Part 3
“Necessity gave me a really exotic scheme of harmony, which, showed itself especially in odd, heterogeneous cadences having the effect of changeable silk. It was the desire for the sharpest kind of individual characterization that led me to bitonality. One can look upon this as a solitary experiment as applied in a special case but not recommend it for imitation.”
Difficulties began with von Schuch’s first piano rehearsals. A number of singers sought to give back their parts till Karl Burrian shamed them by answering, when asked how he was progressing with the role of Herod: “I already know it by heart!” A little later the Salome, Frau Wittich, threatened to go on strike because of the taxing part and the massive orchestra. Soon, too, she began to rail against “perversity and impiety of the opera, refused to do this or that ‘because I am a decent woman’,” and drove the stage manager almost frantic. Strauss remarked that her figure was ‘not really suited to the 16-year-old Princess with the Isolde voice’ and complained that in subsequent performances her dance and her actions with Jochanaan’s head overstepped all bounds of propriety and taste.”
In Berlin, according to Strauss, the Kaiser would permit the performance of the work, only after Intendant von Hülsen had the idea of “indicating at the close by a sudden shining of the morning star the coming of the Three Holy Kings.” Nevertheless, Wilhelm II remarked to Hülsen: “I am sorry that Strauss composed this _Salome_. I like him, but he is going to do himself terrible harm with it!” At the dress rehearsal the famous high B flat of the double basses so filled Count Seebach with the fear of an outbreak of hilarity, that he prevailed upon the player of the English horn to mitigate the effect, somewhat, “by means of a sustained B flat on that instrument.” Strauss’s own father, hearing his son play a portion of the opera on the piano, exclaimed a short time before his death: “My God, this nervous music! It is as if beetles were crawling about in one’s clothing!” And Cosima Wagner declared after listening to the closing scene: “This is madness!” The clergy, too, was up in arms and the first performance at the Vienna State Opera in October, 1918, took place only after an agitated exchange of letters with Archbishop Piffl. The orchestra of _Salome_ in all numbers 112 players. Strauss, however eventually arranged the opera for fewer players and Willy Schuh tells of the composer having conducted it in Innsbruck with an orchestra of only 56 players, winds in twos but highly efficient solo instrumentalists.
At all events, Strauss has been described as an inimitable conductor of _Salome_. Willy Schuh (whom Strauss designated late in his life as his “official” biographer, when the time came to prepare his “standard” life story) alludes to Strauss as an “allegro composer”, whose direction of _Salome_ was of altogether remarkable “tranquillity” and finds that the real secret of his direction of this music drama was to be sought in the “restfulness” and creative aspects of his interpretation, “which avoids every excess of whipped up, overheated effects and sensationalism.” It is, therefore, illuminating to consider the modifications the years have wrought on the interpretative treatment proper to the work. Little by little the legend of the decadent, hysterical, hyper-sensual work was replaced by the assurance of its almost classical character; and the truth of Oscar Wilde’s declaration to Sarah Bernhardt when the play was new: “I aimed only to create something curious and sensual” has at length come to the fore.
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There is scarcely any need to recount in any detail the early difficulties of _Salome_ in America, when the scandalized cries that arose after the work received a single representation at the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, only to be shelved as “detrimental to the best interests of the institution” after a solitary representation still ranks among the notorious and less creditable legends of the American stage. Strauss soon after this taste of the operations of American puritanism accused Americans of “hypocrisy, the most loathsome of all vices.” He was handsomely avenged, however, when on January 28, 1909, Oscar Hammerstein revived the work (with Mary Garden as Salome) at his Manhattan Opera House and started it on a triumphant American career, which confounded all the ludicrous prognostications and horrified shouts with which it has been greeted only a short time earlier.
