NYT: Why the Dying Richard Strauss Couldn't Get Enough of 'Daphne'
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New York Times, 4.9.5
By BRYAN GILLIAM
ON June 11, 1949, his 85th birthday, Richard Strauss
performed at his piano for the last time. A camera crew was
filming a short documentary on him ("A Life for Music"),
and the director asked him to play an excerpt from a long
life's work. One's head spins at the possibilities - more
than 200 songs, many tone poems, 15 operas. Would he choose
something from "Don Juan" or "Der Rosenkavalier"?
Strauss's selection puzzled everyone in the room except his
family. It was a portion of the transformation scene from
the opera "Daphne" (1937), which he played repeatedly at
home in the months before his death that September.
The transformation scene is a gem, as Daphne, in the
moonlight, becomes a laurel tree. It was first brought to
American attention on LP by Beverly Sills in the early
1970's, and it has since been recorded by Kiri Te Kanawa
and Renée Fleming. With its phantasmagorical orchestral
palette, soaring melodies, dizzying interplay of returning
motifs and kaleidoscopic changes of harmonic color,
Daphne's transformation is the most magical finale in all
of Strauss's late operas. The "Four Last Songs" may rival
its sonic luminescence but cannot surpass it.
Over the last decade, there has been a remarkable flowering
of late-Strauss opera in performance and on CD beyond
Germany and Austria. In the last few years alone, "Die
Schweigsame Frau" (1935) was performed at the Zurich Opera
and the Garsington Festival in England, "Die Liebe der
Danae" (1940) at the Salzburg Festival; and recordings of
"Friedenstag" (1936) and "Die Liebe der Danae" have
recently appeared, two of each, at a time when opera
recording is in serious decline.
In June, the Long Beach Opera in California presented "Die
Schweigsame Frau." And "Daphne," recently performed at
Covent Garden in London, makes its New York stage debut on
Wednesday at the New York City Opera.
All this represents a major shift away from the notion of
Strauss's irrelevancy during this later period. But why?
The 50th anniversary of his death in 1999 played a
significant role, but these and other events had actually
been set in motion a decade earlier, when the 40th
anniversary coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the end of the cold war.
While the political cold war was coming to an end, so was a
musical one of sorts. To appreciate the musical cold war,
one need only look back to the Strauss centennial
celebration of 1964. True, there were concerts, operatic
performances and special exhibitions, concentrated mostly
in Europe, but there was a deafening silence worldwide in
the academy.
Perspectives of New Music, then a major organ of postwar
high modernism, was more than just silent. That year it
published an English translation of Theodor Adorno's
brilliant polemical essay commemorating the Strauss
centennial. The journal's intent, though really not
Adorno's, was to declare that 100 years after his birth,
Strauss was irrelevant as a 20th-century composer. In 1964,
style and ideology were hopelessly intertwined in a
modernist dialogue that prized technical progress above all
else.
It was a narrowly musical discourse, insulated from
modernist discussions in the arts and literature, which
drew upon criticism, aesthetics and other disciplines. More
recently, a basic thrust of the so-called new musicology
has been to penetrate such insulation. Conferences on music
and modernism of every type have become routine, as if to
compensate for the myopic discourse in the 1960's and 70's.
The old ideology was one of polarization, with walls
between composer and audience, high art and popular art,
atonality and tonality, the profound and the trivial.
German though he was, Strauss had little appetite for such
discrete dualities. He not only embraced these oppositions
but always had the audience foremost in mind when
composing.
In 1961, the pianist Glenn Gould stood nearly alone when he
called these artificial boundaries into question. Writing
to Leonard Bernstein, Gould praised Schoenberg and Strauss
as the two greatest composers of the 20th century, adding
that Strauss's greatness would be recognized once "the
time-style equation, which clutters most judgment" of his
later work, had dissolved. This was also the year of the
Berlin Wall, and over the decades both the "time-style
equation" and the wall have indeed dissolved and receded in
memory.
Politics, on various levels, played an integral role in the
perception of Strauss. Though the works of the 1930's, like
"Daphne," were deemed moribund, the post-World War II
pieces, like the "Four Last Songs," were recognized as part
of Strauss's Indian summer. For decades after his death,
music composed during the Third Reich and enjoyed by its
audiences retained a tainted aura.
Social and artistic politics can make for strange
bedfellows. At the same time Strauss's "obituary" was
published in Perspectives of New Music, Anton Webern's
atonal, serial music was enjoying a renaissance despite
Webern's overt pro-Nazi sympathies - sympathies that were
not openly discussed until the time-style paradigm had
begun to fade.
Still, the paradox is not that tidy, for Strauss's
connection with the Nazi regime is a matter of record. The
gap between his musical integrity and his personal
integrity at that time simply cannot be bridged. Though he
was not pro-Nazi, he willingly worked with an immoral
regime, and however much one might wish that musical
greatness would equate with personal stature, such is not
the case with Strauss.
