Dirty Dancing: Strauss, “Redemption” and the Affirmation of the Body

“Von Widersachern und Gefährten” or “Strauss and His Scholars”: Reflections on the current state of Strauss-Research

“Ohne daß die Zeit älter wird”: Capriccio and the Limits of History

In Capriccio, the actress Clairon says “In ihrem Salon vergeht die Stunden, ohne daß die Zeit älter wird,” summing up the opera’s setting in a timeless world. Indeed, the opera itself is a passionate argument for the irrelevance of time in determining the value of a work of art. By adopting devices of metathetricality, it seems to exclude all matters outside itself. This exclusion of concerns such as plot gave Strauss and his co-librettist Krauss an unparalleled freedom, and the characters of Capriccio seem to exist outside of musical history - and also political history.

Capriccio’s lack of activist political content makes current liberals uneasy. Leon Botstein writes, “only a falsification of Capriccio’s date of composition [1940-1941] could make one comfortable with it; yet such an act would not appear inconsistent with its musical content.”

By considering aspects of narration, self-reflexivity, and musical style, I demonstrate that while the opera could be read as a form of escapism, Capriccio might be better understood as a defense of l’art pour l’art, where isolation from politics allows art to consider itself in all its depth and complexity, freed from the overpowering demands of ideology. The very choice of escapism is the opera’s moral. In this paper, I wish to argue that even as Capriccio distances itself from a specific time, it betrays Strauss’s view of German music in 1941, offering a powerful argument against politics and nationalism (making it explicitly anti-Wagnerian), and for the eternal importance of music to humanity.

“Children of Annihilated Epochs”: Helena, Danae, and the End of Empires

Heretofore one of Strauss’s most neglected and misunderstood operas, Die ägyptische Helena (1927) has recently been reassessed as a richly representative artistic document which recast the story of Menelas’s and Helen’s homeward journey from Troy in order to create an aesthetic answer to the problems of the (then) present. By highlighting the distinct similarities between the Trojan War and the recent conflict that had completely changed the political, geographical, and social landscape in Europe, Hofmannsthal and Strauss created an opera expressly aware of its historical moment through a multi-faceted literary and musical referentiality inherently characteristic of its creators.

This paper probes the correlation between Die ägyptische Helena (which originally emerged around 1919) and Danae oder der Vernunftheirat [Danae or The Marriage of Convenience], a contemporaneous Hugo von Hofmannsthal draft that carried similar cultural-historical concerns. It is the author’s contention that Joseph Gregor’s inept reworking of this scenario from 1938-1940 as Die Liebe der Danae served to obscure the highly topical and particularised satire of the original which, though unfinished, provides the blueprint for understanding not only Die ägyptische Helena, but also the later opera for which it served as catalyst.

Becoming a Ballet Composer: Richard Strauss en route to Kythere

In this essay I survey Richard Strauss’s compositional activities from 1895 to 1900, focusing not on his tone poems or early operas, but rather on several incomplete dance projects. The former include ballet scenarios by writers such as Otto Julius Bierbaum (Pan im Busch [Pan and His Pipes]), Frank Wedekind (Die Flöhe [The Fleas]), Richard Dehmel (Lucifer), and Paul Scheerbart (Kometentanz [Dance of the Comets]). Strauss also tried his hand at penning dance libretti in the 1890s, such as Künstler Liebes- und Lebenstragödie (The Life and Loves of an Artist) and Die Insel Kythere (The Island of Cythera), the most complete of any of the aforementioned ballets, inspired by paintings by Boucher, Fragonard, and Watteau.

Featuring the form and style of classical set-piece dance scores, these fragmentary undertakings suggest Strauss’s first marked turn towards the 18th century, a move that is commonly cited as occurring after 1910 in the operas Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos. In fact, Strauss’s championing of parody and sardonicism in the vein of Offenbach in the years surrounding Ariadne was foreshadowed by the irreverent Jugendstil spirit of his unrealized ballets in the 1890s, which might also be characterized as proto-neoclassicist. This aspect of Strauss’s aesthetic, rooted in his oft-overlooked engagement with ballet, lies dormant in the extant sketches for Kythere; provocatively, he returned to its music and imagery for his completed dance compositions in the years surrounding World War One, including Josephslegende (1914) and the Tanzsuite aus Klavierstücken von François Couperin (1923).

