(originally published as a programme essay for Royal Opera concert performances of
Capriccio in July 2013)
 |
San Francisco Opera production of Capriccio:
Simon Keenlyside (Flamand), Kiri Te Kanawa (Countess) |
As
the Capriccio Prelude opens, we enter
musically and historically into a mordent-ornamented and mordantly ironic
conversation. It is both playful and played at higher stakes than Strauss might
previously have imagined; it seems to be a conversation that has been in
progress for some time prior to our eavesdropping. What might we have heard,
had we tuned in earlier? We both want and do not want to know, like the
Countess Madeleine herself with her impossible choice between words and music;
and the impossible choices Strauss, and we, must face.
Capriccio’s opening string sextet – the conceit
being that it is itself a new work by Flamand – had already been performed
before the opera’s 1942 premiere. The sextet’s first performance was given at
the villa of Baldur von Schirach, the Vienna Gauleiter who helped Strauss to secure his Belvedere home and who
concluded an agreement that would have had Strauss play a role in furthering
Viennese musical life in return for protection for his Jewish daughter-in-law,
Alice, and his grandsons. (They would not have to wear the Star of David in
public and would enjoy the privilege of an ‘Aryan’ education.) Schirach had acted as patron to the 1941
Mozart Week of the German Reich, held in Vienna, during which Goebbels had
given a speech at the State Opera, declaring that Mozart’s ‘music rings out
every evening over homeland and front. It is part of what our soldiers are
defending against the wild assault of Eastern barbarism.’ Schirach was one of
the two defendants who spoke against Hitler at Nuremberg (the other being
Albert Speer), and he would serve twenty years in Spandau Prison; he was released
in 1966.
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| Baldur von Schirach |
In
negotiating with Schirach, Strauss was at one level simply – or not so simply –
acting as he had long done with other patrons, royal, noble, political, or
otherwise. Ariadne auf Naxos had shown that, though the
patron called the tune, the artist might still retain integrity. Whether that
were the case in such a radically different situation from that of Ariadne is another matter; now the
musical arch-manipulator – Strauss always knows how to elicit the right
response, even, perhaps especially, when one knows that one is being used – was himself
manipulated.
What
should we make of an opera conceived and first performed in such circumstances?
It is hardly a work of overt protest, though how could it be? In its
‘aristocratic’ refinement, both verbally and musically, it stands at one level
about as distant from the catastrophe enveloping Europe in the 1930s and ’40s as
one could imagine. Yet when one considers it more deeply, all sorts of
difficulties (intentional or otherwise) emerge, indeed defiantly present
themselves. This might seem facile, but the very setting in France has
resonances. Moreover, to have the Countess comparing the musical merits of
Rameau vis-à-vis Couperin at this time in Nazi Germany is perhaps more telling
than one might think. Brahms might have edited Couperin, but one will struggle
to find his name or his music in Third Reich performances and musicology. Even
leaving aside matters of nationality, such composers were not part of the
musical mainstream; indeed, many composers
would not necessarily have been well acquainted with their music. Strauss
certainly was, and showed through his composition that he was: sometimes
through direct quotation – for instance the ‘Air italien’ from Rameau’s Les Indes galantes, when the composer is
mentioned – and at other times through allusion. There seems, then, to be an
assertion of humanist, perhaps aristocratic, values, lightly done, as needs
must, yet which connects well with Strauss’s increasing re-immersion in the
work of Goethe, with Metamorphosen as
its ultimate fruit.
The
apparently apolitical becomes highly political, whatever the straightforward ‘intention’.
Arguably true, yet the Rococo – neo-Rococo? – setting cannot help but seem like
a refuge, a retreat. We have, perhaps, returned to the Rosenkavalier problem, albeit intensified, for retreating from
harmonic experiment after Elektra is
one thing, withdrawing from a world of war and genocide quite another. Even in
eighteenth-century terms, the aristocratic salon with exquisite manners and
rarefied æsthetic debate contrasts sharply with what we know was to come after
1789. The alleged ‘truth’ of revolutionary art, exemplified by the studio of
Jacques-Louis David, let alone the Paris of the sans-culottes, seems distant indeed. Yet we can hardly avoid
considering it. Perhaps surprisingly, this is just the sort of setting favoured
by Nazi cultural policy. Goebbels wanted Unterhaltung
(entertainment), not Wagnerian challenge. Capriccio
is certainly not unusual in offering an eighteenth-century setting. What is
more unusual, though not unique, is the combination of that setting with such
reflection, explicit and implicit, upon the nature of art and its relationship
with its historical context. Masks and games both gratify and haunt: Straussian
detachment and irony works its wonders through posing of questions without
evident response (at least from the composer). In context, this was a
reinstatement of the artistic criticism that so troubled Goebbels, who had
requested that journals simply report upon the content of a piece rather than
attempting assessment of its aesthetic quality.
