Do you notice a mistake?
If there is a single composer most strongly associated with post-romanticism, it is Richard Strauss, alongside Mahler, whom he outlived by nearly forty years. Although for a time after 1918 Strauss was dismissed as “outmoded,”1 he ultimately remained Germany’s most formidable composer of the first half of the twentieth century, notably thanks to his “Indian summer” of the 1940s, until Stockhausen imposed an entirely different style in the second half of the century. Strauss met the challenge of inventing a long coda to the work of Wagner. Though the avant-gardes of his time dismissed him as old-fashioned, beneath his archaic façade lurked a discreet modernism.
Discreet, you say? Strauss’s best-known score, popularized by the film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), is anything but discreet. The opening of Thus Spake Zarathustra (1896), based on the eponymous work by Nietzsche (1883-1885), calls for a reinforced orchestra. Strauss not only assimilated the instrumental combinations explored by Hector Berlioz in his Treatise on Instrumentation (which he revised and published in a new edition), but also adopted Wagner’s expanded use of brass and Liszt’s enlargement of the wind sections from two to three players. Pushing this further, he eventually quadrupled the winds. In this post-Wagnerian additive approach, his orchestra even incorporated organ, following the example of Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony (1886). It would be nearly three decades before another orchestra matched this level of intensity, in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring (1913). Zarathrustra was a major step in this upward movement.
At the same time, modernity could be subtractive — think of Satie. In Zarathustra, the four trumpets’ progression over G-C-G is both resonant and empty (an empty fifth and octave), ancient, Pythagorean: the music rises through the harmonic series, Rameau’s “corps sonore.” When the E (the fifth harmonic) is finally reached, it is immediately corrected to an E-flat. The opposite happens the second time around. Strauss in this sense foreshadowed the major/minor ambivalence that characterized the early twentieth century — before Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Bartók, and the French moderns Debussy and Ravel began exploring blue notes (E-flat added in above the E-natural of the C major).
Part Five of Zarathustra, “Science,” is precisely that: scientistic. Twenty-seven years before Schoenberg’s first twelve-tone compositions in 1923, Strauss used what would have been a series (had the G not been repeated) in his fugue. True, he associated it with a tonal, Wagnerian harmony (C major, then B minor, A major, D-flat minor). But as Alex Ross points out, the Vienna School was inspired by Strauss’s polytonality, as well as his anticipation of twelve-tone composing.2
The double basses in “Science” are directed to belt out a sepulchral B as a counter to the contrabassoon’s C, even before the trumpets step in to illuminate the introduction. Strauss’s power, that Germanic “growl,” can be observed in these innovative, cavernous, unexpected low notes. This was sixteen years before the peal of Prokofiev’s deep, powerful, brassy roar was heard, when he was at his zenith in his Second Piano Concerto (1912-1913).
Zarathustra is just one link in a first chain, that of Strauss’s symphonic poems. These poems, which began with Don Juan (1887-1888), would be Strauss’s first musical successes. Their audacity would be understood, because each time, his programmatic approach justified the chance he was taking. The rapidity of the opening modulations in Don Juan (C major, D major, B major, and E major in just three extremely rapid measures), associated with the explosive soaring of the orchestra, marked the invention of Strauss’s particular style of searing brilliance. It is a vehemently new romanticism. The explosion depicts rising sap, the driving energy of the hero.
By the same token, the even more rapid tonal juxtapositions in Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1894-1895) are firmly rooted in this merry prankishness. And the new deep notes mentioned earlier in this text grow even deeper at the end, with a cavernous descending minor ninth. This time, Prokofiev is present. An A-flat clarinet counters, answering back with ultra-high notes: Till brings a rapid sonic breakdown that clearly prefigures the Second Viennese School.
