Die Aufführungen der Opern von Richard Strauss im 20. Jahrhundert: Daten, Inszenierungen, Besetzungen, Band 2 by Günther Lesnig, and: Richard Strauss: A Musical Life by Raymond Holden (review)

If one were to consult a search engine using the terms ‘Richard Strauss’ and ‘performance’, the two items under review would be among the top results, despite there being little overlap between them. Lesnig’s volume is a listing of twentieth-century productions of Strauss’s first five operas (Guntram, Feuersnot, Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier), whereas Holden’s monograph looks in detail at the conducting career of Strauss, normally given short shrift in biographical studies of the composer. The two also differ radically in the methodologies employed: whereas Lesnig goes no further than the presentation of a vast quantity of accessibly arranged data, Holden aspires to be the first interpreter of his own findings. The former has produced a catalogue, the latter a critical analysis. Nonetheless, each book offers a wealth of new, or at least newly systematized, information, and thus will be consulted by other researchers for some time to come.

Having reviewed the first part of Lesnig’s study for this journal (Music & Letters, 91 (2010), 277–80; doi:10.1093/ml/gcq003), I need only summarize the circumstances surrounding the project. The author is a retired lawyer, whose interest in collecting information about Strauss’s stage productions has been pursued with obsessive thoroughness over three and a half decades. The resultant two volumes of meticulously catalogued cast-lists aspire to contain a complete record of all performances of these works up to the turn of the millennium. Given that most of this data is not available in any form on the web, these 1,300 pages necessitated a vast amount of painstaking primary research.

The present study sticks to the format established in its sister volume, with information on each opera organized as follows:

• – a few pages of prose providing an overview of the performance history of the opera

• – a chronological list of all new stage and concert productions

• – a summary of this information giving totals by decade

• – a list of first performances in each country

• – some short excerpts from reviews of the first performances

• – a sample theatre bill

• – lists of the conductor, director, and principal singers for every production, organized alphabetically by city and institution (this takes up by far the most space)

• – a chronological list of all singers who sang the principal role (in this volume, the parts of Guntram, Kunrad, Salome, Elektra, and Octavian) and the date of their debuts in this part

With the exception of the initial descriptive pages, all else is entirely factual data, positivistic research at its most unapologetic. The introductory pages (pp. 7–13) provide us with some numerical totals: Lesnig claims that Volume 2 lists 2,603 productions (both stage and concert) of the five operas, amounting to 31,900 performances; when one includes repeat productions, guest performances, and those at special Strauss occasions, this rises to 4,257 stagings in 494 cities for which casts have been listed. Taken together with the first volume, there are full listings given for virtually all (97%) of 6,929 productions; that is, for 49,400 performances in 595 cities in 45 countries (p. 7). Using the total numbers of productions and performances provided for the sixteen operas (Lesnig separates the 1912 Ariadne as part of the Bourgeois Gentilhomme from the 1916 stand-alone version of the opera), one can quickly rank them according to popularity (the author, perhaps deliberately, does not do this). Unsurprisingly, Rosenkavalier (1), Salome (2), and Elektra (4) were among the most popular in the twentieth century, whereas Feuersnot (12) and Guntram (16) were rarely heard. To give some idea of the range...