Salzburg Festival (4) - VPO/Thielemann: Capriccio (concert performance), 26 July 2024

Grosses Festspielhaus

Flamand – Sebastian Kohlhepp
Olivier – Konstantin Krimmel
La Roche – Mika Kares
Countess Madeleine – Elsa Dreisig
Count – Bo Skovhus
Clairon – Ève-Maud Hubeaux
Major-Domo – Torben Jürgens
Italian Soprano – Tuuli Takala
Italian Tenor – Josh Lovell
Servants – Kieran Carrel, Jonas Jud, Fabio Dorizzi, Ian Rucker, Christian Tschelebiew, Jan Petryka, Lucas van Lierop, Philipp Schöllhorn
Monsieur Taupe – Jörg Schneider

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor)

Images: © SF/Marco Borrelli

There is a certain irony to the popularity of Capriccio in concert performance. The last time the Royal Opera presented Strauss’s valedictory opera – assuming we do not count Des Edels Schattens – it was also without staging. Now, for reasons unclear, it has appeared in the Salzburg Festival’s festival-within-a-festival of sacred music, ‘Ouverture Spirituelle’, treated as the first ‘full-scale’ opera of the festival, works by Georg Friedrich Haas and Luigi Dallapiccola notwithstanding, attracting the traditional complement of dignitaries for its premiere. Irony and Strauss are not so much excellent bedfellows as two sides of the same musical coin, so there is no problem there. If the world of La Roche found itself somewhat obscured on that occasion, the impresario inspired by Max Reinhardt remained present not only onstage, nodding off during the opening sextet, but also in honoured bust-form at the entrance to the Haus für Mozart next door. Strauss himself, naturally, remains on the first floor of the Grosse(s) Festspielhaus itself. And if a concert performance, perhaps especially without interval, may not have been entirely what some of those invited were expecting, they, like the rest of us, will surely have enjoyed finding themselves lightly satirised, elevated, and perhaps even inspired by what unfolded. 

Interestingly, although no ‘concert director’ or similar was credited, a degree of accomplished acting was involved, as were telling transformations in lighting (not least for the closing moonlight). Truth be told, or at least one truth among many, little seemed to be lost. When the cast engaged so animatedly with one another, onstage when necessary and offstage when not, the impression was not so very different from a ‘traditional’ production in which they would do the very same, only seated in an eighteenth-century salon. And Strauss’s question, Countess Madeleine’s too, is ultimately ‘Wort oder Ton?’ not ‘words, music, or gesture,’ however strangely that sits both with the conversations and the composer’s veneration for Wagner’s Opera and Drama (‘the book of books about music’). If we all ultimately know which will win in our hearts and minds, if not necessarily in the Countess’s, then the contest was established with commendable even-handedness by those performing, balances of all kind upheld and dramatically generative, even without a mise-en-scène or directorial Konzept. 

Moreover, if one might expect the conductor, possibly the orchestra too, to be favoured in such a scenario, such was not the case. Christian Thielemann has often proved to be at his best in Strauss. He led an extraordinary performance of Die Frau ohne Schatten in this same hall thirteen years ago, blighted yet far from obliterated by Christof Loy’s arrogant dismissal of the work as director; the composer has long proved central to his operatic work in Dresden, Vienna, and elsewhere. If his Dresden FroSch earlier this year was impressive yet, to my mind, a little on the precious side, this Capriccio unfolded with a warmth, affection, and ease that spoke of a fine balance – that word again – between preparation and familiarity. Restraint is not quite the word, but there was no grandstanding, nothing forced. One was led to listen, perhaps via music, yet to words as much as their confrere-competitors. Quotations were assumed into the orchestral fabric, never underlined. That might be the vulgar way of some, but hardly Strauss’s. There were passages of rapt orchestral magic; if the close of the string sextet has sounded more hushed, I have not heard it so. The Vienna Philharmonic clearly loves playing for Thielemann; it is just as clear that the affection is mutual. And although that sextet was certainly conducted, it never sounded like it. 