The work which followed _Salome_ was _Elektra_, the text of which was the creation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Here began a collaboration between poet and musician which was to last with fruitful results until the latter’s death, and to mark some of the high points of Strauss’s achievements. The story of their joint labors is detailed in a priceless series of letters, brought out in 1925 under the editorial supervision of the composer’s son, Dr. Franz Strauss. These letters afford glimpses into the workshop of librettist and composer which rank with some of the most illuminating exchanges of the sort the history of music supplies. From them we learn that before settling on the tragedy of the house of Agamemnon the collaborators seriously pondered as operatic material Calderon’s _Daughter of the Air_ and also _Semiramis_. Then, early in 1908, they seem to have agreed on _Elektra_. Hofmannsthal’s version of the Greek legend (based on Sophocles) had been acted in Berlin (again with Gertrude Eysolt in the title role); and no sooner had Strauss witnessed the production than he concluded that the tragedy in this form was virtually made to order for his music.
On July 6, 1908, the composer wrote to Hofmannsthal: “_Elektra_ progresses and is going well; I hope to hurry up the premiere for the end of January at the latest.” Strauss was as good as his word. The first performance of _Elektra_ took place January 25, 1909, at the Dresden opera, Ernst von Schuch conducting, with Anni Krull in the name part, Ernestine Schumann-Heink as Klytemnestra and Carl Perron as Orestes. If Strauss would have preferred to write a comic opera after _Salome_ the pull of the _genre_ of “horror opera” was still strong upon him and he was not yet ready to loose himself from its grip. _Elektra_ was, if one chooses, gorier than _Salome_ and perhaps more genuinely psychopathic but less susceptible to provocations of outraged morality. Its instrumental requirements are rather larger than those of Strauss’s previous opera and the whole more nightmarish in its sensational atmosphere. One had the impression, however, that with _Elektra_ the composer had reached the end of a path. He could hardly repeat himself with impunity along similar lines. A turn of the road or something similar must come next unless Strauss’s achievements were to run up against a stone wall or lead him into a blind alley.
This was not fated to happen. What the pair were now to achieve was what was to prove their most abiding triumph—_Der Rosenkavalier_, of all the operas of Richard Strauss the most lastingly popular and if not the indisputable best at all events the most loved and, peradventure, the most viable—and, if you will, the healthiest. If the piece is in some respects sprawling and over-written it does contain a piece of moving character-drawing which stands with the most memorable things the literature of musical drama affords. In her musical and dramatic lineaments the aristocratic Marschallin, whose common sense leads her, on the threshold of middle age to renounce the calf love of the 17-year-old “Rose Bearer”, Octavian, offers one of the finest and most convincing figures to be found in modern opera—a creation not unworthy to stand by the side of Wagner’s Hans Sachs. The Baron Ochs, an outright vulgarian, if the music accorded him does not lie, is a figure who might have stepped out of the pages of Rabelais; Sophie, Faninal and all the rest of the characters who enliven this canvas inhabited by almost photographic types of 18th Century Vienna add up to a truly memorable gallery with which Hofmannsthal and Strauss have brought to life an era and a culture. Strauss’s score has indisputable prolixities and commonplaces. But these traits may pass as defects of the opera’s qualities and, as such, they can take their place in the vastly colorful pageant of Hofmannsthal’s comedy of manners.
It would be a mistake, however, to imagine that a piece as earthy as _Der Rosenkavalier_ should pass without provoking dissent. The German Kaiser, who had small use for Strauss’s operas, yielded to the urging of the Crown Prince so far as to attend a performance, then left the theatre with the words: “Det is keene Musik für mich!” (“That’s no music for me!”) To spare the feelings of the straight-laced Kaiserin it was arranged to place the Marschallin’s bed in an adjoining alcove instead of in high visibility on the stage when the curtain rose. Nor were these the only objections. And, of course, there were the usual exclamations about the length of the piece, no end of suggestions were advanced about the best ways to shorten the work. Strauss, in protest against some of the cuts von Schuch had practised in Dresden, once insisted he had overlooked one of the most important possible abbreviations! Why not omit the trio in the last act, which only holds up the action! It should be explained that the great trio is the brightest gem of the act, perhaps, indeed, the lyric climax of the whole score! As for the various waltzes which fill so many pages of the third act (and to some degree of the second) it may be admitted that, for all the skill of their instrumentation they are by no means the highest melodic flights of Strauss’s fancy, some of them being merely successions of rather trifling sequences.
