Aus Italien: Retracing Strauss’s Journeys

David Larkin Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Introduction

What is not a journey? As soon as one attributes an extended figurative meaning to the word ...the journey coincides with life, no more, no less .... The journey in space symbolizes the passing of time; physical movement symbolizes interior change.1

In the spring of 1886, directly after his first professional engagement at the Meiningen Court had come to an end, the young Richard Strauss visited Italy for the first time and spent five weeks touring various parts of the country. This trip would be no more than an incidental item in the composer’s biography were it not for the fact that it gave rise to a pivotal work in Strauss’s catalog: his symphonic fantasy, Aus Italien (From Italy; 1886). This musical depiction of four different locations he encountered during his travels was Strauss’s first programmatic orchestral composition and thus marks the emergence of the embryonic tone poet. However, despite its acknowledged importance in the development of the composer’s mature style, Aus Italien has largely been overlooked in scholarly writing to this day.2 The primary object of this article is to provide a detailed and long-overdue reassessment of this composition. Strauss’s Italian peregrinations will be a major focus of this inquiry, but of equal interest is the metaphorical “journey” that Strauss embarked upon with Aus Italien, a path that took him from absolute to program composition. The more obvious geographical aspects deserve consideration first of all, particularly since the issue of how travel and music relate to each other in general remains decidedly undertheorized.3 Bernard Se´ve has remarked that, “[o]f all artists, it is the musician who in principle has the least need to travel,” since music can be assimilated at a distance from the place of its composition, whereas visual artists and sculptors had in times past no option but to travel in order to view the art and architecture of other lands.4 In spite of this, travel has played a signifi- cant role in the lives of composers and musicians for at least the last doi:10.1093/musqtl/gdp008 92:70–117 Advance Access publication September 5, 2009. # The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: [email protected] Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 71

five hundred years, and individual journeys—for instance, Bach’s pil- grimage on foot to hear Buxtehude or Wagner’s flight from Riga to Paris to avoid his creditors—have attained legendary status. While some jour- neys are no more than picturesque biographical incidents, others have had a life-changing or art-changing impact on the participants. Such personal upheavals might result from specifically musical experiences (as

was the case with Schu¨tz and Froberger in Italy, for example), or it Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 might be the liberating effect of traveling itself and the experience of new places and cultures that released the creative juices.5 The relative scarcity of musical compositions that attempt to capture the essence of a location or the experience of a journey in comparison with the profusion of travelogues or paintings of foreign scenes has contributed to music’s marginalization in the recent upsurge of travel-related studies.6 In part this has to do with the nature of the musical medium, which is inher- ently more resistant to the inscription of nonmusical experiences (or more accurately, their external aspects) than are other media. However, souvenirs, or geographically inspired tone-pictures, become increasingly popular in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, the “Swiss” volume of Liszt’s Anne´es de pe`lerinage, and Holst’s Beni Mora Suite spring immediately to mind), so perhaps the time has come to redress this imbalance. Some of the most widespread assumptions about Aus Italien will be called into question in this article. As a musical record of his travels, Aus Italien is regarded as Strauss’s instinctive reaction to the sights of Italy, a view that finds corroborative evidence in the composer’s letters from the period. However, without denying that the composer derived inspiration from the ambience of specific locations, Strauss’s itinerary and his artistic responses were arguably also mediated by established tra- ditions of representing Italy. In the first section, Strauss’s journey is ana- lysed in the context of the experiences of other Italian travellers, in particular those of that most famous of German wanderers in Italy, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Given Strauss’s lifelong veneration for his compatriot, which as early as 1885 took the practical form of his setting the Wanderers Sturmlied for chorus and orchestra, he would certainly have been aware that by travelling south he was following in Goethe’s footsteps. While Aus Italien is clearly a turning point in Strauss’s career, the corollary that this work marks his embrace of Lisztian and Wagnerian principles also proves to be problematic on closer scrutiny. Bryan Gilliam has suggested caution in crediting Strauss’s claim to have been con- verted into a fully functioning musical progressive after his winter in Meiningen, and the examination of form and structure both across the 72 The Musical Quarterly

composition in its entirety and in individual movements will bear this out.7 At every level, one can find a me´lange of forward-looking and conservative elements: aspects that foreshadow Strauss’s later development, as well as those which recall his earlier works. The impact of the New German agenda on Aus Italien is assessed further in the final part of this article, in which Strauss’s programmatic strategies are

examined. Aus Italien betrays the influence of a number of composers Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 besides the two most commonly associated with his development at this point in his career. By presenting a fuller picture of the historical antecedents for this composition, its genuinely new aspects will be cast into relief, and the work can begin to enjoy the recognition it deserves.

Italy, the Land where Ideas Bloom

After all, what am I, both in my life and my travels, but a precursor of those who shall come after me?8

When the twenty-one-year-old Strauss departed for Italy with the encouragement of Brahms, he did not expect to profit directly from musical encounters; rather, he was animated by the desire for general cultural betterment.9 Italy was an obvious choice of destination for his first trip beyond the German-speaking lands, as it had been recognized as the center of artistic civilization for centuries, a place of cultural as well as religious pilgrimage. What might be called Strauss’s Bildungsreise, his educational journey, can be seen in the light of an age-old tradition, a late-nineteenth-century offshoot of the Grand Tour, which drew people from across Northern Europe to the land beyond the Alps. Whereas in the seventeenth century such travels had largely been con- fined to the wealthy aristocracy, by Strauss’s time Italy had become fam- iliar terrain for the middle classes in search of sensuous and cultural experience.10 For the native German, a visit to Italy had acquired par- ticular cachet through Goethe’s celebrated travels there.11 This richly symbolic journey thus marks a watershed in Strauss’s early career, his opportunity to acquire spiritual edification through the contemplation of picturesque landscapes and celebrated works of art (both ancient and modern). Strauss’s itinerary took him to Bologna, Florence, Rome, Naples, Sorrento, Capri, Pompeii, and Lake Como, among other places, and he only missed Venice because of a cholera outbreak there (details of his journey are given in Figure 1, and those places which later featured in Aus Italien are set in bold).12 Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 73

Whether Strauss is better classified as a “traveler” or a “tourist” depends on one’s standpoint: in comparison with Goethe, who spent the best part of two years living in the country, Strauss’s five-week immersion seems decidedly bourgeois.13 The Italian journey occurred at a critical juncture in the lives of both artists: in Strauss’s case, the visit marked his rite of passage into artistic adulthood, while the long-coveted

opportunity to tour Italy enabled Goethe to overcome a midlife crisis Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 and reorient himself artistically. Strauss’s father, the irascible hornist Franz, anticipated such a positive outcome for his son: “I firmly believe that this trip will be of influence on your future artistic production, and that you will make a massive stride in conceiving new things.”14 It was indeed not long after his arrival that Strauss junior found himself coming under the influence of the genius loci, a development which rather took him aback, if we can credit his statement to Bu¨low: “I have

Figure 1. Strauss’s trip to Italy and the composition of Aus Italien. 74 The Musical Quarterly

never really believed in inspiration through the beauty of Nature, but in the Roman ruins I learnt better, for there ideas just came flying to me.”15 That Rome, of all cities, should have marked the first stirrings of his programmatic bent is hardly surprising in view of the unique me´lange of cultural riches it offered the traveler at the end of the nineteenth century, ranging from the ancient ruins to the treasures of

Christian and Renaissance art. Strauss’s itinerary took him to the capital Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 of the ancient world with all possible haste (he only gave a day to Bologna on the way, and broke his journey for literally one hour in Florence). Again, there are Goethean parallels to be observed: while his first destination was Venice, the poet’s diary makes clear how powerfully his thoughts were directed toward the Eternal City, his ultimate goal, where he would “slake the yearning of thirty years.”16 Barely a week after he arrived, the first evidence of Strauss’s awa- kening creative urge is found in a letter of 26 April, where he told his sister that a lovely orchestral theme in C had occurred to him when vis- iting the ruined Baths of Caracalla (see Figure 2).17 The musical motive that had come to Strauss so suddenly (see Ex. 1) became the first theme in the second movement of Aus Italien, aptly titled “Among Rome’s Ruins.” Strauss’s main interest was not in

Figure 2. Giovanni Volpato (1733–1803), The Thermae of Caracalla. Freies Deutsches Hochstift, Frankfurter Goethe-Museum. Used by permission. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 75

Example 1. Sketchbook I: 1 (early draft of Aus Italien II, mm. 1–4).

Rome the center of Christendom, but rather in Rome the repository of

ancient culture.18 The remnants of this bygone civilization, set against Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 the backdrop of the contemporary city, moved and inspired him, just as they had his illustrious compatriot a century before. “Here on classical soil now I stand, inspired and elated: / Past and present speak plain, charm me as never before,” wrote the poet at the beginning of his fifth Roman elegy.19 A similar image recurs in the subtitle of Strauss’s Roman movement: “Fantastic images of vanished splendour, feelings of melan- choly and sorrow amid the sunshine of the present.”20 Without much difficulty this motto theme, first heard on the martial trumpet, can be identified with the “fantastic images of vanished splendour.” The “feelings of melancholy and sorrow” that Rome engendered in Strauss are first mentioned in a postcard he sent two weeks after the opening theme was conceived.21 By this time, Strauss had visited all the locations that would feature in Aus Italien (the Campagna, Rome, Sorrento, and Naples), and three of these are mentioned in this vital document.

Setting aside the matter of the key designations for the present, this letter suggests that Strauss had a definite hierarchy of interests, in which historical and cultural matters outranked the beauties of nature. 76 The Musical Quarterly

However, even if he preferred Rome to Naples, he did feature the latter in his symphonic fantasy. Moreover, three of the four movements take nature and ambience as their starting points:

1. Auf der Campagna (On the Campagna) 2. In Roms Ruinen (Among Rome’s Ruins)

3. Am Strande von Sorrent (On the Shore at Sorrento) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 4. Neapolitanisches Volksleben (Folk Life at Naples)

Thus far, there has been no mention of Strauss’s encounter with music during his travels, a significant aspect of any foreign sojourn for a musician, or so one would be disposed to imagine. From a German per- spective in the nineteenth century, “the significant musical Other was Italy,” and there was little chance that one so steeped in the Austro-Germanic tradition as Strauss would regard Italian music neu- trally.22 This southern trip enabled him to broaden his existing acquain- tance with Italian vocal music, which elicited from him a mixture of disapproval and envy. He grudgingly praised Verdi’s Requiem, which he heard in Naples: “[T]he music and performance [were] very theatrical but not bad. There are some very pretty and original things in the Requiem, I even stayed until the end.”23 However, he despised Aida as “dreadful, Indian music” (scheußlich, Indianermusik), was unimpressed by a “very mediocre” (sehr ma¨ßig) performance of the Barber of Seville, and concluded: “I will probably never convert to Italian music, it’s such trash.”24 Nonetheless even if he remained cold toward Italian art music, he apparently derived considerable pleasure from the country’s popular folk music. In the fourth movement of Aus Italien, “Folk Life at Naples,” Strauss employed tarantella idioms to convey the couleur locale. While this may be better characterized as the use of a recognized musical topic rather than a borrowing in the strict sense, Strauss did not shrink from appropriating material directly. For the principal theme of this same movement, he resorted to the notorious “Funiculı`, Funicula`,” apparently under the impression that it was a genuine folksong (there are some metrical adjustments, and a few cadential repetitions have been excised, but the song is still instantly recognizable here). From the point of view of Strauss’s intentions, the error was arguably inconsequential, since the theme more than adequately fulfills his wish to “depict the colorful bustle of Naples in a hilarious jumble of themes.”25 The storm of contro- versy that raged around the movement ever since the premiere was not over the authenticity of the melody. By using Denza’s vulgar tune in his symphonic fantasy, Strauss the enfant terrible has been seen as mocking Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 77

the supposedly sacred domain of the symphony. Another incongruity noted by Charles Youmans is “the enormous and excessive development of that musical idea into a musical structure of proportions obviously incommensurate with the mundane nature of the subject,” which antici- pates similar procedures in the Symphonia domestica.26 Strauss may have only made limited use of the local vernacular in Aus Italien, but where

Italian music is employed, it serves as an instrument to critique that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 most German of entities, the symphony.

