Richard Strauss: An Owner's Manual

By Richard Strauss and David Hurwitz

The life and music of Richard Strauss (1864-1949) span what was arguably the most turbulent period in human history, encompassing the Franco-Prussian War, the unification of Germany, and two world wars. He was one of the very last composers to have started his career in service to the old European aristocracy, but near the end of his life, the continent lay in shambles, and he faced financial ruin even as he remained Germany's greatest living composer. Virtually from the day they were written, Strauss's tone poems from the late nineteenth century – works such as Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Death and Transfiguration – have been repertory standards. So have the operas Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier. And yet a tremendous quantity of very good music, both early and late, has only recently come to the attention of musicians and music lovers alike. This “owner's manual ” accompanied by full-length audio tracks, surveys all the major works with orchestra: symphonies, concertos, tone poems, operas, ballets, suites, and songs. Many of them will be new even to listeners familiar with the popular pieces, part of a vast legacy of immaculately crafted, beautiful music that deserves to be rediscovered and treasured.

• Language: English
• Publisher: RowmanLittlefield
• Release date: Jan 1, 2000
• ISBN: 9781574674668

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Copyright © 2014 by David Hurwitz

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, without written permission, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review.

Published in 2014 by Amadeus Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hurwitz, David, 1961– author.

Richard Strauss : an owner’s manual / David Hurwitz.

pages cm. — (Unlocking the masters series ; No. 25)

ISBN 978-1-57467-442-2

1. Strauss, Richard, 1864–1949—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.

ML410.S93H87 2014

780.92–dc23

2014010594

www.amadeuspress.com

To Jim Bucar

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: A First-Class Second-Rate Composer?

Part 1: Orchestral Music Without Voices

1. Symphonies, Concertos, and Serenades

2. Tone Poems I: People

3. Tone Poems II: Places and Things

Part 2: Theatrical and Vocal Music (Operas, Ballets, Suites, and Songs)

4. Strauss and the German Operatic Tradition

5. The Greek Operas: Six Heroines: Iphigenia, Elektra, Ariadne, Helen, Daphne, and Danae

6. Old Vienna (and Paris): Der Rosenkavalier, Le bourgeois gentilhomme, Schlagobers, Couperin Suites, Arabella, and Capriccio

7. Exoticism and Eroticism: Salome, Josephs Legende, and Die Frau ohne Schatten

8. Domestic Comedies: Feuersnot, Intermezzo, and Die schweigsame Frau

9. War and Peace: Friedenstag and Guntram

10. Over Forty Gorgeous Songs with Orchestra (Who Knew?)

Conclusion

Appendix: Starting a Strauss Collection

Audio Track Listing

Preface

Richard Strauss wrote a huge amount of music in every one of the major media of his day: symphonies, symphonic poems, choral works, operas, songs, piano solo, and chamber music. However, his reputation stands on the symphonic poems and operas of his maturity, and on his orchestral music more generally. For that reason, this survey will consider all of the major works with orchestra and many of the minor ones, including the operas and the orchestral songs. The songs with piano (approximately two hundred of them), chamber music, and choral works belong in a special category of their own (the songs), or are mostly early and/or atypical (the chamber music), or, in the case of the choral works, don’t tell us anything especially significant that can’t be found in Strauss’s other vocal works.

There are also some major works that are barely known, or so seldom recorded that to spend time on them here when you can’t purchase them to enjoy at home would be an exercise in frustration. So they will not be discussed, however much I might have liked to deal with them. As it is, I feel guilty—well, almost guilty—sending you off to find a piece with an unpronounceable name (even in German), such as Panathenäenzug for piano left-hand and orchestra, no matter how delightful and sadly neglected it is.

In this owner’s manual, as in others in this series, I have focused on strategies for listening. Strauss’ music is easy in the sense that almost all of it is programmatic. That is, it describes an extramusical subject, and if you know the story behind the work, then you know the work, at least on one level, and nothing more need be said about it. For me, though, much of the fascination with Strauss’ orchestral music resides in how he shapes and assembles his material into satisfying wholes whether you know anything about the program or not. I hope that this guide will suggest helpful ways to approach the music at this deeper level.

