The Cambridge Companion to Richard Strauss (review)

Strauss’s very popularity with audiences has made him suspect in the eyes of the musicological establishment in Britain: at the time of writing, the provisional programme for the 2012 Royal Musical Association annual conference, devoted to opera, contains not a single paper specifically on the composer, and the present volume contains only one contribution by a British-based scholar. Nevertheless Strauss’s popularity has endured, in spite of the absence in his music of the marked confessional quality that has given ‘cult’ status, and consequent over-exposure, to that of his contemporary, Mahler.

In surviving until the middle of the twentieth century and by continuing to compose until the end of his life, Strauss confounded those who liked to trace a clear progression from Wagner via Austro-German late Romantics such as Mahler (and Strauss himself in his earlier works) to the Second Viennese School and beyond. Strauss not only outlived Modernists he himself might be said to have influenced: he also invalidated the generally accepted Modernist trajectory by proving that it was not necessary to be an ultra-modernist to be a truly twentieth-century composer. Instead, Strauss concentrated on polishing and refining his style, to the extent that Philip Graydon, writing about Strauss’s post-Hofmannsthal operas in the volume under review, is able to remark on ‘the gradual refinement of a harmonic idiom predicated on an enriched, chromaticized tonality whose utilization remained fresh from work to work, yet uniquely Straussian in its deportment’ (p. 148). The late Derrick Puffett, indeed, referred to ‘a purification of his harmonic style, which makes parts of Capriccio sound like late Fauré’ (see ‘“Lass Er die Musi, wo sie ist”: Pitch Specificity in Strauss’, in Bryan Gilliam (ed.), Richard Strauss and his World (Princeton, 1992), 138–63 at 156). The Fauré comparison is apt; both composers were masters in the exploitation of enharmonic modulation and chromaticism—the elliptical enharmonic modulations of bars 461–5 of Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945) sound curiously Fauréan.

Now that it is generally recognized that out-and-out Modernism was only one of many currents in twentieth-century music, Strauss’s reputation can be freed from a couple of widely accepted value judgements: first, that after Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier there was a decline in quality reversed only towards the end of the composer’s life, and, second, that Strauss, though Wagner’s chief successor, was somehow unworthy of his model. The present volume offers ample demonstration that these views are based on a misunderstanding of Strauss’s musical nature on the one hand, and of his relationship to Wagner on the other. In fact, after initial enthusiasm, Strauss rejected the Schopenhauerian philosophical idealism of Wagner and, under the influence of his reading of Nietzsche, embraced a materialistic, anti-metaphysical outlook. As Morten Kristiansen observes in his chapter on the operas up to and including Salome, ‘although Strauss considered himself a Wagnerian, this no longer meant idealism but musical technique’ (p. 109). Salome has been described as ‘perhaps the greatest of all the Wagnerian music-dramas not actually written by Wagner himself’ (Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (3rd edn., London, 1964), 214). What is quite un-Wagnerian, and indeed quintessentially Straussian, is its irony; Bryan Gilliam, in the penultimate chapter of the volume, describes it as a ‘an ironic response to Parsifal, where the redeemer [Jochanaan] is not redeemed, rather beheaded’ (p. 275); Charles Youmans, in the closing chapter, recognizes that ‘the crucial modernist feature of Salome is . . . not technical innovation but irony—a quality that would become both a source of Strauss’s avant-garde authenticity and a defining trait of his artistic output’ (p. 292). In fact, Strauss in Salome is not so much writing a Wagnerian music-drama as writing an opera about a Wagnerian music-drama, and his detachment from his subject matter is in evidence not only in his subsequent operas but also in the immediately...