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Richard Strauss Michael Kennedy BOOKS 157 5. Arianna's lament is now available in 8. "The only Neapolitan composer of these facsimile in the series Italian Secular Song, years who could rival the reputation of 1606-1636 (New York: Garland, 1986), voL 2. Alessandro Scarlatti while being considered a 6. Savioni's parody, "Chi non mi conosce representative of the modern style" (p. 260). dira," is set to a text taken from Pictro Anto- 9. Elizabeth Cropper proposed this rcad- nio Girami's Hospital for the Lovesick. Savioni's ing in a 1990 paper; see her Terrifying Art: cantata exists in two manuscript copies. I- Marino's Poetry and CarwagQO? Metrvpoli- Rvot Chigi Q.VI.86 and F-Pn Res. Vm7 102. ton Museum Journal, voL 26 (1991), pp. His opera, SanfAgnese, was written in 1651 193-212. for the Pamfili family in Rome. 10. Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and the 7. Albinoni's intermezzo is available in End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University Talbot's edition, Pimpirume: intermezzi armid of California Press, 1987). Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/13/4/157/1491111 by guest on 01 October 2021 musical* (Madison, Wis.: A-R Editions, 1983). Richard Strauss Michael Kennedy The Master Musicians New York: Schirmcr Books, 1996 237 pages, $30.00 Perhaps infected by my fanaticism, a friend of mine has become as infatuated with opera as he is with jazz. His operatic CD collection is growing steadily and edectically, with rarely performed bel canto, Strauss, and early Verdi operas joining the single versions of warhorses such as Zauberflote, Carmen, Lucia, Boheme, Tosca, Trovatorc, Traviata, Aida, Salome, and Elektra on his ever-expand- ing shelf. (He is not yet zealous enough to crave multiple recordings of favorite works, but surely that disease is unavoidable once opera is in the blood.) A serious devotee, my friend now wants more background information than can be found in often skimpy (if existent) liner notes. But he is scared off by the daunting multivolume studies of favorite composers, such as Julian Budden's three-volume Verdi set, Norman Del Mar's Strauss trilogy, and Ernest New- man's four-volume life of Wagner, and such hefty single tomes as Mary Jane Phillips-Matz's recent nine-hundred-page Verdi biography.1 Fortunately, there are many less exhaustive studies that will reward operatic veterans as well as newcomers. One thinks first of William Ashbrook's Operas of Puccini, William Mann's books on the operas of Mozart and Strauss, Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp's examination of Handel's earlier stage works, and Charles Osborne's guides to the complete outputs of Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, Puccini, Strauss, and (in one volume) Rossini, Donizetti, and Bellini.2 Schirmer's Master Musicians series, edited by Stanley Sadie of New Grove Dic- tionary fame, includes introductions to composers who wrote few or no operas (Brahms, Liszt, Mahler, Rachmaninov, Sibelius). But opera played an impor- 158 BOOKS rant role in the careers of some of the series' subjects (Handel, Vivaldi, Stravin- sky), and while this study by Michael Kennedy, music critic of the London Sun- day Telegraph and author of The Oxford Dictionary of Music and the Master Musicians Mahler* is valuable for its cogent discussion of vocal, orchestral, and other instrumental works, it is the examination and evaluation of Strauss's fifteen operas that will be of paramount interest to most readers of The Opera Quarterly — and my addicted friend. Peppered with telling anecdotes and delightful examples of Strauss's abun- dant humor, the first half of the book, originally published in England in 1976 and enlarged and revised for this first American edition, is a biography of a man Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/13/4/157/1491111 by guest on 01 October 2021 whose long life (1864-1949) and career began in the gilded age of the impe- rial court composer and ended in the modernist era of Berg, Schoenberg, Hin- demith, Stravinsky, and their disciples. Unlike Mann, Osborne, Del Mar, and George Marek,4 who find much to fault in Strauss's life and music, Kennedy seems determined to defend and, if possible, sanctify the composer. He states in the preface that "now that Elgar and Mahler have been rehabili- tated, Richard Strauss remains the most misunderstood and misrepresented great composer in the last hundred years, Schoenberg included" (p. v). Kennedy takes it as his task to rectify the situation. Thus he is quick to refute "received opin- ion," such as the charge that Strauss's career is one "of radiant dawn, a glorious noonday, a sleepy afternoon and a glowing sunset" (p. 114). One has only to consider that between his seventieth