TUESDAY-THURSDAY UPDATES: I've added another performance of Till Eulenspiegel, fiddled a fair amount with the opera clips (and added English texts), and as explained below finally spun off the section of fully identified Strauss-opera audio clips into a separate follow-up post. -- Ken
In Munich's Herkulessaal, Lorin Maazel leads the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in a beautifully relaxed performance of Till Eulenspiegel.
by Ken
In listening to and thinking about Richard Strauss's Salome, as we've been doing for a number of weeks ("Some out-of-this-world sounds from a singer who proves mistress of a surprising role" [11/18], "After all, the Page in Salome does warn that horrible things are going to happen" [11/25], and "Word is that "Today we are not shocked by Salome." Really?" [12/2]), it's hard not to be aware that when the first performance of the composer's unmistakable breakthrough opera took place, on December 9, 1905, he was already 41½. With regard to Salome's "breakthrough" standing, as Wikipedia notes, "Within two years, it had been given in 50 other opera houses."
It's not that Strauss was a "late starter." After all, by the time of Salome, his Op. 54, he was already world-famous, as the composer of a stream of music that quickly joined and remains firmly ensconced in the standard repertory -- the likes of Aus Italien (From Italy, Op. 16, 1886), Don Juan (Op. 20, 1888), Macbeth (Op. 23, 1886-88), Death and Transfiguration (Op. 24, 1889), Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Op. 28, 1894-95), Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra, Op. 30), Don Quixote (Op. 35, 1896-97), Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, Op. 40, 1898), and the Symphonia domestica (Op. 53, 1902-03). There were also assortments of chamber music and solo-piano works, concertos for piano (the Burleske, 1886), violin (Op. 8, 1881-82), and horn (Op. 11, 1882-83; there would be another horn concerto, but not till 1942) -- and, oh yes, nearly 150 songs.
AND THERE'D BEEN TWO OPERAS BEFORE SALOME
(AND WE'RE GOING TO HEAR SNATCHES OF BOTH!)
It's a curious phenomenon that Strauss's younger colleague Gustav Mahler, who was at least as active and famous as an operatic as a concert conductor, never made a serious effort at composing an opera. Not so Strauss, who had made two oh-so-serious efforts before Salome: first Guntram (Op. 25, 1887-93), then Feuersnot (which translates as something like Fire Famine, Op. 50, 1900-01), and naturally we want to see and hear them. As with Wagner's first two operas, hearing them isn't hard to accomplish nowadays (in a momentwe're going to hear snatches of both), but once you've heard them, you probably won't wonder that seeing them still isn't so easy -- or, perhaps, necessary?
AS, UM, A SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION OF THE PRE-SALOME
STRAUSS, WE'RE GOING TO HEAR TILL EULENSPIEGEL
Setting Strauss's two pre-Salome operas aside for the moment, we're going to sort-of-encapsulate the "pre-Salome" Strauss with two orchestral works, starting with the tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche. I can't believe that in the entire history of Sunday Classics we've never heard Till! I can't believe it for two reasons: first, because Till is one of my very favorite, utterly most beloved pieces of music, by turns (and sometimes simultaneously) grave, impudent, sardonic, and ebullient, and always gorgeous; and second, because I could have sworn I'd slogged through the process of choosing and preparing audio clips for a Till-inclusive post.
Before we get to the music, an obvious first question is: Who or what the heck is/was Till Eulenspiegel? Happily, we've got an expert prepared to introduce us to the legend of Till Eulenspiegel, including what the name means literally.
Till Eulenspiegel, a Fool for all Seasons
Till tricks his father and offends the neighbours. From Ein kurtzweilig lesen...
by Susan Reed, lead curator, Germanic Studies
[An April Fools Day 2016 blogpost from the British Library's European Studies blog -- with lots of illustrations and text-embedded links onsite]
Fools have a long history in literature as people who dare to speak truth to power or figures of fun who reflect and thus rebuke our own follies. In early modern Germany, the popular genre of Narrenliteratur used the latter kind of fool to satirise contemporary types and their behaviour, most notably in Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff.
