It
was to be a theatrical experiment: a playing with the “theater within
the theater,” or better: the “opera within the theater.” The
comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Molière, provided with incidental
music, as the framework for the opera Ariadne auf Naxos. The occasion was the
fiftieth birthday of Max Reinhardt, whom one also wanted to thank for the successful
premiere of the Rosenkavalier. The authors: the librettist-composer team Hugo
von Hofmannsthal-Richard Strauss.
In Molière’s comedy, the nouveau riche draper Jourdain has let his
affluence go to his head to such a degree that he desires to vie with the aristocracy.
What he has overlooked is that those around him are really only out for his money.
At an ostentatious dinner, he thinks that he is host to a Turkish prince. However,
the prince is in reality the costumed commoner Cléonte, who is in love
with Jourdain’s daughter. To impress the supposed prince, the host prepares
a private performance of the opera Ariadne auf Naxos.
The premiere was originally intended to take place in Berlin’s Deutsches
Theater, but because of a lack of space one had to fall back upon Stuttgart,
where the first performance was staged in October 1912. It quickly became clear
that the work would have a difficult time, since, as Strauss put it, “an
audience that goes to the theater does not want to hear opera, and vice versa.
One did not have a cultural appreciation for the pretty ‘hybrid’.” Yet
the two authors did not give up. They were too fascinated by the idea of a fusion
of the various elements of theater. The work was divided up. The “opera
in one act, including a prelude” Ariadne auf Naxos was created, and experienced
its successful Viennese premiere in October 1916 – a version that was ultimately
to establish its place in the repertoire. A year later, Hofmannsthal rewrote
Le bourgeois gentilhomme as a “well-formed burlesque comedy,” and
Strauss provided seventeen incidental pieces. The Ariadne opera was no longer
part of it. Yet this version, too, found only moderate approval at its Berlin
premiere in 1918. For this reason, Strauss decided to make nine of the incidental
pieces into an orchestral suite and at least in this way “save” his
music for the concert hall. This suite was performed for the first time by the
Vienna Philharmonic on 31 January 1920, and finally achieved for Strauss the
longed-for success.
Molière’s play was originally a comedy with music by Jean-Baptiste
Lully. Strauss, in turn, quoted it – as shown by the fifth movement, “Menuett
des Lully” – as a sort of homage to the baroque master. Indeed, the
gallant world of the seventeenth century shimmers through again and again, since
Strauss did, after all, employ light, courtly music as his material, which in
his score he charmingly elaborated with his own compositional means. The plot
of the play can still be recognized from the titles of the movements. The “Overture” depicts
the nouveau riche Jourdain with his ostentatious airs and graces. The “Minuet” is
a dance lesson. The “Fencing Master” describes Jourdain’s inept
attempts at fencing. In the following three dance movements and in Cléonte’s
ceremonious entrance, Strauss plays with baroque patterns. In the Intermezzo
and the concluding “Dinner,” he finally allows his humor free rein
when he quotes from Wagner’s Rheingold and baroque tone-painting. The ensemble
is relatively small: a chamber orchestra grouped around a piano.
Le bourgeois gentilhomme was not to remain the last work in which Strauss was
to reflect upon the genre of opera. In September 1939, he requested support for
a new project from the conductor Clemens Krauss. Strauss was seventy-five years
old and had composed fourteen major stage works. What he was now thinking of
was “something entirely unusual.” In 1933, during the rehearsals
for the premiere of Arabella, Strauss had already discussed with Krauss the relationship
between text and music in opera. And Stefan Zweig had called his attention to
a text by Giambattista Casti that had been set by Antonio Salieri: Prima la musica,
poi le parole. Zweig wrote a first draft based on this theme, but the political
persecution of the Jewish author made a further collaboration impossible. The
theater scholar Joseph Gregor stepped into the breach, but Strauss was not happy
with his sample texts: “Not a trace of that what I was thinking of: a clever
dramatic paraphrase of the theme: first the words, then the music (Wagner) – or
first the music, then the words (Verdi) – or only words, no music (Goethe) – or
only music, no words (Mozart) – to mention only a few catchphrases.” Krauss,
who as a theater practician possessed a sure instinct for dramaturgical structures,
knew what was to be done.
