Lifting the curtain on the 20th century: the metamorphoses of Richard Strauss An entertainment in four acts (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Unbroken Career of Richard Strauss, Symphonic Dramatist
Richard Strauss Jahrbuch 2016, 2017
Towards the end of his life, Strauss described himself as a ‘dramatist’, a term that pays due regard to his operatic endeavours while seeming to overlook the orchestral tone poems on which his reputation was initially founded. This paper shows that in fact Strauss was vitally engaged with the idea of drama even during the period when he was mainly writing for the concert hall. Using evidence found in his letters, notebooks, essays, and his edition of Berlioz’s Treatise on Instrumentation, I demonstrate how Strauss meshed characteristics he associated with dramatic composition with some aspects of traditional symphonic writing in his tone poems. Conversely, when his focus changed to the stage, he continued to uphold the importance of the symphonic element both in theory and in practice. There are thus some important elements of continuity underlying this major shift in his career.
Johann Strauss Jr and Nineteenth-Century Operetta as Intermedial Art World
The operettas of Johann Strauss Jr, composed in the later nineteenth century, we find relationship between different media that is of cultural-historical interest. It is the start of something that was to become more frequent and more multilayered in the succeeding century, the development of practices that are conceived from the beginning in relation to a number of media platforms or channels of communication. Examining the compositional practice of Johann Strauss Jr, I argue that he does not compose for one medium and then adapt for another; instead, he writes music that from the outset relates to both. My use of the adjective " intermedial " is intended to describe a mutually influencing relationship between media platforms, especially that between the dance hall and the operetta stage. Intermediality stands opposed to the Gesamtkunst ideal, which is one of centralization rather than dispersion. In the music dramas of Wagner, for example, it was the composer's wish that the arts should unite to serve the stage performance. In Strauss's operettas, by contrast, we see the emergence of an intermedial concept of artistic creation. 1
Journal of Musicological Research, vol. 31, no. 1, 2012
Strauss's Don Quixote, fantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters, op. 35, remains one of his most misunderstood tone poems. Insights into this enigmatic work can, however, be gained by situating it both within Strauss's modernist aesthetic and his compositional path as evidenced by his tone poems as a whole. This interpretation of Don Quixote considers it not as a sympathetic portrayal of Cervantes's hero, but rather as an indictment of the German Romantic tradition and a manifesto for Strauss's compositional future, in which he abandons the teleological compositional philosophy of other musical modernists in favor of his own stylistically eclectic brand of antimetaphysical musical modernism.
Richard Strauss dietro la maschera. Gli ultimi anni (Torino, EDT 2015)
A vivid portrayal of Richard Strauss, covering philosophy, literature, art and history, which emerges from the analysis of Strauss’s stage productions in his last years. This volume offers an extensive re-reading of Strauss’s life and of his latest, more difficult works, harshly criticized for both his style – which during the tragic context of World War II became progressively more and more rarefied and abstract – as well as for Strauss’s more or less direct involvement with the Nazi regime. Usually considered as detached from historical events, and viewed as an example of personal reticence (or even indifference), Strauss’s latest works actually reveal a thorough portrait of Richard Strauss and of his complex and sometimes obscure vision of the world. The present work focuses on the function of myth, cardinal for Strauss’ s worldview, and tracks its connections to the works of many different authors, from Hugo von Hofmannsthal to Joseph Gregor. The volume is the result of over a decade of research carried out on original, unpublished documents, mostly in the Strauss Archive in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where the composer lived the last years of his life.