A consideration of the processes by which Strauss became a ballet composer shifts the focus on his oeuvre and reconfigures his canonic compositions from around 1900 as themselves transitional, filling the time between when he first expressed interest in ballet and later realized his vision.

Strauss contra Mahler: Observations on Program and Structure in the Alpensinfonie

Strauss’s Compositional Process and the Act I Trio of Der Rosenkavalier

An investigation of the source materials for Der Rosenkavalier reveals a significant aspect of Strauss’s compositional process. Early in the opera’s genesis, Strauss asked Hofmannsthal to append text to the Baron’s Act I monologue in the form of a trio that would rhythmically fit his already-conceived music. Strauss reported having the music in place in March 1909 and confirmed receiving the additions that July. Since his designation of June 27 on the final page of the Particell pre-dates his receipt of the additions, one would presume that the sketchbooks contain only a musical draft of the trio. Surprisingly, both the sketches and Particell contain Hofmannsthal’s additions. Analysis of the sketches confirms that Strauss entered the additions after attempting to draft the music. Thus, the sketches offer evidence that Strauss returned to his sketchbook to finish the draft after working on the Particell, suggesting that his compositional process involves stages that occasionally overlap and are not strictly chronological.

A sketch for the concluding passage of the trio features an eight-measure, homorhythmic phrase around which Strauss drew a large repeat sign, yielding sixteen measures. Comparing the sketch to the finished score, the three vocal lines begin with the text and melody of the first phrase, but by the end of the passage, they switch to that of the second. Strauss could have drafted one full phrase for each character and simply included the text for the other underneath as in a strophic song, composing the melodic variations at a later stage. Instead, the sketch represents a hybrid of the material from the two phrases, beginning and ending with respect to the finished score. While the extant sketch sources are hardly complete, there are numerous documented passages, such as the Act 1 trio, that shed further insight into Strauss’s compositional process.

Richard Strauss and the fin de siècle’s Skepticism of Language

One of the most important and successful librettists for Richard Strauss’ operas was the Austrian writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal who contributed the words for six operas, including. Der Rosenkavalier, Elektra and Ariadne auf Naxos. It is by far less known that the German-Jewish writer Gustav Landauer and his wife Hedwig Lachmann translated Oscar Wilde’s play Salome on which Strauss’ opera with the same title is based and that the triangle Strauss – Hofmannsthal – Landauer was even more complex beyond the contributions of the libretti.

Both Hofmannsthal and Landauer were main figures in the fin de siecle’s Sprachkrise. Gustav Landauer was the first to acknowledge Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos letter as the manifesto of a new poetry, and in his Skepsis und Mystik (1903) he dedicates a few paragraphs to Hofmannsthal and his critical as well as literary works. Landauer wrote that in Hofmannsthal’s poetry the word and the Begriff are the instruments leading to music. Landauer himself employed text-music intermediality as a means to express his skepticism of language in his novels, plays and his melodrama, but when Hofmannsthal started to cooperate with Strauss and wrote libretti for him, Landauer understood this as a step back towards ‘old poetry’ and the “Burgtheaterstil” and accused Hofmannsthal to be a traitor to the skepticism of language and that the Chandos letter was not more that a virtuoso literary ploy: “Verrat am „radikalen“ Programm des Chandos-Briefs,” as he called it. Even after his translation of the Salome, Landauer did not change his judgment on the duo Strauss and Hofmannsthal and in 1918/19 he denounced them as „Anempfinder und Nachahmer.“ Hofmannsthal on the other hand understood writing libretti as a continuation and culmination of his skepticism of language, as he explained in a letter to Richard Strauss.