The action takes place in a castle “near Paris, at the time Gluck began
his reform of the opera there. Around 1775.” The Countess is celebrating
her birthday. A composer, a poet (both are in love with the Countess), a theater
director, and others discuss the relation between text and music. The composer
dedicates to the Countess a string sextet that is performed as a prelude at the
beginning of the opera; the poet dedicates a sonnet to her. Finally, both want
join forces to write an opera.
Strauss wanted this “dramaturgical treatise” to be understood as
an “old man’s entertainment”: “theater of the rational,
brains, dry wit.” Indeed, Capriccio is an opera of reflections – of
reflections in the double sense of the word, since mirrorings and thinking about
oneself characterize this work.
In her big concluding monologue, the Countess talks to her own image in the mirror,
desperately asking it for advice as to whom she should choose: the poet or the
composer, the word or the music. In vain she awaits an answer. The mirror only
reflects her own ironic look. The whole composition is this sort of self-reflection.
Full of self-irony, Strauss quotes from his operas Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne
auf Naxos, and Daphne, but also composers such as Rameau, Piccini, Couperin,
Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner. And not least, intellectual trends of the time in
which the story takes place are also mirrored in Capriccio. Only one thing is
not reflected upon: the time in which the work was premiered, the year 1942.
An opera in which one made conversation about questions of musical aesthetics
was composed in the middle of the Second World War. Strauss was attacked repeatedly
because of it – and he was entirely conscious of the anachronism. Yet,
Krauss urged him on, and Strauss finally replied: “Let’s just write
it for ourselves and a few other people who have not yet gone mad.” The
mirrors facing the outside world were darkened, but the mirrors facing inward
polished all the more. With Capriccio, however, Strauss also held up a mirror
to his audience, a mirror in which it was not intended for the audience to recognize
the bestiality of its own time, but rather – as if from another world – intelligence,
creative power, and spiritual existence. And he discussed fundamental questions
concerning opera, or better, theater, as a whole, which – as Egon Friedell
wrote – “is actually more than most people believe: not a colorful
surface, not merely theater, but something that removes the seals and liberates,
something absolutely magical in our life.”
The work perhaps displays its greatest magic right at the beginning when, completely
unexpected in an opera, six string soloists strike up the passionately glowing
string sextet – like an enchantingly melancholy farewell song: farewell
to beauty, harmony, and Romantic tonal ecstasy in the music – a mirror
of a long-past time, simultaneously beautiful and questionable. This Andante
con moto in F Major experienced its first performance, independent of the opera,
in the house of Strauss’ friend, the Gauleiter and art connoisseur Baldur
von Schirach, and has since then repeatedly found its way into the concert hall
as a sextet.
Two years after the Munich premiere of Capriccio in October 1942, Strauss celebrated
his eightieth birthday in Vienna in grand style. His popularity was unbroken,
but his heyday past and he himself an old, tired man. He lived in his villa in
Garmisch and read Goethe, while after the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler
the noose of National-Socialist terror continued to tighten. The bombing of the
opera houses in Munich, Dresden, Berlin, and Vienna, in which Strauss’ operas
had been performed for half a century, plunged the composer into a deep resignation.
He wrote to his biographer Willi Schuh: “With Capriccio my life’s
work is finished, and the notes that I am now scribbling as wrist exercises for
my estate do not have any music historical importance.”