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It was assumed after _Der Rosenkavalier_ that the success of the opera indicated that the composer, in a mood for concessions, had tried to meet the public half-way and had renounced the violence, the cacophonies and the dissonances and sensational traits supposed to be his stock-in-trade. The comedy was assumed to be a proof of this. The real truth was that Strauss had not changed his ideals and methods in the least. It was, rather, _that the public, converted by force of habit, was itself catching up with Strauss and that the idiom of the composer was quickly becoming the musical language of the hour_. Sometimes it took even a few idiosyncrasies of the musician for granted. One did not always inquire too closely into just what he meant. There is one case when Strauss even went to the length of _writing music_ to the words “diskret, vertraulich” (“discreetly, confidentially”) when Hofmannsthal had written them as _stage directions_ to be followed _not_ as part of a text to be sung! All the same Strauss usually kept an eagle eye on the dramatic action he composed. With regard to the libretto of _Der Rosenkavalier_ he wrote to the poet “the first act is excellent, the second lacks certain essential contrasts which it is impossible to put off till the third. With only a feeble success for the second act, the opera is doomed.” Be this as it may, _Der Rosenkavalier_ was anything but “doomed”. It was, in point of fact, the work which Strauss had in mind when, at the close of the first _Elektra_ performance he remarked to some friends: “Now I intend to write a Mozart opera!” Whether or not “Der Rosenkavalier” really meets the prescriptions of a “Mozart opera” we feel rather more certain that his next work, _Ariadne auf Naxos_ comes closer to filling that bill.
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The development of this work hangs together with production in Stuttgart, October 25, 1912, of a German adaptation by Hofmannsthal of Molière’s comedy _Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme_. Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain, who has made money, induces a certain charming widow, the Marquise Dorimène, to come to a dinner he gives in her honor. A reprobate noble, Count Dorantes, tells the Marquise that the soirée at Jourdain’s home is really intended as a gesture of admiration for her. M. Jourdain has engaged two companies of singers who are supposed to perform a serious opera, _Ariadne on Naxos_, and a burlesque, _The Unfaithful Zerbinetta and Her Four Lovers_. Both pieces are supposed to have been composed by a protégé of M. Jourdain. During a dinner scene Strauss has recourse to bits of musical quotation—a fragment of Wagner’s _Rheingold_ when Rhine salmon is served and several bars of the bleating sheep music from _Don Quixote_ when servants bring in roast mutton. The banquet is interrupted and Jourdain finds it necessary to curtail the scheduled program. As a result the young author is commanded by Jourdain to combine his two works as best he can!
Hofmannsthal’s Molière adaptation (in which the operatic part takes the place of the French poet’s original “Turkish ceremony”) was a clumsy, indeed an impractical distortion. But Strauss had no intention of sacrificing his composition without at least an attempt to salvage something from the wreck. The _Ariadne_ portion as well as the _Zerbinetta_ companion piece were preserved but carefully detached from the Molière comedy. In place of this Strauss and Hofmannsthal supplied a sort of explanatory prologue whereby arrangements are made for better or worse to combine the stylized _opera seria_ about Ariadne and her rescue on a desert island by the god Bacchus, with the comic doings of Zerbinetta and her _commedia del arte_ companions. In this shape the piece has succeeded in surviving and actually makes an engaging entertainment, with the young composer (a trousered soprano) reminding one of a lesser Octavian.
There is considerable charming music in what is left of the originally involved and over lengthy entertainment. First of all, Strauss was suddenly to renounce the huge, overloaded orchestra of _Salome_, _Elektra_ and _Rosenkavalier_ and to supplant it by a much smaller one designed for a transparent texture of chamber music. In any case, the definitive _Ariadne auf Naxos_ is a real achievement and stands among Strauss’s better and more memorable accomplishments. In the estimation of the present writer the tenderer romantic portions of the piece excel the comic pages associated with Zerbinetta and her merry crew. In writing these the composer aimed to be Mozartean (or, if one prefers, Rossinian) by assigning the colorature soprano a florid rondo of incredible difficulties—so mercilessly exacting, indeed, that it first moved Hofmannsthal to discreet protest. Eventually, the composer took steps to modify some of the cruel problems of Zerbinetta’s solo and it is in this amended form that one generally hears this air today, when it is sung as a concert number.