In my paper I will outline this conflict between Landauer and Hofmannsthal and analyze short passages from selected libretti to answer the question whether Richard Strauss’ music can legitimately be positioned in the context of the Sprachkrise around 1900. A second aspect is the question whether fact that both Landauer and Hofmannsthal were “marginal Jews” played a role in the conflict and their assessments on Richard Strauss.

Strauss’s First Librettist: Ernst von Wolzogen Beyond Überbrettl

Although he authored the text of Strauss’s second opera Feuersnot and thus became the composer’s first librettist, Ernst von Wolzogen (1855-1934) has received virtually no attention in the (sparse) literature on the opera. Rather than examining Wolzogen’s life and works, most scholars have been content to quote the same passages from Wolzogen’s autobiography, ones apparently passed on from one generation to the next. Given the instant fame of his Berlin cabaret Das Überbrettl in the same year as the Feuersnot premiere (1901), it should perhaps not surprise us that commentators, in addition to blaming him for the opera’s lack of success, have considered him unworthy of closer scrutiny. Had they read his autobiography, however, they would have discovered that the details of Wolzogen’s biography and his views on art and music resonate strongly with those of Richard Strauss.

Since no appraisals of his work exist (in any language) beyond sketchy encyclopedia articles, a more comprehensive profile of Wolzogen assembled from primary sources (autobiography, literary works, and essays [many on music], among others) is needed in order to do justice to Strauss’s first librettist. The principal aim of this paper is to outline such a profile of Wolzogen, a realist and humorist who witnessed important musical environments (Wagner’s Bayreuth, Liszt’s Weimar) and advocated aristocratic principles, individual freedom, and moral propriety. Its secondary goal is to pursue the many parallels with Richard Strauss, ones that include intense reception of Wagner followed by severed ties with Bayreuth (Ernst’s half-brother was arch-Wagnerian Hans von Wolzogen), artistic individualism, rejection of Christian redemption (as influenced by Nietzsche), pronounced autobiographical tendencies, and a belief in sexuality as a primary source of artistic creation. Although he is now remembered almost exclusively for his pioneering introduction of artistic cabaret into Germany in 1901, Ernst von Wolzogen has much to offer Strauss scholars beyond a deeper understanding of Feuersnot.

Back to Nature: Comparing Strauss’s Italian and Alpine Journeys

‘I never really believed in inspiration through the beauty of Nature, but in the Roman ruins I learnt better, for there ideas just came flying to me’, confessed Strauss after returning from his first visit to Italy. Strauss memorialised various places and scenes from his trip in the resultant symphonic fantasy Aus Italien (1886), his first programmatic work. Interestingly, it was not until his final tone poem that Strauss again chose to represent landscape in an orchestral composition. Despite its complicated gestation, Eine Alpensinfonie (1915) in its final form is ostensibly a depiction of the various stages in an Alpine ascent.

Bassoon’s Suicide and “Quartettstyl”: Strauss’s Duet-Concertino in the Context of His Late Compositions

When on 4 April 1948 Strauss’s Duet-Concertino was performed for the first time it seemed quite clear that with regard to his music the composer had overcome the depressive mood of his Metamorphosen, which he had finished more than two years before. The music seemed to have changed from resignation to mellowness; the main keys of the Concertino – F-major and A-major – symbolise the spheres of brightness and serenity. Apparently, the aged master of tone painting had turned to plain classicism.

After the composer’s death it became public that, like the early tone poems, the Duet-Concertino had been based on a literary programme. According to the sketches Strauss seemed to have had in mind a story of a princess (clarinet) and a beggar (bassoon), but any attempt to find the specific subject the music was modelled on was in vain. Neither Andersen’s “The Swineherd”, as handed down by Roland Tenschert, nor Simon Dents simplified version of “Beauty and The Beast” matches with Strauss’s few programmatic notes.

A careful examination of the sketches and of Strauss’s correspondence and notes of the 1940s leads to the musical and ideal origins of the composition, and helps to estimate the role of Strauss’s programmatic notes for musical structure and form. In addition, however, there is some evidence that Strauss started working on the Duet-Concertino earlier than it has been supposed, and that it is related in a very special way with the Metamorphosen.

