, “and I have difficulty in finding music for whatever bores me” (“was mich mopst”) . ”

“ Strauss’s own father, hearing his son play a portion of the opera on the piano, exclaimed a short time before his death: “My God, this nervous music! It is as if beetles were crawling about in one’s clothing!” And Cosima Wagner declared after listening to the closing scene: “This is madness!” The clergy, too, was up in arms and the first performance at the Vienna State Opera in October, 1918, took place only after an agitated exchange of letters with Archbishop Piffl. The orchestra of Salome in all numbers 112 players. ”

“ For all the enthusiasm it evokes in some of the inner Straussian circles this opera, which combines length, breadth and thickness, is a real problem. The writer of these lines, who has been exposed to the work fully half a dozen times always with a firm resolve to enjoy it, has never succeeded in his ambition. Though Strauss and Hofmannsthal discussed the plans for the piece in 1912 and once more in 1914 the first act was not finished till that year; and war held up the completion of the opera three years more. ”

“ There is, in reality, nothing serious or genuinely based on musical inspiration in the opera, the best features of which are certain set pieces (some rather adroitly polyphonic) and a charmingly orchestrated overture described in the score as a “potpourri”. A tenderer note is struck only at the point where, as evening falls, the old man drops off to sleep.
As librettist for his next two operas, Friedenstag and Daphne, Strauss sought the aid of Joseph Gregor. The first named work (in one act) was performed on July 7, 1938, in Munich, under Clemens Krauss. ”

“ Still another tone poem was to succeed—A Hero’s Life (Ein Heldenleben) performed under the composer’s direction in Frankfurt. The work is autobiographical with the composer himself as its hero and his helpmate, (obviously Frau Pauline, his “better half” as she was to be called) . For a long time Ein Heldenleben passed as the prize horror among Strauss’s creations, especially its fierce and rambunctious battle scene, which some critics considered a 25 kind of bugaboo with which to frighten the wits out of grown-up concertgoers! For its day A Hero’s Life was unquestionably strong meat. ”

“ The music of Intermezzo has never been acclaimed a product of the greater Strauss. And yet Alfred Lorenz, famous for his series of eviscerating studies of the structural problems of Wagner’s music dramas, has made it clear that the Wagnerian form problems are likewise the principles which underlie such a relatively tenuous Straussian score as Intermezzo. ”

“ It had been the powerful impressions made on the composer by some of the Shakespearian productions of the dramatic company in Meiningen which gave the incentive for Macbeth. In the case of Don Juan the moving impulse was the poem of Nikolaus Lenau (whose real name was Niembsch von Strahlenau) , and who described the hero of his work as “one longing to find one who represented incarnate womanhood” in whom he could enjoy “all the women on earth whom he cannot as individuals possess.” ”

“ The songs of Strauss, the earliest specimens of which date from 1882, and which span (though in steadily diminishing numbers) , the most fruitful years of his life, aggregate something like 150. If the better known ones are with piano accompaniment, not a few are scored for an orchestral one. A large number long ago became musical household words, along with the Lieder of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, though having a physiognomy quite their own. ”

“ The convalescent, with a finished opera libretto in his baggage went to repair his health in Italy, Greece and Egypt. In Egypt he recovered completely. In the Anhalter railway station, Berlin, he was to see for the last time the mortally sick von Bülow, likewise 21 journeying to Egypt in a last effort to repair his shattered constitution. Poor Bülow was not to survive the trip. The wiry frame of Strauss helped him over any threat of tuberculosis and not only defied any peril to his lungs but seemed actually to renew his creative powers. ”

“ Be this as it may, Der Rosenkavalier was anything but “doomed”. It was, in point of fact, the work which Strauss had in mind when, at the close of the first Elektra performance he remarked to some friends: “Now I intend to write a Mozart opera!” Whether or not “Der Rosenkavalier” really meets the prescriptions of a “Mozart opera” we feel rather more certain that his next work, Ariadne auf Naxos comes closer to filling that bill. ”

“ The work is program music, if you will; but the idea that it originally set out to illustrate the poem about the man dying in a “necessitous little room” and, after his death struggles, translated to supernal glories, is wrong. Moreover the long accepted notion, that the music is based on lines by Alexander Ritter, is fallacious. For, in the first place the composer did not aim to illustrate his friend’s word picture; and in the second, Ritter wrote the poem only after becoming acquainted with the score. ”

“ The first concert the youth from Munich conducted in Meiningen took place on October 18, 1885. It afforded him a chance to exploit his talents as pianist and batonist as well as composer, what with a program that included Beethoven’s Coriolanus Overture and Seventh Symphony, Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto and that F minor Symphony of his own which Theodore Thomas had conducted the previous year in New York. Strauss had every reason to be pleased with the outcome. Bülow speaking of his debut as pianist and conductor had referred to it as “geradezu verblüffend” (“simply stunning”) ”

“ The orchestra depicts successively “Night”, “Sunrise”, the “Ascent”, “Entrance into the Forest”, “Wandering besides the Brook”, “At the Waterfall”, “Apparition”, “On Flowery Meadows”, “On the Alm”, “Lost in the Thicket”, “On the Glacier”, “Dangerous Moment”, “On the Summit”, “Mists Rise”, “The Sun is gradually hidden”, “Elegy”, “Calm before the Storm”, “Thunderstorm”, “The Descent”, “Sunset”, “Night”.
On account of its length the “Alpine Symphony” has never been a favorite among Strauss’s achievements 41 of tone painting. ”

“ The libretto which occupied his attention was that of his opera, Guntram, the first and least known of his productions for the lyric stage.
Guntram is without question a “Stiefkind” among Richard Strauss’s operas. The average Strauss enthusiast’s acquaintance with its music may be said to be confined to the brief phrase from it cited in the section called The Hero’s Works of Peace in the tone poem Ein Heldenleben. Nevertheless, the opera cost the composer six long years of his time. It received a performance in Weimar, July 12, 1894. ”

“ The composer was later to explain that a new song might be dashed off at any half-way idle moment—might even be scribbled down in the twinkling of an eye between the acts of an opera performance or during a concert intermission. And as spontaneously as Schubert, Richard Strauss busied himself with poems of the most varied character.
* * *
On the young man’s twenty-first birthday Hans von Bülow recommended to Duke George of Meiningen “an uncommonly gifted” musician as substitute while he himself went on a journey for his shattered 12 health. ”

“ The development of this work hangs together with production in Stuttgart, October 25, 1912, of a German adaptation by Hofmannsthal of Molière’s comedy Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, who has made money, induces a certain charming widow, the Marquise Dorimène, to come to a dinner he gives in her honor. A reprobate noble, Count Dorantes, tells the Marquise that the soirée at Jourdain’s home is really intended as a gesture of admiration for her. ”