A less didactic German literary fool from the same period is the trickster Till Eulenspiegel, whose exploits first appeared in print around 1511. Most of Till’s tricks spring simply from a love of mischief. In the second of the 95 chapters in the book, we learn that from the age of three he ‘applied himself to all kinds of mischief’ and was declared a scoundrel (‘Schalck’) by his neighbours. Confronted with this accusation by his father, young Till offers to ride behind him through the village to prove that he is unfairly maligned; unseen by his father, he bares his backside, at the neighbours, whose loud complaints convince the father that Till was simply ‘born in an unlucky hour’.
Sometimes Till plays tricks not just for the sake of mischief, but to gain food or money or as a form of vengeance against those who exploit or insult him. Employed as a watchman by the Count of Anhalt, when nobody remembers to bring him food he deliberately shirks his duty, claiming he is too weak with hunger to blow his horn. Later he sounds a false alarm which sends the Count’s men rushing from the castle so that he can steal their dinner.
Till attempts many trades and crafts in his life and generally causes mayhem, often by deliberately misunderstanding an instruction or taking figurative language literally. Again, this is sometimes a ploy to get his own back on a master he dislikes, but sometimes just pure foolery, as when he works for a tailor and is told to sew ‘so that no-one will see it’ so hides beneath a tub to work.
In other tricks, Till exposes the folly or greed of higher authority figures. Even on his deathbed, he manages to trick a greedy priest into digging deep into a ‘pot of gold’ which in fact contains excrement beneath a thin layer of coins. If this seems a tasteless detail, it is in fact one of the milder examples of the scatological humour which characterises many of the tales. This element was gradually toned down in later centuries when the stories became popular as children’s literature; it was only with the revival of academic interest in the book that unexpurgated editions became more widely available again.
The last chapter shows Till’s epitaph with the motif of an owl and a mirror. ‘Owl-Mirror’ is the literal translation of ‘Eulenspiegel’, and in one tale Till leaves pictures of these attributes with the Latin words ‘hic fuit’ over the door of a smithy where he has tricked his master – ‘Eulenspiegel woz ere’. A memorial in the North German town of Mölln shows a figure holding the same symbols and is claimed as the resting place of the original Till, who lived in the early 14th century. However, in its present form the plaque post-dates the first publication of the book by at least two decades, and there is no firm evidence that there was ever a ‘real’ Till Eulenspiegel.
But whether based on a real figure or entirely imagined, once in print Till was unstoppable. The book went through many editions and translations, and the character of Till became well-known in Germany and beyond. Wilhelm Busch borrowed two of Till’s pranks for his own classic tricksters Max und Moritz, while Richard Strauss’s 1895 tone poem Till Eulenspiegel was inspired by the character and stories. Till’s name has been given to a satirical magazine and a publishing house as well as various other brands. There are at least three Eulenspiegel museums in Germany, and even some schools bear his name, something which might give a touch of rebellious pleasure to any disaffected pupil who has read how the uneducated Till defeated the learned professors of Prague and Erfurt.
ARE WE EVER GOING TO HEAR SOME MUSIC?
Yes, yes, we're going to hear Till, a whole bunch of times. But first, another obvious question, this one relating directly to the music: Given how descriptive, even pictorial, it frequently sounds, does it have a program? This very question was put to the composer at the outset. As Paul Thomason recounts in his San Francisco Symphony Till program note, the composer wasn't enthusiastic about the idea.
Before the premiere of Till Eulenspiegel in Cologne in 1895, the conductor Franz Wüllner wrote to Strauss asking about a written program. This was a long time before “movie music,” of course, but Strauss was leery of encouraging a literalistic view of his tone poem, even though it was programmatic music. He replied: “It is impossible for me to give a program to ‘Eulenspiegel’: what I had in mind when writing the various sections, if put into words, would often seem peculiar, and would possibly even give offense. So let us, this time, leave it to the audience to crack the nuts which the rogue has prepared for them. All that is necessary to the understanding of the work is to indicate the two Eulenspiegel themes which are run right through the work in all manner of disguises, moods and situations until the catastrophe, when Till is strung up after sentence has been passed on him. Apart from that let the gay Cologners guess what the rogue has done to them by way of musical tricks.”Before we proceed to our audio recordings, let me say again how much I enjoy the video performance I plunked atop this post by Lorin Maazel and the Bavarian Radio Symphony. The unhurried but never slack pacing allows the musicians to shape and shade the piece with stylish elegance and still a fair measure of wit. This sounds like a performance I'm going to enjoy returning to.