With Don Quixote (1897) Strauss introduced a vein of humor and lightness (most notably in Sancho Panza’s theme) that would become central in much of his later work. Beyond the brief moments of polytonality heard at the beginning, he experimented with bold orchestral effects that did more than just heighten intensity, long before Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night and before Ives or Stravinsky. The battle with the sheep (Variation II) remains genre music; flatterzunge (used earlier in Till), and of course tremolos, represent bleating — such unexpected color would not be approached even in French Impressionism. Variation VII, “The Ride through the Air,” using a wind machine, harp glissandi, and parallel fifths (D–A, C–G, B-flat–F, A-flat–E-flat, D-flat–A-flat) anticipated Impressionism, or the new orchestra in Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé (1912).
Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1897-1898) offers other polytonal and even atonal moments. When the hero is slandered by his enemies, their gossip is depicted through total-chromatic polyphony. Programme oblige. By 1898, the sawtooth curves of Strauss’s shattered atonal lines (starting with that of the flute) represented violent German intonations, a subtle “intonationism” closer to real prosody than Hugo Wolf or Modest Mussorgsky would ever write; it even preemptively surpassed that of Leoš Janáček in its precision. This moment passed, the hero’s pained reaction quickly reinstates Wagner’s tonal chromaticism. Dominique Jameux has noted Strauss’s tendency, having introduced a new invention, to “give in, for a moment, to some euphoric impulse, bewitching and beguiling, sharing in the audience’s pleasure.”3
Strauss’s symphonic poems, as the first historic vein in his music, would have two late codas: Sinfonia Domestica in 1902 and An Alpine Symphony in 1911-1915.
In Salomé (1903-1905), a teenage girl kisses the lips of the severed, still-bleeding head, lopped off at her behest, of Saint John, who baptized Jesus Christ. The opera’s premiere in Dresden was a huge scandal — and a stupendous success. Immediately after it was reprised in New York in 1907, the opera was banned in the United States for seventeen years. This certainly gave the work its bona fides among the avant-garde. The scandal began with its libretto. Its excessively Viennese, Freudian themes already appeared to be expressionist. There is sex (as Bryan Gilliam has underlined4): in the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” the title character — or a dancer playing her double — is undressed entirely. There is violence: after Carmen and before Lulu, sixteen-year-old Salomé provokes the suicide by sword of Narraboth, Captain of the Guard, as she looks on, then causes the decapitation of a saint. There is also incest: King Herodias is attracted to Salomé, who is his wife Herodias’s daughter. And it was brief: just as Wozzeck, some twenty years later, would last just an hour and a half, Strauss was already working in this apparently modern short form. At an hour and forty minutes, his opera was over nearly as quickly as Berg’s, and similarly forceful in its pre-cinematographic “cutting” down to a single act.
Strauss did without a prologue (as he would also in Elektra). A minor chord is transfigured into a major one, here again, and the voice enters. These first six notes, the saint’s second leitmotiv, when he appears before the awestruck heroine, recall the opening of Zarathustra. Again, the clamoring, empty-pedaled C: the prophet John answering the prophet Zoroaster. Here, the C is circumscribed with fourths (C–G, then F–G). Even more fourths are stacked together for the “Dance of the Seven Veils.”5 This was just before Mahler and Schoenberg had the same idea, Mahler in his Seventh Symphony (1904-1905, at the end of the first movement) and Schoenberg in his Chamber Symphony (1906), and well before Bartók’s general stylization. Notes 5 and 6 affirm a tritone (A–D#), itself one of the surest heralds of the avant-garde and of the twentieth century. Yes, Strauss was already “fascinated” by the tritone, as Ross points out. John the Baptist was indeed prophesying the future — of music history.
Salomé’s sound is even more powerful than Zarathustra’s, with an orchestra of over a hundred musicians, including an offstage organ and harmonium, fifteen brass instruments, and no fewer than nine percussionists. While Bartók would soon expand the percussion even more, one can hear in Strauss the seeds of both Bartók and Ionisation (1929-1931) by Varèse. In these works, Strauss reached the height of his avant-gardism. With scandalous libretti and music that frequently modulates and is at times polytonal, he was following in the footsteps of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) — with far greater impact, effectively ushering in twentieth-century opera.