Possibly the programmatic hints given in the sketches of the Duet-Concertino are rather derived from motives of Ancient Greece than from 19th century fairytales or modern literature. Thus, the Concertino – like many other works – fits in well with Richard Strauss’s interest for the Classical World, which the composer had been occupied with all his life and, in particular, during his last years.

Paul Wittgenstein’s Voice and Richard Strauss’s Music: Discovering the Musical Dialogue between Composer and Performer

The promising career of the piano virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961), older brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, was dramatically changed by events of WWI. On reconnaissance patrol, he was wounded and eventually suffered the amputation of his right arm. Remarkably, Wittgenstein continued his performing career by commissioning the leading composers of his time to address his special abilities on the concerto and chamber music stage. Asserting the privilege of ownership, Wittgenstein intentionally prevented other interpreters from having access to “his compositions.” Consequently, autographs, scribal manuscripts, orchestral parts, and printed sources to more than twenty orchestral and chamber music compositions by Ravel, Prokofiev, Britten, Korngold, Tansman, Bortkiewiecz, Schmidt, Schütt, Bricht, Demuth, Gál, Walker, Braun, and Richard Strauss, unceremoniously disappeared into his private archive. In 2005, this extensive and virtually unknown archive, delineating the various musical streams of early Modernism and beyond, has found its way into the hands of a private Hong Kong collector.

Richard Strauss furnished the pianist with two large-scale works for piano left-hand and orchestra, the Parergon zur Symphonia domestica and the Panathenäenzug. Immediately upon receipt, the scores were subject to elaborate processes of modifications. Composer and performer embarked on a dialectic process that reshaped the musical, structural and interpretive aspects of both works. Changes to localized orchestral color, balance and articulation aside, the collaborative effort cultivated the interaction between soloist and orchestra, as additional cadenzas sectionalize Strauss’s original orchestral conception. These subdivisions to the incessant musical flow effectively introduce and mediate an inherited concerto tradition by communicating a distinctly profiled alternation between orchestra and soloist. These unknown alternate versions, which greatly differ from the received published texts, not only present a rare and compelling synthesis of musical inspiration and virtuosity but also permit us to discover how the Strauss/Wittgenstein dialogue was initially performed and heard.

The late Mythological Operas and some Contemporary Paintings: A Methodological Key

The interpretation of Richard Strauss’ late operas suffered until 15 years ago from a misunderstanding, which underlined the reactionary and retrospective way of the composer in his musical style and in his choice of subjects. Scholars like Botstein and Gilliam have contributed to invert this tendency, pointing out how late operas are basic in Strauss’ development and rich in new meanings. Now it is necessary to go on expanding the research of the meaning of Strauss’ use of classical Greek myths in his late years. He reveals a contemporary use of myth which considers the classicality as a living part of 20th century culture, if not of any culture in general. Operas like Daphne and Die Liebe der Danae are not only examples of klassizistische Moderne, but also share characters with postmodernism in combining elements of the past and of the present. Exactly this personal feature of Strauss has been simply considered as a surving of a past tradition, in both a musical and a cultural sense. But we cannot forget that other artists of the mid 20th century, not only musicians, believed in a way of development which combined an ever present classicality with modernity. This clearly comes out in painting of the thirties and forties, which choose to represent classical elements in modern contexts. We also know that Strauss was very interested in visual arts and in its heritage for the human culture. So the methodological approach I suggest for interpretating Strauss’ late mythological operas is to compare them with contemporary paintings, which in the same way and with similar enigmas show both ancient and modern elements. This demonstrates that Strauss’ position was not isolated and regressive, but one of the most important and authoritative ones inside a whole aesthetics which affirmed an eternal contemporaneity of the myth.