Moving on to our audio versions, you'll note that we kick off with a recording conducted by the composer, who in 1944 recorded most of his major orchestral works -- pretty much without rehearsal, it's said -- with the orchestra he felt closest to, the Vienna Philharmonic. And then, for something perhaps even more historic, and partly as recompense for the fact that I don't seem to have, as I thought I did, a CD edition of my longtime "go to" Till recording, Otto Klemperer's stereo version with the Philharmonia Orchestra, we rewind another 15 years to hear Klemperer's 1929 78-rpm recording.
Then we have, I think, an interesting assortment of stereo versions, with pride of place going to the animated yet beautifully proportioned Till from Rudolf Kempe's great series of Strauss orchestral works for EMI. Then again, Georg Solti is having one heckuva time, and the Chicago Symphony plays him proud -- and Chicago's legendary horn principal Dale Clevenger is in a class by himself in the famous horn solos. Of course if you prefer a mellower horn sound, there's a lot to love in the Karajan-Vienna Till, from one of the happiest periods of Karajan's recording career.
[UPDATE: New Till performance added. Dresden's Staatskapelle, the orchestra that produced such consistently glowing, intimate performances in the Kempe-EMI orchestral-Strauss series (and also the complete Ariadne auf Naxos from which we've heard a number of excerpts, and will shortly be rehearing one), can lay claim to having as close a relationship with the composer as the Vienna Philharmonic, and in some ways a more intimate one -- Strauss, though Bavarian by birth, seems to have had a sort of "spiritually Saxon" streak that made Dresden something close to an adoptive musical home base for him. Anyway, when I remembered that I have this 1959 Konwitschny Till, and considering that we're already hearing the 1956 Konwitschny-Dresden Symphonia domestica, I thought I'd just plunk this extra Till in. (For what it's worth, our two Vienna Philharmonic performances, the Strauss and the Karajan, are actually closer in time -- only 16 years apart -- than our two Staatskapelle Dresden ones, separated by 21 years.)]
R. STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche
(Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks), Op. 28
Vienna Philharmonic, Richard Strauss, cond. Broadcast performance, June 15, 1944
Berlin State Opera Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, cond. Polydor, recorded June 3 and 24, 1929
Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded June 1970
Staatskapelle Dresden, Franz Konwitschny, cond. Broadcast performance, Aug. 7, 1959
Vienna Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan, cond. Decca, recorded 1960
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Sir Georg Solti, cond. Decca, recorded 1973
Cleveland Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Decca, recorded July 11, 1988
POSTSCRIPT: Could Till have had his own opera? Since our real subject here is Strauss's belated but spectacular emergence as an operatic composer, it's worth noting that early on he gave the Till Eulenspiegel material a long, hard look as a potential operatic subject. Credit him with concluding that this was not a good idea -- and of course with conjuring from this material a miraculous tone poem that's one of the most glorious 15-minute hunks in the orchestral literature. It's no accident that conductors simply love to conduct it.
I PROMISED ANOTHER PRE-SALOME ORCHESTRAL
WORK, AND HERE IT IS: THE SYMPHONIA DOMESTICA
The Symphonia domestica has always led a fringier existence than such other large-scale orchestral works of Strauss as Ein Heldenleben, Zarathustra, and Don Quixote, but devoted Straussian conductors have always had a soft spot, and wound up making more recordings of it, you suspect, than their record companies might have wished.
It's an audacious, or perhaps just crazy, idea: making a sort-of-symphony out of the domestic life of a fairly ordinary-seeming middle-class family. It's not an easy task conductors are set: aligning listeners with just the right wavelength for the piece. Again we've got a composer-conducted version from 1944 and also a 78 recording -- are we surprised to find that it's conducted by Eugene Ormandy? -- that goes back even farther, though in this case not that much farther. Again too the conductor who makes the piece sound most significant as well as relatable is Kempe -- I mean, the playing he gets out of the Dresdners! But Reiner and Franz Konwitschny are true believers in the piece too, and make an appealing case for it. Finally, since we heard Vladimir Ashkenazy in Cleveland doing Till Eulenspiegel, I thought it might be interesting to hear him here in Prague.