With Elektra (1906-1908), Strauss delivered another dark, weighty combat haunted by the bass clarinet. Its modulations come even more frequently, approaching atonality, particularly in the tortured tirades of Clytemnestra. The blueprint of musical expressionism is beginning to be sketched out. But vertical consonances, even if they are fleeting, are never fully abandoned. Paradoxically, the libretto is less scandalous: though no less a monster, Electra does not possess Salomé’s disturbing charm. The harmonic rasp reaches new heights when she recognizes her brother and cries out, “Orestes!” At this point, Strauss ventures the most explicit polytonality of his career, heightened by a sweeping orchestral climax. A review in the New York Herald Tribune placed Elektra, along with Pelléas and Wozzeck, among the three operas to outdistance Wagner.6 Yet, while Salomé, and even more so Elektra, might seem expressionist with their themes of murder and incest, their persistent historic and mythological roots suggest they belong more to the artistic prelude to that movement — the height of German Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) — rather than fully within expressionism itself.
Elektra was Strauss’s first collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The second would be a complete departure from the first: Der Rosenkavalier (1909-1910), a curious “giant operetta.”7 The Marschallin seduces the teenage Octavian (recalling Cherubino in the Marriage of Figaro), whom she nicknames “Quinquin,” while he calls her “Bichette.” At times, she has a “Migräne.” The action hearkens back to Mozart’s libertine era, though at a pace slower and weightier than an opéra bouffe. The music remains post-romantic, with opulent orchestration; at the same time, the mischief of the libretto is heightened by a new style of “musical conversation.” It would be the most phenomenal success of Strauss’s career. As an old man, when the Allies arrived at his villa, Strauss would cry out, “I am the composer of Der Rosenkavalier!”
Here was Strauss’s other side: his lighthearted, South German (Viennese) spirit symbolized by his anachronistic waltzes (found in Der Rosenkavalier and even in Elektra8), reflecting a musician brimming with happiness in his home life and success in his professional life, who could afford to display an overflowing sense of humor. This humor would reach its summit in Der Krämerspiegel, op. 66 (1918), whose title translates as “The Shopkeeper’s Mirror.” This cycle of lieder satirizes music publishers such as Breitkopf & Härtel or Bote & Bock in Berlin. Bock (German for “billy goat”) is depicted munching on flowers, which symbolize music, while Bote (“the messenger”) pays a visit to the Rosenkavalier.
This first “opéra rose,” to use Jameux’s term for it, was followed by a second, Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, with a second version in 1916), which featured a return to the aria and the recitativo secco. Well before Prokofiev and Stravinsky, several of its elements pointed the way to neoclassicism, although Strauss continued to mix it with his persistent post-romanticism. Klee had not yet written (he would only do so in 1915) that “the experiences of the Baroque share something fundamental with the present time,”9 yet Strauss had cut the orchestra by two-thirds, to thirty-five musicians. Modernity struck again with a violent mise en abîme, the libretto’s surprising diachrony.10
Built on Hofmannsthal’s symbolism, the story of The Woman without A Shadow remains light in tone, more of a fairy tale. Musically, its large orchestra is powerful, while also rich in picturesque, varied, and exotic effects, in the same vein as Bluebeard’s Castle (1911). As with Bartók, each effect is justified by magical elements in the libretto: the impressionistic celesta accompanies the talking fish, the low brass the evil Nurse (as for the cruel chef in Prokofiev’s The Love For Three Oranges, 1918-1921), the piccolo clarinet’s Stravinsky-esque ostinato the call of the falcon, and the solo violin the final reappearance of the shadow, symbol of female fertility. Its moral glorifies domestic, conjugal, earthly love — and, ultimately, Strauss’s happy marriage. The work’s Mozartian approach sets up a parallel between the two couples in Strauss’s opera and those in the Magic Flute.