But there has also been an unfair impulse to transfer
weaker personal stature to music of great beauty and
importance, and history now shows the fallacy of such a
strategy. Gould may have thought he was doing Strauss a
favor in 1961, when Schoenberg's star was at an all-time
high, but four decades later Strauss is in no need of such
charity. In his new-millennium contribution to The New
Yorker in January 2000, Alex Ross wrote an essay declaring
Strauss "the composer of the century."
If a moral issue were to be raised, it might be that
"Daphne" was escapist music at a time when the Germans were
about to annex Austria and were gearing up for war, or that
Strauss's "Capriccio" (1941) had its premiere the year of
the Wannsee Conference. But without approaching the issue
of politics and art on a broader, more contextual level, we
are left, as the historian and critic Edward Said argued,
with little more than "hortatory testimonials to the horror
of German fascism, raised eyebrows and finger-pointing."
What's more, there are potent connections among "Daphne,"
its historical context and Strauss's life. The opera's
origins date to the summer of 1935, when the librettist
Stefan Zweig, a Jew, stepped aside as collaborator and
ultimately emigrated. That year, Strauss was also fired
from his post as president of the German Music Chamber, and
his "Schweigsame Frau" (text by Zweig) was banned. That
autumn, the infamous Nuremberg race laws stripped Strauss's
daughter-in-law and two grandsons of their basic rights as
citizens, and within a year, Germany occupied the Rhineland
and began the four-year plan for war.
Strauss was "stupefied," according to his wife. Within a
single day (July 6, 1935), he had lost Zweig and the
government post and met his librettist-to-be, Joseph
Gregor, a poetically challenged theater historian.
Challenged or not, Gregor supplied Strauss with texts for
his next three operas: "Friedenstag," "Daphne" and "Die
Liebe der Danae." Gregor's awkward reworking of Zweig's
"Friedenstag" plagued Strauss throughout the summer of
1935, and he confessed to his wife that he might never
compose opera again.
His immediate solution was to turn away from opera toward
lyric poetry. Two poems, by the German Romantic Friedrich
Rückert, struck him in particular, and sketches show that
he considered setting them for men's chorus. They
compellingly reflect Strauss's disgust with German
politics, his fear of impending war and the hope of finding
some sort of inner consolation.
One poem, "Inner Peace," decries the clever stratagems of
politics that threaten to constrict the very heart of
humanity. Politics may well feed on its own deceptions, but
it cannot deceive the inner spirit. An image in the poem
uncannily anticipates the final scene of "Daphne," in which
the heroine is transformed into a laurel tree because of
Apollo's deceitful seduction of her. In Rückert's poem, God
drops a seed into the open wound of humanity, and a tree of
peace grows.
His other poem, "Reconciliation," also speaks of nature's
blooming where "once blood did flow." Though Strauss
ultimately failed to set these poems, he set three others,
the "Drei Männerchöre" of 1935, and composing them broke
his creative impasse with "Friedenstag," which he finished
within a year.
Coaxing a good libretto out of Gregor for "Daphne" was even
harder, for unlike "Friedenstag," it originated with Gregor
himself. Often tactless, at times even brutal, Strauss
managed to get a suitable text, though no urging or
coercing in the world could get Gregor to fashion a
transformation scene equal to Strauss's sonic imagination.
Strauss did what now seems as though it had been intended
all along: he got rid of the text altogether, creating a
miniature tone poem with vocalise, informed by ideas in the
Rückert poems he never set.
Before "Daphne," transformation in Strauss opera meant
attaining humanity. Ariadne was eventually lured out of her
isolated, deathly cave, transformed into a new life in the
arms of Bacchus. The shadowless Empress of "Die Frau Ohne
Schatten" is transformed into a mortal being through a
profound act of humanity. But Daphne searches for the
opposite, seeking to leave a world of corruption and
deceit, joining eternal nature and thus becoming divine in
a German Romantic sense that would have resonated well with
Rückert.
Zweig committed suicide in exile in 1942, leaving a note
expressing the hope that his friends would "see the dawn
after the long night."
"I, all too impatient, go on before," he added.
The dawn
that Strauss witnessed cast harsh light on opera houses,
concert halls and museums reduced to rubble, all painful
visual metaphors for the end of culture as he knew it: a
German culture brought down by its own dark instincts.
During the four years that remained to him after the war,
he composed music oscillating between resignation
("Metamorphosen") and hope (the late concertos and woodwind
pieces). But in the end, as in the "Four Last Songs," he
reconciled those oppositions through serenity and
acceptance, contemplating the meaning of death and eternity
through the natural world.
Daphne found that very serenity as she joined nature in
wordless song - hence Strauss's preoccupation with the
magical music of her transformation, above all other works,
in the final months of his life.