19TH CENTURY MUSIC Framing Till Eulenspiegel JAMES HEPOKOSKI Strauss, Nietzsche, and DIE MODERNE mations of an emerging new age of symphonic composition. In the interim Strauss had pro- Strauss’s fourth tone poem, Till Eulenspiegels duced several other pieces, including Lieder and, lustige Streiche, received its premiere in Co- most notably, the opera Guntram (1887–93). logne on 5 November 1895. With its renewed More to the point, around 1893–94 he had clari- embrace of a vivid, post-Lisztian program- fied his own aesthetic position with regard to maticism, coupled with a hypertechnically sen- the expected reverential posture vis à vis Wag- sational orchestration, Till Eulenspiegel marked nerian adaptations of Schopenhauerian musi- the onset of a “second cycle” of the composer’s cal metaphysics. Even while still admiring and symphonic works. Producing the earlier tone- building upon technical features of Lisztian and poem cycle, Macbeth, Don Juan, and Tod und Wagnerian musical practice, he had largely cast Verklärung, had occupied the years 1886–89 aside the spiritual posture and claims of tran- (with a revision of Macbeth extending to 1891). scendental content that that practice typically These pieces had served as flamboyant procla- believed itself to exemplify. As urged particu- larly in the counselings of his former mentor, Alexander Ritter, some tenets of this musical faith—at least in certain devout strains famil- Shorter versions of this article (originally titled “The Fram- ing of Till Eulenspiegel: Strauss’s Credo of Musical Mod- iar to the post-Wagnerian 1880s and 1890s in ernism?” and dwelling on all of the separate themes found Germany—had also included reflexive, verbal here) were delivered at the Eastman School of Music and asseverations of spiritual asceticism and the Cornell University on 30 April and 1 May 1995 and at the international conference, “The Music of Richard Strauss,” Schopenhauerian denial of the Will, Willens- at the University of North Texas, 3 February 2000. verneinung. 4 19th-Century Music, XXX/1, pp. 4–43. ISSN: 0148-2076, electronic ISSN 1533-8606. © 2006 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals/rights.htm. This content downloaded from 128.36.7.70 on Sat, 23 Feb 2019 20:32:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms The details of Strauss’s deflationary transfor- to Willensverneinung.”2 Radical as the conver- JAMES HEPOKOSKI mation have been laid out in recent work by sion was, it may not have been total or adhered Framing Till Charles Youmans.1 The spell-breaking process— to without inner struggle. Again Youmans: “In Eulenspiegel individually pursued, needless to say, within a spite of the corroboration that he pulled from broader, richly complex cultural and philosophi- Nietzsche’s writings, Strauss remained plagued cal-aesthetic context—occurred over several by doubts about his emerging antimetaphysical months. Not surprisingly, it seems to have been aesthetic—which of course placed him on a personally convulsive. These newly elaborated collision course with the reigning axioms of considerations are of signal importance to the Austro-Germanic music.”3 Nonetheless, as way that we construct the history (or subhis- Youmans also pointed out, in 1896 Strauss’s tories) of this period. They ought not to be friend and former university classmate in marginalized as merely anecdotal or biographi- Munich, Arthur Seidl (to whom the composer cal. At the most telling levels they are pro- dedicated Till Eulenspiegel),4 concluded in an foundly engaged with the main lines of Austro- essay, “Richard Strauss: A Character-Sketch,” Germanic early modernism at the turn of the that the composer’s philosophical turnabout century. In them we may discern the initial had already been evident in the “transition- declarations from a major figure—ringing pro- point” occupied by the 1893 Guntram: nouncements delivered from within the system (one brimming over with its own self-granted Insofar as he here more broadly develops within authority)—that the imposing metaphysical himself, so to speak, [the move from] Schopenhauer claims of art music not only were no longer to Nietzsche, advances further from world denial to sustainable but had also been based on illusion self-affirmation, converts from the democratic prin- from the start. To the extent that we, too, grasp ciple to a rigorously aristocratic one, and makes a decision in favor of the individualism of the subjec- the larger implications of Strauss’s antimeta- physical turn (waking up from the dream), we might conclude that many of our own often- 2Youmans, “The Private Intellectual Context,” p. 110. See heroic narratives of