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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