He’s modern but not. His work spanned the first four decades of the 20th century, and tumult in Germany. But his musical heroes were Mozart and Wagner – what to expect from that mix?
The most well known fact about the man is that in 1933 he became Hitler’s head of the Reichsmusikkammer and principal conductor of the Bayreuth Festival (Toscanini had resigned in protest at the Nazi regime). There’s a pretty thorough intro to this apparently apolitical artist and his work in Wikipedia here.
His music was always controversial, unsettling, strange. Today, probably the best known of his works is Also sprach Zarathustra, or at least the first two minutes of the piece, now attached always to the image of a badly clad neanderthal. But then, almost as well known, and totally different, are his Four Last Songs, his final works, beautiful, soaring, sweet pieces about death and parting and loss, written for his soprano wife and celebrating – as did all his works - the female voice in pure melody. Here’s Jessye Norman.
So Strauss is associated with a monster politician, a belligerent ape and lyrical, romantic music. And then there’s the operas. Perhaps the opera composer with most variety in plots and productions, he reached from Greek tragedy to spoofing Greek tragedy, from a biblical gory story to a sometimes tedious chat about an absurd question: which matters most, words or music? Some of his messages are radical – hatred of unreasonable authority, derision at the delicious hypocrisy of old Vienna. Some are lightweight critiques of cultural debates.
And the music reaches across that range – from dissonance and harsh drama to melodic, lush, full sound and sweet, strange melding of (female) voices. We’ll meet them all this term. During the years of recent lockdowns, we were offered free live in HD operas from the archives of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. In July last year, they screened a week of the six leading operas of Richard Strauss - here's our blog post on that week's gems.
This term we will explore each of those six, as well as the most obscure and challenging of his operas, Die Frau ohne Schatten. (Yes, it's the woman without a shadow!) But we’ll start with the lush and lovely, in his best known opera, Der Rosenkavalier.
You've not met Der Rosenkavalier? Check out our post last year when a great performance by Garsington Opera was provided free on YouTube. It's there till April: Click here to watch.
If you (think you) know the opera, go to this classic production, described as the Holy Grail of Rosenkavalier performances. The extraordinary Elizabeth Schwarzkopf is the Marschallin - in Salzburg, 1961 - here pictured suitably gowned. The cast is so brilliant, who needs subtitles? Just listen to how the music tells the story.
With Rosenkavalier, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, librettist to Strauss for decades, took the Bavarian Strauss into aristocratic Vienna society with a vengeance. Strauss responded with marvelous music, including recreating the Viennese waltz of his namesake (no relation) Johann. There’s a great story here about the opera and its interpretations.
For an introduction to Rosenkavalier, go to our blog post last year.
And for compulsory reading, here’s a gem (thankyou Jill), an extract from Denis Forman’s classic The Good Opera Guide, (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1994 London.) Meet Forman here in an interview .
Here’s a taste of his guide to the music.
The opera has three overlapping but distinct classes of music, the music of sentiment, the waltzes and the back-up music. The last, for all its force and variety, does no more than support the action on the stage during the spells of farce. The waltzes are wonderful, and at least three of them are world-beaters, the theatre music does its work efficiently but it is in the music of sentiment that we find the true glory of Rosenkavalier. Strauss has an astonishing ability to tug at the heartstrings through his gentle, tender brand of music. In this territory he was a musical psychiatrist with a romantic bent and the best passages in Rosenkavalier have in their recipe a dash both of Freud and of a very superior Barbara Cartland.
Lyn, 6/2/22
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