Strauss’ operas and songs represent his lifelong attempt to find new, fresh, but always appropriate ways to tackle the issue of the relationship between text and music. Many of these works are little known, but all of them have something valuable to offer the listener, and it will be a very great pleasure to describe them to you. Operas and songs are even simpler to hear than programmatic symphonic music: you just follow the text or synopsis and enjoy the show. The only serious issue you might have is making sufficient time to get to know the music really well. That is a problem that no book can solve completely, but it can at least point your attention in the right direction so that the time you do have to invest will be spent productively.

In most of my guides for this series, including this one, I have taken great care to provide full orchestration lists for all of the works described. This was a major project, as most of Strauss’ mature works employ very large orchestras with a notably complicated layout, and the actual scores are sometimes imprecise in giving complete lists of their instrumental requirements. The woodwind section, especially, contains a huge number of doubling parts—that is, a single musician plays multiple instruments. A flutist also plays the piccolo; the second oboe doubles on English horn, and the clarinets may take any member of that family. Strauss routinely calls for clarinets in A, B-flat, D, C, and E-flat, and bass clarinets in A and B-flat, plus basset horns, and so as not make things even more complicated, I have simplified the lists somewhat by sticking to raw numbers within each instrumental family—clarinets, for example—where the question is simply one of key rather than significant differences in range or timbre.

Aside from the fact that this is a book primarily about orchestral music, you actually can learn a great deal about a work before you even hear it simply by looking at its scoring. In particular, the relative numbers of woodwinds and strings quite often give a very strong indication of how the music is going to sound, whether the work (if it is an opera) will be comic or tragic, and what the composer’s compositional strategy might have been. Does the lack of a part for contrabassoon signal a general lightness of texture? Does the huge brass section in An Alpine Symphony anticipate the grandeur of the symphonic journey up the mountain before it even begins? Take a guess and see if your preconception turns out to be correct. Either way, it’s a useful strategy to focus your attention when listening.

As with all the books in this series, there is no reason that you need to go through it in order. You can dip in at your pleasure, though I would suggest reading the introduction first, since it sets the stage and puts Strauss in a helpful context. Other than that, you should feel free to follow your own interests wherever they lead.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge very gratefully the help and support of everyone who contributed to the successful completion of this project, first and foremost series editor Bob Levine, as well as the team at Amadeus Press—John Cerullo, Jessica Burr, and copyeditor Angela Arcese (copyeditors never get the credit that they deserve, and it’s an especially tough job in books like this, with titles in multiple languages, orchestration lists, and numerous formatting details). I also must thank Steve Miller, a dear friend and a serious Strauss aficionado, for sticking to his guns during a time when I doubted the value of much of Strauss’ work. He was right all along. Lastly, many thanks to Strauss’ publisher Boosey & Hawkes for making available scores of some difficult-to-find works, in particular his early Gluck arrangement Iphigenie auf Tauris. We badly need a decent recording.

Introduction:

A First-Class Second-Rate Composer?

In order to get a sense of the complexity and enduring fascination of Richard Strauss, both as a person and a musician, it is only necessary to consider the place and date of his birth, Munich in 1864, and that of his death, Garmisch (outside Munich) in 1949. In 1864, Munich was located in the independent kingdom of Bavaria. Germany did not exist as a political unity, and would not until 1871. The American Civil War was in full swing; Abraham Lincoln would be assassinated in the following year. By the time Strauss died in 1949, civilization as he knew it had been destroyed by two world wars, and recovery was just beginning. When he was born, the railroad was the latest innovation in transportation; shortly before his death, he was able to fly to England for a festival of his works.