Departing from the Conventional Symphony

Back at home, sitting at my desk again, I was nonetheless very content, for the one pleasure that persists, of which I shall never tire, is the work to which I have dedicated myself entirely.27

On his return to Munich in late May 1886, Strauss threw himself into the composition of Aus Italien and seemingly derived at least as much enjoyment from the act of working out his ideas as he did from the trip that inspired them. The chronology of the work’s composition, insofar as this can be ascertained, is laid out in Figure 1, although no dates are available with regard to the completion of the second movement. The full score was finished on 31 October, and was premiered four months later on 2 March 1887 under the direction of the composer. Soon after- ward, Strauss wrote to the dedicatee, Hans von Bu¨low, claiming that the work had “many new things, both harmonically and especially formally,” an announcement that was unlikely to have gladdened his old mentor’s heart. Even at this point, however, Strauss knew that his development was far from complete: Aus Italien only constituted his “first step toward independence,”28 in which he started “to go [his] own way, to create [his] own forms and to torment lazy listeners.”29 In 1902, with the benefit of hindsight, Strauss confirmed this earlier prediction when he described Aus Italien as “the connecting link with [sic] the old and the new methods.”30 Toward the end of his life, he summed up the work somewhat more deprecatingly as “the first hesitant attempt” (der erste schu¨chternde Versuch) to implement the Liszt-derived principles of allow- ing the programmatic subject to determine the formal structure.31 Strauss thus consistently referred to the symphonic fantasy as a novel departure, although his views on the magnitude of the advance it represented changed over time. When he drew attention to the innova- tive aspects of Aus Italien in the immediate aftermath of its completion, it is interesting that he referred to the work’s structure rather than to its programmaticism (the two are of course linked, as he eventually 78 The Musical Quarterly

acknowledges). In his late essay “Recollections of My Youth and Years of Apprenticeship”(Aus meinen Jugend- und Lehrjahren), Strauss lists the formal innovations as follows: “the displacement of the movements, and, as in the third movement (Sorrento), of the constituent parts of move- ments.”32 There are thus departures from normative procedures at the level of the work as a whole and within individual movements, both of

which must be examined if we are to come to a true estimation of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 Strauss’s achievement. “Away with the barren four-movement formulaic entity, which has sprouted no new content since [Beethoven’s] IXth,” Strauss proclaimed in 1888.33 With hindsight, a composer whose subsequent programmatic compositions were all ostensibly one-movement works could only view the retention of a multi-movement structure in Aus Italien as a supine concession to an outmoded tradition. Norman Del Mar’s belief that “Strauss did not yet feel sure of himself, nor had he yet developed the skill to cast the enormous mass of heterogeneous material in a single complex symphonic movement” is probably true, although it is doubtful whether Strauss had any such ambitions in 1886.34 However, even though the work is still clearly in dialogue with the classical four- movement symphony, Strauss was at pains to establish a distinction between the two. Aus Italien was published as a “symphonic fantasy,” a generic description that pays due regard both to the traditional and the more radical elements in the work. Late in life, the composer referred to it as a “suite,” perhaps because the nature of the programmatic elements enhanced the distinctness of the movements and strengthened its resemblance to a collection of individual descriptive pieces.35 There are, admittedly, several motivic connections between the outer movements, the most notable of which is the recurrence of the G-major theme from the first movement in the finale, programmatically justified as “possibly expressing the yearning for the peace of the Campagna while in the midst of noisy, bustling Naples.”36 Strauss’s use of inter-movemental the- matic citation here is essentially the same as in his Symphony No. 2 (which, like Beethoven’s Ninth, parades themes from earlier movements in the finale) and is peripheral in contrast to the intricate web of motivic associations found in works like Liszt’s Faust Symphony. Granted that he did not write a symphony proper, Strauss still invited a reading of Aus Italien against the standard multi-movement symphonic outline when he referred to a “displacement” in the order of the movements. No further clues are given, but it may be surmised that the Rome movement, the first to be conceived, was originally intended to open the composition. In his own analysis of “Rome,” Strauss revea- lingly stated that it had the form of “a large first movement of a Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 79

symphony.”37 While this could just be another way of describing sonata form (just as in English “first-movement form” is an acceptable ana- logue) it seems likely that Strauss was deliberately giving a clue to the structural importance of the movement. This is reinforced by his descrip- tion of the “Campagna” movement as a “Prelude” (Pra¨ludium) in this analysis. The theory that the C-major “Rome” was the original first movement carries with it interesting implications for the tonality of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 overall composition: the annotated postcard he sent his mother suggests that C was originally the main tonal focus for the composition as a whole.38 As further evidence of this preponderance of C, the first sketches for the opening of the “Campagna” movement are in C major, not G major.39 More significantly still, it can be inferred from the evidence that Strauss initially intended the “Naples” finale to be in C major. In the final version, the second-group material comprises a “Mittelsatz” in D major, followed by a D-minor Tarantella; this was first sketched in G major/minor. Since this material is in the dominant rela- tive to the main “Funiculı`” theme, it suggests that the overall key of the movement would have been C major.40 What, therefore, was the rationale for switching “Rome” from first to second position, a reversal that entailed a considerable reworking of the original tonal plan? Strauss viewed this displacement as one of his “hesitant” attempts to put Liszt’s ideas into practice, which suggests some extramusical motivation. We can probably assume that the Campagna movement was originally in second position, given the geo- graphical proximity of Rome and the Campagna (Strauss’s words do not rule out more far-reaching rearrangements, but the other two places are considerably further south). In one of the very few detailed discussions of this work, Richard Specht invites the listener to imagine a journey across the Campagna toward Rome in the early morning, followed (one presumes) by some sightseeing around the Forum.41 Strauss’s program note actually refers to the view of the sunlit Campagna from the Villa d’Este in Tivoli instead of a dawn journey toward the city, but in spite of this, Specht’s theory of a progression from one scene/movement to the next is plausible in its general outlines, particularly as Strauss mentioned visiting the Roman ruins after an afternoon drive in the Campagna in the postcard cited earlier.42 The shape of the Campagna movement (dis- cussed below) bears out this interpretation: the music grows in intensity until the dramatic breakthrough at m. 99, which irruption clearly could relate to the first sight of Rome. One does not have to search hard to find purely musical reasons for the movement inversion: for one, the “Campagna” and “Sorrento” movements are rather too similar in character to be effectively juxtaposed, as they presumably were before “Rome” was 80 The Musical Quarterly

interposed.43 Additionally, a harmonically ambiguous, slow introduction before a sonata-form movement was commonplace, even if this more fre- quently comprised a section rather than an entire movement. Strauss is hardly venturing into uncharted waters with these manipulations of the symphonic schema, but, however tame, they are indicative of a desire to play with inherited conventions. There are

tantalizing suggestions in the surviving correspondence that Strauss Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 contemplated another departure from the normative model: in a letter to Bu¨low, he mentioned that he was at work on a five-movement piece.44 The additional movement may have been a musical depiction of a sea-storm: he told his father he had drafted this in “Sorrento,” but no trace of it has survived.45 One might surmise that it was intended for the center of Aus Italien, separating the two slower move- ments. The rearrangement of the first two movements would have given Strauss one reason to excise the storm (or vice versa), while fears over the length of the composition could have also been a con- tributing factor (the surviving four movements last a substantial forty-five minutes in performance).

Interlude. Strauss in 1886: The Aspiring New German The overall trajectory of Strauss’s early career is defined by his journey from musical conservatism to the forefront of the avant-garde in Germany, with Don Juan (1888) generally regarded as marking the emergence of the fully mature composer.46 Thus discussions of Aus Italien have inevitably been dominated by grand narratives of “progress” and “development,” tropes which ought not to be accepted uncritically or without due scrutiny. In particular, the tale of the composer’s interest in Wagner and Liszt has strongly influenced reception of the work, although matters here are more complicated than is generally perceived. Strauss’s early distaste for Wagner’s music, and his discovery of Tristan at the age of seventeen, are staples of his youthful biography. Without going into the minutiae of his vacillating stance on Wagner’s music in the early 1880s, one can safely maintain that Strauss was not a card-carrying Wagnerian during this period.47 His ambivalence can be seen in the following remarks on Tristan from 1884:

In spite of there being some ravishing parts (the Introduction, potion- drinking scene, beginning of the second and third acts, the love duet and the ending), the whole is a very unedifying thing; one gets really sick and tired of the second and third acts. At the beginning the piquant harmonies still intrigue the fastidious ear, but one becomes sated Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 81

with them quicker than by eternal lobster mayonnaise and salmon with remoulade.48

Admittedly, these irony-laden comments were probably intended to pacify his anti-Wagnerian father, but even allowing for this, it is clear that some reservations persisted. Such was the situation when Strauss took up his first professional engagement in Meiningen, in October Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 1885. The composer’s final conversion to the New German way is described in one of the best-known passages from his autobiographical writings. The agent whom Strauss credited with bringing about this change of heart was Alexander Ritter, violinist in the Meiningen orches- tra and rabid supporter of Liszt and Wagner. In Strauss’s own words:

[T]he greatest event of the winter in Meiningen was my acquaintance with Alexander Ritter, who ...invited me to his house, where I found the spiritual stimulus which was the decisive factor in my further devel- opment. As a result of my upbringing, I still had some prejudices against Wagner’s and especially against Liszt’s work, and I scarcely knew Richard Wagner’s writings at all. Ritter, with patient explanations, introduced me to them ...and proved to me that the road led from the “musical expressionist” Beethoven ...via Liszt who, with Wagner, had realized correctly that Beethoven had expanded sonata form to its utmost limits.... New ideas must search for new forms—this basic principle of Liszt’s symphonic works in which the poetic idea was really the form-shaping element, became from that day on the guiding principle for my own symphonic work.49

This account has been widely propagated and only very recently has its accuracy been called into question. Charles Youmans has cast doubt on the role allegedly played by Ritter and argues (somewhat tendentiously, it must be said) that Bu¨low’s “catholicity” of taste, “peppered liberally with critical commentary,” was more significant to the young Strauss’s development.50 More convincingly, he has demonstrated that the pro-Wagner position in the late nineteenth century was not a mono- lithic entity. Strauss encountered a host of competing “Wagnerisms,” which raises the question, “[i]f Strauss did experience a revelatory moment on the road to Damascus, to what was he converted?” Youmans goes so far as to call into question the whole notion of a “con- version,” suggesting that “Strauss always saw something of interest in Wagner’s music, and he always regarded it with a critical eye.”51 While there is no gainsaying Strauss’s divided state of mind vis-a`-vis the Wagnerian legacy in the early 1880s, there is a wealth of documentation to support the view that by the end of the decade Strauss had become a 82 The Musical Quarterly

committed Wagnerolator. True, his compositions enter into a complex intertextual relationship with Wagner’s artworks, but his belief in their essential greatness never faltered thereafter. One does not have to doubt the essential truth of Strauss’s account to have suspicions about the accuracy of particulars. Bryan Gilliam believes that “[i]n his sentimental reminiscence of the

Meiningen period Strauss collapsed years of evolving thought into a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 single event,” and contends that Strauss’s Brahmsschwa¨rmerei over- lapped with his rising fascination with Wagner.52 This view finds support in one of Strauss’s earliest autobiographical sketches (probably dating from January 1898), where he credits Ritter with having turned him “into a confirmed musician-of-the-future after years of affectionate efforts and teaching.”53 In this version, closer in point of time to the actual events, Strauss’s radical change of course is described as the outcome of a process lasting a number of years, which effectively quashes the view (implicit in the later, better-known essay) that the hitherto Brahms devotee departed for Italy in 1886 with an entirely new agenda. Such a radical and rapid change of direction seems improbable: Strauss may have had Wagnerian leanings beforehand, but his acquaintance with Liszt’s music was negligible before Ritter took him in hand.54 In sum, Strauss’s “conversion” was not of the bolt-from-the-blue kind that turned Saul into St. Paul; a more accu- rate parallel might be the lengthy process by which St. Ignatius con- vinced Francis Xavier. Swapping religious for biological imagery, the seeds of Strauss’s future devotion to Liszt and Wagner had already been laid by the time he left Meiningen. The Italian journey was especially significant in that it inspired Strauss to compose; that the outcome was a programmatic work, one which openly advertised the extramusical impulsion behind it, might incline one to believe that Ritter’s teachings had germinated as a result of this southern exposure and come to an early flowering.