Sebastian Kohlhepp and Konstantin Krimmel made for a pair of finely cast, nicely contrasted suitors as Flamand and Olivier respectively. If Flamand ultimately stole the heart, that is really Strauss’s doing. Mika Kares lived up to La Roche’s outsize promises in a performance that relished not only his boastfulness but also his status as dramatic lynchpin, leaving implicit sadness – or am I being sentimental? – to another day. Ève-Maud Hubeaux was a splendid Clairon; before I knew who she was, I truly sensed the ‘act’ of a French tragedienne. Such is not reserved to a French singer, of course, but there was a tang of almost Voltairean authenticity here, without sacrifice to crystal-clear German. Bo Skovhus marshalled his resources wisely as the Count. Torben Jürgens’s Major-Domo made a fine impression, as did an array of individual servants, perhaps the best I have heard. They might have had a spin-off show of their own; perhaps one day they will. 

One person is missing in that, of course, and it was there that I found myself, seemingly unlike the audience, somewhat in two minds. Elsa Dreisig’s Countess was well sung, well acted, in general had much to commend it, yet somehow did not feel quite ‘right’ to me. Was that a matter of having too much a certain interpretation or mode of interpretation in my head, to which others must conform? Quite possibly, but what I heard came across in tone and character as more girlish, even Sophie-like, than a successor to the Marschallin, the true director of metatheatrical proceedings. I shall dwell on this no more; we all have our preconceptions and prejudices, and this may well have been mine. As we all know, no operatic performance is or can be perfect, let alone correct. Music, words, and theatre (visible or invisible) are too human for that.

Capriccio, Garsington Opera, 9 June 2018

Garsington Opera House, Wormsley

Images: Johan Persson
Andrew Shore (La Roche), William Dazeeley (Count), Hanna Hipp (Clairon),
Miah Persson (Countess), Benjamin Bevan (Major-Domo)

Flamand – Sam Furness

Olivier – Gavan Ring

La Roche – Andrew Shore

Countess Madeleine – Miah Persson

Count – William Dazeley

Clairon – Hanna Hipp

Major-Domo – Benjamin Bevan

Italian Soprano – Nika Gorič

Italian Tenor – Caspar Singh

Servants – Richard Bignall, Dominic Bowe, Robert Forrest, Andrew Hamilton, Emanuel Heitz, Jack Lawrence-Jones, David Lynn, Kieran Rayner

Monsieur Taupe – Graham Clark

Young Dabicer – Lowri Shone

Tim Albery (director)

Tobias Hoheisel (designs)

Malcolm Rippeth (lighting)

Laïla Diallo (choreography)

Garsington Opera Orchestra

Douglas Boyd (conductor)

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.

With those words, the director Rudolf Hartmann recalled the 1942 Munich premiere of Richard Strauss’s final opera, Capriccio. They are not without sugary romanticism, which tells its own contemporary as well as subsequent story, yet by the same token, would surely touch all but the stoniest of hearts. (Of the many, there are alas far too many – especially when it comes to Germany.) Since first reading them, I have found it difficult to put them and their implications – some, to borrow from Nietzsche, beyond good and evil – out of mind when listening to and thinking about Capriccio.

The Servants (Robert Forrest, Jack Lawrence-Jones, Andrew Hamilton, Richard Bignall, Dominic Bowe, David Lynn, Kieran Rayner, Emanuel Heitz)

Perhaps, then, it is merely my problem that Tim Albery’s new production seems strangely uninterested in what for me has become very much part of the work. That despite a strange claim quoted in the programme: ‘I’ve worked with Tobias Hoheisel, a London-based German designer, who has a real sensibility for Strauss’s world and language. We talked a lot about the political context of the opera and decided that we should not set it in the ruins of a collapsing Europe. We set it in the time in which it was composed, when so many people were forced into exile.’ I am far from saying that a performance of any work should always concern itself with origins, the conditions of its first performance, or indeed any one time or place. Albery’s distinction, though, makes little sense, for Capriccio was composed during the Second World War: Europe was – again – collapsing. It was not 1945, but nor was it 1935, let alone 1925. One might accuse Strauss of evasion – although, by this stage, what on earth was he supposed to do? – but there seems to me here a degree of evasion here too.

