Richard Strauss in the twilight

The Metamorphosen really is "a study for 23 solo strings" -- it's scored for 23 individual instruments (10 violins, 5 violas, 5 cellos, and 3 double basses).

"Metamorphosen . . . is a work I have loved, on paper, as a concept, for nearly thirty years but which I had long since written off. . . . All that changed when I first heard Karajan's magisterial recording. For weeks . . .. I played that disc, passed through the eyes-uplifted-in-wonder stage, went well beyond the catch-in-throat-and-tingle-on-the-spinal-cord phase."

-- Glenn Gould (1976), quoted on the Arkiv Music website

by Ken

As we'll see, my experience with the Metamorphosen is rather different from Glenn Gould's, but rest assured, we are going to hear the Karajan recording in question. The point to take away here is that this is an extremely unusual, and extremely complex piece, this product of Richard Strauss's final years.

No, we haven't finished with Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos -- or, for that matter with his Four Last Songs. But since the Four Last Songs have already raised the subject of Strauss in his final years, I thought this might be a good occasion to fill out that picture a little.

As we learned several weeks ago ("Richard Strauss: 'Music is a holy art,' sings Strauss's Composer -- plus Two (out of Four) Last Songs, part 2"), the last of the Four Last Songs to be completed, the Hesse setting "September," was completed on Sept. 20, 1948, when the composer was 84, less than a year before he died, on September 8, 1949.


THE WORKS ON TODAY'S MENU ARE
EARLIER, BUT NOT BY THAT MUCH

Sunday Classics goes on hiatus

The "Moonlight Interlude" from Richard Strauss's last opera, Capriccio, is played here by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under the composer's friend Clemens Krauss, who happened also to be the librettist of the opera. It's from a complete Munich broadcast performance of Capriccio from 1953.

by Ken

As TV savants know, this is not usually a good thing, when a program goes -- or more properly is sent -- on hiatus, a domain from which only the select few spectacles return, except perhaps for the run-off of previously unaired but already-paid-for episodes during times when nobody is expecting to be watching anyway.

Some other time maybe I'll talk about some of the thinking (for want of a better word) that has gone into this development. For now, though, my concern, is the mass of Sunday Classics material that's already floating around on servers somewhere. I haven't actually tried to count, but between previews and main posts, that's two posts a week (or actually, for the period when I usually did two previews, three) going back to early 2009, which adds up to . . . um, a heap.

So to anyone who cares, I offer a sneak peek at something I've begun putting together at the link sundayclassicswithken.blogspot.com. So far all I've done is gather posts working backward from the final post in December all the way to, um, late October. And while I can report that I've also started compiling an index to posts, aimed at eventual incorporation with the old Sunday Classics Index that covered posts through July 11, 2010, at present it doesn't yet go back as far as October 2012. (In fact I haven't even posted it yet.)

One thing I can say is that in just the bit of work (or play) I've done so far with this bewildering mass of, er, stuff, I was kind of tickled to discover that there's a huge amount of really fabulous music here, and with a decent pair of headphones plugged into just the electronics of my home and office Macs, it sounds to me pretty darned good.

For tonight I thought I would add a couple of tidbits derived from that mammoth Berkshire Record Outlet order I mentioned receiving last month. Oh, I know! We'll do one bitty tid tonight, and then a slightly more extended one on Sunday. (Friday night-Sunday morning -- force of habit.)

Mr. Strauss Goes to Italy

Zdeněk Košler conducts the Slovak Philharmonic in the first section, "In Campania," of the 22-year-old Richard Strauss's "symphonic fantasy" Aus Italien (From Italy).

by Ken

In the standard telling the 22-year-old Richard Strauss -- already Kapellmeister of the Munich Court Orchestra -- was encouraged by no less than Johannes Brahms to go to Italy, and if Brahms told you to go to Italy, you probably would too.

As with the Italian sojourn of young Felix Mendelssohn which produced his Italian Symphony (which we heard two weeks ago, followed by Tchaikovsky's string sextet Souvenir de Florence last week), Strauss's travels filled his head with music. He visited Bologna, Rome, and -- in the Campania region south of Rome (see the map at right) -- Naples, Capri, Salerno (which includes the town of Campagna), and Sorrento. The result was the sequence of four musical impressions he called Aus Italien (From Italy). When he performed his "symphonic fantasy" (generally counted as the first of his symphonic poems, his most characteristic orchestral form) with the Court Orchestra in March 1887, the reception was bordered on the disastrous. Interestingly, Strauss's confidence in the piece wasn't shaken, which takes a pretty darned tough set of musical balls.

I can't say I've ever been wildly enthusiastic about, or given enormous attention to, the piece, but approaching it again, listening with the sounds of the composer's long subsequent career in mind, I'm startled by the extent to which it's all there. In a not especially illuminating liner note for the original issue of the Kempe-Dresden recording, Ernst Krause referred to Aus Italien as "this early evidence of what was to come." This now seems to me to be putting it mildly.

The insinuating, shifting harmonies that shimmer and the tunes and melodic fragments that soar -- it's vintage Strauss. And it all moves so inexorably. This is music that's always in movement, and the ways of its movement effectively lay out the composer in his full career.

(In Friday night's preview we listened to the chunk of Act I of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier which includes the Italian Singer's possibly affectionate, possibly sarcastic aria. "Di rigori armato." The deep affection for Italy evinced in Aus Italien should at least answer any thought that blanket ridicule was intended.)

ARE WE READY TO LISTEN TO AUS ITALIEN?