Manipulating the Conventions in Individual Movements

From the F-minor symphony onward I have found myself in a gradually ever-increasing contradiction between the musical poetic content that I want to convey and the ternary sonata form that has come down to us from the classical composers.55

Even after Strauss became intellectually convinced of the historical “right- ness” of the Zukunftsmusik path, it took some time before his compositional Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 83

style adjusted to the new demands laid on it, as the protracted revisions Macbeth underwent demonstrate. Aus Italien was well described by its com- poser as the “bridge” into his own “totally individual path.”56 The transi- tional character of the work is evinced in the amalgam of progressive and conservative traits in the structure of the composition as a whole, and the tug-of-war between the two is played out again in (or rather, between) the

individual movements. By examining each of these in turn, a truer esti- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 mation of the composer’s position at this time in regard to Formenlehre structures and the like will be reached. One reason for Strauss’s choice of “symphonic fantasy” over “symphony” as the designation for Aus Italien is suggested by a remark he made directly after the 1887 premiere: “it departs in almost every respect from the conventional symphony, that is, from sonata form.”57 That Strauss understood the symphony to be concomitant with sonata structure is unsurprising, although his extensive knowledge of the reper- tory would have made him aware how different any two works in “sonata form” could be. In any case, however justified the premise may be, Strauss’s boast of having almost totally disregarded sonata form is a flagrant exaggeration: his own published analysis effectively refutes this. Reference has already been made to this extremely valuable source, one of only two such guides penned by Strauss himself, which was used for performances of Aus Italien in Berlin in 1888 and published in the fol- lowing year when the work was programmed again at the Tonku¨nstler- Versammlung in Wiesbaden.58 In his analysis of “In Roms Ruinen,” Strauss openly concedes that the second movement is in sonata form, and even employs terminology such as “main theme” (Hauptthema), “subsidiary theme to the main theme” (Seitensatz des Hauptthemas), “central theme” (Mittelthema), and “closing figure” (Codamotiv; see Ex. 2). However, even in this seemingly conservative movement, surprises are not excluded, particularly in terms of tonality. The two coda motives (mm. 100, 101), labeled as such by Strauss, do not provide uncompli- cated expositional closure. Instead, they initiate modulations from the established secondary key of G major to more distant areas, and when G is finally restored around m. 113, it is in the minor mode. Compared with the lyrical Mittelthema music, the texture here is fragmented, almost suggesting a development passage.59 In the reprise, matters are treated with still greater freedom, as can be seen from Figure 3: first- group areas which were originally in the tonic minor are now in the rela- tive minor, while the Mittelthema, in the default dominant key the first time round, begins and ends in E, the mediant major (its appearance in the expected tonic in mm. 326–42 is sandwiched in the middle). None of these departures from the norm is without precedent in nineteenth- Downloaded fromhttps://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560bygueston02October2021 84 h uia Quarterly Musical The

Figure 3. Schematic layout of Aus Italien II (In Roms Ruinen). “Tilde” symbol implies a part or development of the theme concerned. “Right arrow” symbol indicates a tonally indeterminate section (usually leading to or coming from a relatively stable area). Major keys are in upper case, minor in lower case. Functional descriptions which explicitly derive from Strauss are in ordinary type; otherwise my interpretations are in italics. The roman numeral identification of themes corresponds to Example 2. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 85 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 2. Thematic material in Aus Italien II (as listed by Strauss).60 century symphonic composition, but Strauss has made clear advances on his own Symphony in F Minor (1884).61 The use of semitonally related tonalities is another progressive if not pioneering element in this movement and foreshadows the practice in many later works (notably Also sprach Zarathustra). The development begins in A-flat, initially introduced as Neapolitan harmony in G minor (see Ex. 3a),62 while the retransition ends with a symmetrically balanced descent from an extended D-flat pedal (mm. 227–66) onto the C-major first theme (the final chord is an augmented sixth resolving outward onto the tonic, as can be seen in Ex. 3b). Sharp disjunctions of this sort, resembling the fault line between two tectonic plates, are often 86 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 3. a. Aus Italien II. mm. 135–43. # 1904 by Jos. Aibl Verlag, Leipzig. Renewed 1932 by C. F. Peters Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. b. Aus Italien II. mm. 227–67 (harmonic outline).

employed in the later tone poems not only to indicate important struc- tural divisions but also for plot reasons. The other movement where sonata form seems to be the dominant structural paradigm is the finale, “Neapolitanisches Volksleben.” Again, Strauss used terms such as Mittelsatz and Codamotiv in both the sketches for and the analysis of the movement.63 As was also the case in the “Rome” movement, the closing theme in the exposition is unorthodox, but here it is programmatically apposite, a whirlwind Tarantella symbo- lizing the “hedonism and unrestraint” of Naples.64 More startling is the jokey recapitulation of the main idea, transposed up a semitone (m. 258), eventually arriving back in G major for the final part of this theme (m. 316).65 The extensive employment of the final theme from the first movement in the reprise is also worthy of note, particularly when this motto appears in keys far distant from the surrounding material.66 The nonappearance of the Tarantella theme in the recapitulation and the complete subjugation of the Mittelsatz to the first-movement melody suggest a “breakthrough” deformation, even if the delicate Campagna theme is diametrically opposed to the usual heroic style of such Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 87

intrusions. However, these wistful recollections of the peace of the Campagna are eventually vanquished by helter-skelter triplet-based musical material as the mood reverts to Neapolitan frenzy: the triplets, which continue for the rest of the movement, giving it something of the character of Berlioz’s Le carnaval romain Overture, ultimately derive from the seemingly absent Tarantella.67 Perhaps we might speak of a

“failed” breakthrough here, that is, a deformation of the deformation Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 type. Thus both quick-tempo, even-numbered movements are patently in dialogue with sonata form. By contrast, the slower “Campagna” and “Sorrento” movements are less easily characterized in terms of schematic patterns. “Auf der Campagna” in particular resists any attempts to parse it as a Formenlehre offshoot. Of the three themes Strauss quotes in his analysis, the brief G-major fanfare (m. 100) is identified as the most important.68 This only emerges after two-thirds of the movement have elapsed, although it is foreshadowed in m. 18, where the basic fanfare pattern rises quickly throughout the orchestra (see Ex. 8a below). The delayed appearance of the complete theme anticipates a similar strategy in Tod und Verkla¨rung, where “the main theme is first brought in as a culmination point in the middle.”69 In Aus Italien, the triumphant fanfare is doubly a point of arrival, marking as it does the first attain- ment of a stable theme in the tonic. It might be seen as a breakthrough event, or alternatively as the endpoint of a teleological process, the logical response to the lack of a decisive theme at the opening and the constant postponement of the main tonality.70 At the very outset of the movement, G major is destabilized by the exploratory chords illustrated in Example 4. Strauss is making a bold statement of his new direction here through the use of unrelated, chromatic sonorities. The semitonal play found in both the “Rome” and “Naples” movements is also visible here in the slippage from G major to F-sharp minor over the course of the two phrases. Harmonically indeterminate or exploratory introductions leading to a more stable main section were something of a musical cliche´ by this time, and the long pedal D (mm. 29–39) seems to presage the confir- mation of G major. However, arrival on the tonic is frustrated in typi- cally Wagnerian fashion by an interrupted cadence (D–E-flat). The first distinctive melodic utterance in the movement, described by Strauss as the “secondary theme” (Seitenthema), is therefore in the distant key of flat-VI. In fact, an E-flat-major plateau extends from here virtually as far as the entry of the fanfare theme in m. 99 (circa m. 80, the music moves to the parallel key of C minor). This cantabile Seitenthema fulfills the “feminine” stereotype for secondary themes and is strongly 88 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 4. Aus Italien I, mm. 1–17. # 1904 by Jos. Aibl Verlag, Leipzig. Renewed 1932 by C. F. Peters Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 89 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 4. Continued. 90 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 4. Continued. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 91

contrasted to the martial main fanfare theme: surely this is an obvious instance of the innovatory “reversal of themes” to which Strauss drew attention. Interestingly, the fanfare lasts only a few bars, and is less a theme in the strict sense than a gesture of arrival. Once G major has been triumphantly confirmed, the fanfare gives way to a more extended tonic melody, the lyrical “Coda theme” that reappears in the finale. The

main event in the tonal drama may be over, but the excitement is not Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 ended, as the Coda theme is whipped into ecstasy in a Don Juan-like Steigerung, reaching another climax on a D pedal. Even now we wait in vain for what might be called the “point of essential structural closure,”71 a perfect authentic cadence in the tonic: instead, the D– E-flat cadence from earlier is reenacted, followed by snippets of the orig- inal E-flat theme in the winds. In a framing gesture that Strauss would use again in later tone poems, the movement ends with a repetition of the introductory chords, short-circuited so as to end in G major. In this movement, Strauss has managed to construct a structure that is logical without being at all predictable, and so this counts among his earliest truly original formal ventures. The formal conundrums posed by “Am Strande von Sorrent” are in many ways the most intriguing of all. Strauss’s published note (given in full below) is not obviously helpful in deciphering the structure, con- sisting as it does of a programmatic description rather than an analysis proper, and lacking any Formenlehre terminology. The movement falls into three main sections, the outer two of which are clearly related by use of the same thematic material. These are separated by a brief central portion (mm. 130–59) which introduces the melody representing the Boatman’s song, the only theme Strauss quoted in his note. This ternary layout more specifically seems to bear some relationship to a sonata-form scheme. After a harmonically wide-ranging introduction, a series of new themes (labeled I–IV in Ex. 5) is presented, with theme IV in the domi- nant key (E major, m. 95) and the preceding theme III in the dominant of the dominant (B major, m. 84). These themes all reappear in the third part of the movement, and the “sonata principle” is observed to the extent that the off-tonic themes III and IV are now reprised at least partially in A major (at mm. 206 and 176, respectively). In this 6 interpretation, the intervening 8 Boatman music (theme V in Ex. 5) would stand in place of the development. It is surely significant that Strauss described this theme as an “episode,” a label that carries with it the implication of something inserted into a more logical formal struc- ture. The deployment of quasi-independent episodes into the develop- ment space is very common in the nineteenth century, particularly in the works of Liszt (Les Pre´ludes, Tasso, and many others) and Wagner 92 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 5. Thematic material in Aus Italien III. # 1904 by Jos. Aibl Verlag, Leipzig. Renewed 1932 by C. F. Peters Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

(Siegfried Idyll). The material used in this movement is given in Examples 5 and 6 (with admittedly tendentious formal descriptions), while Figure 4 lays out in greater detail how this material is deployed. The sonata-form reading advanced above is only a provisional interpretation, and proves highly problematic on further scrutiny. The lyrical trawl through themes I–IV in the first part is very different Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 93 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 6. Aus Italien III, mm. 1–10. # 1904 by Jos. Aibl Verlag, Leipzig. Renewed 1932 by C. F. Peters Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 94 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021

Example 6. Continued. Downloaded fromhttps://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560bygueston02October2021

Figure 4. Possible schematic layout of Aus Italien III (Am Strande von Sorrent). “Tilde” symbol implies a part or development of the theme concerned. “Right arrow” symbol indicates a tonally indeterminate section (usually leading to or coming from a relatively stable area). Major keys are in upper case, minor in lower case. Functional descriptions which explicitly derive from Strauss are in ordinary type; otherwise my

interpretations are in italics. The roman numeral identification of themes corresponds to Example 5, and the Nature material is given in Journeys Strauss’s Retracing Example 6. 95 96 The Musical Quarterly

from the usual dynamic of opposition and contrast inherent in the expositional space. The recapitulation, too, is highly unorthodox: material is brought back in a different order and is subject to consider- able variation, to the extent that this section might be seen as a con- flation of development and recapitulation. Even the climactic return of 6 theme III in the tonic is weakened by its appearance above a 4 chord.

