An examination of questions
raised by the Strauss anniversary
[From
OPERA, August 2014, pp. 955-962]
For as long
as there have been anniversaries, it seems, composers’ champions have bemoaned
the way in which they have been celebrated, prompting questions of what—if
anything—their purpose should be. Traditionally, they provide an opportunity
for dusting off rarities. However, in 2014 poor 300-year-old, seldom-performed
Gluck is all but absent from the British stage (the Buxton Festival has bucked
the trend with its Orfeo ed Euridice, which Scottish Opera also stages
next summer). For Richard Strauss, on the whole, it seems largely to be a case
of repertoire as usual—certainly in the UK—just perhaps a little more of it.
Beyond its
new Frau ohne Schatten, the Royal Opera has celebrated with revivals of Elektra
and Ariadne auf Naxos (plus, at a push, last summer’s concert
performances of Capriccio); Glyndebourne has staged Der Rosenkavalier;
the Proms offers that Glyndebourne Rosenkavalier semi-staged, plus Elektra
and Salome; NI Opera tackles Salome early in 2015. One
exception will be at Garsington, which, after having served rare Strauss well
in the late 1990s, will present Intermezzo next summer—and that work,
admittedly, has also been seen in recent years at Buxton and Scottish Opera. (There
is no Strauss scheduled in the foreseeable future at ENO, which last tackled
one of his operas, Der Rosenkavalier, in 2012.)
The picture
across the Atlantic is similar. The Met’s 2013-14 season included Frau, Rosenkavalier
and Arabella. Various other usual suspects are dotted around the US
schedules; Chicago’s Capriccio is an honourable exception, as was a New
York concert performance of Feuersnot, courtesy of Leon Botstein and his
American Symphony Orchestra (whom we also have to thank for modern recordings,
on Telarc, of Die aegyptische Helena and Die Liebe der Danae).
In mainland
Europe, of course, the situation is more complex, but it is still striking how
the rarities remain, well, just that: there is no production of Danae,
no Helena, no Friedenstag or Guntram. Stagings of Die
schweigsame Frau are a little thin on the ground (a new production in Essen
next year is joined by a revival of Barrie Kosky’s Munich staging; the Chemnitz
production on which cpo’s recent recording was based was also revived earlier
this year). The anniversary year’s only fully-staged Feuersnot was at
Palermo’s Teatro Massimo; it was complemented in June, around the time of
Strauss’s birthday, by a concert performance of the piece in Vienna’s Volksoper
and a semi-staged version given in the courtyard of Dresden’s Residenz, under
the auspices not of the Semperoper—that Straussian institution par
excellence—but of the Dresden Festival. The Semperoper has, however, performed Guntram
in concert, and in November puts on its own mini-festival, featuring Capriccio,
Daphne and Arabella (in the poorly-received Florentine Klepper
production unveiled at this year’s Salzburg Easter Festival). Daphne does
reasonably well elsewhere, too, with further new anniversary-year stagings in
Toulouse and Brussels. The main Salzburg Festival, meanwhile, could be accused
of playing it safe with a new Rosenkavalier (albeit one in the hands of
Harry Kupfer).
Alexander
Pereira, the outgoing Salzburg boss, has expressed a reluctance to play the
anniversary game, and of course no one is under any obligation to do anything special
to mark an anniversary. However, the fact that so many institutions are
claiming to do so, but are doing so without doing what we usually expect
anniversaries to do, is surely worth exploring. And the fact is that the
situation as regards the position of Strauss’s operas in the repertory has
changed little since the composer’s last major anniversary 15 years ago. At
that time, in a feature ahead of Garsington’s bold staging of Die
aegyptische Helena, Rodney Milnes could announce that ‘Today Arabella and
Capriccio are repertory pieces, Frau ohne Schatten is done
everywhere, and there are those (few, admittedly) who believe Intermezzo to
be his best opera.’ In a polemical article published in these pages a few years
after that, Robin Holloway even put forward a case for Capriccio as ‘the
most perfect of Strauss’s stage works’; Helena, incidentally, he
dismissed as a ‘tired old jade that hasn’t made it into general repertory
even in these times when almost anything goes’.