Sam Furness (Flamand), Gavan Ring (Olivier), Andrew Shore (La Roche)

What we are left with is a typical rococo palace with more modern touches: costumes and artwork. The action and conversation – are they the same thing, somewhat different, even in some respects opposed? should we not at least ask? – proceed straightforwardly. Everything is well directed on stage, but there is little edge: which only the ignorant and/or hostile could claim of the work itself.  This might seem facile, but the very setting of the work in France has – and had – resonances. To have, moreover, the Countess comparing the musical merits of Rameau vis-à-vis Couperin is more telling than many might think: Brahms might have edited Couperin, but one will struggle to find his name or his music in Third Reich performances and musicology. Indeed, many composers, let alone others, would not necessarily have been well acquainted with the music of eighteenth-century France. Strauss certainly was – and showed through his composition that he was: sometimes through direct quotation, for instance the ‘Air italien’ from Les Indes galantes, when the composer is mentioned, at other times through allusion. Likewise for Gluck – what are we to make here of a ‘German’ composer acting as a ‘French’ one? – and much else.

 

William Dazeley (Count),Miah Persson (Countess), Sam Furness (Flamand)

The apolitical, especially at times such as this, may actually be read as highly political, whatever Strauss’s – or anyone else’s – straightforward intention. Perhaps the beauty of the costumes, the Countess (Miah Persson) truly resembling a star from the Golden Age of Hollywood, the servants’ livery truly impeccable, hints at something more; perhaps it does not. That ambiguity is welcome, but might we not have had a little more? One need not have Baldur von Schirach on stage to listen to the opening sextet – although why not? – to hint at something more troubling. (The sextet had its private premiere at Schirach’s villa, the Vienna Gauleiter having helped Strauss secure his Viennese Belvedere home. In return, moreover, for the composer playing his part in furthering Viennese musical life, Schirach, the only defendant other than Albert Speer to speak against Hitler at Nuremberg, had offered protection for Strauss’s Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice, and his grandsons.) A challenging work, ever more so the more one gets to know it and think about it, deserves perhaps rather more challenge than this. Otherwise, the updating might as well not have happened; it does not seem in any way to shape, to comment, or even to frame the drama. More fundamentally, though, I missed the achievement of Christian von Götz’s Cologne staging, which I saw at the 2007 Edinburgh Festival. There, not only was one forced to confront the work’s political difficulties; one emerged, at least I did, with ever-greater admiration for it. (Indeed, it was the aftermath of that experience that set me on the road to writing a chapter on Capriccio in my book After Wagner.)

Miah Persson (Countess)

If Albery’s production comes across as something for those as unconcerned with such matters as many have erroneously claimed Strauss to be – non-, even anti-metropolitan opera – there were many musical rewards to enjoy. That was true above all for Persson. Her musical line, subtly inflected brought into greater relief than anything on stage the central question of ‘Word oder Ton?’ This was in every respect, certainly verbal, yet not only so, a superior performance to that heard in concert from Renée Fleming a few years ago. (Why are Covent Garden and still more ENO so hostile to staging Strauss, or at least so reluctant to do so?) The vocal bloom of her final scene was well prepared, prefigured perhaps more subtly still than the theme on which Douglas Boyd had proved perhaps just a too insistent in his orchestral highlighting. That said, if sometimes apparently viewing Strauss’s motivic technique a little too much as concerned with reminiscence, and not quite enough as ‘the binding together of a music drama through a dense web of motivic connections from within’ (Carl Dahlhaus on Wagner), Boyd handled and communicated the ebb and flow well: no easy task. It was doubtless no coincidence, given his background as an oboist, that the woodwind of the excellent Garsington Orchestra were afforded especial opportunity to shine. If a few more strings would at times have been appreciated, there were no real grounds for complaint here either; the section certainly came into its own at climaxes.