In sum, while elements of sonata form may be detected in this move- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 ment, it does not account for some of the most distinctive features. An alternative, or perhaps a supplementary, explanation of the formal procedures in this movement can be advanced if greater cognizance is taken of Strauss’s program, given here in its entirety:

This movement attempts to represent in tone painting the tender music of nature, which the inner ear hears in the rustling of the wind in the leaves, in bird song and in all the delicate voices of nature, in the distant murmur of the sea, whence a solitary song reaches to the beach;

and to contrast it with the sensations experienced by the human listener, which are expressed in the melodic elements of the movement. The interplay between the separation and partial union of these opposites constitutes the spiritual content of this mood picture.72

In Strauss’s dualistic conception of “Sorrento,” the music representing nature is initially distinct from the human reaction to these sights (and sounds). All the thematic tags quoted in Example 5 (aside from the “Boatman” idea) pertain to the onlooker, and each of these themes is strongly melodic in character. By contrast, the music associated with the “voices of nature” (see Ex. 6) is more concerned with texture and timbre and consists of three separate ideas, sequentially presented in the first twelve measures: searching, unconventional chordal motion (mm. 1–4), an arpeggiated passage of ascending trills (mm. 5–8), and finally the gloriously effulgent melismas in upper strings and woodwinds, which descend across three octaves (mm. 9–12). Where Strauss saw the inter- play between and partial union of these two opposing entities as consti- tuting the spiritual content of “Sorrento,” the process whereby these are fused is also arguably the essential formal procedure in the movement. As can be seen from Figure 4, the material reprised after the Boatman’s song is integrated with elements of the Nature music (a procedure not Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 97

unlike the way Wagner embeds the melodic-harmonic identities of the “Siegfried” and “magic sleep” motives into the textural “fire” motive at the end of Die Walku¨re). Thus, apart from resolving the tonal dichotomy set up in the exposition, the “recapitulation” serves to unite Man with Nature. Neither this unitive process nor a straight sonata-reading alone is a satisfactory explanation of the formal processes in this movement; rather, both are meshed in a complex response to the programmatic con- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 cerns. Other formal explanations could be contrived, no doubt, but the essential point is that the qualities of openness, ambiguity, and multiva- lence that would become characteristics of Strauss’s mature orchestral works are already in evidence in 1886.

Italy Reimagined: Strauss’s Precursors and His Programmatic Strategies This close interdependence of form and content in “Sorrento” is thoroughly in keeping with the principle underlying Liszt’s own orches- tral works, a principle Strauss adopted as his own. In fact, Strauss may have owed more particular debts to the Hungarian here: this specific programmatic scheme is strongly reminiscent of the symbolic opposition of man and nature in Liszt’s Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, which Strauss may have known at this time. In Liszt’s preface, he speaks of there being “two voices.... One is the voice of nature, the other humanity. Both voices struggle toward each other, cross and merge into each other until they finally unite in consecrated contemplation and afterward die away.”73 The work thus follows a similar trajectory to “Sorrento,” although union in Liszt’s work is accomplished not by the- matic fusion but by the introduction of a chorale, an established topical referent for religious or para-religious transcendence. There are also a number of similarities to Liszt’s syntactic procedures in “Sorrento”: the outre´ final expansion of the tonic by means of an unrelated chord (see Ex. 7a) has a number of precedents in the Hungarian’s oeuvre (one of which is illustrated in Ex. 7b).74 Most strikingly derivative, arguably, is the opening thirty-two-measure paragraph of this movement, a passage with palpably Lisztian overtones that explores nontraditional harmonic relationships and exhibits a somewhat repetitious, disjointed structure, the whole clothed in gorgeous orchestral sound. Strauss shows himself to be more subtle than Liszt in his use of repetition: the complex tripartite main idea (see Ex. 6) occurs three times, but none of the segments returns exactly as before. The straightforward, unvaryingly repetitive sequence technique used by Liszt has perhaps been imbued with the developing variation beloved of Brahms.75 98 The Musical Quarterly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 Example 7. a. Aus Italien III, mm. 243–44. # 1904 by Jos. Aibl Verlag, Leipzig. Renewed 1932 by C. F. Peters Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. b. Liszt, Sonneto de Petrarch No. 104, mm. 77–79.

“Sorrento” may thus be steeped in the spirit of the New Germans, but not exclusively so. Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture could alterna- tively have served as a model for the programmatic strategies in “Sorrento,” in that it, too, has been seen as representing both nature (the surging opening music) and the presence of a viewer (the more lyrical second-group idea).76 Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably, criti- cal reactions to Aus Italien have tended to focus on those aspects of the work that were novel, or that with hindsight were seen to presage future developments in his craft, and therefore the New German elements have received more attention. One of the earliest reviews commented that “it rests completely on the base of the tone poems by Liszt and Berlioz,” and another lamented that “in spite of the unconstrained encroachment on Wagner’s musical world, everything sounds so icy and frosty as though it came directly from the North Pole.”77 However, it is possible to hear many other voices, since every aspect of the work, from its formal construction and harmonic language to the nature of the pro- grammatic content, bespeaks its transitional status. The ever-insightful Eduard Hanslick noticed the mixed pedigree of the work when he reviewed a performance on 23 November 1899: “In spite of his being visibly inspired by Berlioz and employing Wagnerian combinations, Strauss does not disdain to borrow from Mendelssohn on a few occasions.”78 If the vivid depiction of nature in “Sorrento” is the undoubted high-water mark of extramusical imagination in this work, in other parts Strauss focused on mood and ambience rather than on tone painting—a variety of programmatic strategies that became an essential component of the composer’s personal style, according to his first biographers.79 The nature of the relationship between music and paratext has come under scrutiny from the beginning, and “Among Rome’s Ruins” has aroused particular controversy in this regard.80 Max Bruch pointed out the lack of pertinence between the epigraph and the music in “Rome” in the Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 99 course of an exchange with Strauss, and refuted Strauss’s lofty defense that the poor reception of the even-numbered movements could be ascribed to the conservative audience’s unfamiliarity with the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz.81 Even Strauss’s analytic essay, to which Bruch probably did not have access, does not clear up the confusion. In the essay, Strauss reproduces the score’s epigraph—“Fantastic images of vanished splendour, feelings of melancholy and sorrow amid the sun- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 shine of the present”—and glosses it further: “The following themes cor- respond to the three basic moods identified in the heading.”82 He then lists no fewer than five themes that constitute the main melodic material of the movement (see Ex. 8). Various commentators have attempted to map these three ill-defined emotions (are the “vanished splendour” and the “sunshine” metaphors for two of the emotions?) onto the themes with some success.83 But the fact remains that the extramusical only impinges on the constitution of the themes (and questionably so), not

Example 8. a. Aus Italien I, mm. 18–21. b. Wagner, Overture to Der fliegende Holla¨nder, mm. 108–12. c. Aus Italien I, mm. 41–51. Strauss, Aus Italien. # 1904 by Jos. Aibl Verlag, Leipzig. Renewed 1932 by C. F. Peters Corporation. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission. 100 The Musical Quarterly

on the processes whereby these interact; hence a relatively orthodox sonata form could still operate here. Gustav Brecher was of the opinion that Aus Italien as whole hear- kened back to a pre-Lisztian type of program music based on mood- painting, a view which finds some support in Strauss’s own remarks on the subject.84 Even the program note for “Sorrento” contains a preemp-

tive defense against accusations of “mere pictorialism”: the claim to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 have represented things as “heard by the inner ear” is tantamount to a declaration that he intended a personalized rather than a literal, onoma- topoetic rendition of nonmusical phenomena. In an 1889 letter to Karl Wolff, Strauss deprecated vulgar interest in these surface elements, which led audiences to focus on these peripherals at the expense of the true content of his work.85 The unapologetic realism of Don Quixote is still far distant. However, Strauss’s indignation rings rather hollow, since he clearly wishes both to have his cake and to eat it. By indulging in depiction of the extramusical, but insisting that it is refracted by human experience, Strauss can titillate the audience with his realistic tone- painting, while claiming it only serves as the means through which the emotions of the character viewing the scene are represented. The aforementioned letter to Wolff is a rich source for those wishing to disentangle the complexities of Strauss’s stance on program- matic matters around this period. Strauss openly identifies himself as a disciple of Liszt and Wagner (and of late-period Beethoven), and adduces this as a reason why his work would have to go beyond the “piquant tone-painting” that lay within the capacity of every conserva- tory student. Expression, he argues, is the essential core of music, but since poetry was the mother of all the arts,

a piece of music which has nothing truly poetic to convey to me— naturally, the sort of thing which can be properly represented only in music, content that words may be able to suggest, but only to suggest—a piece like that in my view is anything you care to call it—but not that most poetic of arts, capable of the highest expression: music.

He goes on to claim that Aus Italien is a record of his “feelings at the sight of the splendid beauties of nature in Rome and Naples, not descrip- tions of these.”86 This phrase clearly echoes Beethoven’s famous descrip- tion of his Pastoral Symphony as “more the expression of feeling than tone-painting” (Mehr Ausdruck der Empfindung als Malerei). Strauss can be accused of special pleading—he referred only to the more conserva- tive, even-numbered movements—but even Beethoven was probably being a little disingenuous (the river, birdsong, and storm are somewhat Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 101

more pictorial than he seems to admit). The importance of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony as a model for Aus Italien should not be underesti- mated. Strauss’s modifications to his initial plan for a five-movement work (including a storm) may have weakened the external similarities, but his approach to musical representation here does not depart radically from that practiced by Beethoven.

By the time Strauss wrote his symphonic fantasy, there was a size- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 able body of orchestral works overtly inspired by or relating to Italy, and Aus Italien inevitably enters into intertextual dialog with these. Looking across this corpus of works as a whole, one can discern recurring pat- terns in the way different composers have represented the country musi- cally (an obvious one is the use of a lively Neapolitan movement to finish).87 Hence, resemblances between any two works may betoken a more remote kinship through this representative tradition rather than any specific indebtedness.88 Nonetheless, certain similarities are particu- larly suggestive: the idiosyncratic trajectory of Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony (from A-major first movement to A-minor finale) might potentially have influenced Strauss’s initial conception of a C-major– C-minor key scheme across the work. The lack of specific literary refer- ents in Mendelssohn’s symphony certainly makes it a closer model for Aus Italien than Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (after Byron’s Childe Harold), or indeed Liszt’s Anne´es de pe`lerinage, Book 2: Italie, a collection of piano miniatures commemorating the artworks of the land rather than the land itself.89 Hanslick’s shrewd observation on the stylistic heterogeneiety of Aus Italien applies to the harmonic syntax as much as to the programma- tic strategies. There is much in “Auf der Campagna” which seems to echo Wagner: the passage that introduces the proto-fanfare motive might even be a deliberate allusion to the Overture from Der fliegende Holla¨nder (see Exx. 8a/b), a work which Strauss had conducted during his Meiningen period.90 Matthias Hansen has described Strauss’s melodic style elsewhere in this movement as a fusion of reactionary and avant-garde elements: he hears in the Seitenthema (Exx. 8c) the ballad- like linearity of Wagner’s earlier style, while the elegantly shaped line suggests to him Mendelssohn. (He invokes the same pair of composers in characterizing the first melody [m. 33] from “Sorrento” as a mixture of Lohengrin and Sommernachtstraum in its flow, rhythm, and harmony.)91 Perhaps these are no more than analogies for the type of melody Strauss was composing at this stage in his career, but even as metaphors they are revealing. There are, in sum, a large number of con- tending influences discernible in this symphonic fantasy. Neither Strauss’s technique nor his programmatic strategies had fully crystallized 102 The Musical Quarterly

at this point, but by opening himself to the achievements of the past, he was able to find new ways forward.

