Richard Strauss
After a crayon by Faragò (1905)
The first-fruits of Ritter's influence upon Strauss were the symphonic fantasia Aus Italien (1886). The young revolutionary as yet moves with a certain amount of circumspection. The new work is poetic, programmatic, but it is cast in the conventional four-movement form, the separate movements corresponding roughly to those of the ordinary symphony. It is obviously a 'prentice work,’ but it is of significance in Strauss's history for a warmth of emotion that had been only rarely perceptible in his earlier music. Here and there it has the rude, knockabout sort of energy that was noticeable in some of the earlier works, and that in the later works was to degenerate into a mere noisy slamming about of commonplaces; but it also shows much poetic feeling, and in particular an ardent romantic appreciation of nature.
Aus Italien was followed by a series of remarkable tone-poems—Don Juan (op. 20, 1888), Macbeth (op. 23, written 1886-7 but not published until after the Don Juan), Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (op. 28, 1894-95), Also sprach Zarathustra (op. 30, 1894-95), Don Quixote (op. 39, 1897), Ein Heldenleben (op. 40, 1898), and the Symphonia Domestica (op. 53, 1903). With the last-named work Strauss bade farewell to the concert room for many years, the next stage of his development being worked out in the opera house.
The forms, no less than the titles, of the orchestral works, reveal the many-sidedness of Strauss's mind, the keenness of his interest in life and literary art, the individuality of the point of view from which he regards each of his subjects, and the peculiarly logical medium he adopts for the expression of each of them. Bound up with this adaptability are a certain restlessness that drives him on to abandon every field in turn before he has developed all the possibilities of it, and a certain anxiety to 'hit the public between the eyes' each time that gives him now and then the appearance of exploiting new sensations for new sensations' sake. It is perhaps not doing him any injustice, for instance, to suppose that a very keen finger upon the public pulse warned him that it would be unwise to bombard it with another blood-and-lust drama of the type of Salome and Elektra; so, with an admirably sure instinct, he relaxes into the broad comedy of Der Rosenkavalier. Feeling after this that the public wanted something newer still, he tried, in Ariadne auf Naxos, to combine drama and opera in the one work. Then, realizing from the Western European successes of the Russians that ballet is likely to become the order of the day, he tries his hand at a modified form of this in 'The Legend of Joseph.'
What in the later works has become, however, almost as much a commercial as an artistic impulse, was in the early years the genuine quick-change of a very fertile, eager spirit, with extraordinary powers of poetic and graphic expression in music. Strauss, like Wagner, is a musical architect by instinct; he can plan big edifices and realize them. The sureness of this instinct is incidentally shown by the varied forms of these early and middle-period orchestral works of his. As we have seen, the writer of symphonic poems is always confronted by the serious problem of harmonizing a poetic with a musical development; and in practice we find that, as a rule, either the following of the literary idea destroys the purely musical logic of the work, or, in his anxiety to preserve a formal logic in his music, the composer has to impair the simplicity or the continuity of the poetic scheme, as Strauss has had to do in the passage in Till Eulenspiegel, already cited. But, on the whole, Strauss has come much nearer than any other composer to solving the problem of combined poetic and musical form in instrumental music. In Macbeth he has 'internalized' the dramatic action in a very remarkable way—a procedure he might have adopted with advantage on other occasions. Here, where there was every temptation to the superficially effective painting of externalities, he has dissolved the pictorial and episodical into the psychological, making Macbeth's own soul the centre of all the dramatic storm and stress, and so allowing full scope for the purely expressive power of music. In Don Juan the form is rightly quasi-symphonic—a group of workable main themes representing the hero, with a group of subsidiary themes suggestive of the minor characters that cross his path and the circumstances under which he meets with them. The tissue is not woven throughout with absolute continuity, but the form as a whole is lucid and coherent. The episodical adventures of Till Eulenspiegel could find no better musical frame than the rondo form that Strauss has chosen for them; while the variation form is most suited to the figures, the adventures, and the psychology of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In the Symphonia Domestica the number and relationship of the characters, and the incidents that make up the domestic day, are best treated in a form that is virtually that of the ordinary symphony compressed into a single movement. A similar congruity between form and matter will be found in Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben.
This fertility of form was only the outward and visible sign of an extraordinary fertility of conception. No other composer, before or since, has poured such a wealth of thinking into program music, created so many poetic-musical types, or depicted their milieu with such graphic power. Each new work, dealing as it did with new characters and new scenes, spontaneously found for itself a new idiom, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic; in this unconscious transformation of his speech in accordance with the inward vision Strauss resembles Wagner and Hugo Wolf. The immense energy of the mind is shown not only in the range and variety of its psychology, but physically, as it were, in the wide trajectory of the melodies, the powerful gestures of the rhythms that sometimes, indeed, become almost convulsive—and the long-breathed phraseology of passages like the opening section of Ein Heldenleben.
It was perhaps inevitable that this extraordinary energy should occasionally get out of hand and degenerate into a sort of Unbändigkeit. Strauss is at once a man of genius and an irresponsible street urchin. With all his gifts, something that goes to the making of the artist of the very greatest kind is lacking in him. He has a giant span of conception that is rare in music; but he seems to take a pleasure in constructing gigantic edifices only to spoil them for the admiring spectator by scrawling a fatuity or an obscenity across the front of them. He can be, at times, unaccountably perverse, malicious, childish towards his own creations. This element in him, or rather the seeds from which it has developed, first become clearly visible in Till Eulenspiegel. There, however, it remains pure gaminerie; it does not clash with the nature of the subject, and the jovial, youthful spirits and the happy inventiveness of the composer carry it off. But afterwards it often assumes an unpleasant form. There are one or two things in Don Quixote that amuse us a little at first but afterwards become rather tiresome, as over-insistence on the purely physical grotesque always does in time. In Ein Heldenleben a drama that is mostly worked out on a high spiritual plane is vulgarized by the crude physical horror of the brutal battle scene, and by the now well-nigh pointless humor of the ugly 'Adversaries' section. There are pettinesses and sillinesses in the Symphonia Domestica that one can hardly understand a man of Strauss's eminence troubling to put on paper. Altogether, we may say of the Strauss of the instrumental works alone—we can certainly say it of the later Strauss of the operas—that he is, in Romain Rolland's phrase, a curious compound of 'mud, débris, and genius.' Always he is a spirit at war with itself; sometimes he seems cursed, like an obverse of Goethe's Mephistopheles, to will the good and work the ill. But he has enriched program music with a large fund of new ideas, and given it a new direction and a new technique. He has established, more thoroughly than any other composer, the right of poetic instrumental music to a place by the side of abstract music. He has attempted things that were thought impossible in music, sometimes failing, but more often than not succeeding extraordinarily.
His workmanship is equal to his invention; of him at any rate the post-classicists can never say, as they said half a century ago of Liszt and his school, that he writes literary music because he lacks the self-discipline and the skill necessary for success in the abstract forms. If anything his technique, especially his orchestral technique, is too astounding; it tempts him to do amazing but unnecessary things for the mere sake of doing them. But with all his faults he is a colossus of sorts; he bestrides modern German music as Wagner did that of half a century ago. In wealth and variety of emotion and in power of graphic utterance his work as a whole is beyond comparison with that of any other contemporary composer.