Strauss did not work with Hofmannsthal for his 1924 opera buffa Intermezzo (which is part singspiel, part operetta), and instead crafted the libretto himself. Its innovation is its economical and “empty” sparring match between two arguing spouses, inspired by the outbursts of Strauss’s own wife Pauline, a woman as unpredictable as her namesake Polina in Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler. Jamaux has argued that Intermezzo is modern in its use of language, too.11 Strauss pioneered these updated “domestic” comedies, in which contemporary devices such as the telephone play a key role — as they would in Schoenberg’s Von Heute auf Morgen (1928-1929) and Francis Poulenc’s La Voix humaine (1958). Winter sports, a novelty at the time, are accompanied by a comic glissando, echoing the slides of a sled. These touches are undeniably cinematographic.12
Hofmannsthal’s last libretto, written for Arabella (1928-1932), follows Der Rosenkavalier in its use of cross-dressing as a plot device (Zdenka/Zdenko), leading to new Migränen. While this hefty operetta takes its time to unfold, it lightens the orchestration of Der Rosenkavalier to achieve the status of a neo-Mozartian drama giocoso. According to Ludwig Karpath, “It’s an opera that makes you a better person.”13
Strauss’s devotion to opéra bouffe continued in his collaboration with Stefan Zweig, who wrote the libretto for Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman, 1935). The opera was an attempt to reinvent The Marriage of Figaro or The Barber of Seville; indeed, given its own barber character, Strauss might even have titled it The Barber of London. In this opera, Strauss’s post-romanticism meets Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, for example in the comic ascending three-note horn ostinato at the beginning. This influence appears again in Die Liebe der Danae (The Love of Danae, 1940), where the initial ostinato (A, B-flat, A, D) thickens into polytonality that is overtly Stravinskian.
It wasn’t until Capriccio, premiered in October 1942, that Strauss reached what Lucien Rebatet called his chef-d’œuvre.14 Its libretto is an overt musicological discussion of the history of opera. In this dream of the postmodernist future, quotations become necessarily and seamlessly integrated into the work. Buttressed by the harpsichord, quotations from Gluck, Couperin, and Rameau rub shoulders with strains of Wagner (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg), Piccinni — and, of course, Mozart. Capriccio is a gallery of sounds, with its justified anachronisms and post-romantic interludes, peaking in the “moonlight music” at the beginning of Scene 13. Its packed libretto opens with two complex jokes15 — yet, like The Magic Flute with Emanuel Schikaneder, it was assembled by amateurs (Strauss and the conductor Clemens Krauss). This “Straussian catalogue” provides the ultimate story-within-a-story. After the first hypertext in Ariadne auf Naxos, Strauss staged the life story of an orchestra conductor in Intermezzo, and then, in Die schweigsame Frau, that of Henry and his opera troupe. “My life’s work is at an end with Capriccio,” Strauss told Willi Schuh.16
Capriccio was the culmination of the romantic neoclassicism that was Strauss’s personal hallmark. A more orthodox, more Stravinskian neoclassicism existed alongside it. After Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1919), Strauss himself would write several “remakes,” including Dance Suite From Keyboard Pieces by François Couperin (1929) and a neo-Idomeneo after Mozart (1930).
Beyond that, several works composed toward the end of his career are “pure” concertante-style music. This “purity” again recalls Mozart, an inspiration Strauss had never before taken so far. Writing between his Second Concerto for French Horn (1942) and his Double Concerto for Clarinet and Bassoon (1947), he attempted a new degree of discretion and emptiness with his Oboe Concerto (1945). The strings open it with a birdlike quiver, D, E, D, E. It seems a long way from Zarathustra. Strauss combines harmonic formulae, parallel thirds, and “urgent” accompaniments (eighth rests followed by three eighth notes) drawn from Mozart with Strauss’s own modulations: sudden changes or breaks, but which pivot on common tones.