Conclusion

So long as I had nothing to express, so long as nothing stimulated me, so long as I had to make a great effort searching for a worthy subject and, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 in spite of all my searching, seldom found one, where should I have found a genuine impulse to make pictures? But in this country, so much crowds in upon one and one absorbs so much that one cannot help becoming an artist and producing something.92

Goethe’s words convey something of the powerful, fructifying effect that Italy could have on creative imaginations. Strauss, the aspiring homme cultive´, may have traveled south without any expectation of commemorating his travels in music, but the “impulse to make pic- tures”—in his case sound-mood pictures—proved irresistible. He would pour scorn on those who described Aus Italien as a “musical Baedeker,” but there is inevitably an element of the travelogue to the finished composition, even if emotion (mood and ambience) rather than description (tone-painting) dominate.93 The focus on landscape and location here is somewhat anomalous in his output: not until Eine Alpensinfonie almost three decades later would Strauss again write a work which overtly took nature as its subject matter. Many of the intervening tone poems are strongly associated with literature, a fact which perhaps strengthens the hypothesis that Strauss’s engagement with the Italian landscape was at least partially refracted through a lit- erary medium. The resemblances to Goethe’s Italienische Reise are indeed striking: apart from those similarities noted above, the episode that Strauss outlined in his program note to the “Sorrento” movement recalls a parallel Goethean incident.94 In a memorable passage, the poet recalls being told about Venetian fishermen who exchanged songs with their wives on the shore:

“It is [the women’s] custom to sit on the seashore while their husbands are out sea-fishing, and sing these songs in penetrating tones until, from far out over the sea, their men reply, and in this way they converse with each other.” ...It is the cry of some lonely human being sent out into the wide world till it reaches the ears of another lonely human being who is moved to answer it.95

This anecdote differs from the scene depicted in the symphonic fantasy only in that the song of Strauss’s boatman, which comes across the Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 103

water, does not meet with a vocal response from the observer. However, it does not go unanswered: the song proves to be the catalyst for bring- ing about the reconciliation between man and nature in the second half of the movement. It is ironic that, so far from effecting a conversion to any indigen- ous Italian style of music, Strauss’s five-week journey inspired him to

engage more earnestly than before with the German instrumental tra- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 dition. Clearly this has much to do with his upbringing, and also with his interest in orchestral rather than stage composition at this point in his career. The most obvious influences on Aus Italien point to Strauss’s dawning appreciation for the music (and more importantly, the aesthetic philosophies) of Wagner and Liszt, but these do not predominate to the exclusion of all else. In addition to the intertextual links with Beethoven and Mendelssohn mentioned above, Strauss’s music is still audibly indebted to Brahms; echoes of the latter’s Symphony No. 3 surely after (first movement) are to be heard in the play of cross rhythms found in the “Rome” movement.96 On a human level, the trip marked an important rite of passage for Strauss: it was the first time that he ventured outside the German-speaking lands, and consequently the first time that he managed to liberate himself entirely from family and professional com- mitments. Freud has observed that a “great part of the pleasure of travel lies in the fulfillment of ...early wishes to escape the family and especially the father,” and Strauss’s early life was dominated by no fewer than three significant father figures (Franz Strauss, Bu¨low, and Ritter).97 A temporary removal from their benign but arguably oppres- sive influence was indeed welcome to the young man, even if he never directly articulated these sentiments. It was this intoxicating feeling of liberty, no less than the beauty and cultural richness of the land itself, that set his musical imagination on fire and led to such important developments in his art. Strauss attained final independence from Ritter in remarkably similar circumstances, the catalyst in this case being an eight-month convalescent trip to Egypt, Greece, and Italy in 1893. The revisions to the libretto for Guntram, which he undertook while away, led to a breach with his last and arguably most influential mentor.98 Some decades after Strauss first traveled south, D. H. Lawrence wrote: “[F]or us to go to Italy and to penetrate into Italy is like a most fascinating act of self-discovery.”99 This was also Strauss’s experience: beyond the inspiration provided by particular places that were then memorialized in music, Strauss’s southern sojourn led him to make a number of important discoveries about himself and his methods of 104 The Musical Quarterly

composing. For one, he found the climate propitious for creation, so much so that in later life he claimed to need warmth and sun before he could compose. Even more significantly, it was in Italy that he first discovered how stimulating the extra musical could be to his imagin- ation, as the following telling anecdote bears out:

On a drive on the Appian Way one glorious afternoon, I suddenly Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 caught myself going quite unconsciously in my own mind through the D-major trio of the scherzo of the 7th Symphony [by Beethoven], it expressed so completely the mood of this wonderful Campagna.100

The art of hearing and constructing musical analogs for extramusical phenomena is something that became central to his art, as the later tone poems amply evince. Back at his desk in Munich, Strauss would draw on the memories of his recent travels to construct his symphonic fantasy, the work that would begin his metamorphosis into the tone poet we are familiar with. Aus Italien thus initiates one journey as it commemorates another and, therefore, marks an important milestone in Strauss’s developing career.

Notes David Larkin is a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Music, University College Dublin, where he holds a fellowship awarded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Larkin gained his doctorate from the University of Cambridge in 2007 for a dissertation which explored Strauss’s reception of the music and aesthetics of Liszt and Wagner, and the impact which this had on the creation of the tone poems. He is currently working on a study of the interaction of the symphonic and the dramatic in Strauss’s oeuvre, and also on the rise of the compositional avant- garde over the long nineteenth century. Email: [email protected] Portions of this article were presented in papers at the Sixth Annual Music Graduate Exchange Conference at the University of Oxford (13 April 2004) and the Music and Travel Conference organized by the British Forum for Ethnomusicology at the University of Manchester (2 December 2006), both of which elicited much helpful comment. I also have used material from the second and third chapters of my disser- tation, “Reshaping the Liszt-Wagner Legacy: Intertextual Dynamics in Strauss’s Tone Poems” (PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2006). Particular thanks are due to Walter Werbeck, Martin Ennis, Scott Warfield, Julian Horton, Barbara Eichner, Christian Leitmeir, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal. 1. Tzvetan Todorov, “The Journey and Its Narratives,” trans. Alyson Waters, in Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830, ed. Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 287. 2. Even with the recent upsurge of interest in the composer, this lacuna remains. It is probably significant, or at least symptomatic, that Walter Werbeck should not have included consideration of Aus Italien in his 1996 study of Strauss’s tone poems (the Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 105

starting point for subsequent scholarly enquiry into these works). To be sure, Aus Italien is mentioned en passant in virtually every survey of Strauss’s life and works, but more detailed studies are few and far between. The most significant items are Gustav Brecher’s “Aus Italien,” in Richard Strauss: Symphonien und Tondichtungen, ed. Herwarth Walden, Meisterfu¨hrer 6 (Berlin: Schlesinger, n.d. [ca. 1908]), 17–45; a chapter in Richard Specht’s 1921 study Richard Strauss und sein Werk, vol. 1: Der Ku¨nstler und sein Weg: Der Instrumentalkomponist (Leipzig: Tal, 1921), 138–83; Hon-Lung Yang, “From

Symphony to Symphonic Poem: A Study of Richard Strauss’s Two Early Symphonic Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 Works [sic]” (M.Mus. dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1989); and a chapter in Mathias Hansen, Richard Strauss: Die Sinfonischen Dichtungen (Kassel: Ba¨renreiter, 2003), 23–37. Since completing this article, I came across a useful study by Katrin Schmidinger, Zwischen Gondel und Vesuv: Deutschsprachige Komponisten des 19. Jahrhunderts in Italien (Leipzig: Reinecke, 2007). The chapter devoted to Strauss (179–240) explores his 1886 itinerary, the resultant work, and analyses early critical responses to Aus Italien. 3. This apathy over how travel and Western art music affect each other is in pointed contrast to ethnomusicological interest in similar topics. In 1999, an entire issue of World of Music was devoted to the theme “Music, Travel and Tourism” (vol. 41, no. 3), guest edited by Mark F. DeWitt (the broadest consideration of issues is found in Martin Stokes, “Music, Travel and Tourism: An Afterword,” 141–55). The importance of music to diaspora communities has long been appreciated outside (ethno)musicological circles, and recently a complete issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies was devoted to the topic (see the editorial by John Baily and Michael Collyer, “Introduction: Music and Migration,” vol. 32, no. 2 [2006]: 167–82). 4. Bernard Se´ve, “Le chemin de musique,” in Musiques, villes et voyages, ed. Bernard Se´ve (Paris: Cite´ de la musique, 2006), 7–16, here 8 (all translations are my own unless indicated otherwise). Se´ve justifies his belief by reference to Nelson Goodman’s well-known categories of autographic and allographic art, music, of course, being an instance of the latter. 5. A useful discussion of travel and music during the seventeenth century is found in Curtis Price, “Music, Style and Society,” in The Early Baroque Era: From the Late Sixteenth Century to the 1660s, ed. Curtis Price (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 1–2. It is to the more general type of stimulus that Chloe Chard alludes when she writes: “[T]ravel is a form of personal adventure, holding out the promise of a discovery or realization of the self through the exploration of the other: according to this view— which for convenience, may be termed the Romantic approach—travel entails crossing symbolic as well as geographical boundaries.” Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 11. 6. The following selection of recent scholarship on travel, particularly as related to art and literature, is very much a sampling of an enormous field: Percy G. Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars 1660–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, first pub. 1976); Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); Paul Fussell, ed., The Norton Book of Travel (New York: Norton, 1987); Jonathan Culler, “The Semiotics of Tourism,” in Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 106 The Musical Quarterly

1988), 153–67; Dennis Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); Charles Fitzroy, Italy: A Grand Tour for the Modern Traveller (London: Macmillan, 1991); Georges Van Den Abbeele, Travel as Metaphor: From Montaigne to Rousseau (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992); James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); Chloe Chard and Helen Langdon, eds., Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography,

1600–1830 (esp. Chard, “Introduction,” 1–29; Richard Wrigley, “Infectious Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 Enthusiasms: Influence, Contagion, and the Experience of Rome,” 75–116; and Chard, “Crossing Boundaries and Exceeding Limits: Destabilization, Tourism, and the Sublime,” 117–49); Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour; Nigel Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing, 1770–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) (esp. Helen Carr, “Modernism and Travel [1880–1940],” 70–86; Mary Baine Campbell, “Travel Writing and its Theory,” 261–78); Ralph Pordzik, The Wonder of Travel: Fiction, Tourism, and the Social Construction of the Nostalgic (Heidelberg: Universita¨tsverlag Winter, 2005). See also the items in note 11. 7. Bryan Gilliam, Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35–36. 8. “Bin ich doch nur ein Vorfahr von ku¨nftigen andern, im Leben wie auf der Reise!” Entry for 13 April 1787 in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Italienische Reise: Zweiter Ro¨mischer Aufenthalt,” in Goethes Werke, vol. 11: Autobiographische Schriften, Dritter Band, ed. Herbert von Einem (Hamburg: Christian Wegner, 1950), 251; an English version of the same text can be found in Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Italian Journey (1786–1788), trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 246 (hereafter citations will take the form “Goethe, Italienische Reise, 251/ E246”). A more modern English version exists: Italian Journey, trans. Robert R. Heitner, ed. Thomas P. Saine and Jeffrey L. Sammons (New York: Suhrkamp, 1989), which claims greater fidelity to the German text, but I have chosen to stick with the classic and more easily available Auden/Mayer translation. All citations from the latter have been checked against the original. 9. Strauss reported to his father that Brahms advised against delaying his Italian trip with a visit to Berlin (“Brahms hat mir doch sehr zugeredet, gleich nach Italien zu fahren und nicht die Zeit in Berlin zu vertro¨deln und er hat recht.”) Letter from Strauss to Franz Strauss, 6 April 1886; Richard Strauss, Briefe an die Eltern, ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich: Atlantis, 1954), 91–92. 10. Fitzroy, Italy, xviii. This guide is intended to help the modern tourist to retrace the course of the Grand Tour and focuses mainly on the experiences of famous British travelers. 11. Studies that examine Goethe’s journey and the effect it had on writers and artists who subsequently visited Italy include Harry G. Haile, Artist in Chrysalis: A Biographical Study of Goethe in Italy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); Gretchen Hachmeister, Italy in the German Literary Imagination: Goethe’s “Italian Journey” and Its Reception by Eichendorff, Platen, and Heine (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002); Richard Block, The Spell of Italy: Vacation, Magic, and the Attraction of Goethe (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2006). Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 107

12. The information in this table has been collated from a variety of sources, the most important being the collection of letters (many of which are unpublished) that Strauss wrote to other family members, now held at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (D-Mbs). The dates of the completion of the score are taken from Franz Trenner, Richard Strauss: Werkverzeichnis, Vero¨ffentlichungen der Richard-Strauss-Gesellschaft 12 (Munich: Ludwig, 1993), 122; and Franz Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik zu Leben und Werk, ed. Florian Trenner (Vienna: Verlag Dr. Richard Strauss, 2003), 52–53.

