SubmittedFriday, 03 May 2019
The Wanderers Sturmlied
I shall not say much about the four first works, where the mind and manner of the artist is taking shape. The Wanderers Sturmlied (the song of a traveller during a storm, op. 14) is a vocal sextette with an orchestral accompaniment, whose subject is taken from a poem of Goethe’s. It was written before Strauss met Ritter, and its construction is after the manner of Brahms, and shows a rather affected thought and style. Aus Italien (op. 16) is an exuberant picture of impressions of his tour in Italy, of the ruins at Rome, the seashore at Sorrento, and the life of the Italian people. Macbeth (op. 23) gives us a rather undistinguished series of musical interpretations of poetical subjects. Don Juan (op. 20) is much finer, and translates Lenau’s poem into music with bombastic vigour, showing us the hero who dreams of grasping all the joy of the world, and how he fails, and dies after he has lost faith in everything.
Tod und Verklärung («Death and Transfiguration,» op. 24[171]) marks considerable progress in Strauss’s thought and style. It is still one of the most stirring of Strauss’s works, and the one that is conceived with the most perfect unity. It was inspired by a poem of Alexander Ritter’s, and I will give you an idea of its subject.
[Footnote 171: Composed in 1889, and performed for the first time at Eisenach in 1890.]
In a wretched room, lit only by a nightlight, a sick man lies in bed. Death draws near him in the midst of awe-inspiring silence. The unhappy man seems to wander in his mind at times, and to find comfort in past memories. His life passes before his eyes: his innocent childhood, his happy youth, the struggles of middle age, and his efforts to attain the splendid goal of his desires, which always eludes him. He had been striving all his life for this goal, and at last thought it was within reach, when Death, in a voice of thunder, cries, suddenly, «Stop!» And even now in his agony he struggles desperately, being set upon realising his dream; but the hand of Death is crushing life out of his body, and night is creeping on. Then resounds in the heavens the promise of that happiness which he had vainly sought for on earth–Redemption and Transfiguration.
Richard Strauss’s friends protested vigorously against this orthodox ending; and Seidl,[1] Jorisenne,[2] and Wilhelm Mauke[3] pretended that the subject was something loftier, that it was the eternal struggle of the soul against its lower self and its deliverance by means of art. I shall not enter into that discussion, though I think that such a cold and commonplace symbolism is much less interesting than the struggle with death, which one feels in every note of the composition. It is a classical work, comparatively speaking; broad and majestic and almost like Beethoven in style. The realism of the subject in the hallucinations of the dying man, the shiverings of fever, the throbbing of the veins, and the despairing agony, is transfigured by the purity of the form in which it is cast. It is realism after the manner of the symphony in C minor, where Beethoven argues with Destiny. If all suggestion of a programme is taken away, the symphony still remains intelligible and impressive by its harmonious expression of feeling.
[1] Richard Strauss, eine Charakterskizze, 1896, Prague.]
[2] R. Strauss, Essai critique et biologique, 1898, Brussels.]
[3] Der Musikführer: Tod und Verklärung, Frankfort.]
Many German musicians think that Strauss has reached the highest point of his work in Tod und Verklärung. But I am far from agreeing with them, and believe myself that his art has developed enormously as the result of it. It is true it is the summit of one period of his life, containing the essence of all that is best in it; but Heldenleben marks the second period, and is its corner-stone. How the force and fulness of his feeling has grown since that first period! But he has never re-found the delicate and melodious purity of soul and youthful grace of his earlier work, which still shines out in Guntram, and is then effaced.
this was: The Wanderers Sturmlied
go to next chapter: Strauss has directed Wagner’s dramas