But, after
the flurry of performances around 1999, are we really in a time ‘when almost
anything goes?’ Can Capriccio, still often dependent on being championed
by a diva such as Renée Fleming, really be counted a repertoire piece? One
definite truth is that Die Frau ohne Schatten retains a strong position,
as this season demonstrates: apart from the Royal Opera’s Claus Guth staging
(first seen, of course, in Milan) and the Met’s revival of Herbert Wernicke’s
staging in the autumn, 2014-15 will have witnessed Krzysztof Warlikowski’s new
Munich production, plus several other new German stagings (Leipzig, Kassel,
Gelsenkirchen, Saarbrücken). Straussians can only be thankful for this profusion
of Frauen, but the opera’s newfound ubiquity has, if anything, also made
us ungrateful—it is no longer counted the rarity it once was.
Strauss
scholarship—which has been doing its best to change attitudes towards the
composer in the last few decades, putting forward a revisionist account of his
career—might have played some role in helping secure Frau’s position.
That revisionist account re-characterizes his post-Elektra ‘volte-face’
less as a retreat from the avant-garde, for which the composer was for a while
a (distinctly reluctant) figurehead, than an exploration, in Der
Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos in particular, of a kind of
post-modernism avant la lettre. (The way in which Die Frau ohne
Schatten, arguably the finest achievement of a Strauss in resolutely
un-post-modern mode, fits in here is more complex.) Beyond this, Intermezzo,
it has been argued, looks forward to film techniques in its rapid, quickly
flowing scenes; Die aegyptische Helena was a Zeitoper with its
finger very much on the pulse. Friedenstag, we are now told (contrary to
earlier critiques), represents an act of resistance against the Nazis. At the
other end of Strauss’s career, Feuersnot has been demonstrated to be an
essential stepping-stone to Salome, away from the Wagnerian
philosophizing that (along with the difficulty of its title role) makes Guntram
probably the least salvageable of all the Strauss operas.
The problem
remains, though, that you cannot fill a theatre on the back of musicological
defences alone, however persuasive many of these arguments are; and it’s
perhaps understandable that some opera-lovers find, say, the voyeurism of Intermezzo,
or the ironic self-reflection that informs so many of Strauss’s operas less
appealing than the more visceral, un-ironic drama of other works contemporary
with mid-period Strauss—by Janáček, for example. Few will argue with
Kasper Holten, I’d imagine, when he suggests that The Makropoulos Case or
From the House of the Dead—neither of which has ever been seen at Covent
Garden—would be more deserving of a Royal Opera staging than some lesser-known
Strauss. The operas of Korngold and Schreker also, as Holten notes, vie for
attention among the profusion of works from the period—and those composers
certainly have their claims bolstered by political reasons.
A pragmatic
Holten further explains that, in basic bums-on-seats terms, Strauss can be
problematic. In London at least, he suggests, the operas can be split into four
categories, with only Der Rosenkavalier fitting into the top, ‘popular’
one. Salome and Elektra—still in terms of PR able to ride their
century-old wave of controversy—constitute a second category. Die Frau ohne
Schatten and Ariadne fill the third semi-canonical one, with the
rest of the works essentially in a fourth. And Covent Garden’s director of
opera expresses a certain sense of disappointment that the enormous effort
taken to put on a critically-acclaimed production of Die Frau ohne Schatten was
not matched at the box office. ‘When we finally did the piece in Denmark,’ he
tells me, ‘everybody was queuing up to see it.’ Oper Frankfurt’s Bernd Loebe
feels similarly proud of his company’s recent revivals of Frau, but also
admits it’s often hard to sell. Even when a bona-fide Strauss house such as Vienna’s
Staatsoper staged its Robert Carsen production of the piece for the first time
in 1999, there were unsold seats. In Strauss’s home town of Munich, though, the
Bayerische Staatsoper’s new production did sell out in its opening run in the
autumn.