birthday in 1934 and the end of 1937 Strauss wrote three such different operas as his opera buffa [Die scbweigsame Frau], his political testament [Friedenstag], and his celebration of pastoral love and Hellenism [Daphne], each with a contrasted harmonic and melodic vocabulary, to realize the wronghead- edness of the view that he was either an extinct volcano or, at best, a garrulous old man composing from memory. Daphne by itself is suffi- cient proof that his genius was burning strongly with a new and thermal glow. (p. 165) When criticizing Strauss scores, Kennedy does so gently, consistently urging that the glass is half full rather than half empty. Echoing Strauss's droll retort to a young man who told the composer that, try as he might, he just couldn't bring himself to like Der Rosenhtvalier ("What a shame for you" [p. v]), Kennedy writes of this masterpiece that "it is a great confection and for some tastes it is too sweet (the fault of the taste, not the music)" (p. 143). Kennedy also is eager to "correct" what he believes to be the harsh judgments of other Strauss scholars, and he likes to blame any failure of Strauss's music to make the desired effect on weak performances or insensitive audiences, not on compositional shortcomings. He declares that the ballet Josephslegende "is bct- - ter than is usually suggested" (p. 175), and in the chapter on the tone poems he argues that "the charge of vulgarity is often levelled against Strauss, but there is no vulgarity if his music is well played and conducted with a respect for the BOOKS 159 score" (p. 121). Discussing Ariadne aufNaxos, Kennedy insists that "there is good music in the final duet. William Mann went too far in calling it 'a lengthy failure.' Admittedly one has heard performances which justify this stricture,, but also ones which, if only temporarily, sweep away any suspicions that this is Strauss below his best, attempting to re-create the Recognition scene from Elek- tm but without the real impetus to do so" (p. 146). Of Rosenkavalier, Kennedy admits that "there are longueurs0 but counters that they are "intensified in a poor or poorly sung production" (p. 143). Turning to Die agyptische Helena, he says: Of all Strauss's operas, Helena has been the least successful and remains Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/oq/article/13/4/157/1491111 by guest on 01 October 2021 the least known. It has been harshly criticized, but the music does not deserve most of these strictures. It is Strauss's bel canto opera, written for great singers with whom he had been working in Vienna.5 Act I in particular is full of vocal plums which deserve to be better known.. .. There is still a future for this opera, if the right producer and the finest singers can be engaged for it. It is not a repertory piece; it is a twentieth-century vocal equivalent of a Bellini opera, strictly reserved for the best. (pp. 158-59) In insisting that only the finest performances do justice to Strauss's music, how- ever, Kennedy merely echoes the composer's remark to Scbweigsame Frau libret- tist Stefan Zweig: "I have never had the talent to write what can be performed easily; that is the special gift of inferior musicians" (p. 169). Examining Die scbweigsame Frau, Kennedy puts a positive spin on faults he cannot avoid acknowledging by saying, "The work fails to deserve a place among endearing comic operas because too much of the melodic invention is Strauss below his best, not because he was taking it easy but because he was try- ing too hard. If he had maintained the quality of the examples I have just cited, the contrived twists of the plot would not matter" (p. 163). Advocating some trimming of the score (an ovcrlong one for a comedy), he says that "if the stage production has plenty of pace and freedom, then Die schweigsame Frau can make a delightful evening. It will never replace its models [Rosenkavalier, Ariadne, Arabella], but it contains too much that is good and brilliant to vanish com- pletely from the stage" (p. 163). Perhaps Kennedy's greatest stretch to deify Strauss (and, coincidentalry, a fel- low Englishman) occurs in the section on Die Frau ohne Schattcn.6 Discussing the final scene, he writes that the whole extraordinary culmination calls for music of transcendental sublimity. Strauss failed to provide it; although he pulls out every stop in the orchestra to provide a feast of colourful sound, he can no more avoid banality than Mahler did when he strove to universalize religion and eternal womanhood in his Eighth Symphony. In terms of such high-flown operatic endeavour, only Mozart in Die Zauberfiate, Beethoven I 6 o BOOKS in Fidelia and Vaughan Williams in The Pilgrim's Progress have matched the sublime mood of their final scene.
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