Calling the works that were written during this period – including his
last instrumental concerto, the Duett-Concertino, but also the Metamorphosen,
the two Sonatinas for sixteen wind instruments, the Second Horn Concerto, the
Oboe Concerto, and the Four Last Songs – “scribbled wrist exercises” is
typical Straussian understatement, considering that these works include several
masterpieces in which Strauss picked up the thread of the early years of his
artistic work: The musical dramatist again turned increasingly to “absolute” instrumental
works that did not want to be anything other than skillful and seemingly light
music. In doing so, Strauss had above all one goal: “to give pleasure.” He
found his way to a classicistic late style that is characterized not by boldness
of invention and tonal means, but rather by circumspect use of all his artistic
experience, and that never makes an old-fashioned effect in spite of the conscious
adherence to tonality. Time and again in these works he looks back. So, too,
in the Duett-Concertino, composed at the end of 1947 for the small ensemble of
Radio Svizzera Italiana. Not only with the formal structure, based on the three-movement
concerto form, did Strauss conjure up the Viennese Classic he so greatly respected,
but also with the blissfully indulgent high Rosenkavalier-parallel thirds at
the end of the third movement, with which he managed to insert a double allusion:
to the world of the rococo, in which the Rosenkavalier is set, as well as to
his own past, when he found himself at the height of his fame. With the unusual
instrumentation, Strauss – as Ernst Krause has shown – may have recalled
a remark made in 1885 by Hans von Bülow, drawing his attention at that time
to the Trio pathétique for clarinet, bassoon, and piano by Glinka. Indeed,
in 1947 Strauss once again derived pleasure from the combination of two tonally
opposite woodwind instruments – the velvety-smooth clarinet and the humorous
bassoon – that he effectively allows to enter into a concertante dialogue
with a string orchestra with harp, from which, however, he again and again sets
off a sextet of soloists. That the old master, in spite of all wistful reminiscence,
was still up to his old tricks is shown by the clarinet’s descending eighth-note
motion with triplets right at the beginning of the first movement with which
Till Eulenspiegel, cockily whistling to himself, once again seems to be sending
his greetings from a distance.
All too often, critics want to see the Duett-Concertino merely as a routine work.
Behind the lightness of the melodic writing, however, is concealed precisely
that which can also be recognized in other compositions of this period: Strauss’ search
for that unvanquished beauty that in reality no longer existed, a sort of musical
escapism that reveals something about the composer’s relationship to society;
this can be interpreted as an artistic echo of an outlook that, in view of his
own entanglement in the atrocities of a dictatorial regime, only allows a wistful
glance back or the drawing of castles in the air – like Strauss’ idea
for an “opera museum.”
Already in 1944, after the premiere of Die Liebe der Danae, he had taken his
leave of the official musical world – on the surface it was a move precipitated
by old age, but one that seemed to the composer to be “synonymous with
the end of German music,” as whose “crowning conclusion he, in all
modesty, saw himself” (Albrecht Dümling). The concurrent destruction
of Germany confirmed for him this view of history, which is so provocative that
it has hardly been discussed up to now. Yet, if one views his last compositions
against precisely this backdrop, it becomes clear why he no longer wanted to
consign them to musical history. The sovereign manner in which he moves in pure
tonality, in unshakeable aesthetic beauty over thirty years after the revolutionary
achievements of Schoenberg’s Viennese school, as well as after the experiences
of the Second World War, is hardly to be believed. Thus, these compositions are
ultimately also a farewell to an art that cannot be developed any further, whose
preserved masterworks Strauss considered, however, to be immortal. The determination
and artistic skill with which he transformed his escapism into music makes these
works important – important and suspect at the same time. It is this inscrutableness
that also makes up the actual appeal of the Duett-Concertino. His magic is a
broken one
Paavo
Järvi
Resident in the USA since 1980, the Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi studied
at the Curtis Institute of Music, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute
under Leonard Bernstein. As a passionate supporter and emissary of Estonian
music, he regularly works with the Estonian National Orchestra. He took up
the post of Musical Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra in September
2001, and has also held positions on the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the
City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra.
In January 2004 he joined the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen as Artistic
Director. The main emphasis of this collaboration will be the rehearsal for
and performance of all of Beethoven’s symphonies.