Die Frau
ohne Schatten is
famous for the demands it makes on an opera house’s resources, but the majority
of Strauss’s operas—regardless of the subject matter or tone—also tend to need
outstanding singers, plus a lot of players, playing a lot of notes. In an essay
written for the 100th anniversary of Strauss’s birth, the stern
Frankfurt-school theorist Theodor Adorno—one of the composer’s most astute
critics, at least once one gets beyond the occasionally impenetrable
philosophical armour—wrote that Strauss was ‘the first composer to adopt the
gesture of the idealized big industrialist. He does not need to scrimp; his
means are highly expendable. He does not need to check his books: production
goes on without a care.’ For the Marxist Adorno, this was in part a critique of
how Strauss shamelessly partook in capitalism—not just ideologically but also,
in practical terms, in his work on behalf of copyright and composers’ rights.
The point
about the expendability of Strauss’s means holds, though, and it reflects the
fact that he was largely composing in an operatic economy that was very
different from ours, when opera houses’ means were also a great deal more
expendable. There are further issues, too, as Milnes noted in his Helena essay.
‘If you are amongst the most successful composers of your generation,’ he
observes, ‘then you write for the greatest singers of that generation …
and that can make it extremely difficult for casting directors of future
generations.’ Garsington’s production was counted a great success, cast carefully
within its means. When it was felt a modern match for the first Helena,
Elisabeth Rethberg (or the first Helena in New York, Maria Jeritza), had been
found in Deborah Voigt, however, even that didn’t help the Metropolitan Opera’s
2007 production.
The musical
difficulty of the operas is often also matched by their literary complexity.
Hofmannsthal, of course, is the original bogeyman in this regard, and was for a
long time implicitly—if not explicitly—held responsible for Strauss’s
undignified retreat from the front line of modernism to explore decorous
historicism in Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne, impenetrable
allegory in Die Frau ohne Schatten and misguided levity in Die
aegyptische Helena, and to attempt to recapture former glories in Arabella
(‘so patently second brew from [Der Rosenkavalier’s] silvery teapot’,
as Holloway put it). This of course ties in with the now-largely-discredited
narrative of post-Elektra decline, but charges against Hofmannsthal’s
wordiness, philosophical complexity, and general evasiveness (in both his life
and his work) persist. Despite his best efforts, the librettist regularly
struggled to hold back the tide of his own enormous erudition and learning that
threatened to engulf his collaborations with Strauss: we probably have the
composer’s pragmatism to thank for the fact that Die Frau ohne Schatten,
to pick the most obvious example, was ever completed.
It’s
fascinating to speculate where Strauss’s collaboration with Hofmannsthal would
have gone after Arabella, had the latter not died suddenly in 1929—and
to wonder, too, how different that opera would have been had the librettist
survived to revise the final two acts. Certainly Hofmannsthal, had he lived,
would have given the Nazis an even greater headache than did Stefan Zweig,
Strauss’s next librettist. (Hofmannsthal’s own Jewish heritage could be
conveniently ignored after his death.) The events surrounding the 1935 premiere
of Zweig and Strauss’s Die schweigsame Frau—during which both the
librettist and, to a lesser extent, the composer fell foul of the regime—are
well documented, and the fortunes of the piece have arguably never recovered. A
charming comedy based on Ben Jonson (and surely a gift for one of the London
houses), it nevertheless suffers from Strauss’s reluctance to tailor his
musical means to the dramatic ends. And its appeal is by no means universal:
Loebe declares himself indifferent to its ‘crampy’ humour, and although Kosky’s
Munich production sold out in its first run, in the Prinzregententheater, it
will be interesting to see how it fares in its revival in the much larger
Nationaltheater.
Strauss
then ended up with Joseph Gregor, his third Austrian librettist, of whom he had
a famously low opinion. Gregor was a theatre historian and for his two main
operas with Strauss, Daphne and Die Liebe der Danae (which itself
has its roots in a plan by Hofmannsthal), Strauss’s trusted friend Clemens
Krauss was called upon to suggest changes to bring the librettos out of the
library and into the theatre. Gregor failed in Danae’s libretto to make
the various mythical sources cohere, but David Blewitt was right, when
reviewing the opera’s 1999 outing at Garsington, to conclude that ‘Danae may
be no masterpiece, but it can boast some of the finest music Strauss ever
penned’. He further notes that ‘thematically it is thoroughly contemporary’—now,
one might add, more so than ever. (Kirsten Harms’s recent Deutsche Oper
production, available on Arthaus DVD and Blu-ray, further emphasizes the
contemporary relevance of its love-before-money message.)