These modulations are a backdrop for the Straussian “surprise,” a thread that runs from Don Juan through to Four Last Songs (1948), passing through Arabella, whose opening juxtaposes A minor, F minor (the most Straussian of sequences), and D minor: three chords in three seconds. Strauss pushes consonance beyond Wagner, through a varied tonal universe that has been cinematically collaged and passed through successive colored lenses. The opening of the last of the Four Last Songs, “Im Abendrot,” features modernist “pedal chords”: E-flat major, then C minor, then A-flat minor, again pivoting via common tones.
Wagner’s lyricism in Strauss’s composition becomes a poly-Tristan poly-lyricism. Several voices sing out at full volume at the same time, the first violins and high woodwinds on one side, the second violins and alto woodwinds on the other, starting with the third chord. In writing counterpoint, Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms maintained their own voices but also remained slightly archaic, diligent, and preoccupied with Bach. Strauss’s approach is to superimpose several romantic melodies, several entreaties, creating what can be called lyric counterpoint. Rachmaninov, another poly-romantic, employed the same kind of layering.
In this vein, the scene of the goddess’s final metamorphosis in Daphne (1938) highlights the solo voice, naturally, but each voice seeks to stand out, to spark emotion. As Daphne transforms into a laurel tree, she continues to sing: accompanied, fittingly, by woodwinds, representing the wood of the tree. The music unfolds into a multitude of branches, each a kind of prima donna.
Similarly, Metamorphosen (1945) was, in principle, written “for twenty-three solo strings.” In practice, this level of individual autonomy is impossible to attain. Strauss nevertheless was making explicit a principle of lyric profusion — it might almost be possible to say that by the end of his career he was theorizing or generalizing it. In fact, the juxtaposed tonalities, Strauss’s horizontal collage technique, reaches a kind of shattered, Cubist romanticism. Breaks and distruptions occur throughout the thirty-minute piece, creating a melody that is continually discontinuous. This was Strauss writing experimentally, with neither program nor libretto, pushing beyond Elektra.
No. A program for his Metamorphosen exists: it is the ruins left by the Second World War. This rare exception reveals that Strauss’s romanticism, elsewhere in his catalogue, was hardly the catastrophic or self-destructive romanticism of Mahler. To the contrary, it was affirmative, victorious, following in Wagner’s footsteps; it tended toward major keys, toward optimism, firmly grounded in fifths, which could rumble in the low notes (the low fifth that opens “Im Abendrot”) or ring out in lighter works such as Arabella (whose chords retain this distinct “grain” of German sound). He extended the gravity of Beethoven, of Brahms. Was it this affirmation of Germanness that, beyond his celebrity and his status as a national composer, made Strauss so sought after, and later partially rejected, by the Nazi regime, and Goebbels in particular? In 1942, the Munich Opera was rehearsing Capriccio just a few kilometers from the Dachau concentration camp. And yet Capriccio seemed to be affirming Austria, and even France, more than Germany.
“After The Magic Flute,” Adorno wrote, “it was never again possible to force serious and light music together”17; however, Capriccio proves otherwise. The towering composer of Zarathustra, this Richard II became also the “Offenbach of the twentieth century.”18 He brought together the whole of the Germanic spirit — south and north, lighthearted and serious, Catholic and Protestant. His “romantic neoclassicism” at times became a kind of contradiction of itself; Ross argues that he embodied a multi-stylistic approach that was a precursor of postmodernism.