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It would not be altogether excessive to claim that _Ariadne auf Naxos_ marks a midpoint in Strauss’s career. He still had a long and fruitful life ahead of him and, as it was to prove, he was almost incorrigibly prolific not hesitating to experiment with one type of composition as well as another. On the eve of the First World War he became interested in Diaghilew’s Russian Ballet and the various types of choreographic and scenic art which it was to engender. Hofmannsthal wanted him to occupy his imagination and “to let the vision of one of the grandest episodes of antique tragedy, namely the subject of Orestes and the Furies, inspire you to write a symphonic poem, which might be a synthesis, of your symphonies and your two tragic operas!” And the poet adjured him to think of Orestes as represented by Nijinsky, “the greatest mimic genius on the stage today!” But apparently Strauss had had his fill of the _Elektra_ tragedy at this stage and had no stomach for more of this sort of thing, whether symphonic or operatic. So he remained unmoved by Hofmannsthal’s urgings. Yet the Russian Ballet gave him a new idea. He thought of a pantomimic ballet conceived in the shapes and the colors of the epoch of Paolo Veronese.
From this conception, based on a scenario by a Count Harry Kessler and von Hofmannsthal dealing with the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, there grew the _Legend of Joseph_, first produced in Paris with extraordinary scenic and decorative accouterments on May 14, 1914. The staging was a pictorial triumph which, though the ballet was several times performed elsewhere, appears never to have been anything like the visual feast it was at its first showing. The score seems to have missed fire and has never been reckoned among the composer’s major exploits. None the less the effect of the music in its proper frame and context is compelling. What if much of it sounds like discarded leavings from “Salome”? Strauss confessed that from the first the pious Joseph bored him, “and I have difficulty in finding music for whatever bores me” (“was mich mopst”). To “his dear da Ponte”, as he came to call Hofmannsthal, he gave hope and said frankly that though the virtuous Biblical youth tried his patience, in the end some “holy” strain might perhaps occur to him. The present writer has always felt that the _Josefslegende_ is a far too maligned work and that it would repay a conductor to disentomb the grossly slandered score, which when properly presented is striking “theatre”.
On October 28, 1915, there was heard in Berlin, under the composer’s direction, the first symphony (in contradiction to “tone poem”) Richard Strauss had written since 1886. Like _Aus Italien_ it was again outspokenly pictorial. The composer himself wrote titles into the divisions of the score (which he is said to have begun to sketch in 1911, though the music was set down to the final double bar four years later). Some spoke of the _Alpensymphonie_ as a work which “a child could understand”. And the various scenic divisions of this Alpine panorama, distended as it undoubtedly is, can be described as plainly pictorial. The orchestra depicts successively “Night”, “Sunrise”, the “Ascent”, “Entrance into the Forest”, “Wandering besides the Brook”, “At the Waterfall”, “Apparition”, “On Flowery Meadows”, “On the Alm”, “Lost in the Thicket”, “On the Glacier”, “Dangerous Moment”, “On the Summit”, “Mists Rise”, “The Sun is gradually hidden”, “Elegy”, “Calm before the Storm”, “Thunderstorm”, “The Descent”, “Sunset”, “Night”.
On account of its length the “Alpine Symphony” has never been a favorite among Strauss’s achievements of tone painting. Indeed, it may be questioned whether its sunrise scene can be compared for suggestiveness and purely musical thrill to the glorious opening picture of _Also Sprach Zarathustra_.
