The Richard Strauss Companion

481 Pages·2003·26.095 MB·English

by  Mark-Dan Schmid

The Richard Strauss
Companio n
Edited by
MARK-DANIEL SCHMID
P1RAEGER '"**•* "TEE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publishing Data
The Richard Strauss companion / edited by Mark-Daniel Schmid.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
ISBN 0-313-27901-2 (alk. paper)
1. Strauss, Richard, 1864-1949—Criticism and interpretation. I. Schmid,
Mark-Daniel.
ML410.S93R465 2003
780'.92—dc21 2002044545
[B]
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2003 by Mark-Daniel Schmid
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002044545
ISBN: 0-313-27901-2
First published in 2003
Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.praeger.com
Printed in the United States of America
The paper used in this book complies with the
Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National
Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
1100 99 88 77 66 55 44 33 22 11
Copyright Acknowledgments
The editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission for use of the following
material:
Heiner Wajemann. "Die Einfliisse: Brahms, Liszt, Wagner, Mozart und andere." Richard
Strauss-Blatter, Neue Folge, Heft 43 (June 2000): 149-176. Copyright © Richard Strauss-
Gesellschaft. Used with permission of Dr. Hans Schneider Verlag GmbH.
Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig. A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss an
Stefan Zweig: 1931-1935. Translated by Max Knight. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977. Used with permission of the Regents of the University of California.
Contents
Foreword vii
Bryan Gilliam
Preface xi
Abbreviations xv
I. Influences 1
1. The Influences of Richard Strauss 3
Heiner Wajemann
2. Strauss and His Contemporaries: Critical Perspectives 31
Peter Franklin
3. The Development of Richard Strauss's Worldview 63
Charles D. Youmans
II. Instrumental Works 101
4. Richard Strauss's Tone Poems 103
Walter Werbeck
5. The Early Reception of Richard Strauss's Tone Poems 145
Mark-Daniel Schmid
vi Contents
6. From "Too Many Works" to "Wrist Exercises": The Abstract
Instrumental Compositions of Richard Strauss 191
Scott Warfield
III. Vocal Works 233
7. Richard Strauss before Salome: The Early Operas and
Unfinished Stage Works 235
Morten Kristiansen
8. The Late Operas of Richard Strauss 285
James L. Zychowicz
9. Richard Strauss's Poetic Imagination 301
Pierre Marc Bellemare
10. The Lieder of Richard Strauss 335
Christine Getz
11. The Challenge of the Choral Works 383
Suzanne M. Lodato
Selected Bibliography 411
Scott Warfield
Index of Musical Works 439
General Index 453
About the Contributors 463
Foreword
Bryan Gilliam
As this volume goes to press, it has been a decade since the appearance of
two volumes of essays and documents on Richard Strauss. One is the ex
tension of the first major international musicological conference (at Duke
University in Durham, North Carolina) on the composer, the other is a part
of the Strauss music festival held at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson;
New York. What has happened in these ten years—in both scholarship and
performance—has been utterly remarkable. At least a half-dozen biogra
phies of Strauss, a number of new monographs and dissertations on his
work, and a host of newly published correspondence have appeared, and
several more conferences have been held on both sides of the Atlantic.
Moreover, an international institute for Strauss research opened in
Garmisch, Germany, on 8 September 1999.
The music industry has been no less idle during this period. New record
ings of his operas have enriched the market beyond the Salome, Elektra,
Der Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne canon. Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die agy
che Helena, Friedenstag (three different versions), and Die Liebe der Danae
have all appeared during a time when opera recording is generally in a seri
ous decline. A series of recordings called Der unbekannte Strauss, which is
now in its twelfth volume, feature previously unrecorded chamber music,
orchestral music, ballet, and choral works.
In the realm of live performance (beyond the triangle of Vienna, Mu
nich, and Berlin), later Strauss operas have made significant inroads at
major opera houses such as Covent Garden, the Metropolitan Opera, the
New York City Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, the Chicago Lyric Opera,
via Foreword
and the San Francisco Opera, not to mention the various festival opera
houses of Salzburg, Glyndebourne, Garsington, Santa Fe, Glimmerglass,
and others. It would be foolhardy to propose an all-encompassing explana
tion for this explosion of interest in Strauss. Certainly some of this activity
may have been catalyzed by the fiftieth anniversary of the composer's death
in 1999, but, then, how does one explain the fact that the fortieth anniver
sary went practically unnoticed, especially in the academic community?
At the time of Strauss's birth (1864), his native Bavaria was still a king
dom; when he died (1949), the Federal Republic of Germany had been in
existence for four months. A month after his death (September 8), the com
munist German Democratic Republic was established. Curiously, the year
that commemorated the fortieth anniversary of the composer's death also
marked the fortieth anniversary of East German socialism, its rapid un
raveling, and the opening of the Berlin Wall.
While the political Cold War was rapidly coming to an end, so was a
musical one of sorts. To understand better the significance of the musical
cold war, one need only look back at the Strauss centennial celebration of
1964. Whereas special concerts and operatic performances took place all
over the world, there was a deafening silence among music scholars on the
subject of Strauss. Indeed, Perspectives of New Music, a major organ for po
war high modernism, broke the silence of 1964 with an English translation
of Theodor Adorno's brilliant, polemical essay commemorating the cen
tennial. The intent of Perspectives was to create a negative commemoratio
to declare that, one hundred years after his birth, the Straussian legacy was
essentially moribund.
During that year, the ideas of Darmstadt continued to resonate inter
