A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Strauss Pt1
Having written last week about my beloved Debussy, I thought this might be the time to look at another of the great vocal composers, Richard Strauss. His absolute dream voice was the soprano, and he wrote some of the most beautiful music ever composed for that voice, but he also wrote two stand-out roles for bass, Baron Ochs in ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ and La Roche in ‘Capriccio’. I have been lucky enough to have sung both those roles in the course of my career, as well as many of the wonderful songs that he composed throughout his long life.
There is a famous quote about Richard Strauss that “if we must have a Richard, let it be Wagner, and if we need a Strauss, let it be Johann”. A good joke, but it’s really unfair. Unbelievably, this Richard could write waltzes as well as Johann and operas which rivalled those of Wagner.
Who was this genius?
He was born in 1864 in Munich in the Kingdom of Bavaria to Franz Strauss, principal horn in the Court Opera in Munich and a professor at the Royal Music School there, and Josephine (née Pschorr), daughter of a major brewery owner in Bavaria. His upbringing was typically musical and bourgeois, comfortable and prosperous, and his talent was recognised at an early age and was nurtured and heavily influenced by his father. Throughout his compositional career, the French Horn featured strongly, and his music has a ‘Gemütlichkeit’ (cosiness) redolent of that childhood. Strauss was not a revolutionary, and this has sometimes led to a dismissal of his music as somehow lacking, old-fashioned and staid, backward-looking and banal. Quips like the one above serve to muddy his reputation, and the suspicion that he was all too comfortable with the Nazi regime in the 30s and 40s has cast a pall over his memory. I hope I can, in the course of this article, persuade you that this dull and indeed vicious reputation is a calumny which deserves to be consigned to fiction, and to reveal the utter genius of this composer, who, throughout his long life (he lived to be 85 and only died in 1949), wrote some of the most fabulous music I know in his own late-Romantic style, full of invention and subtlety.
He was to be heavily influenced by the music of Richard Wagner, but his early heroes were Schumann and Mendelssohn, and, in fact, his father was deeply uncomfortable with Wagner’s style, forbidding his son from studying Wagner’s music. Astonishingly, his father played in the world premiere of Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ at Bayreuth in 1882, attended by the young Richard, but the family failed to grasp the wonders which Wagner had created.
With his comfortable family position, Richard was able to start composing from an early age, but life was not easy. His father was a very dominant person, both privately and in his work. He was notoriously difficult as an orchestral member, and had frequent arguments with conductors and composers, including Wagner! The fact that he was a fantastic horn player saved his career on several occasions, but he must have been both an inspiration and a monster as a father. Richard’s mother was very highly-strung, and sadly spent a lot of her later years in mental institutions, suffering from various forms of depression.
Throughout most of his life, he mixed composition and conducting, beginning his conducting career in 1883 as assistant to Hans von Bülow with the Meiningen Court Orchestra in Thuringia. Bülow’s place in history is already assured by the fact that he was a student of Liszt, and married Liszt’s daughter, Cosima, who left him for Richard Wagner. Perhaps his story is better remembered for being Strauss’s mentor. However, when he suddenly left Meiningen for Berlin, Strauss took over and almost immediately found himself preparing the orchestra for the world premiere of Johannes Brahms’ 4th Symphony in 1885, conducted by the composer. Not long afterwards he became 3rd Conductor at the Bavarian State Opera, and then Principal Conductor in Weimar, after various conducting engagements elsewhere in Germany including Leipzig, where he met Gustav Mahler. In 1889, his tone poem ‘Don Juan’ was premiered in Weimar, to much acclaim and his career really took off, as he wrote more tone poems and conducted all over the world. He had met the soprano Pauline de Ahna in 1887 in Munich and she became his student and eventually his wife. His conducting debut at the Bayreuth Festival was in 1894 in Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” with Pauline as Elisabeth. They were married later in 1894 in Munich and Richard gave his bride 4 songs – ‘Ruhe, meine Seele’, ‘Cäcilie’, ‘Heimliche Aufforderung’ and ‘Morgen’ – as wedding presents. These are four of the most beautiful songs in the entire Lieder repertoire. What a gift!
Strauss composed songs throughout his entire career, ending with the Four Last Songs of 1948, which were only performed after his death in 1949. They were premiered by the great Norwegian Wagnerian soprano, Kirsten Flagstad at the Albert hall in London in 1950. There is a recording of that concert available, conducted by Furtwängler, which is fascinating, but the songs ideally require a different sort of voice. I love the versions by Gundula Janowitz, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Jessye Norman. Several others are available and also excellent. These songs are a magical conclusion to a great career.