Defining the Relationship between Life and Work in Late Strauss: An Enigma Reconsidered

Strauss said in one of his most important self-observations, the so-called Letzte Aufzeichnung: “Why doesn't one see what is new about my works, how [...] the man plays a visible part in them.” Undoubtedly an analysis of the relationship between life and work leads to the core of Strauss's late art. However, although the composer himself emphasized the intense intertwining of man and music, standard interpretations have constantly discovered only their incompatibility. Leon Botstein went so far as to declare this incompatibility to be one of the Straussian enigmas.

But is it really Strauss who is responsible for the “perceived incongruities” and “dissonances”, the “clash between the man and his art”, to quote Botstein? At first glance, the late works indeed seem to have little or even nothing to do with the composer's biographical background. Yet upon closer inspection this distance emerges as the late music's true idea.

Certainly, the contradictions in assessing Strauss's life and work originate from the composer's aesthetics. These aesthetics themselves, though, are not yet contradictory. In fact they are both logically consistent and historically legitimized, since Strauss's notion of music is nothing but a renewal of the Goethean concept, wherein art is “aesthetic play”. It is only when this sublime idea comes in contact with the trivial understanding of a composer's work as a direct reflection of his life that dissonances arise. This trivial understanding, which Stefan Kunze saw as being “just as trite as dogmatic reflection theory”, is in the end responsible for the predominance of difficulties in analysing Strauss the man and his music: Such a materialistic approach fails to notice that Strauss was essentially an exponent of German idealism. My paper will show how the enigma of late Strauss's life and work could be reduced if scholars considered the composer's idealistic ideology of art.

Like Father, Like Son, or Something More?: Franz Strauss’s “Copies” of his Son’s Manuscripts

The fundamentally conservative nature of Richard Strauss’s education in music has been an accepted fact virtually from the earliest published accounts of his life in the late nineteenth century to the present day. The composer’s father, Franz Strauss, is always credited with having indoctrinated his son with only Classical models and also with having overseen Richard’s music education under the conservative Munich Court Kapellmeister Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer. Franz’s influence is well known from a handful of secondary sources, chiefly Richard’s “Erinnerungen an meinen Vater” [undated, published 1949], the correspondence with his parents [Briefe an die Eltern (1954)], and a few articles by Franz Trenner [notably “Franz Strauss (1822-1905),” published 1960].

Beyond those anecdotal sources, a few manuscripts of Richard’s works in the hand of his father attest to Franz’s involvement in the early years of Richard’s career. Those scores have generally been ignored in the literature, presumably because their descriptions as Abschriften (“copies”) in the catalogs of Erich Mueller von Asow and Franz Trenner suggest that there are no meaningful differences between Richard’s autographs and his father’s “copies.” In fact, a close comparison of the extant pairs of manuscripts (from both father and son) for Richard’s works shows that Franz’s scores differ from his son’s originals in several significant ways.

The sources for at least one of these works, the Serenade, o.Op. 32 (TrV 52), contain evidence of Franz’s teaching of Classical style to his son, while others—the Festmarsch, Op. 1 (TrV 43), the Symphony in D minor, o.Op. 69 (TrV 94), and two later Festmarsches, o.Op. 84 (TrV 135) and o.Op. 87 (157)—reveal how Franz edited or revised his son’s music to improve its effect. Collectively, these manuscript pairs offer the first hard musical evidence of how Franz Strauss worked to promote his son’s nascent career.

Modernism and the Death of the Idealist: Reinterpreting Strauss’s Don Quixote

Despite being relatively well-known today, Strauss’s Don Quixote remains one of the most misunderstood of his tone poems. Although many commentators have offered valuable interpretations, analyses, and reflections on the work, the vast majority of their discussions are infused with a sense of perplexity and bewilderment. Strauss’s declaration, for instance, that “Don Quixote is only fully and entirely comprehensible at the side of Ein Heldenleben” is still open for interpretation. Insights into this enigmatic work can, however, be gained by situating it into Strauss’s Modernist aesthetic and into his compositional path as evidenced by his tone poems as a whole.