nationally (though not uniformly) with an ideology of musical style that
prized technical progressiveness above all else. During this period of ideo
logical polarization, the discourse on musical modernity centered on the
materials of music, and thereby insulated itself from modernist discussions
concerning the fields of art and literature, which drew from criticism, aes
thetics, and other disciplines. A fundamental emphasis was placed on
"value" in a musical work, and value, in turn, was defined by technical
progress. The evolutionary, triadic compositional narrative of "growth,
achievement, and mastery" (rooted in the Beethoven model) continued in
the twentieth century, where "mastery" was now equated with serialism.
Strauss's own historical pessimism would not allow for such a linear,
unified narrative, which he believed to be incompatible with the modern
world. As a result, his musical development was unjustly ignored by most
musicologists, specializing in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
modernism. Many textbooks presented a facile triadic narrative that de-
Foreword IX
scribed Strauss's development in metaphorical terms of promise, decline,
and a sentimental notion of "Indian summer." For the more orthodox mod
ernists, promise, decline, and irrelevancy characterized a composer they
could not equate with the tradition of the so-called Second Viennese School.
It was a highly linear, historicized narrative that could adopt strong,
antagonistic modes of thinking, a worldview that would lead Rene Leibowitz,
who taught at the Darmstadt festivals in the late 1940s and mid-1950s, to go
so far as to declare (in 1955) that the tonal Jean Sibelius was leplus mauvais
compositeur du monde (the worst composer in the world). In such a polar
ized atmosphere composers out of touch with public taste believed that high
art could never meet popular art, tonality and atonality must not mix, and
the profound and the trivial should remain separate.
Thus, in the biography of Kurt Weill in the first edition of the New
GGrroovvee ( (11998811),) ,t hthee a auuththoor rd deecclalareredd t hthaat tt htheerere w waass n noot to onnee b buut tt wtwo oW Weiellisll,s t,h teh
European modernist and the American Broadway sell-out. Adorno supplied
labels for these two Weills: "Komponist" (composer) and "Musikregisseur"
(musical director). Nothing could have been farther from the thinking of a
composer like Richard Strauss, who not only embraced and thematicized
the putative binary oppositions cited above (often in a single work) but—
as his letters to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Gregor
show—he always had the audience clearly in mind as he was composing
opera.
In the early decades that followed Strauss's death, musical and social pol
itics overlapped to create a sad and confusing mix as music commentators
in opposing camps dug in their heels and assumed unreflective, unyielding
positions. For those early defenders of Strauss's legacy, the high modernists
were dangerous radicals undermining occidental culture, and, for the high
modernists, the Straussians were hopeless, narrow-minded reactionaries.
Many early Strauss advocates sought to soft pedal, or even obscure, Strauss's
shameful dealings—and early cooperation—with the National Socialist
regime, while the composer's detractors indulged in questionable, often er
roneous, ad hominem polemics against him.
During the 1960s, Glenn Gould stood alone in calling these artificial
battle lines into question. In a letter he wrote to Leonard Bernstein in 1961,
Gould lauded Schoenberg and Strauss as the two greatest composers of
the twentieth century, saying that Strauss's greatness would finally be rec
ognized as such once "the time-style equation, which clutters most
judgment of his work" dissolves. The year of that letter was also the year of
the Berlin Wall's construction, and both the "time-style" paradigm and the
former edifice have, indeed, receded in our memory, especially in the mem
ory of a younger generation of scholars in Europe and the United States.
X Foreword
Many of those younger scholars are represented in this volume, which of
fers fresh and current insights on one of the most complex composers in
modern German history. Hopefully their work will help the layperson and
scholar alike to understand the music of the man whose presence in the per
formance world continues to flourish and, equally important, who has now
found a firm place in the discourse of musicology.
Preface
There is no longer any doubt that Richard Strauss has secured his place in
the ranks of the most celebrated composers of Western art music. This,
however, was not the case just a few decades ago, although the composer
had been at the forefront of creative artists during most of his long life. One
had to wonder, could the works of Strauss stand the test, and would his am
biguous political association be in the way of his gaining the eternal seal of
public approval? Answers to these questions were not immediately at hand.
Then in the early 1990s two comprehensive volumes and a series of disser
tations indicated a new trend toward a growing interest in Strauss among
scholars. The fiftieth anniversary celebration in 1999 not only confirmed
this but also provided the definitive answer that interest in Strauss is last
ing: his tone poems are staples in many orchestras' repertoires, and his
operas appear regularly on stages internationally. At the same time, more
and more writers find the composer's works and personal life a challenging
area of study, as is obvious from the large number of biographies and stud
ies dealing with musical and philosophical as well as political and
sociological aspects of Strauss's music. Apart from accounts of the com
poser's life—most abundantly furnished by German- and English-speaking
scholars—the probing into every aspect of his artistic and personal legacy
has also yielded a new body of Strauss scholarship, as a direct result of con
ferences and festivals organized around the anniversary of the composer's
death. The contributions in these publications—by a host of Strauss schol
ars as well as other scholars—focus frequently on rather specific in
vestigations relating to the composer, ranging from studies of particular