Hanna Hipp (Clairon)

Otherwise, there was a fine sense of vocal ensemble, Andrew Shore’s typically characterful La Roche, Hanna Hipp’s rich-toned Clairon, and Graham Clark’s properly scene-stealing Monsieur Taupe (even without Götz’s yellow star, the escape carriage having been missed) for me the pick of the bunch. If Albery’s staging perhaps serves La Roche’s caricatured aesthetics better than his broader role as impresario and indeed spokesman for broader theatrical values – Max Reinhardt his obvious (Jewish) inspiration – the opera is such that a thinking audience member cannot help but reflect upon such matters. Capriccio is a good deal less fragile, as well as a great deal more political, than it might seem and than it might have been ‘intended’ to be.

Special offer: 25% off my new book, After Wagner

My new book, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from 'Parsifal' to Nono will be published this month. My publisher, Boydell & Brewer, has kindly offered 25% off the recommended price to readers of this blog. Please click here for the online flyer, which includes a discount code for any of you who might be interested. I reproduce below the blurb and front cover, which features a scene from Stefan Herheim's Bayreuth production of Parsifal:

 

 

This book is both a telling of operatic histories ‘after’ Richard Wagner, and a philosophical reflection upon the writing of those histories. Historical musicology reckons with intellectual and cultural history, and vice versa. The ‘after’ of the title denotes chronology, but also harmony and antagonism within a Wagnerian tradition. Parsifal, in which Wagner attempted to go beyond his achievement in the Ring, to write ‘after’ himself, is followed by two apparent antipodes: the strenuously modernist Arnold Schoenberg and the æstheticist Richard Strauss. Discussion of Strauss’s Capriccio, partly in the light of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron, reveals a more ‘political’ work than either first acquaintance or the composer’s ‘intention’ might suggest.

 

Then come three composers from subsequent generations: Luigi Dallapiccola, Luigi Nono, and Hans Werner Henze. Geographical context is extended to take in Wagner’s Italian successors; the problem of political emancipation in and through music drama takes another turn here, confronting challenges and opportunities in more avowedly ‘politically engaged’ art. A final section explores the world of staging opera, of so-called Regietheater, as initiated by Wagner himself. Stefan Herheim’s celebrated Bayreuth production of Parsifal, and various performances of Lohengrin are discussed, before looking back to Mozart (Don Giovanni) and forward to Alban Berg’s Lulu and Nono’s Al gran sole carico d’amore. Throughout, the book invites us to consider how we might perceive the æsthetic and political integrity of the operatic work ‘after Wagner’.

 

After Wagner will be invaluable to anyone interested in twentieth-century music drama and its intersection with politics and cultural history. It will also appeal to those interested in Richard Wagner’s cultural impact on succeeding generations of composers.

 

 

 

Capriccio, Royal Opera, 19 July 2013

Royal Opera House

(concert performance)

Countess Madeleine – Renée Fleming

Olivier – Christian Gerhaher
Flamand – Andrew Staples
La Roche – Peter Rose
The Count – Bo Skhovus
Clairon – Tanja Ariane Baumgartner
Major-Domo – John Cunningham
Italian Singer – Mary Plazas
Italian Singer – Barry Banks
Servants – Pablo Bemsch, Michel de Souza, David Butt Philip, Jihoon Kim, Ashley Riches, Simon Gfeller, Jeremy Budd, Charbel Mattar
Monsieur Taupe – Graham Clark

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Andrew Davis (conductor)

 

‘Wort oder Ton?’ may be the Countess’s question, but it is far from the only question asked in, let alone by, Capriccio. La Roche, for instance, introduces the rival element of the stage – and seems, by the force of his panegyric alone, to have won everyone over. (Not, of course that that brief meeting of minds and souls whole; once discussion of the opera begins, æsthetic and personal bickering resume.) The question of staging inevitably came to mind, here, of course, given the curious decision to present Capriccio in concert. Even if, as rumour has it, the decision to perform Strauss’s last opera was made late in the day, as a consequence of Renée Fleming having elected not after all to take on the role of Ariadne, it is difficult to understand why, instead of a desultory couple of concert performances, a production from elsewhere might not have been brought in. The Cologne Opera’s excellent, provocative staging, seen first at the Edinburgh Festival, would have been one candidate; so, by all accounts, would be Robert Carsen’s Paris production. (That is to leave aside the question, worthy of Capriccio itself, of why a singer wields such power at all. Gérard Mortier in Paris had the healthier attitude that if ‘stars’ were willing to perform in and to throw themselves wholeheartedly into interesting repertoire and stagings, all the better; if not, a house could and should manage perfectly well without them.)