I think the vague program below, which doesn't come from the composer but was tolerated by him, is helpful to the listener in organizing the piece, and even though it's through-composeed, the somewhat arbitrary four-movement "structure" really does help me at least "follow along" with the music.
R. STRAUSS: Symphonia domestica, Op. 53
i. Introduction and development of the three chief groups of themes:
-- The husband's themes: (a) Easygoing; (b) Dreamy; (c) Fiery
-- The wife's themes: (a) Lively and gay; (b) Grazioso
-- The child's theme: Tranquil
ii. Scherzo: Parents' happiness. Childish play. Cradle song (clock strikes seven in the evening)
iii. Adagio: Doing and thinking. Love scene. Dreams and cares (the clock strikes seven in the morning)
iv. Finale: Awakening and merry dispute (double fugue). Joyous conclusion
[i. 0:01, ii. 5:03; iii. 17:14, iv. 30:16] Vienna Philharmonic, Richard Strauss, cond. Broadcast performance, Feb. 17, 1944
[i. 0:01; ii. 4:48; iii. 16:18; iv. 27:18] Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy, cond. Victor, recorded May 9, 1938
[i. 0:01; ii. 5:10; iii. 17:21; iv. 30:24] Staatskapelle Dresden, Rudolf Kempe, cond. EMI, recorded Mar. 1972
[i. 0:01; ii. 4:52; iii. 18:02; iv. 32:57] Staatskapelle Dresden, Franz Konwitschny, cond. DG, recorded June 14-20, 1956
[i. 0:01, ii. 5:22; iii. 17:50, iv. 29:39] Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner, cond. RCA, recorded Nov. 5, 1956
[i. 0:01, ii. 5:09; iii. 17:43; iv. 29:12] Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Vladimir Ashkenazy, cond. Ondine, recorded Apr. 19-20, 1997
A BRIEF SPELLING NOTE ABOUT THE SYMPHONIA
You'll see the Symphonia domestica spelled sometimes Symphonia and sometimes Sinfonia. You'd figure Strauss must have had a preference, but I haven't uncovered it. Sinfonia seems to be more in vogue these days, and it's certainly a more plausibly Italian spelling, but I don't know how much he cared about a plausible Italian spelling. After all, the published editions I've seen, which is to say early ones, which the composer also saw, seem set on "Symphonia." That's good enough for me.
NOW, ABOUT THE TWO PRE-SALOME OPERAS --
There are abundant indications that Strauss never got over the disasters of his first two operas, that in fact he thought of them as things that had happened to him rather than things that he had created, in the form of two truly terrible operas -- and I mean terrible in every way that operas can be terrible: characters and situations I can't imagine anyone connecting to or caring about in any way, set to music I would say pretty much the same about.
By chance I found nestled in the Sunday Classics music archive a whole bunch of clips -- that is to say, virtually all the clips from Operas A, B, C, D, and E -- which I though would form an interesting juxtaposition from the newly made clips from Operas X and Y. I don't think anyone's likely to have a hard time figuring out what's going on here
Opera X: Overture
Opera Y: Opening scene
Operas Z and A: Opening scenes
Hmm, I think that for the moment we'll hold off on these "missing links."
Opera B: Opening scene
Opera C: Orchestral introduction
Opera D:
Opening 1
Opening 2
Opera E:
Orchestral introduction only
Orchestral introduction continuing into the opening scene
I WOULDN'T LEAVE YOU HANGING, WOULD I?
OR, TO PUT ALL OF THAT ANOTHER WAY --
Okay, as I mentioned in earlier versions of this post, I thought about it -- i.e., holding off a day or a week before offering you the "key" to those openings we've just heard from Operas X, Y, and Z and Operas A through F. But in those earlier versions, I didn't have the heart to do it, and while I expressed the hope that you availed yourself of the opportunity to listen to our alphabet soup of Strauss-opera openings more or less blind, to compare and contrast the respective X-to-Z and A-to-F groupings, in this updated version -- mostly because this post has become too cumbersome for reliable loading, but also because I've been fiddling with (and adding) audio clips and also adding English translations of the sung portions -- I'm going to take the choice out of your hands: All you get for now in this post is the phantom version of the clips.
For further, enlightenment, click through to the continuation post.
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