From a purely modernist perspective, Strauss only set the very tips of his toes in the twentieth century, with his heels firmly planted in the nineteenth. His historical peak can be traced to the exact turn of the two centuries, in 1900, to the Jugendstil of Salomé. He was active on both slopes of this summit for seventy-eight years, from the age of six until the age of eighty-four. Notably, at least six of the operas he wrote after Salomé are now part of the classical repertoire, including his 1941 “chef-d’œuvre.” Again according to Rebatet, after Mozart, Wagner, and Verdi, Strauss was the composer “who contributed the greatest number of works destined for a long stage life.”19 Antoine Goléa compares Strauss’s lyric range to that of Puccini, noting that Strauss carried the final surge of great dramatic tonal repertoire several decades further after Turandot (left incomplete in 1924) — and did so while deliberately avoiding the shortcuts Puccini took, such as doubling the vocal line with the strings.20
One can only conclude that this history is nonlinear. By the same logic, a purely modernist vision would dismiss Bach for adhering to an outdated concept of polyphony in the eighteenth century — a system theoretically obsolete, because it was based on Renaissance principles. This vision would prefer Vivaldi and his more “modern,” vertically structured orchestrations, which Bach admired and indeed sometimes copied. Adorno offers a tidy rejection of this view on the basis of the “untruth of any genius aesthetics that suppresses the element of finite making, the technè in artworks.”21
Strauss’s technè, his professional skill, ends up becoming an aesthetic and historical concept: a new density, horizontal (dazzling romanticism) and vertical (poly-romanticism), not to mention his completely original orchestrations. A young Adorno — just twenty-one years old and a staunch modernist, while critiquing a “lack of objectivity” in Strauss (in 1924, at the very moment when Strauss was falling out of fashion) nevertheless acknowledged an underlying “aesthetic truth” in his music.22
Futurist collectives, in contrast, were quick to show their radical, often political, leanings, declaring on the front page of Le Figaro of 20 February 1909 that “a roaring automobile, which sounds like it is running over shrapnel, is more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace.” But Strauss was a unifying force, driving that old sculpture — romanticism — at automobile speed. Fierce energy in itself was a prophesy of modern times, of The Man in a Hurry whose story Paul Morand would tell in his 1941 novel.
Strauss’s hedonism lies in his physical, almost athletic romanticism. Amateur orchestras can barely perform his works. Rarely has an orchestrator become so invasive (with a remarkably abundant discography) and therefore, pragmatically, so accessible to the public while remaining so difficult for musicians to perform. This new high point in the history of the orchestra was, paradoxically, a breaking point, as well.
We have not yet discussed Strauss’s piano repertoire, some forty-two pieces, most dating from his youth. It seems, in fact, that he truly found his voice only through the orchestra, as in Burleske (1886, for piano and orchestra), where, at twenty-two, his brilliance emerged, shaped by abundant humor embedded in a riot of instrumentation. Years later, Varèse declared: “Forget the piano,” and Strauss’s legacy might be seen as saying nearly the same thing of the very piano it used. In practice, his music declares the orchestra’s victory as a laboratory of sound for the twentieth century — essentially a victory for Varèse’s vision.
He was humming this thesis off in the wings, a tune completed by Makis Solomos: that the twentieth century was about sound, not language.23 Strauss’s version was even more cloudy and clandestine than it was broad and populist. Since the language “no longer counts,” in keeping tonality yet reinventing the orchestra (sound itself) from top to bottom, what emerges are bubbles, historical singularities, such as Zarathustra or Ravel’s Bolero (1928). Both works thrive on the same paradox: they retain tonality yet revolutionize the orchestra.
I might conclude with the “pure craftsman” — with the idea that pure beauty is free of concept, just as music is, according to Kant.24 However, to do so would be to forget Strauss’s study of philosophy in his youth and his tribute to Nietzsche in Zarathustra. Indeed, quite to the contrary, he nearly always relied on stories, libretti, and arguments. His music is therefore firmly of the twentieth century — conceptual, topical, full of images, even “impure.” Here, Hofmannsthal the poet seems necessary, inseparable from Strauss himself. Who other than Strauss could have been so devastated by the death of his librettist? Strauss’s melodic lyricism operates literally, within the poetic repertoire.