There are
different difficulties with Daphne, one of which is the nature of its
heroine, whose transition from an initial passivity to even greater passivity
is almost the exact opposite of the transformation undergone by many of the
great female characters in the Strauss-Hofmannsthal operas. The shimmering
beauties of the exquisitely crafted score cannot, perhaps, make up for the lack
of drama. As a result, it seems, it can be a hard sell: Frankfurt’s
critically-acclaimed Claus Guth production achieves roughly 75 per cent
audiences on its revivals. (Friedenstag, originally conceived as Daphne’s
companion piece, and worked out in clandestine collaboration with Zweig, on
whose idea it was based, remains probably, with the exception of Guntram,
the hardest sell of all.)
By a
similar token, if in certain senses Holloway is right about the perfectness of Capriccio,
that opera (with a libretto by Strauss and Krauss) is arguably too clever, too
self-reflexive and too much an opera about opera to appeal to a wider audience.
A similar problem, at the other end of Strauss’s oeuvre, exists with Feuersnot.
The piece teems with rich melodies, brilliant orchestration and fascinating
pre-echoes of later works, and is suffused, with its trenchant critique of
petty bourgeois morality and conservatism, with a bracing sense of the new
century. But both its score and the libretto (by the satirist Ernst von
Wolzogen) are full of in-jokes, puns and allusions that must have passed much
of the audience by even in 1901, let alone in 2014.
Beyond the
issues already raised, there’s another vexed question, one whose apparently
subjective nature means that it is carefully avoided in musicological discourse
but passionately embraced and debated elsewhere—that of actual quality. Strauss
is a composer who can polarize opera-lovers still today, for an array of complex
reasons both political and musical. But there is also, it seems, residual
suspicion regarding the fact that he was a fully professional composer, who
essentially treated his vocation as such, rising early to be at his desk and
put in a full day’s work. He had little time for the Romantic clichés regarding
inspiration, dictation from above and the like—at least in regard to himself:
he made an exception with regard to his beloved Mozart.
In what few
public proclamations he made, he maintained a self-deprecating persona, and
it’s possible to argue that this, his humble (if always, one suspects, slightly
tongue-in-cheek) acknowledgement of his modest position in relation to his
great predecessors, made him a far more ‘modern’ composer than those who clung
onto the (Romantic) illusion of ‘greatness’. But it also makes his works
particularly susceptible to charges of note-spinning, of his producing (to
extend Adorno’s industrialist metaphor) counterpoint by the yard, melisma by
the metre. In some cases this charge is perhaps unfair (and when we read in a
letter to Hofmannsthal of his concern he might be ‘note-spinning’ in the final
pages of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the German word is ‘musizieren’, which
doesn’t carry quite the same negative connotations). It is worth remembering,
too, that the effect of the favourite passages of Strauss is always greater in
context: it can’t be Rosenkavalier Trios and Recognition Scenes all the
way. But in other cases it is impossible to deny drops in inspiration, the
occasional need for cuts—even if it’s less the composer’s fault, perhaps, than
his librettists’.
Ultimately,
though, in the cold light of today’s straitened operatic climate, it’s the
basic business case for so much rare Strauss that doesn’t quite add up. Of
course one could argue that it’s a matter of chicken and egg: opera houses need
to present persuasive productions of Die Liebe der Danae, for example,
in the first place to give the audience the appetite. The danger is that,
as with Die Frau ohne Schatten, such productions will attract only the
passionate minority, and not the all-important intrigued majority that will
make the necessary revivals viable. Oper Frankfurt has recently chosen the sensible
middle ground in opting for concert performances of Danae this season
and Die aegyptische Helena in 2014-15, and disappointment that such
works can’t be experienced even in that format in the UK is probably justified.
Holten, however, hints at some hope for the
future: ‘If we’re to be very crude about it,’ he admits, ‘in 2019 Strauss goes
out of copyright. I’m sure opera directors around the world are sitting there
and anxiously waiting for Strauss to become a free for all, and for us not to
have to pay quite a sizeable amount from our box office to the Strauss estate.’
I wonder if Strauss would appreciate the irony if, in the end, it took the
expiration of the rights he fought so hard to establish to save great swathes
of his
