The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (review)

At first glance, a study of Richard Strauss's ballet collaborations would seem a thankless task. As Wayner Heisler, Jr. readily admits in the introduction to his important new book, 'beyond Josephslegende and Schlagobers, Strauss's only completed ballets with original scores, he was involved in an array of incomplete and seemingly minor projects that rarely garner attention' (pp. 2-3). Indeed, those original scores count traditionally among the composer's most critically denigrated creations: Josephslegende (1914) as pretentious and overblown as Schlagobers (1924) was misguided and tasteless, an extravagant monument raised to its composer's superficiality in a post-war Vienna that could ill afford to indulge him. Strauss's engagement with ballet, however, spanned half a century, and, Heisler argues, represents an important influence on his creative output. The author thus positions himself against Norman Del Mar, who musters little enthusiasm for the ballets in his still-influential life and works, yet it is arguable whether he succeeds in his aim of 'consciously avoid[ing] the totalizing tendencies of both the traditional and more recent "alternative modernist" paradigms' of Strauss scholarship (p. 5).

Based on the author's doctoral thesis, the book is admirably clear in structure: its two parts cover the periods either side of the First World War; five chapters deal chronologically with five works. Although Heisler writes that his 'intention was not to author a definitive study of Strauss's ballets, assuming that such a thing is possible or even desirable' (p. 217), it is as an exhaustively researched account of this largely unexplored part of Strauss's output that this book is at its best; it is the nearest thing to a definitive study we are ever likely to have. His work is distinguished by a willingness to face the interdisciplinary challenges such a study inevitably poses, offering an account that balances the glut of biographical material available on Strauss with original research on his sometimes obscure collaborators. Detailed accounts of the works themselves and painstaking reconstruction of the scenarios will surely, as Heisler hopes, lead to further research that erodes the boundary traditionally maintained between musicology and dance studies.

While the contextualization of these works within the broader history of ballet is expertly carried out, the book becomes more problematic in its attempt to place Strauss's ballet collaborations within the context of the composer's life, or, more precisely, to challenge the standard critical attitude towards them and demonstrate their importance in Strauss's aesthetic world view. In the case of Josephslegende and Schlagobers this would be a bold strategy, but one that could clearly be justified by seeing a composer's intellectual engagement with a project as being somehow commensurate with the effort expended. Indeed, this seems particularly necessary in the case of Schlagobers, since the fact that Strauss produced both the scenario and a 300-page score makes it impossible to ignore. Yet Heisler's claims for the fragmentary Die Insel Kythere (The Isle of Cythera, 1900) and, in particular, the two Couperin-based scores, Balletsoirée (1923) and Verklungene Feste: Tanzvisionen aus Zwei Jahrhunderten (Bygone Celebrations: Dance Visions from Two Centuries, 1941), are less persuasive.

Nevertheless, as shown in the opening chapter, 'Strauss en route to Die Insel Kythere', Strauss's interest in dance was genuine enough, built on the sturdy philosophical foundations of his Nietzschean conversion in the early 1890s. Kythere, inspired by a series of Watteau canvases at the Louvre, is used to help place the composer's early interest in ballet into the context of his own intellectual development and the wider cultural currents of the time. The fin de siècle fascination with dance, however, was countered by a prevailing negative attitude to'traditional' ballet, resulting, as Heisler shows, in fascinating attempts to reconcile the two that actively subverted the genre's perceived historicism. Throughout the 1890s an array of Jugendstil writers offered Strauss scenarios that all commented actively on the very pastness of ballet, coupling it with...