 

Anyway, we had what we had – and I missed a full staging far less than I should ever have expected. Part of that was a matter of a generally strong musical performance, Ton winning out perhaps, but it seemed also to be a credit to the acting skills of the singers, who edged the performance towards, if not the semi-staged, at least the semi-acted. Though most did not follow Fleming’s lead – she has recently sung her role on stage – in dispensing with their scores, there was genuine interaction between them and more than a little moving around the stage in front of the orchestra. Presumably those credited with ‘stage management’ – Sarah Waling and Fran Beaumont – had some part in this far from negligible achievement too. Moreover, Fleming’s Vivienne Westwood gown, granted a lengthy description in the ‘production credits’, might as well have been intended for a staged performance.  

 

Fleming’s performance was more mixed than her fans would doubtless admit, or perhaps even notice. There was a good degree of vocal strain, especially at the top, accompanied at times by a scooping that should have no place in Strauss. It would be vain, moreover to claim that there were not too many times when one could not discern the words. That said, it seemed that there was an attempt to compensate for (relative) vocal deficiencies by paying greater attention to the words than one might have expected; there were indeed occasions when diction was excellent. She clearly felt the agonistic tensions embodied in the role, and expressed them on stage to generally good effect in a convincingly ‘acted’ performance. There were flaws in her final soliloquy, but it moved – just as the Mondscheinmusik did despite an unfortunate slip by the first horn.

 

It will come as no surprise that Christian Gerhaher excelled as Olivier. Both he and Andrew Staples offered winning, ardent assumptions of their roles as suitors for the affections of the Countess – and of opera itself. Gerhaher’s way with words, and the alchemy he affects in their marriage with music, remains an object lesson . His cleanness of tone was matched – no mean feat – by that of Staples, a more than credible rival. Peter Rose offered a properly larger than life La Roche, though vocally, especially during his paean to the theatre, it could become a little threadbare. Bo Skovhus may no longer lay claim to the vocal refulgence of his youth; he can still hold a stage, though, even in a concert performance, and offered a reading of the Count’s role that was both intelligent and dramatically compelling. Tanja Ariane Baumgartner, whom I have had a few occasions to praise in performances outside this country, made a splendid Covent Garden debut as Clairon, rich of tone and both alluring and lively of presence. Graham Clark offered a splendid cameo as Monsieur Taupe, rendering the prompter’s late arrival genuinely touching. There was, moreover, strong singing, both in solo and in ensemble, from the band of servants, many of them Jette Parke Young Artists. John Cunningham’s Major-Domo faltered somewhat, but he had a good line in the brief declamatory. The audience clearly fell for Mary Plazas and Barry Banks as the Italian Singers, though I was not entirely convinced that some of those cheering understood that they were acknowledging Strauss in parodic mode.

 

Sir Andrew Davis led an estimable performance from the orchestra, the occasional fluff notwithstanding. There were moments of stiffness, not least in the Prelude; transitions were not always as fluid as they might have been. Davis, however, marshalled his forces well, and pointed up the myriad of references to other music, whether direct quotation or something more allusive. For all the perfectly poised nature of the ‘discussion’, we always know that Strauss (and thus music) will win out, as he did here. The performance was recorded by BBC Radio 3 for future broadcast: inevitable cavils notwithstanding, it remains highly recommended.

Unanswered Questions: Strauss's Capriccio

(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.





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?

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.