In the world of music—German music specifically—by 1864 Wagner and Brahms were in midcareer. Liszt had just invented the symphonic poem. Strauss’ father, Franz, was the principal horn player at the Bavarian Court Opera. By 1949, with European culture in as much of a shambles as Europe itself, the atonal revolution had swept through contemporary music. Schoenberg’s theory of twelve-tone composition vied with the neoclassicism of composers such as Stravinsky and Hindemith. American jazz was all the rage, and serious classical music was quickly losing its centrality in the cultural life of the middle classes. Music making moved out of the home and, thanks to radio and recording technology, became the province of professionals, bolstered by large public and private corporations. Strauss spent much of his career in service to aristocrats, and ended it self-employed.

Set against the massive upheavals that occurred around him, Strauss’ personal life could hardly have been less controversial. He was happily and faithfully married to a singer, Pauline de Ahna, who was born a year before him and died a year after. He adored her, and she him. Their relationship was stimulating, enduring, and wholly productive despite (or because of) their very different characters. They had one son, Franz, who together with his wife Alice went into the family business—they became Strauss’ managers. His wife, son, daughter-in-law, and their two children were the most important things in Strauss’ life, alongside his music. Indeed, the two often intermingled.

Strauss saw no reason why his comfortably middle-class home life was not a legitimate source of musical inspiration, most obviously in works such as the tone poem Symphonia Domestica and the opera Intermezzo. He worked tirelessly to professionalize the status of composers, fighting ceaselessly to improve copyright law and better organize the administration of German musical life. Despite his personal success, he suffered near financial ruin twice, after each world war. His concern with the mundane aspects of his profession earned him a reputation for being shallow and mercenary, part of a bad boy aspect of his personality that he actively cultivated and actually seemed at times to relish.

Strauss handled those in authority with a characteristically nineteenth-century combination of public servility mixed with private contempt, a formula that worked well for him until his unfortunate dealings with the Nazis. Against the fact that he used his status as Germany’s greatest living composer to save his Jewish daughter-in-law and two grandsons from almost certain death, we must contrast the fact that he was pleased, at least for a brief time, to try to exploit the power of Hitler’s regime to his own advantage. That he completely misjudged his situation can best be summarized by the image of him driving up to the gate of the Terezin concentration camp and demanding to see his daughter-in-law’s relatives, who were imprisoned there (later to perish in the Holocaust). The guards thought he was a nut and sent him away.

Strauss’ life story has been well told in a number of recent biographies, and because this is a book about his music, we shall only touch on those aspects of immediate concern to the works under discussion. He wrote a great deal of music—about three hundred individual compositions in all—and the more popular titles remain just the tip of the Straussian iceberg. With a few noteworthy exceptions at either end, such as the early First Horn Concerto and the late Four Last Songs, the music on which his reputation rests was composed roughly between 1890 and 1920. This period encompasses his artistic maturity through middle age. Yet there is so much more than that, and knowledge of his broader output yields an incomparably richer and, for the listener, more enjoyable experience.

It is certainly fair to say that Strauss was born with a musical silver spoon in his mouth. The son of one of the most highly respected musicians in Germany, he had every opportunity to acquire a first-class musical education and interact with the most noteworthy figures in German musical life. The conductor of the Court Opera in Munich, Hans von Bülow, for example, would eventually become his mentor. Bülow (1830–1894) was without question one of the greatest musical figures of the age. And although Richard’s father, Franz, detested modern music, he still played first horn in the world premieres of several Wagner operas and other new works, all of which the younger Strauss had the opportunity to witness and absorb.

Today we value Richard Strauss solely as a composer, but during his lifetime he was equally in demand as a conductor, holding major posts in Meiningen, Munich, Berlin, and Vienna, among other places. He also played violin (in the semiprofessional orchestra his dad conducted in his spare time) and piano, gradually giving up both, save for recital tours with his wife. It was Strauss’ musical skill on the podium, combined with his notorious reputation as an avant-garde composer, that led to his exceptional success from about 1890 onward. His musical career was not entirely smooth sailing, but it was about as ideally prepared as it possibly could have been. He still had to compete for recognition, but he seldom had to fight.