13. Particularly significant studies of the changing sociocultural dynamics of travel Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 and tourism, and of the loaded connotations of these two terms are found in MacCannell, The Tourist, and Buzard, The Beaten Track. The increased technification of society was one factor which deeply affected the type of experience available to later visitors, transforming “the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century into the citi- zens’ travel of the nineteenth century and finally into the mass tourism of the twenti- eth” (Fussell, Norton Book of Travel, 271). The way in which Strauss and Goethe made their way to Italy symbolizes how the pace of existence had changed over the intervening century: Strauss journeyed overnight from Munich to Bologna by train, whereas Goethe’s impulsive Hegira from Weimar to Verona took a week by stagecoach. 14. “[Ich] glaube, daß dieser Eindruck auf Dein ku¨nftiges ku¨nstlerisches Schaffen von Einfluß ist, und Du Dich mehr dem großen breiten Zug in der Konzeption Deiner neuen Sachen zuwenden wirst.” Letter from Franz Strauss to Richard Strauss, 29 April 1886; Strauss, Eltern, 95. Goethe’s father, Johann Caspar, had undertaken a lengthy tour of Italy during his youth and constantly encouraged his son to do the same; the fact that the latter postponed this until after his father’s death and then attempted to surpass Goethe senior’s experiences by visiting Sicily has been eagerly seized upon in psychobiographical studies of the poet (for instance, see Block, Spell of Italy). 15. “Ich habe nie so recht an eine Anregung durch Naturscho¨nheit geglaubt, in den ro¨mischen Ruinen bin ich eines Besseren belehrt worden, da kommen die Gedanken nur so angeflogen.” Letter from Strauss to Bu¨low, 23 June 1886; Gabriele Strauss, ed., Lieber Collega! Richard Strauss im Briefwechsel mit zeitgeno¨ssischen Komponisten und Dirigenten, Vero¨ffentlichungen der Richard-Strauss-Gesellschaft 14 (Berlin: Henschel, 1996), 38. English translations of the letters can be found in Correspondence of Hans von Bu¨low and Richard Strauss, ed. Willi Schuh and Franz Trenner, trans. Anthony Gishford (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1955), 34. 16. Quoted in translation in Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: The Poet and the Age, The Poetry of Desire (1748–1790), vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). When he finally turned his steps Rome-ward, Goethe’s daemon drove him onward relent- lessly: Ferrara, Cento, and even Bologna were given short shrift, so overwhelming was his desire. Such was its symbolic significance for him that the reality, inevitably, was bound to fall short, although Boyle argues that Goethe’s time in Rome is not ade- quately represented as “a story of the loss of illusions” (491). On the return leg of his journey, Goethe ended up staying for nearly a year in Rome, and his letters radiate active contentment. The significance that Rome had for travelers on the Grand Tour more generally is discussed in Chard, “Introduction,” 6–7, and Wrigley, “Infectious Enthusiasms,” 77–78. 17. “In den Thermen des Caracalla ist mir ein sehr scho¨nes Orchesterthema eingefal- len: Cdur 6/4.” Postcard from Richard Strauss to Johanna Strauss, 26 April 1886; 108 The Musical Quarterly

D-Mbs Signatur Ana 330, I, Strauss: no. 89 (also quoted in Walter Werbeck, “Introduction,” in Richard Strauss, Tondichtungen I, vol. 20 of Richard Strauss Edition (Frankfurt: Peters, 1999), vii). The theme quoted in Example 1 differs only in its final measure from the published score. 18. “I will remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life’s end!” wrote Strauss a few months before he died. Letter from Strauss to Siegfried Trebitsch, 18 November 1948; quoted in translation in Gilliam, Richard Strauss, 25. The composer’s final notebook entry, the “Letzte Aufzeichnung” (dating from June 1949), ends with Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 the self-apostrophe, “Der griechische Germane!” Richard Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, 2nd enlarged ed. (Zurich: Atlantis, 1957), 182. 19. “Froh empfind ich mich nun auf klassischem Boden begeistert; / Vor- und Mitwelt spricht lauter und reizender mir.” Goethe, Ro¨mische Elegien no. 5; text and translation in Goethe’s Roman Elegies, trans. David Luke (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977), 40–41. The contrast between ancient monuments and contemporary settings particularly engaged the poet, as one can see from his September 1787 diary musings on the “quodlibet” that was Rome. See Goethe, Italienische Reise, 404/E392–93. 20. Strauss certainly was not blind to contemporary Rome; he noted the fashionable crowd at St. Peter’s and the large number of beautiful women he saw there. Letter from Richard Strauss to Josephine Strauss, 22 April 1886; Strauss, Eltern, 93. 21. Postcard from Richard Strauss to Josephine Strauss, 11 May 1886; Strauss, Eltern, 98 (modified). When compared with the original (D-Mbs Signatur Ana 330, I, Strauss: no. 100; see also the facsimile in Richard Strauss: Autographen, Portra¨ts, Bu¨hnenbilder. Ausstellung zum 50. Todestag, ed. Hartmut Schaefer et al. [Munich: Bertelsmann 1999], 271), the text positioning in the published version (Strauss, Eltern, 98) is inaccurate, and thus the key designations are not reproduced alongside the relevant locations. The layout above reproduces as accurately as possible that of the original postcard. To clarify matters: the body of the text was written first, then Strauss added the line “Ich komponiere auch viel in” in the top righthand corner (between the date and the text, therefore on a line just below “Liebste Mama”). Along the righthand side of the page, orthogonal to main text, are listed various key designations:

“C-dur” [opposite the words “Rom verlebt”], “A-dur” [opposite the words “u¨berlegenen Neapal”], “G-dur” [opposite the line ending “Forum Romanum herum”].

The final addition “in C moll natu¨rlich auch ein bißchen” is at the bottom of the page, level with signature “R” but written upside down. These keys are further discussed in note 38. 22. Gundula Kreuzer contrasts this Italian-German musical opposition with the French-German political polarity. See her “‘Oper im Kirchengewande’? Verdi’s Requiem and the Anxieties of the Young German Empire,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 58, no. 2 (2005): 399–450, here 401. 23. “Musik und Auffu¨hrung sehr theatralisch, doch nicht schlecht. Im Requiem sind sehr hu¨bsche und originelle Sachen, ich bin sogar bis zum Schluß geblieben.” Letter from Strauss to Franz Strauss, 10 May 1886; Strauss, Eltern, 98. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 109

24. “zur italienischen Musik werde ich mich wohl nie bekehren, es ist eben Schund.” Letters from Strauss to Franz (19, 27 April 1886) and Josephine Strauss (22 April 1886); Strauss, Eltern, 94–95. Strauss’s relationship with Italian opera is explored in more detail in Reinhard Schlo¨tterer, “Ironic Allusions to Italian Opera in the Musical Comedies of Richard Strauss,” in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 55–76.

25. “in einen lustigen Durcheinander von Themen das bunte Treiben Neapals schil- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 dern.” Richard Strauss, “Aus Italien: Analyse vom Komponisten,” Allgemeine Musikzeitung 16, no. 26 (28 June 1889): 263, 265–66, here 266. 26. Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 243. 27. “Als ich wieder zu Hause an meinem Schreibtisch saß, war ich doch wieder sehr vergnu¨gt, der anhaltendste und nie ermu¨dende Genuß ist doch die Arbeit, der ich mich vollsta¨ndig ergeben habe.” Letter from Strauss to Bu¨low, 23 June 1886; Strauss, Lieber Collega, 38; English translation in Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 122. 28. “Das Werk, das harmonisch u. besonders formell viel neues bringt”; “Der erste Schritt zur Selbsta¨ndigkeit.” Letter from Strauss to Bu¨low, 11 March 1887; Strauss Lieber Collega, 57. 29. “daß ich nun auch meine eignen Wege zu gehen anfange, meine eigne Formen schaffe und den faulen Menschen Kopfzerbrechen verursache.” Letter from Strauss to Carl Ho¨rburger, 4 March 1887; quoted in Max Steinitzer, Richard Strauss, 1st–4th ed. (Berlin: Schuster & Loeffler, 1911), 48 (also, with slight orthographic differences, in Felix Hoerburger, “U¨ ber einige Briefe von Richard Strauss an Franz Carl Ho¨rburger,” in Gedenkschrift Hermann Beck, ed. Hermann Dechant and Wolfgang Sieber [Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 1982], 201–08, here 203). 30. “Interview with Richard Strauss,” Musical Times 44, no. 719 (January 1903): 9–15, here 10. 31. Strauss, Betrachtungen, 210–11, translated in Richard Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, trans. L. J. Lawrence (London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1953; based on 1949 first edition), 139 (hereafter citations will take the form Strauss, Betrachtungen, 210–11/E139). 32. “Verschiebung der Sa¨tze, und, wie im dritten Satz (‘Sorrent’), der einzelnen Satzteile selbst.” Strauss, Betrachtungen, 210/E139 (translation modified). The operative word “Verschiebung” was confusingly translated in the English edition as “transposi- tion,” which in a musical context has very different connotations. 33. “Hinweg mit dem o¨den viersa¨tzigen Formelwesen, dem seit der IX.ten kein neuer Inhalt mehr entsprossen ist.” Letter from Strauss to Johann Leopold Bella, 2 December 1888; Dobroslav Orel, Ja´n Levoslav Bella: k. 80. narozenina´m seniora slovenske´ hudby (Bratislava: Philosophy Faculty of the Comenius University of Bratislava, 1924), 567. 34. Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on His Life and Works, vol. 1 (London: Barrie & Rockliff: 1962), 41. 110 The Musical Quarterly

35. Strauss, Betrachtungen, 210/E139. Schuh was certainly aware of this when he described the work as lying “somewhere between a suite and symphonic poem.” Schuh, Richard Strauss, 140. 36. “Einige Ankla¨nge an der ersten Satz mo¨gen die Sehnsucht nach der Ruhe der Campagna ausdru¨cken.” Strauss, “Analyse,” 266. For a full discussion of the deployment of the G-major theme, see note 66. Other links between the framing movements include the echoes of the opening chordal progression (I: mm. 3–4) at IV: m. 47; the first violin figure at I: m. 20 recurs at IV: m. 92; and the dotted figure from I: m. 100 at Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 IV: m. 94. 37. “Der formelle Aufbau dieses Satzes ist der eines grossen ersten Sinfoniesatzes.” Strauss, “Analyse,” 265. 38. The key designations begin with C major and end with C minor, although the latter may have been a humorous farewell an die fernen Geliebten (his parents and sister). The other two tonal centers mentioned in the document feature significantly in the final work, without necessarily corresponding to the extramusical indications men- tioned in the letter. In the text, G major appears to be adjacent to the “Roman Forum,” but is actually used as the tonic key of the “Campagna” movement. The key of A major is slightly more problematic: it does not appear significantly in either the “Rome” or “Naples” movements (either of which might be suggested by its location in the letter), but is used as the primary tonality of “Sorrento.” 39. Mm. 1–9 of the “Campagna” movement were first drafted in C major (Richard Strauss, Skizzenbuch 1 [Strauss Familienarchiv, Garmisch-Partenkirchen], 5, hereafter Sketchbook 1), something which has hitherto been overlooked. The next identifiable sketches for this movement (Sketchbook 1, 9) are in G major. The latter page contains early versions of mm. 128–37 and 146–51. The first sketches for the “Seitenthema” of this movement (m. 41) were in B-flat rather than E-flat (Sketchbook 1, 10). 40. “Mittelsatz Gdur Tarantelle Gmoll.” Sketchbook 1, 7. This “middle theme” can definitively be equated with that beginning in m. 92: Strauss sketched what became mm. 73–85, then indicated a planned four-measure link (eventually seven measures) and the word Mittelsatz. All the early editions of Denza’s score which I have con- sulted—Funiculı`, Funicula`: Canto popolare di Piedigrotta (1880), the “transcrizione facile per Pianoforte” (1881), and a version with English and Italian words titled “A Merry Heart” (1883)—are in F major, which leaves the tune in an ideal range for flashy tenor singing. Of course, Strauss heard the work as a folksong, so it was not as if he had to consciously transpose a score. Interestingly, Arnold Schoenberg also selected C major when he arranged this tune for a small ensemble (violin, mandolin, clarinet (B-flat), viola, guitar and cello). See Hans-Joachim Erwe, “Funiculı`, Finicula`: Marginalien zu einem Thema der Symphonischen Phantasie Aus Italien,” Richard-Strauss-Bla¨tter 14 (December 1985): 43–59, for a discussion of other composers who have used this tune. 41. Specht, Richard Strauss und sein Werk, 150. 42. “Diesem Pra¨ludium, welches die Stimmung wiedergiebt, die der Komponist beim Anblick der weiten, in Sonnengluth getauchten ro¨mischen Campagna, von der Villa d’Este in Tivoli aus gesehen, empfand, liegen folgende 3 Haupthemen zugrunde [etc.].” Strauss, “Analyse,” 263. Chard (“Introduction,” 7) notes that “[t]he arrival in Rome itself entails crossing a symbolic threshold: the desolate Campagna, which supplies a space for anticipatory excitement or apprehension.” During his visit to Italy, Strauss Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 111

made use of guidebooks by Gsell-Fels and Baedeker; the latter particularly recommends the drive Strauss took. “Even at the present day the Via Appia merits its proud ancient title of the ‘queen of the roads.’ It affords perhaps the finest of all the nearer excursions in the Campagna. Shortly after leaving the city, we enjoy a magnificent prospect, embracing the Campagna, the ruins of the aqueducts, and the mountains, while numer- ous ancient tombs are situated on each side of the road.” Karl Baedeker, Italy: Handbook for Travellers, Second Part: Central Italy and Rome, 9th rev. ed. (Leipzig: Karl