Some thoughts on Richard Strauss's Capriccio

Capriccio has been much on my mind over the past week. Not only am I part way through writing a chapter concerned with Strauss; I gave a paper at the University of Surrey on Capriccio and also gave a talk at the Peterhouse History Society on Music in the Third Reich (starting with Triumph of the Will and moving via Furtwängler to Strauss). Here are a few thoughts that have arisen (some taken from an earlier Edinburgh Festival review, for which I hope I may be forgiven).


For what it is worth, it seems to me that, if we must confront the 'facts' with which people are so obsessed when it comes to the Third Reich, Strauss acted in a pretty ordinary way: neither ‘great’ nor ‘disgraceful’. Perhaps that in itself is a problem for us: we find it easier to deal with heroism or evil; perhaps we fear that we, with our everyday concerns and fears would actually have acted in too similar a way to Strauss, yet he has no excuse, since he was a Composer – and that should be a force for good in the world. Strauss certainly proved no hero, though there were occasions when he acted well, as in his defence of Stefan Zweig. He was less of a figure of opposition, say, than Furtwängler, whom many consider nevertheless deeply compromised; there is no equivalent to the anger expressed in some of Furtwängler’s wartime performances, though there is some equivalent to that expressed privately in Furtwängler’s notebooks, albeit perhaps more disdain than anger. Sadly – and one can hardly help feeling a certain sadness, if one cares about Strauss’s music – politics were not of interest to him; art was. There were particular personal difficulties: his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren, for instance, whom, with considerable difficulty, he managed to save from being sent to a concentration camp. That seems to have been a reason for accepting the presidency in 1933 of the Reichsmusikkammer – that, and it may be noted, an apparently genuine desire to safeguard the performance of music by Jewish composers, such as Mendelssohn and Mahler. That post came to an end the following year, however, upon the Gestapo’s interception of the letter to Zweig, in which Strauss protested in no uncertain terms about Nazi cultural policy towards Jewish artists. Likewise, Strauss refused to have Zweig’s name as librettist removed from the programme for the premiere of Die schweigsame Frau; Goebbels refused to attend, and the work was soon proscribed. The former is just as one might expect, I might add, for someone who, whatever he believes or does not about anyone else, does believe in art in a way that goes far beyond self-interest. One might well dissent from such a world-view but it is far from cynical.

Capriccio itself of course originated in an idea from Stefan Zweig, derived from his British Library researches into eighteenth-century opera; taking his cue from a rival of Lorenzo da Ponte, Abbé Giovanni Battista Casti, Zweig had wished to create a new work exploring one of the fundamental issues in operatic creation, namely the relationship between words and music. Upon his flight from Austria, Zweig had hoped that Joseph Gregor would take up the plan for a libretto, but Strauss, always a productively difficult taskmaster in these respects, found Gregor’s proposals wanting, eventually proposing to the conductor, Clemens Krauss, that he take on the task. Krauss and Strauss ended up writing the text in collaboration, though the music was of course entirely Strauss’s own. What arose was a metatheatrical conversation piece, very much in the line of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal Ariadne auf Naxos. Set in the salon of Countess Madeleine outside Paris in 1775, that is at the time of controversy over Gluck’s operatic reforms, we witness disputes between the countess, her brother, the composer Flamand, the poet Olivier, and the theatrical impresario La Roche, over the nature of music, drama, and opera; the Count hits upon the idea that the events arising should themselves be turned into an opera, a collaboration between the artists present. The Countess, at least on the surface, proves as incapable of choosing æsthetically between words and music as she is romantically between poet and composer. Unlike Strauss’s preceding opera, Capriccio received wartime performances, being premiered at the Nationaltheater in Munich on 28 October 1942, and moving on to Dresden and Vienna in 1944.


The opening string sextet – the conceit being that it is itself a new work by the composer, Flamand – had already been performed at the villa of Baldur von Schirach, the Vienna Gauleiter. Schirach would receive twenty years imprisonment in Spandau prison at Nuremberg; he was one of the two defendants, the other being Albert Speer, who spoke against Hitler. Krauss, whom it is probably fair to describe as a skilled careerist, managed to secure the premiere by persuading Goebbels, with whom Strauss was once again out of favour, to assume patronage of the occasion.