Clemens
Krauss, a skilled careerist, conducted the 1942 Munich premiere (with his wife Viorica
Ursuleac singing the role of the Countess, by persuading Goebbels, with whom Strauss had once again fallen
out of favour, to assume its patronage as part of a Strauss festival mounted in
the honoured Hauptstadt der Bewegung.
(The ‘Capital of the Movement’: Munich was always more palatable, more ‘home’,
to the Nazis than ‘red Berlin’.) The director Rudolf Hartmann was present at
the premiere, and recalled it thus (arguably with a dose of sugary romanticism that
tells its own story):
Who among the younger generation can
really imagine a great city like Munich in total darkness, or theatre-goers
picking their way through the blacked-out street with the aid of small torches
giving off a dim blue light through a narrow slit? All this for the experience
of the Capriccio première. They
risked being caught in a heavy air raid, yet their yearning to hear Strauss’s
music, their desire to be part of a festive occasion and to experience a world
of beauty beyond the dangers of war led them to overcome all these material
problems... Afterwards it was difficult to relinquish the liberating and
uniting atmosphere created by the artistic quality of the new work. But outside
the blackened city waited, and one’s way homewards was fraught with potential
danger.
Strauss’s
æstheticism almost seemed confirmed in such an experience. What might once have
seemed anti-political now offered an alternative or complementary community to
that of the ‘real’ world.
Aerial
bombing would very soon incinerate the Munich Nationaltheater. Wartime
performances would nevertheless be heard subsequently in Darmstadt, in Dresden
(whose destruction lay close) and, almost inevitably given Schirach’s patronage
and predilections, in Vienna. Since so much of the drama concerns itself with
artistic patronage, we almost seem invited by the material, even despite the
composer, to consider the patronage of Schirach and Goebbels. How do we read in
context a work in which it is the patroness, the Countess, who insofar as
anyone can, resolves or, perhaps better, suspends dramatic conflicts?
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| Munich, May 1945 |
La
Roche, moreover, takes an affectionate cue from the Jewish impresario Max
Reinhardt, an old and valued collaborator of Strauss from the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, even before even their
part in the foundation of the Salzburg Festival. In that context, it becomes
crucially important, even a case of dissent, that La Roche/Reinhardt, riled by
the impudence of callow poet and composer, has his say, above all in his
dignified panegyric to the theatre. His monologue is boastful. Yet what La
Roche says of himself – ‘Without my kind, where would the theatre be? – applies
to art more generally. Art chips away at the political present’s would-be
totalitarianism. What might, in Ariadne
– dedicated to Reinhardt, its first director – have concerned itself more
exclusively with the business of putting together and putting on an opera,
takes on a different light in different times.
There
may also be an echo of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina,
itself a defence of aristocratic culture, albeit during World War I rather than
World War II, the first performance taking place in Munich in 1917. In a stroke
of irony (perhaps someone should write an opera about this!) Pfitzner would be
interned opposite Strauss’s Garmisch villa in 1945. A presentiment closer to home might be the
attack in Strauss’s 1901 second opera, Feuersnot
by Kunrad upon the Wagnerphilister of
Munich. If only, then, Strauss had not joined the party he had once excoriated
by signing, alongside Pfitzner, Hans Knappertsbusch, and several others, the
1933 protest by the ‘Richard Wagner City Munich’ against ‘Mr Thomas Mann’, the
‘national restoration of Germany … [having] taken on definite form’. There was
nothing necessarily ‘National Socialist’ about the protest; indeed, it had more
in common with a far more conservative form of nationalism. Its defensive,
philistine attitude towards Mann’s brilliant, provocative portrayal of Wagner
as a ‘cultural Bolshevist’, and its acknowledgement of Hitler’s movement as
national saviour nevertheless did none of the signatories any credit.
The outside world will not cease intruding. Schirach was not the most favoured of
the Nazi establishment by this time, his criticism of conditions attending
deportation of the Jews having annoyed the high command. Hitler, Goebbels, and
Himmler would in turn find occasion, even at this point when they might have
had more pressing concerns, to visit petty humiliations upon Strauss, ensuring
that he receive no public honour. Strauss’s conduct was not that of a moral
beacon; still less so was Schirach’s. Yet that does not equate them with
Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler. Strauss’s accommodationism, ‘real’ yet not without
limits, was owed partly to his need to safeguard his grandsons, Richard and
Christian, and somehow it all sounds very much more ‘real’ when one names them.
Wort oder Ton – ‘words or music?’ –
is far from the only question Capriccio
asks us.