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Strauss’s symphonic excursion in the Alps was succeeded by a return to opera. Between 1914 and 1917 (which is to say during the most poignant years of the First War) he busied himself with a work which was to become a child of sorrow to him but which to a number of his staunchest worshippers often passes as one of his very finest achievements—_Die Frau ohne Schatten_ (_The Woman Without a Shadow_), first performed under Frank Schalk in Vienna, October 10, 1919. For all the enthusiasm it evokes in some of the inner Straussian circles this opera, which combines length, breadth and thickness, is a real problem. The writer of these lines, who has been exposed to the work fully half a dozen times always with a firm resolve to enjoy it, has never succeeded in his ambition. Though Strauss and Hofmannsthal discussed the plans for the piece in 1912 and once more in 1914 the first act was not finished till that year; and war held up the completion of the opera three years more.
It has been maintained that in _Die Frau ohne Schatten_ marks “the combination of a recitative style with the forms of the older opera” and that in it Strauss has yielded to a mystical tendency. Willy Brandl claims that Hofmannsthal’s libretto attracted the composer and stimulated him “precisely because of its obscurity”; that he saw in it a series of problems to be “clarified, not to say unveiled, in their complexities precisely through the agency of music.” The question of motherhood lies at the root of the opera. Hofmannsthal saw in his poem a “kind of continuation of _The Magic Flute_. On one hand we have the superterrestrial worlds, on another the realistic scenes of the human world bound together by the demonic figure of the Nurse. And a new element is to be sensed in the score—the powerful, hymn-like character of the music overpoweringly disclosed in the music, a new feature in Strauss’s compositions.”
It may be questioned whether Strauss was truly content with the bloodless symbolism which fills _The Woman Without a Shadow_. In any case at this juncture he began to long for something new. Somehow Hofmannsthal did not at that moment appear to be reacting sympathetically to the dramatic demands which just then seemed to be filling Strauss’s mind. He informed Hofmannsthal that he longed for something to compose like Schnitzler’s _Liebelei_ or Scribe’s _Glass of Water_. He asked for “characters inviting composition—characters like the Marschallin, Ochs or Barak (in _Die Frau ohne Schatten_).” And so, when Hofmannsthal did not “respond” promptly he took up the pen to work out his own salvation. The consequence was _Intermezzo_, a domestic comedy in one act with symphonic interludes. It was produced at the Dresden Opera, November 4, 1924, under Fritz Busch. Two years before that Strauss had presented in Vienna a two act Viennese ballet, _Schlagobers_ (_Whipped Cream_) which can be dismissed as one of his outspoken failures. As for _Intermezzo_ it had biographical vibrations in that it pictured a domestic episode in Strauss’s own experiences. It had to do with a conductor, _Robert Storch_, and thus Strauss could make amusing stage use of the unmistakable initials “R.S.” and make various allusions to the game of skat, which had for years been a favorite diversion of his. The music of _Intermezzo_ has never been acclaimed a product of the greater Strauss. And yet Alfred Lorenz, famous for his series of eviscerating studies of the structural problems of Wagner’s music dramas, has made it clear that the Wagnerian form problems are likewise the principles which underlie such a relatively tenuous Straussian score as _Intermezzo_.
In spite of the dubious fortunes which were to dog the steps of an opera like _The Woman Without a Shadow_ the composer once again allowed himself to be seduced by a work of relatively similar character, _Egyptian Helen_, a somewhat tortured mythical tale, based on a rather far-fetched “magic” fiction by von Hofmannsthal, relating to a phase of the Trojan war, in which Helen is shown as wholly innocent of the ancient struggle. Magic befuddlements, potions capable of changing the characteristics of people, draughts which rob this or that personage of his memory, an “omniscient shell” which launches oracular pronouncements and a good deal more of the sort lend a singular character to the strange fantasy, in which some have chosen to discern a kind of take-off on the various drinks of forgetfulness and such in _Tristan_ and _Götterdämmerung_. _Egyptian Helen_ is the only sample of this strange stage of the Strauss who was reaching the frontiers of old age which American music lovers had the opportunity to know. It would be excessive to claim that, either in Europe or in the western hemisphere, the work was a noticeable addition to the enduring accomplishments of the master. More than one began to obtain the impression that, for all the splendors of his technic Strauss seemed to be going to seed.
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