He could not understand the half-lyricism of Pelléas et Mélisande, which Debussy modeled on the flat intonations of French speech patterns: “It’s too humble,” declared the German composer.25 Strauss’s double lyricism represents a culmination in musical history. We have not even needed to analyze his piano pieces, his twenty-four chamber music compositions, let alone his more than two hundred lieder. He was a striking exception in terms of historical continuity, a craftsman with an “old fashioned” level of productivity: similar to Bach or Mozart, he succeeded in composing a lot. As a result, his lieder now seem, in retrospect, to function as sketches for his operas, and yet Ständchen (1886) became a global phenomenon. This serenade twinkles with liquid piano arpeggios, resembling Liszt’s Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este (1877-1882).
Whether his lieder are accompanied by piano or orchestra, nearly all of them were composed for a soprano vocalist. Unofficially, they were written for his wife Pauline, who was a singer. In fact, the Strauss household seems to have functioned as the aesthetic heart of their music. Pauline would survive him by only a few months. Their collaboration was hedonistic, happily Epicurean, and in its way, prophetic, in that it served as a model for our own times. Today, this has been exaggerated into a kind of “duty to happiness,” an insidious puritanism that is both normative and “guilt inducing,” as Pascal Bruckner wrote in 2000.26
Gilliam has noted that sexuality emerges in Strauss’s work as something of a weary Viennese trope: Jugendstil and Freudian. In Salomé, the character of John the Baptist, traditionally an ascetic who lives on “locusts and wild honey,” becomes under Strauss’s pen, by the end of his second leitmotiv, as sensual as Isolde under the power of the love potion. Gilliam also described the vein of “erotic humor” that runs through Strauss’s work.27
Nietzsche, in the final era of the Case of Wagner (1887-1888) and of Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888), would no doubt have preferred the second Richard to the first, whose Parsifal he deemed derisive and anti-Semitic. The late Strauss, in contrast, moves away from the great regal ceremonies of Parsifal’s “Sacred Scenic Festival.” His only true ceremony was that of chocolate — the pleasure ritual of the French Enlightenment, uplifted in Capriccio as a parade of delights offered up by the orchestra like so many pastries in a baker’s window, a tasting menu of treats.
Like Bartók, Berg, Mahler, and Varèse, Strauss was an atheist. Here, he converged with what would become consensus in the skeptical scientific world, more than composers who held onto their religious beliefs, such as Stravinsky or Schoenberg. The major-key, even joyful universe of Strauss’s music after 1910 might even be described as “positive” in all senses of the term — perhaps even in the sense of Auguste Comte — were it not for the deep presence of emotion, rootedness, and tradition (here again, Southern Germany).
The only god(dess) to whom Strauss might have shown devotion was his own Demeter: Pauline, and, through her, women, the earth, nature, fertility. The main characters in his operas are nearly all women: Salomé, Electra, Ariadne, the “Woman without a Shadow,” Helen of Egypt, Aida, Arabella, “The Silent Woman,” Daphne, Danae, and finally, the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, as well as the countess in Capriccio. This matriarchal approach is, in fact, also Viennese and Jugendstil: it is Karl Kraus’s feminist vision in his 1905 production of Pandora’s Box.
It was to this gynaeceum, to the earth, to the Alps, that an 84-year-old Strauss — born before the premiere of Tristan, raised while the sun set on the House of Hohenzollern and alive to witness the dawn of the Atomic Age — bid goodbye with “Im Abendrot.” Written in 1948 as the final of his Four Last Songs, this orchestral song was explicitly intended as his last testament. It would even become, in terms of discographic tradition, the final work of Germany’s “great” (tonal) music. The elderly Strauss was still melding instruments in new combinations, even to the last measures, where the full unison woodwind section doubles the strings: German metallurgy, with a new solidity. In the last moments, the flutes enter, trilling in thirds — Mozart’s birds, too, are bidding a final farewell. The closing chord is a major one; we leave each other with a smile: “Thank you.”
1. Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss. L’homme, le musicien, l’énigme, Paris, Fayard, 2001. In English, the section of this book that covers the 1920s is titled “Out of Fashion.” (Richard Strauss: The Man, The Musician, The Enigma, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.) Citations herein are from the French version. ↩
2. Alex Ross, “Strauss's Place in the Twentieth Century,” The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 195. ↩
3. Dominique Jameux, Richard Strauss, Paris, Seuil, 1971, p. 81. ↩
4. Salomé is the central example given by Bryan Gilliam in his article, “Strauss and the Sexual Body: The Erotics of Humor, Philosophy, and Ego-Assertion,” The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 2), p. 269-279. ↩
5. In the first fourteen measures, Strauss stacks, at least in the melodic sense, three quarter notes, B–E, E–A, and A–D. The low chords, doubled between the bassoons and upright bass, play E–A and A–D, while the first violins play B–E and E–A. ↩
6. Quoted in Jameux, Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 3), p. 175. ↩
7. These are Émile Vuillermoz’s words, quoted in Jameux, ibid., p. 83. ↩
8. The last dance in Elektra uses ternary rhythm and a waltz tempo. ↩
9. Quoted in Jameux, Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 3), p. 128. ↩
10. Hofmannsthal superimposes the composition of an ancient Greek Ariadne over an adaptation of the Bourgeois gentilhomme. The actors in the latter comment on the tragedy and ultimately intervene in it. The hypertextuality of late-twentieth-century opera is not far behind this. Potential inconsistencies in musical language are justified in this way — sometimes Wagnerian, sometimes modern, sometimes Mozart-inflected. In an article on opera, Bernd Alois Zimmermann argues that in this sense Strauss’s Ariadne is an essential work of contemporary opera. ↩
11. This is Dominique Jameux’s central point in “Style, modernité, modernisme,” L’Avant-scène opéra, 138 (1991), p. 102-105. ↩
12. See Kennedy, Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 1), p. 334. ↩
13. Cited in Kennedy, ibid., p. 355. ↩
14. Lucien Rebatet, Une histoire de la musique, Robert Laffont (1969), p. 539. [Translator’s note: Rebatet was a fascist journalist and music critic, whose Une histoire de la musique remains a widely read source in France.] ↩
15. Capriccio is set in 1775, Mozart’s era, in France, where a poet and a musician are each fighting for the heart of the Countess Madeleine and, through her, the heart of musical history. In opera, prima la musica e doppo le parole? Or is the opposite true? The composer Flamand’s sextet, which the characters listen to alongside the audience, opens the opera with a historically unprecedented lightness and the opera’s first mise en abîme. Then the audience hears one of the poet’s pieces on its own, which includes a spoken singspiel passage. Finally, an opera within an opera is written, and the action is joined by a comical prompter, Monsieur Taupe. ↩
16. Quoted in Kennedy, Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 1), p. 470. ↩
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Le Caractère fétiche dans la musique et la régression de l’écoute, Paris, Allia, 2001, p. 19. (“On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening,” in Essays on Music, ed. by Richard Leppert, transl. Susan Gillespie, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002.) ↩
18. Kennedy, Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 1), p. 269. ↩
19. Rebatet, Une histoire de la musique, op. cit. (note 14), p. 541. ↩
20. See Antoine Goléa, Richard Strauss, Paris, Flammarion, 1965, p. 219-220. ↩
21. Theodor W. Adorno, Théorie esthétique, Paris, Klincksieck, 1974, p. 227. (Aesthetic Theory, transl. by Robert Hullo-Kentor, London, Athlone Press, 1997, p. 170.) ↩
22. An English translation of this article, Zeitschrift für Musik (1924), was published in “Richard Strauss at Sixty,” in Richard Strauss and his World, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 406-415. ↩
23. See Makis Solomos, De la musique au son, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013. ↩
24. Music would thus be “pure sensation, without concept.” See Ch. 53 of the Critique of Judgment (1790). ↩
25. Quoted in Goléa, Richard Strauss, op. cit. (note 20), p. 140. ↩
26. See Euphorie perpétuelle: Essai sur le devoir de bonheur, Paris, Grasset, 2000. ↩
27. Gilliam, “Strauss and the Sexual Body,” op. cit. (note 4), p. 269. ↩
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