I have always loved singing Strauss songs, as they are wonderful to sing, and audiences always enjoy them. He wrote a few expressly for bass, and I have taken great pleasure over the years in singing the splendid “Im Spätboot” in concerts, ever since I first sang it in the Schwarzkopf Masterclasses on BBC in 1981. The main thing to grasp about singing Strauss Lieder is that, despite the often extremely complex harmonies and dense textures of the accompaniment, you can nearly always find your note in there somewhere! The same applies to the operas too, so you can be completely accurate in pitching Strauss if you look and listen hard enough. If only more contemporary composers could help the singer in this way! Unless one is blessed with perfect pitch (the spontaneous ability to see a note and sing it), much of post-Romantic music is a nightmare for the performer. Strauss was often castigated for his backward-looking style, and his strict adherence to tonality, but, for me, it is his greatest asset.
His first great operatic success, ‘Salome’, which premiered in December 1905 in Dresden with a libretto based on a German translation of Oscar Wilde’s play, was a sensation, both musically and theatrically. Interestingly, Wilde wrote the play in French, and in 1907, Strauss adapted the opera to be sung in French. Mary Garden, the Aberdonian diva who had created Mélisande for Debussy, was the first to sing the title role in French. She scandalised the New York audience at the Metropolitan Opera with her realistic acting, lasciviously kissing the severed head of John the Baptist and performing the Dance of the Seven Veils in a flesh coloured body stocking.
‘Salome’, despite being firmly in the tonal tradition, was seen as very avant-garde at the time, and Strauss’ next opera, ‘Elektra’ took harmony even further, and even has some sections which are atonal. Using Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of his own play based on the Greek tragedy by Sophocles, Strauss composed a one act opera that was premiered, again in Dresden, in 1909. This expressionist, and “modernist” work pushed the boundaries of taste and harmony to the very limits, full of violent brutality and wild discord. It is yet another superb vehicle for a soprano, needing a big voice (even bigger than Salome) with great expression. I was lucky to be present in the little King’s Theatre at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974, when the great Swedish soprano Birgit Nilsson sang Elektra, along with the Royal Opera, Stockholm, in a magnificent performance which I remember for the sheer volume produced by this extraordinary singer. I was in the cheapest seat at the back of the Gods, and I felt almost pinned to the back wall by the laser intensity of Nilsson’s voice. It was a true never to be forgotten experience. She was the world’s highest paid singer at the time, the best Brünnhilde and Isolde, Salome and Elektra, and Turandot, and she was singing in my hometown! That was a great era for the Edinburgh Festival, and it was one of the catalysts for my career.
After the success of ‘Salome’ and ‘Elektra’, it came as something of a shock to the musical world when Strauss, again working with Hofmannsthal, produced the miracle that is ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ in 1911. People had been expecting another modernist, expressionist work to follow, and instead were presented with the most marvellous romantic comedy, awash with beautiful, harmonically lush orchestration, complete with waltzes, duets and trios. Strauss, the enfant terrible, had reverted to his own nature, and his own style. Whereas the world expected him to go down the path of the avant garde, he decided to perfect his late-Romantic style, much to the satisfaction of singers and audiences everywhere!
Brian performs in Der Rosenkavalier
He followed up the success of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ with ‘Ariadne auf Naxos’ and ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’, more tonally based works of genius with the added input of Hofmannsthal’s libretti. The final collaboration with Hofmannsthal was ‘Arabella’ in 1929, just before the librettist’s death from a stroke. The opera was eventually premiered, again in Dresden, in 1933.
The coming to power of the Nazi Party in Germany was a difficult time for Strauss. He was not a political creature, and believed in the power of music rather than war, but his son Franz had married a Jew, Alice Grab von Hermannswőrth, and he was determined to save his family and his grandchildren from the clutches of the Nazis. He took on the role of head of the Reich Music Chamber, hoping with his high profile to escape the opprobrium of Hitler and Goebbels, and also to help perform music by composers the Nazis had banned, such as Mahler, Mendelssohn and Debussy (who married a Jew). He was also determined to keep copyright fees safe for all composers. His stubbornness in continuing to use the Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig for his opera ‘Die Schweigsame Frau’, and particularly a letter he wrote to Zweig traducing the Nazis, led to his removal from the Reichsmusikkammer in 1935, and his last opera before WW2,’Friedenstag’, a thinly veiled critique of Nazi policy with a clear anti-war message, left him in a sort of no man’s land. His fame in the world kept Alice and her children safe but he was no longer lionised by the Party. That he was able, with the conductor, Clemens Krauss, working on ideas from Zweig and Josef Gregor, to write his wonderful opera ‘Capriccio’, premiered in 1943 at the height of the war, was a minor miracle. It is a work very dear to my heart, and in the next article, I will write about it in more detail.
As with Mozart, I seem to have quite a lot to say about Richard Strauss, so I propose to end Part 1 here, and resume soon.