Perhaps the single greatest determining factor in Strauss’ trajectory as a composer was the fact that he was ethnically German. This may seem an obvious point, but in the late nineteenth century this had very specific and significant musical implications, not just for his performing career, but also for the kind of composer that he ultimately became. Specifically, if you consider some of the other composers in this series of guides, who were contemporaries of Strauss and who also worked within the German tradition—Dvořák, Mahler, and Sibelius—you will find that they were all symphonists. Strauss was not, even though he called a couple of symphonic poems symphonies and wrote two early works in the genre. The reason for this distinction offers a useful way of placing Strauss in musical history.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the German symphony was as good as dead. This does not mean that composers stopped writing symphonies—far from it. But the fact is that there are no German symphonists after Brahms and Bruckner, both gone by the mid-1890s, whose music we care about today. Not one. Let me clarify this point a bit with reference to two twentieth-century German composers. Kurt Weill, for example, wrote two fine symphonies, but he is best known for this theater works, such as The Threepenny Opera. Paul Hindemith wrote symphonies, but just as often he cast his abstract orchestral pieces in unique, proprietary forms, as is the case with his Konzertmusik series. His popular Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber is a four-movement work completely symphonic in structure, but Hindemith denied it that title, while two of his symphonies, Mathis der Maler and The Harmony of the World, are suites arranged from operas.

In short, when later German composers, at least the really good ones, wrote orchestral music, they tended either to avoid focusing on symphonies completely, or to use the term symphony in a loose and generalized sort of way, much as Strauss himself did in writing a tone poem that he happened to call An Alpine Symphony. This tendency can be explained as the natural result of two simultaneous historical trends, one conservative, the other progressive.

Perhaps the most famous musical battle of the nineteenth century took place in Germany between the followers of Brahms and those of Wagner. The Brahms faction was considered to be conservative; the Wagnerians were the progressives, or avant-garde. Both sides claimed to be the legitimate heirs of the Viennese classical tradition of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Mozart, for example, was Strauss’ favorite composer, an untouchable ideal, with Beethoven not too far behind. Haydn was highly respected in Strauss’ youth, but more as the precursor of his two younger colleagues, while Bach was still in the process of being rediscovered.

The main difference between the two groups, though, was that Brahms worked in the traditional, abstract instrumental media: sonata, concerto, various chamber ensembles, and above all, the symphony. Wagner wrote operas almost exclusively. Brahms wrote nothing for the theater at all. The result of this bifurcation and specialization was that, with the exception of the Wagnerian symphonist Bruckner, whose music was highly controversial and unpopular until long after his death, symphonies were regarded as belonging squarely in the conservative camp. Legitimate, German symphonies by German composers thus had to be written according to tried-and-true rules of construction, even down to permissible orchestration.

It is difficult for listeners today to understand just how stifling these aesthetic standards were. Even in France, when composer César Franck wrote a symphony (his famous Symphony in D Minor) having only three movements and employing an English horn and a harp, a near riot occurred at its 1889 premiere among an audience of listeners with very fixed notions of what such works could be. Symphonies just didn’t do that sort of thing. They were supposed to be models of compositional and aural sobriety—never mind that the classical composers would have been shocked at the very idea. Strauss’ early symphonies follow this conservative pattern; they are strikingly well made and, true to their textbook origins, strikingly unoriginal.

Dvořák, Mahler, and Sibelius all in their various ways wrote symphonies that advanced the possibilities of the genre, but all three were outsiders, ethnically or culturally. Dvořák was Czech, Sibelius Finnish. Both had a local base of operations and an open field within which they could find ways to give the German symphony a flavor regarded as simultaneously individual and nationalistic. Mahler was both Czech and Jewish, a fact that encouraged him to synthesize a personal, eclectic symphonic language that aesthetically was wholly antithetical to the purist, German school. He was largely rejected as a composer during his lifetime, especially in Germany, for both musical and racial reasons.

Strauss admired Mahler and actively promoted his music but never challenged him as a symphonist. This may have been because Strauss was the ultimate insider. His evolution as a composer, from conservative to radical, took place entirely within the conventions of the German tradition in which he was raised. Even at his most radical, Strauss never had his right of participation in that tradition questioned,