{"id":3299,"date":"2011-08-12T11:30:17","date_gmt":"2011-08-12T10:30:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/?p=3299"},"modified":"2024-05-25T09:21:53","modified_gmt":"2024-05-25T08:21:53","slug":"re-rating-richard-part-ii-strauss-innovation-and-absolute-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kennethwoods.net\/blog1\/2011\/08\/12\/re-rating-richard-part-ii-strauss-innovation-and-absolute-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-rating Richard part II: Strauss, innovation and absolute music."},"content":{"rendered":"

Part II- Strauss and Modernity, Strauss and Program Music <\/strong><\/p>\n

(Part I- “He was no Mahler, he was no Wagner” is here”)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Richard Strauss\u2019s music is an intergral and popular part of the modern concert repertoire, and yet, he remains one of our most misunderstood and underrated composers.<\/p>\n

We all know the case against Richard Strauss: he was no Gustav Mahler, he was no Richard Wagner, he turned his back on modernity, he was \u201conly\u201d a program-music and opera composer, who couldn\u2019t write in classical forms, he was an egomaniac, he was a Nazi, his music lacks spirituality and depth.<\/p>\n

My purpose here is not to rehabilitate Strauss as a historical figure, but to look at whether too many of us have been listening to his music with ears and hearts only partly opened.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3- Strauss turned his back on modernity<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I hinted at this in my discussion of Mahler and Strauss. It was long accepted as a truism that Strauss had somehow betrayed history and sold out when he went from the hyper-intensity and violence of Elektra to the sophisticated lyricism and humane wit of Der Rosenkavalier. I remember one of my teachers saying \u201cStrauss had promise, but he spent the last 38 years of his career discrediting himself as a composer.\u201d Really?<\/p>\n

First of all, Strauss was modern way before Salome and Elektra- his very modern sounding Burleske for Piano and orchestra was, amazingly, written in 1885.\u00a0 Strauss had had been deploying a tremendous facility with dissonance and dislocation for over 25 years by the time he wrote Rosenkavalier- he was smart enough to realize that \u00a0he had to continue to grow and develop, which for him, meant making his style more classical and melodic. Strauss always said that the musical language of Salome and Elektra had been a response to the stories they told, not the outgrowth of an aesthetic program. He didn\u2019t want to keep retelling the same stories, retreading the same emotional territory.<\/p>\n

Strauss\u2019s real contributions to modernity go far beyond the searing dissonances unleashed in Elektra.\u00a0 Strauss was the first great composer to see the bankruptcy of the Romantic project. Take Don Juan, one of his earliest major works. What first seems like the quintessential Romantic\u00a0 and heroic orchestral showpiece turns out to\u00a0 be more like a vivisection of the genre. After 20 minutes of Romantic clich\u00e9s on steroids, Strauss kills his Don in one of the most shockingly nihilistic endings in all of music. Not for Strauss a cathartic funeral march, or a searing death aria- just the cold realization that it is over. \u00a0Almost all of the endings to Strauss\u2019s early tone poems avoid a sense of closure and fulfillment. He\u2019s not one for catharsis. The beginning of Also Sprach is infinitely more exciting and satisfying than the bleak and ambivalent ending.\u00a0 Till is executed, Quioxte dies.\u00a0 In many ways, Strauss saw the world with more \u201cmodern,\u201d clear-eyed skepticism than Mahler. Strauss understood that life is messy, complex and confounding. Where Mahler almost always manages to solve all the problems of the universe by the last bar of a symphony (and nobody ever did it better), Strauss\u2019s endings are truer to life- sometimes incomplete, sometimes violent, sometimes enigmatic, and with the very notable exception of Death and Transfiguration, almost always hinting that problems remain to be solved.<\/p>\n

What the case of Strauss illustrates all-too-well is just how comically narrowly people defined musical modernity and innovation for most of the 20th c.. Dissonance and innovation are not the same thing. Yes, Ariadne auf Naxos is not as dissonant a piece as Elektra or Lulu or Erwartung, but it is a hugely original and innovative piece- it breaks more new structural, philosophical and instrumental new ground than any of those three modernist masterpieces. And how much fresher, more orignal and more interesting is this piece than any number of orthodox regurgitations of serial orthodoxies by composers not on the same level as Berg and Schoenberg?<\/p>\n