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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