Baedeker, 1886), 344. Strauss probably used the German-language edition which Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 appeared in the same year: Italien: Handbuch fu¨r Reisende, Zweiter Teil: Mittelitalien und Rom, 8th rev. ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1886). 43. This point was also made by Specht, Richard Strauss und sein Werk, 152. The resulting displacement of “Rome” to second position mitigates another mildly hetero- dox aspect of the work: the absence of a scherzo proper. The jaunty opening rhythmic cell (see Ex. 1) does not sound inappropriate for a light movement. Alternatively, one could see the duties of the scherzo subsumed by the finale, a frivolous romp. 44. See the letter from Strauss to Bu¨low, 23 June 1886; Strauss, Lieber Collega, 38. When exactly Strauss rearranged the ordering of the movements cannot be determined from the surviving sketch materials, but it was probably fairly soon after this, early in the gestation of the work. 45. “[Ich habe] einen famosen Seesturm fu¨r Orchester entworfen.” Letter from Strauss to Franz Strauss, ca. 4 May 1886; quoted in Werbeck, “Introduction,” vii. Strauss experienced stormy seas on a boat trip from Salerno to Capri on 4 May, vividly described in a letter to his parents the following day (Strauss, Eltern, 95). The chronol- ogy is difficult to establish with exactitude, but this may have occurred after Strauss reported sketching the sea-storm to his father, and so be another case of life imitating art. The incident also recalls Goethe’s experience during a turbulent crossing to Sicily, during which the poet was violently sea-sick (a fate Strauss boasted of having avoided). 46. Recently, Youmans has made a convincing case for “the separate chronologies of [Strauss’s] musical and intellectual maturation” (Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Works, 145). The former was already complete by the time of Don Juan, while the latter was achieved over the course of the complicated gestation of Guntram (completed 1893). 47. An exhaustive study of all documentary evidence pertaining to Strauss’s reception of the music and ideas of Wagner and Liszt has been undertaken in chapter 2 of my dis- sertation, “Reshaping the Liszt-Wagner Legacy: Intertextual Dynamics in Strauss’s Tone Poems” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2006). 48. “Trotz einiger hinreißender Stellen (Einleitung, Liebestranktrinken, Anfang des zweiten und dritten Aktes, das Liebesduett, der Schluß) ist das Ganze doch ein sehr unerquickliches Zeug, das einem besonders im zweiten und dritten Akt zum Hals her- auswa¨chst. Anfangs reizen die pikanten Harmonien noch das verwo¨hnte Ohr, doch dagegen wird man rascher stumpf als gegen ewige Hummermajona¨sen und Rheinlachs mit Remoladen.” Letter from Strauss to Franz Strauss, 1 February 1884; Strauss, Eltern, 39. Compare his warmly appreciative view of Brahms’s Symphony No. 3 in the same letter (partly quoted in note 96). 49. “Das Hauptereignis des Meininger Winters war fu¨r mich die Bekanntschaft mit Alexander Ritter.... Er lud mich in sein Haus, in dem ich geistige Anregung fand, die den entscheidenden Ausschlag gab fu¨r meine ku¨nftige Entwicklung. Durch die 112 The Musical Quarterly

Erziehung hafteten mir noch immer manche Vorurteile gegen das Wagnersche und besonders das Lisztsche Kunstwerk an, ich kannte kaum Richard Wagners Schriften. Mit ihnen ...machte mich Ritter in erkla¨render Ausdauer bekannt und vertraut, bewies mir, daß der Weg von dem ‘Ausdrucksmusiker’ Beethoven ...u¨ber Liszt fu¨hre, der mit Wagner richtig erkannt hatte, daß mit Beethoven die Sonatenform bis aufs A¨ ußerste erweitert worden.... Neue Gedanken mu¨ssen sich neue Formen suchen— dieses Lisztsche Grundprinzip seiner sinfonischen Werke, in denen tatsa¨chlich die poe-

tische Idee auch zugleich das formbildende Element war, wurde mir von da ab der Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 Leitfaden fu¨r meine eigenen sinfonischen Arbeiten.” Strauss, Betrachtungen, 209–10/ E138–139 (translation modified). 50. Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Works, 17–18. For a complex mixture of per- sonal and musical reasons, Bu¨low switched allegiance from the New Germans to the Brahms camp during the 1870s, while continuing to appreciate and conduct Wagner’s music. However, holding up Bu¨low as an example of moderation and the juste milieu seems ironic in view of his rabid partisanship earlier in life and does not even square with his rejection of Liszt’s music in later years. 51. Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Works, 31, 32. 52. Gilliam, Richard Strauss, 36. Youmans (Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Works, 17) makes a similar point, and cites the Burleske (1885–86) and the Violin Sonata (1887) as works that “juxtapose antithetical styles without celebrating one at the expense of the other.” The fact that the strongly Brahmsian violin sonata postdates Aus Italien does indeed problematize any linear history of Strauss’s development, although the issue of genre needs to be taken into account. 53. “Bekanntschaft mit Alexander Ritter, der mich ...durch langja¨hrige liebevollste Bemu¨hungen u. Belehrungen endgiltig zum Zukunftsmusiker gestempelt hat.” Monacensia- Abteilung und Handschriftensammlung. Sta¨dtische Bibliothek, Munich (D-Mmb): Sammelstu¨ck no. 151 (also reproduced in Walter Werbeck, Die Tondichtungen von Richard Strauss [Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1996], 527–30, here 528). The document was sent to Eugen Spitzweg, Strauss’s publisher. 54. Even three months into his Meiningen stay, Strauss was still making disparaging com- ments about Liszt’s music. See his letter to his parents, 27 January 1886; Strauss, Eltern,83. 55. “Ich habe mich von der f-moll-Sinfonie weg in einem allma¨hlich immer gro¨sseren Wiederspruch zwischen dem musikalisch-poetischen Inhalt, den ich mitteilen wollte u[nd] der uns von den Klassikern u¨berkommenen Form des dreiteiligen Sonatensatzes befunden.” Letter from Strauss to Hans von Bu¨low, 24 August 1888; Strauss, Lieber Collega, 82, translated in Schuh and Trenner, Correspondence, 82. 56. “[Ich habe] mit den beiden Werken [Don Juan und Macbeth] meine ganz ureigenste Bahn, zu der die italienische Fantasie die Bru¨cke war, betreten.” Letter from Strauss to Carl Ho¨rburger, 11 June 1888; quoted in Franz Grasberger, ed., “Der Strom der To¨ne trug mich fort”: Die Welt um Richard Strauss in Briefen (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1967), 41. 57. “es [weicht] fast vollsta¨ndig von der herkomlichen Sinfonie d. h. Sonaten form [ab].” Letter from Strauss to Carl Ho¨rburger, 4 March 1887; quoted in Hoerburger, “Briefe,” 203. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 113

58. The other analysis Strauss undertook was of the Symphony in F Minor for a Berlin concert organized by Hermann Wolff (“Sinfonie in F moll, Op. 12 [Analyse vom Componisten],” reproduced in facsimile in Ju¨rgen Schaarwa¨chter, Richard Strauss und die Sinfonie [Cologne: Dohr, 1994], 155). After his experience with Aus Italien, Strauss apparently decided that he was doing more harm than good, and stopped producing his own official program guides. This must be related to the fact that his later works all had an accompanying paratext, theoretically supposed to justify any formal novelties, while the resultant forms themselves became increasingly difficult to explain in terms of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 traditional Formenlehre. For a detailed account of Strauss’s Informationspraxis and how this changed over the course of the set of tone poems, see Werbeck, Tondichtungen, 215–89. 59. Visually, the end of the exposition is clearly signaled by means of a double bar at m. 142. See also note 62. One might relate the dissolution of the coda’s tra- ditional closing function here to sonata types found in overtures by Mendelssohn and Schumann, where similarly codaesque figures meld directly into the develop- ment. In “Rome,” the music is brought back for a structurally significant cadence in the secondary tonality (the PAC one might have expected earlier is postponed until here). 60. Strauss, “Analyse,” 265. The roman numerals are not original and are used for convenience of reference in Figure 3. 61. In fact, the structures of the first movement of the Symphony and the “Rome” movement are externally very similar (the former also has two Seitenthemen,a Mittelthema, and a Codathema), making comparison between them easy. The principal differences are as follows: in the Symphony movement, both Seitenthemen are presented in the tonic; the Coda motif simply reinforces the established secondary tonality of D-flat; in the recapitulation, the first group appears exactly as before; and while the middle theme is recapitulated off-tonic (A-flat), it is not in nearly so remote a key as is the case in Aus Italien II. Overall, “Rome” demonstrates greater tonal mobility and greater freedom in how thematic materials are handled. 62. In his sketches for the movement, Strauss wrote, “Cadence in G minor end of the first part / Deceptive cadence onto A-flat major ff” [Cadenz Gmoll Schluß des 1ten Theils / Trugschluß nach Asdur ff]. Sketchbook 1, 3, also quoted in Franz Trenner, Die Skizzenbu¨cher von Richard Strauss: Aus dem Richard-Strauss-Archiv in Garmisch, Vero¨ffentlichungen der Richard-Strauss-Gesellschaft 1 (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1977), 1. 63. Sketchbook 1, 9, transcribed in Trenner, Skizzenbu¨cher, 1; Strauss, “Analyse,” 265. 64. This depiction of Naples is ubiquitous in travel writings; see Chard, “Introduction,” 22. 65. There is a precedent for this gesture in the finale of Brahms’s Sonata No. 2 for Cello and Piano, op. 99. 66. The first appearance of the theme in the finale is at m. 344 (first four bars in D-flat); following this at mm. 354 (first four bars in B-flat major), 413 (first two bars in A-flat), 419 (first two bars in B-flat), 423 (first two bars in F), and 462 (modified version in the original key of G). On the last presentation it seems to be heading for a 114 The Musical Quarterly