This paper offers an interpretation of Don Quixote that considers the work not as a sympathetic portrayal of Cervantes’s hero (as it is often interpreted), but as both an indictment of the German Romantic tradition and a manifesto for Strauss’s compositional future. My reading is derived from two interlocking hermeneutic approaches. On one hand, the musical elements are analyzed in light of the compositional conventions present in Strauss’s preceding tone poems; despite its discursive, episodic large-scale structure (described by even Strauss himself as simply “fantastische Variationen”), an important sonata form convention is still present in the work and serves as a valuable interpretive tool. On the other hand, the programmatic elements of the tone poem are examined for their metaphorical implications in light of Strauss’s Modernist aesthetic. In my interpretation, the death of the protagonist at the end of the work marks none other than the demise of an aspect of Strauss’s compositional persona; the composer resolutely bids farewell to his compositional past before striking out anew in Ein Heldenleben.

Analysing Arabella’s Past

Arabella is commonly regarded as a turning point in Strauss’s career: it marks the end of his collaboration with Hofmannsthal, whose untimely death blighted the opera’s vetting, and it signals the onset of the depression which, according to Gilliam, influenced Strauss’s subsequent aesthetic direction. That the opera also straddles an unseemly historical period, however, is an aspect musicologists have not considered at great length. Indeed, Arabella is more frequently approached as a ‘second Rosenkavalier’ (a left-handed compliment that draws attention to its aesthetic infelicities) rather than as an historical object of the late-Interwar period requiring critical appraisal.

By contrast, the opera’s subtly charged historical and political implications are well known outside musicological circles. Hofmannsthal scholars such as Bogosavljevi? (1993) and Vilain (1998) have challenged Arabella’s image as a blithe romantic comedy, and have offered nuanced readings of the libretto, suggesting that its 1860s Viennese setting and characters symbolically reflect Hofmannsthal’s politically conservative re-visioning of Austrian history during the Gründerzeit.

Taking such interpretations as a starting point, this paper advances an analysis of Strauss’s music as engaged with the historicist aspects of Hofmannsthal’s drama, in particular focusing on the Viennese waltzes that structure much of the opera. By comparing Strauss’s appropriation of the waltz in Arabella with those in Der Rosenkavalier, it is possible to evaluate how the composer self-consciously constructs the genre’s historical connotations to different ends. This intertextual investigation therefore not only allows us to apprehend the particular historicist dimensions of Arabella’s musical surfaces, but also to measure how Strauss’s techniques of appropriation and attitude toward nineteenth-century music history shifted after the First World War. In conclusion it is suggested that Arabella, contrary to received wisdom, bears evidence of its precarious historical context, sharing commonplace anxieties about the tenability of historical narratives and political configurations during the late-Weimar Republic.

Subjectivity and Sentimentality in the Late Works of Richard Strauss

Recent research on the philosophical dilemmas of the young Strauss sheds new light on later periods of his output, particularly the so-called “Indian Summer,” a phase marked by musical and extra-musical engagement with the composer’s early career. In these final works Strauss returned not just to long-abandoned genres but to the way stations of his road to maturity, for reasons addressed elliptically in the late diary entry now known as the “letzte Aufzeichnung.”

Strauss scholarship has yet to answer the composer's final, emphatic complaint that his peculiar brand of musical autobiography had been misunderstood. Characterizations of Strauss as a wearer of masks, an artist fundamentally detached from his work, can deepen this misunderstanding with the implication that behind the mask lay a coherent, controlling subjective presence. When read as a response to his youthful crisis, the variety of Strauss’s autobiographical statements tells a different story, one both darker and more sincere; it speaks of an unstable, fragmented conception of subjectivity, which Strauss was forced to accept as a consequence of his critique of musical idealism.

The most direct statement of this personal philosophy came in the Metamorphosen, a disturbingly honest work in which Strauss juxtaposed the loss of the self, anticipation of his own death, and the decline of German culture. Traces of it can be found as well in the revival of concerto, lied, and sonatina, where Strauss drew distinctions between ironic distance and modernist sentimentality. As the eighty-five-year-old suggested, these insights provide a context for interpreting his oeuvre as a whole, by clarifying the relationship between the work and its creator.