English Deutsch Français An introduction to Richard Strauss’s music by David Nice
‘Richard the Third’ he may have been in his youth – Hans von Bülow
accorded him this title because there could be no ‘second’ after Richard Wagner
– but Richard Strauss was destined to become a leader, not a follower. Only a pioneer
could have inspired a genius of the younger generation to become a composer through the
sheer vertiginous force of a single score, as was the case with Bartók after hearing
Also
sprach Zarathustra in 1902, and Strauss’s influence remains far-reaching; the
technical and expressive treasuries of his two most radical operas,
Salome and
Elektra,
still have a lot to teach young composers today.
According to some of the musical history-books Strauss became a
‘retrogressive’ after the shocks of those two volcanic masterpieces in the first
decade of the twentieth century. Yet only force of circumstance had turned the composer
away from comedy after
Salome. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whom Strauss quickly
recognised as his ideal ‘poet for music’, insisted that their first opera be
based on his adaptation of Sophocles’
Electra. It was three years before
Strauss was able to turn to
Der Rosenkavalier and indulge to the full, and without
stylistic compromise, the comic-lyric genius that was the essence of his personality, as
observed by his friend and colleague Romain Rolland. Most Straussian paths lead to and
from
Der Rosenkavalier’s rich vein of invention; Rolland had already detected
the true Bavarian humorist beneath the mock-heroics of the tone-poem
Ein Heldenleben,
and hymned the profound joy of its preposterously delightful successor the
Symphonia
Domestica.
That radiant wholesomeness also anchors the later operas, for all their psychological
complexity, especially the autobiographical domestic comedy
Intermezzo, the
still-underrated mythologies of
Daphne and
Die Liebe der Danae and that
increasingly popular postscript on an operatic career spent balancing the rival claims of
words and music,
Capriccio. It is hard to believe that the last three were written
in dark times, but then Strauss always had an uncanny ability to focus single-mindedly on
his musical world-within-world. He did make one bewildered response to the madness around
him in the monumental
Metamorphosen for 23 strings before returning to the pure
instrumental forms he had preferred during his easy-going Munich youth; and in the
Four
Last Songs he achieved exactly the kind of quiet curtain he had stage-managed so well
in many of his operas and tone-poems.
It was towards the end of his life that Strauss made the off-the-cuff remark to
orchestral players about being a ‘first-class second-rate composer’.
Occasionally, perhaps, he was – and without shame, for all but a few of the greatest
creative artists know how to turn their hand to routine commissions while major projects
hang fire. Yet his musical integrity always reasserted itself. Unlike many lesser
composers who felt compelled to assume new personalities to move with the times, he
remained essentially true to the turn of the century in which he came to maturity; and
unlike another branch of lesser composers content to repeat old formulas, he never let his
sense of beauty turn to stone – no mean achievement given the upheavals through which
he lived. The sentiment of which he was so proud may sometimes spill over into
sentimentality, but at its best, allied to a glowing orchestral palette and a flow of
melodic inspiration, his music touches on the profound; the style is certainly the man.
David Nice, 1997
(Lecturer, broadcaster and music journalist for Gramophone and
BBC Music Magazine; author of short studies of Strauss, Elgar and Tchaikovsky, currently
working on a biography of Prokofieff)
Eugen d'Albert
