In the summer of 1929 Hofmannsthal suddenly died. Some time before he had written a short novel, Lucidor, about an impoverished family with two marriageable daughters for whom an attempt is made to secure wealthy husbands. To facilitate the marital stratagem one of the daughters is dressed in boy’s clothes. The disguised girl falls in love with a suitor of her sister, Arabella, to whom one Mandryka, a romantic Balkan youth of great wealth, pays court. The period is the year 1860, the scene Vienna.
Inevitably, Arabella turned out to be something of a throwback into the scene, if not the glamorous period or milieu, of Der Rosenkavalier. Almost inevitably, the lyric comedy—the final product of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal partnership—is filled with scenes, characters and analogies to the more famous work. In truth, Arabella is a kind of little sister of Rosenkavalier. At the same time the texture of the score and the character of the orchestral treatment has a transparency and a delicate charm which Strauss rarely equalled, even if the melodic invention and the instrumentation suggest a kind of chamber music on a large scale. As in Ariadne auf Naxos the composer does not hesitate to make use of a florid soprano to introduce scintillating samples of ornate vocalism. One feels, however, that Arabella is a semi-finished product. The second half of the work does not sustain the level of the first. Many things might have been worked out more expertly if the librettist had been spared to supervise work, which as things stand is far from a really satisfactory or unified piece. But the score contains some of the older Strauss’s most enamoring lyric pages and it is easy to feel that his heart was in the better portions of the opera. The score of Arabella benefits by the introduction of folk-songs influence—in this instance of a number of South Slavic melodies, which are among its genuine treasures.
Lacking his faithful Hofmannsthal Strauss turned to Stefan Zweig, who had made for him an operatic adaptation of Ben Jonson’s play, “Epicoene, or The Silent Woman”. On June 24, 1935, it was produced under Karl Böhm at the Dresden Opera. At once trouble arose. Hitler and the Nazis had come into power and Zweig, as a Jew, was automatically an outcast. After the very first performances the piece was forbidden, not to be revived till after Hitler’s end (and then in Munich and in Wiesbaden). It is actually a question whether the temporary loss of Die Schweigsame Frau must be accounted a serious deprivation. The Silent Woman is a rowdy, cruel farce about the tricks played on a wretched old man, unable to endure noise and subjected to all manner of torments in order that he be compelled to renounce a young woman, who to assure a lover a monetary settlement, plays the shrew so successfully that the old man is only too willing to pay any amount of his wealth to be rid of her. It is much like the story of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and the dramatic consequences are to all intents the same. There is, in reality, nothing serious or genuinely based on musical inspiration in the opera, the best features of which are certain set pieces (some rather adroitly polyphonic) and a charmingly orchestrated overture described in the score as a “potpourri”. A tenderer note is struck only at the point where, as evening falls, the old man drops off to sleep.
As librettist for his next two operas, Friedenstag and Daphne, Strauss sought the aid of Joseph Gregor. The first named work (in one act) was performed on July 7, 1938, in Munich, under Clemens Krauss. Ironically enough this work that aimed to glorify the coming of peace after conflict, was first performed with the political troubles which heralded the outbreak of the Second World War, visibly shaping themselves. Daphne, bucolic tragedy in a single act, also from the pen of Gregor, was heard in Dresden, October 15, 1938. And Gregor, too, supplied the aging composer, with the book of Die Liebe der Danae, a “merry mythological tale” in three acts. To date its sole production to date seems to have been in Salzburg, as a “dress rehearsal”, August 16, 1944.
Strauss’s last opera (produced under Clemens Krauss in Munich on October 28, 1942), was Capriccio, “a conversation piece for music”, in one act. Krauss and the composer collaborating on the book. The “conversation” is a discussion of certain aesthetic problems underlying the musical treatment of operatic texts. It was the final work of operatic character Strauss was to attempt. This did not mean, however, that he had written his last score. Far from it! At 81 he was to complete several, the real value of which may be left to the judgment of posterity. They include some songs, a duet-concertino for clarinet and bassoon with strings, a concerto for oboe and orchestra, a still unperformed concert fragment for orchestra from the Legend of Joseph. More important, unquestionably, is Metamorphoses, a “study for 23 solo strings”, first played in Zurich, January 25, 1946 under the direction of Paul Sacher. This work, despite its length, is music of suave, beautiful texture; a certain nobly nostalgic quality of farewell which seems to sum up the composer’s life work, with all its ups and downs. We may allow it to go at this and to spare further enumeration of the innumerable odds and ends he was to assemble from his boyhood to the patriarchal age of more than 85 years; or even to allude to his gross derangement of Mozart’s “Idomeneo”, done in 1930 at Munich.
Having lived through a lively young manhood and endured the bitter experience of two world wars Richard Strauss in the end performed the miracle of actually dying of old age! One might almost have looked for convulsions of nature, for signs and portents at his eventual passing. But his going was to be accompanied by no such things. His death in Garmisch, September 8, 1949, was brought about by the illnesses of the flesh at more than four score and five. He died of a complication of heart, liver and kidney troubles—and he died in his bed! A Heldenleben, if you will! And a death and transfiguration played against the loveliest conceivable background—an incomparable stage setting of Alpine lakes and heights, with streams and gleaming summits furnishing a glorious backdrop for his resting place!
COMPLETE LIST OF RECORDINGS
by
THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY
OF NEW YORK
COLUMBIA MASTERWORKS RECORDS
The following records are available on Columbia “Lp”