climactic Steigerung through sequence but is soon interrupted by irrepressible triplets (m. 476), which dominate the rest of the movement. 67. In a personal communication, Walter Werbeck made a case (against Strauss’s own reading) for regarding the Tarantella as the main second-group counterpart to the “Funiculı`” theme. He argues that the “Mittelthema” beginning in m. 92 is more a col- lection of motives than a theme proper. While acknowledging this mosaiclike fragmen- tariness, the position and deployment of this music (initially in the dominant, brought back at m. 362 in the tonic) conforms well to second-group type. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 68. Strauss, “Analyse,” 263. The first example quoted is the fanfare and the other two themes are qualified with special designations: the second incipit (mm. 41–51) is called the “Seitenthema,” while the “Codathema” is the melodic passage beginning in m. 106. 69. “Tod und Verkla¨rung bringt das Hauptthema erst als Culminationspunkt in der Mitte.” Tagebuch Blau V (Strauss Familienarchiv, Garmisch-Partenkirchen), 8; see also Franz Grasberger and Franz Hadamowsky, eds., Richard Strauss-Ausstellung zum 100. Geburtstag (Vienna: O¨ sterreichische Nationalbibliothek, 1964), 127. The fanfare in “Auf der Campagna” occurs at a position which approximates a “golden section” div- ision of the movement (m. 100 of 156). 70. A similar view of the movement is expressed in Yang, “From Symphony to Symphonic Poem,” 26. 71. James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy, Elements of Sonata Theory: Norms, Types and Deformations in the Late Eighteenth-Century Sonata (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20. 72. “In diesem Satze ist der Versuch gemacht, die zarte Musik der Natur, die das innere Ohr im Sa¨useln des Windes in den Bla¨ttern, in dem Gesang der Vo¨gel und allen den feinen Naturstimmen, in dem fernen Rauschen des Meeres, von dem ein ein- samer Gesang ans Ufer schallt vernimmt, tonmalerisch darzustellen und in Gegensatz zu bringen zu der sie aufnehmenden menschlichen Empfindung wie sie sich in den melodischen Elemente des Satzes a¨ussert. Das Wechselspiel in Auseinandertreten und der theilweisen Vereinigung dieser Gegensa¨tze bilden den geistigen Inhalt diese Stimmungsbildes.” Strauss, “Analyse,” 265, translated in Schuh, Richard Strauss, 139 (translation modified). 73. Quoted in translation in Keith T. Johns, The Symphonic Poems of Franz Liszt, ed. Michael Saffle (Stuyvesant, NY: Pendragon Press, 1997), 79. 74. Christopher Headington also discusses a series of purposely outlandish final cadences from Liszt’s music in “The Songs,” in Franz Liszt: The Man and His Music, ed. Alan Walker (London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1970), 221–47, here 242–44. 75. The similarities between Liszt and Strauss in this work may extend beyond the method of developing ideas to thematic shapes themselves: theme III from “Sorrento” begins with the “Cross” motif so beloved of Liszt (for instance, compare Aus Italien III, mm. 84–86, with Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, mm. 105–09). However, this figure, a well- known plainchant incipit, is too short and generic for its occurrence here to be posi- tively identified as deriving from Liszt. 76. Thomas S. Grey, “Fingal’s Cave and Ossian’s Dream: Music, Image, and Phantasmagoric Audition,” in The Arts Entwined: Music and Painting in the Nineteenth Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 115

Century, ed. Peter L. Schmunk and Marsha L. Morton (New York: General Music Publishing, 2000), 63–99, here 68–69. 77. “[Aus Italien steht] vollsta¨ndig auf dem Boden der Tondichtungen Liszt’s und Berlioz’s.” “[T]rotz der ungezwungensten Eingriffe in Wagner’s Musikthum, klingt alles so eisig und frostig, als wenn das Ganze direkt ‘vom Nordpol’ ka¨me.” Reviews in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 30 June 1889 and 19 January 1889, respectively; quoted and trans- lated in Mark-Daniel Schmid, “The Tone Poems of Richard Strauss and Their Reception History from 1887–1908” (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1997), Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 63–64. 78. “Sichtlich von Berlioz inspiriert, mit Wagnerschen Kombinationen arbeitend versch- ma¨ht es Strauss trotzdem nicht, einigemal von Mendelssohn zu borgen.” Eduard Hanslick, Aus neuer und neuester Zeit (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein fu¨r Deutsche Literatur, 1900); rep- rinted as The Collected Musical Criticism of Eduard Hanslick, vol. 9 (Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), 82 (date according to Schmid, Tone Poems of Richard Strauss, 72). 79. Arthur Seidl and Wilhelm Klatte, Richard Strauss: Eine Charakterskizze (Prague: Payer, 1896), 8. 80. See the review by Otto Lessman in the Neue Zeitschrift fu¨r Musik on 27 April 1887; quoted in Schmid, “The Tone Poems of Richard Strauss,” 55. 81. See the correspondence between the two from 20 November to 10 December 1889; Strauss, Lieber Collega, 195–98. 82. “Fantastische Bilder entschwundener Herrlichkeit, Gefu¨hle der Wehmuth und des Schmerzens inmitten sonnigster Gegenwart. Den in der Ueberschrift angegebenen drei Grundstimmungen entsprechen folgende Themen.” Strauss “Analyse,” 265, translated in Schuh, Richard Strauss, 139. 83. Yang (“From Symphony to Symphonic Poem,” 36–37) suggests that the Hauptthema (I) stands for the “fantastic images of vanished glory,” the Seitenthemen (II, III) and Coda motives (IV) relate to the “melancholy and grief” (all three are in the minor mode), and the Mittelthema (V) stands for the brilliant sunshine. This interpret- ation has the advantage of clearing up a minor puzzle: why the Coda motives are listed before the Mittelthema in the program note, given that this reverses their ordering in the work. Hermann Kretzschmar’s explanation is similar, but he goes into greater detail: the first Seitenthema (II) is the melancholy (Wehmut) theme, the second Seitenthema (III) represents grief (Schmerz) with the fleeting coda figures (IV) seen as representing the passing of the glory of Ancient Rome. See Fu¨hrer durch den Konzertsaal, 4th ed., part 1, vol. 1: Sinfonie und Suite (Leipzig, Germany: Breitkopf & Ha¨rtel, 1913), 416. 84. “U¨ berhaupt treibt Strauss hier noch Programmmusik nicht im Lisztschen Sinne, sondern in der a¨lteren Weise, d.h. bloße Stimmungsmalerei.” Gustav Brecher, Richard Strauss: Eine monographische Skizze (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, n.d. [1900]), 15. 85. “[Es ist passiert] dass sich ein grosser Teil von Kritik, wie Publikum, durch viel- leicht blendende, rein nebensa¨chliche Aeusserlichkeiten meines Werkes u¨ber den eigen- tlichen Inhalt desselben ta¨uschen liessen, ja, denselben vollsta¨ndig u¨bersehen haben.” Letter from Strauss to Karl Wolff, January 1889; quoted in full in Werbeck, Tondichtungen, 26n3. 116 The Musical Quarterly

86. “‘Ausdruck’ ist unsere Kunst, mehr als die bildenden Ku¨nste, ja selbst als die Wortpoesie! Die Poesie ist aber die Mutter aller Ku¨nste, und ein Musikwerk, das mir keinen wahrhaft poetischen Inhalt mitzuteilen hat—natu¨rlich einen, der sich eben nur in To¨nen wahrhaft darstellen, in Worten allenfalls andeuten, aber nur andeuten la¨sst—ist fu¨r mich eben etwas, was ich unter alles andere eher rechnen mo¨chte, als unter die eben deshalb poetischste Kunst, weil sie des ho¨chsten Ausdrucks fa¨hig ist: die Musik.... [Der] Inhalt meines Werkes: Empfindungen beim Anblick der herrlichen Naturscho¨nheiten

Roms und Neapels, nicht Beschreibungen derselben.” Letter from Strauss to Karl Wolff, Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 January 1889; Werbeck, Tondichtungen, 25–26n3, translation draws on Schuh, Richard Strauss, 136, which uses a corrupt version of the text. 87. Found, for instance, in Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony and Raff’s five-movement “Italian” Suite for orchestra (written 1871, published 1884) as well as Aus Italien. 88. The marked similarities between Bizet’s initial ideas for what became the Roma Symphony (“Venice will be my Andante, Rome my first movement, Florence my scherzo and Naples my finale”) and Aus Italien are of this generically determined sort. Quoted in Felix Aprahamian, “Foreword,” to Bizet, Roma: Suite de Concert No. 3 (London: Eulenberg, n.d.), iii. 89. This volume contains pieces inspired by Raphael’s Sposalizio, Michelangelo’s Il penseroso, and sonnets by Petrarch and Dante’s La divina commedia. The first volume of the Anne´es, Suisse in a sense mediates between these two approaches: many of the indi- vidual pieces depict aspects of nature, but even in such cases, they may be supplied with a poetic epigraph. 90. It was in an unrehearsed, impromptu performance of this overture for his royal patroness at Meiningen that Strauss considered his first conducting success. See his letter to Josephine Strauss, 14 October 1885; Strauss, Eltern, 61. 91. Hansen, Sinfonischen Dichtungen, 25–26, 33. Yang (“From Symphony to Symphonic Poem,” 27) has also seen the influence of Wagner’s endless melody in the Seitenthema from the “Campagna” movement. 92. “Wenn ich nichts auszudru¨cken habe, wenn mich nichts anreizt, wenn ich wu¨rdige Gegensta¨nde erst mu¨hsam aufsuchen muß, ja, mit allem Suchen sie kaum finde, wo soll da der Nachahmungstrieb herkommen? In diesen Gegenden muß man zum Ku¨nstler werden, so dringt sich alles auf, man wird voller und voller und gezwun- gen, etwas zu machen.” “October Correspondence,” letter of 2 October 1787; Goethe, Italienische Reise, 411/E397–98. 93. The only reference to Goethe’s travelogue that I have come across in Strauss’s cor- respondence is in a letter written on 27 May 1893 to Cosima Wagner. He mentions having read the Italienische Reise while in Palermo, and could hardly believe how closely it matched his own responses [Reiseempfindungen] when travelling in Italy and Greece. See Cosima Wagner - Richard Strauss: Ein Briefwechsel, ed. Franz Trenner (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978): 159. The tone of this passage suggests that this was his first time reading the book, but in view of the remarkable parallels discussed here, it seems incon- ceivable that in 1886 he was unfamiliar with at least the outline of Goethe’s travels and his responses to Italy, whether directly or as mediated through post-Goethean commentary. Retracing Strauss’s Journeys 117

94. “‘...ein musikalischer Ba¨deker Su¨ditaliens’ bekam ich einmal zu lesen.” Letter from Strauss to Karl Wolff, January 1889; Werbeck, Tondichtungen, 26n. 95. “‘Sie haben die Gewohnheit, wenn ihre Ma¨nner aufs Fischen ins Meer sind, sich ans Ufer zu setzen und mit durchringender Stimme abends diese Gesa¨nge erschallen zu lassen, bis sie auch von ferne die Stimme der Ihrigen vernehmen und sich so mit ihnen unterhalten’ ...Gesang ist es eines Einsamen in die Ferne und Weite, damit ein anderer, Gleichgestimmter ho¨re und antworte.” 7 October 1786; Goethe, Italienische Reise, 85–86/E93. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mq/article/92/1-2/70/1104560 by guest on 02 October 2021 96. Strauss praised Brahms’s Third Symphony warmly in the same letter in which he gave such mixed views on Tristan (see note 48). This is indicative of the relative stand- ing of the two composers in his mind at this point. Letter from Richard Strauss to Franz Strauss, 1 February 1884; Strauss, Eltern, 38–39. 97. Quoted in Fussell, Norton Book of Travel, 13 (ellipsis in original), see also John Paul Russo, “Freud and Italy,” Literature and Psychology 36, nos. 1–2 (1990): 1–25. 98. See also Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, 59–82, and note 46 above. 99. D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia,inD. H. Lawrence and Italy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 123. The typically Lawrencian phallocentric imagery feeds into a long tradition which equates Italy with the feminine (most famously in Germaine de Stae¨l’s 1807 novel, Corinne, ou l’Italie). See Glenda Sluga, “Gender and the Nation: Madame de Stae¨l or Italy,” Women’s Writing 10, no. 2 (July 2003), 241–51. 100. “Vielleicht interessiert es Sie, daß ich mich auf einer Fahrt auf der Via Appia an einem herrlichen Nachmittag plo¨tzlich ertappte, daß ich fortwa¨hrend, ganz unbewußt das D-Dur-Trio des Scherzos der 7. Sinfonie vor mich hinsummte, es entsprach so ganz der Stimmung dieser wunderbaren Campagna.” Letter from Strauss to Bu¨low, 23 June 1886; Strauss, Lieber Collega, 38, translated in Schuh and Trenner, Correspondence, 34. Interestingly, the Campagna movement opens with a neighbor-note figure similar to that found at the beginning of Beethoven’s trio.