Austro-Germanic modern- also the more expansive discussion in Youmans, Richard ism are also threadbare: reductionist products Strauss’s Orchestral Music, pp. 83–113 (“Strauss’s Nietzsche”), especially—with regard to buzzwords—pp. 95– of twentieth-century historical and aesthetic 99. Potentially relevant by way of additional background ideologies in need of serious rethinking. is Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts By the mid-1890s Strauss’s belief in any such (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 7–35 (“Ambivalent Modernism: Perspectives metaphysical assertions had collapsed. In their from the 1870s and 1880s”) and 36–62 (from the chapter place had rushed the individualistic declara- “German Naturalism”). tions of Max Stirner and, especially, Friedrich 3Youmans, “The Private Intellectual Context,” p. 112. 4The mere fact of Strauss’s dedication of Till Eulenspiegel Nietzsche: Beyond Good and Evil, Human, All to Seidl may be read as connoting a Nietzschean subtext Too Human, and, in all probability, Thus Spoke to that work. Seidl (1863–1928) was a writer and critic Zarathustra (since he would base a tone poem with a background in literary and cultural history, phi- losophy, aesthetics, and music. He received a doctorate on it in 1896). As Youmans put it, “The whole- from Leipzig in 1887 with the thesis, “On the Musical sale appropriation of Nietzschean buzzwords— Sublime: Prolegomena to an Aesthetics of Music.” In the ’affirmation,’ ‘optimism,’ ‘becoming,’ and the mid-1890s Seidl—while also part of the Strauss circle— worked as a journalist and critic in Dresden, Hamburg, like—strongly suggests that [by 1893] Strauss and elsewhere, and in 1898–99 he held a position at the believed that he had found his critical response Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, then working on the publi- cation of vols. 1–8 of the edition of Nietzsche’s works and letters. See, e.g., Hugo Riemanns Musik-Lexikon, ed. Alfred Einstein, 11th edn. (Berlin: Max Hesses, 1929), p. 1684. 1Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music See also the information about Seidl in Youmans, “The and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington, Ind.: Private Intellectual Context” and Richard Strauss’s Or- Indiana University Press, 2005); “The Private Intellectual chestral Music, pp. 21–23; in Gilliam, The Life of Richard Context of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra,” Strauss, pp. 19, 36, 61, and 64; and in Morten Kristiansen, this journal 22 (1998), 101–26; “Ten Letters from Alexander Richard Strauss’s Feuersnot in Its Aesthetic and Cultural Ritter to Richard Strauss, 1887–1894,” Richard-Strauss Context: A Modernist Critique of Musical Idealism (Ph.D. Blätter 35 (June 1996), 3–22. Compare the summary in diss., Yale University, 2000), pp. 80–94 (also cited in Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, pp. 259– Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 50–66. 60, n. 28). 5 This content downloaded from 128.36.7.70 on Sat, 23 Feb 2019 20:32:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH tive personality, his work in this [ca. 1893] phase of the orchestra as a sacramental or metaphysical CENTURY development appears as a transitional stage. It re- MUSIC vessel but came to regard it more palpably— veals his work as a transition-point on the way to more “of this earth”—as the bearer of a worldly 5 further, more purified transformations. material Klang operating unashamedly within a sometimes-cynical and vigorously competi- The ramifications of such a conversion by tive marketplace of art. For both traditionalist Austro-Germanic music’s leading young mod- partisans and ardent Wagnerians this was an ernist were as complex as they were enormous. unpardonable act of lèse-majesté. Strauss’s or- On the one hand, in the mid-1890s Strauss was chestra was becoming a machine for manufac- brandishing the external signs that had been turing technological astonishment, and part of the identifiers of an ideologically stable musi- its musical “progress” lay in its ability to pro- cal faction for decades: grandiose assertions of duce a calculated exactitude of nuance. “progress” (der Fortschritt) and the “music of All of this was in dialogue with an ongoing the future” (die Musik der Zukunft); the de- tradition, but it was also detaching itself from ployment of a massive, quasi-technological or- that tradition in decisive ways. Thus Ritter’s chestral apparatus; the recourse to symbolic or dismayed conclusion regarding act III of leitmotivic organization; the advocacy of a “po- Guntram that Strauss had swerved willfully etic logic” of program music prepared to