Guest positions have conveyed him to numerous large orchestras including the
Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony, the BBC Philharmonic,
the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Berlin and
Munich Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the French National
Orchestra, the Scala Orchestras in Milan, the Swiss Romande Orchestra, the
Czech and Israeli Philharmonic and the NHK, as well as the Tokyo and Sydney
Symphony Orchestra. In America, Järvi has appeared with the Los Angeles
and New York Philharmonic Orchestras, and the Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia,
San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles Orchestras.
The
Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen
After the first SACD by the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen with its artistic
director Paavo Järvi, the present disc is the second sound document of
this musical collaboration. And as previously with Igor Stravinsky, Paavo Järvi
has chosen seldom-performed works by Richard Strauss that are scored for small
chamber music ensembles.
Paavo Järvi appreciates “his” Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie
Bremen above all as an orchestra made up of outstanding soloists. With the
solo violin in Le bourgeois gentilhomme and, above all, the clarinet and bassoon
in the Duett-Concertino, which are each performed here by members of the Deutsche
Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, the truth of this statement is shown impressively.
Principal clarinet Nicole Kern, principal bassoon Higinio Arrué, and
the orchestra’s concertmaster Daniel Sepec appear here as soloists, accompanied
by their orchestra colleagues.
The repertoire of the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen extends without a
break from the baroque era to contemporary music, whereby the orchestra frequently
collaborates with specialists for the individual epochs and stylistic trends – for
example with Trevor Pinnock, Ton Koopman, Frans Brüggen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste,
Heinz Holliger, and Pierre Boulez.
In addition, its unique and refreshing style of musical interpretation has
helped the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen establish longstanding musical
relationships to internationally renowned soloists like Viktoria Mullova, Christian
Tetzlaff, Sabine Meyer, and Olli Mustonen. Paavo Järvi’s predecessors
as the orchestra’s artistic director were Daniel Harding, Thomas Hengelbrock,
and Heinrich Schiff. The musicians are all partners in the democratically governed “entrepreneur
orchestra,” and make all decisions concerning artistic and financial
matters themselves.
“You have to go all the way back to Fritz Reiner to find recorded performances
with such lapidary delicacy and precision, and by exceeding Reiner in the
wit and charm category, Paavo Järvi makes the music sparkle that much
more. PentaTone's sonics bring out the best points of the music as a top-line
jeweller showcases diamonds.” --Joseph Stevenson, ClassicsToday
“Järvi and the chamber orchestra play all of this music superbly,
and producer Stephan Schellmann and his staff have provided state-of-the-art
surround sound with performers in front, ambient sound from the rear.” --Robert Benson, Classicalcdreview.com
“The music making, though precise, has a laid-back sense of humor
and lyrical feeling that are bewitching to hear. The neoclassical Le
Bougeois Gentilhommemusic is long on charm and devoid
of sentimentality. The recorded sound is exceptionally transparent – seldom
have the strands of this composition been heard so clearly – yet there
is cohesion as well.” --UltraAudio.com
“Composed near the end of WWII, with Strauss entangled with the Nazi
regime, the lovely work seems to look for a musical escapism from the real
world. Pentatone’s five-channel surround concentrates on the front
soundstage and cleanly places the small orchestra in the frontal arc.” --John Sunier, Audiophile Audition
“Järvi’s performance enters with total conviction into
the bumptious vitality of the music.” --Bernard Jacobson, Fanfare
“…the
musicianship from the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie is everywhere evident.
It is a real orchestra of soloists” ---Matthew Rye, The Telegraph
“This PentaTone release is probably among the five best-sounding high-resolution
discs encountered thus far….But this sonic excellence is beside the
point if the performances are negligible. This happily, is not the case…the
individual virtuosity of the Bremen Chamber Orchestra members is manifest…The
new PentaTone is definite Want List material.” ---Anrew Quint, Fanfare