What, then, do we make of an opera conceived and first performed in such circumstances? It is hardly a work of protest, though how could it be? In what I am tempted to call its ‘aristocratic’ refinement, both verbally and musically, it stands at one level about as distant from the catastrophe enveloping Europe as one could imagine. Yet when one begins to think about it a little more deeply, all sorts of difficulties, intentional or otherwise, emerge. 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. Such composers were not part of the musical mainstream, even leaving aside matters of nationality; indeed, many composers, let alone others, would not necessarily have been well acquainted with their music, though 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, at other times through allusion. There seems, then, to be an assertion of humanist, perhaps aristocratic, values, lightly done, as it had to be, but which connects very well with his increasing re-immersion in the work of Goethe. The apolitical, especially at times such as this, might actually be read as highly political, whatever the straightforward intention.





Arguably true, perhaps, but the Rococo – or should that be neo-Rococo? – setting cannot help but seem like a refuge, a retreat. (We are back, perhaps to the Rosenkavalier problem, yet intensified, for retreating from harmonic experiment after Elektra is one thing, withdrawing from a world of war and genocide quite another. At least that is how many of us would see it…) 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. Once again, masks and games both gratify and haunt us: Straussian detachment and irony.


And since so much of the drama concerns itself with artistic patronage, we can hardly help consider the patronage of Schirach and Goebbels. What then, are we to make of a work in which it is the patroness, the Countess, who insofar as anyone can, resolves dramatic conflicts? Having said that, if, as seems clear, the representation of La Roche takes an affectionate cue from the Jewish impresario, Max Reinhardt, an old and valued collaborator with Strauss from beyond even the foundation of the Salzburg Festival, indeed from the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier, then letting La Roche/Reinhardt have his say, above all in his dignified panegyric to the theatre, is not without its importance.



A recent production from the Cologne Opera, which I saw at the Edinburgh Festival in 2007, heightened the contrast between political reality and work, and made a powerful case for political reality as part both of the work and our inevitable response to it. That contrasts strongly and tellingly with the San Francisco DVD I have (see above YouTube link) as ‘traditional’ a production as one might conceive, but which one necessarily reads in a different way once one has started to think about these issues. In one of the archetypal operas about the making of an opera, it is more than usually appropriate to add another narrative layer, in which the era of the making of Capriccio itself features. Our first sight, disturbingly set against the beauties of the sextet – some might be tempted to call it the Schirach sextet – was of the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Elysées. The opera therefore remained in France, somewhere outside Paris. The bulk of the action, Capriccio's creation of an opera as opposed to the production's creation of Capriccio, took place in eighteenth-century costume: a final house party, in which the coming of the Gestapo might be put out of mind for a couple of hours. One might have been tempted to wonder: is this perhaps what Strauss himself was doing?


There were from time to time reminders of approaching fate, which grew more numerous as time – a crucially important concept – went on. Every aspect of the production, be it 'political' or 'aesthetic', showed the dichotomy to be false and worked inexorably towards the denouement: the Count's preparation of a cyanide capsule, the last vain attempt to answer or perhaps to evade not only the vexed question of words or music, but arguably to answer or to evade other questions too, and perhaps most chillingly of all, the prompter, Monsieur Taupe, replete with his yellow star, being left behind by the departure of the main party and offered his own carriage ‘home’. In this context, the actress Clairon’s constant refrains that she must depart for Paris sounded differently indeed.


The final scene then depicted the Countess saying farewell. Who knew when or indeed whether she would ever return after being escorted to the railway station? And yet, there was another, equally important side to what was going on. Strauss's music arguably offered some sense of hope, ‘utopian’ in a sense Ernst Bloch might have understood, against this terrible backdrop. Whether the hope were vain or even irresponsible remained unanswered, at least explicitly. Yet just as surely as music always wins out against the words, for the apparently insoluble argument is answered by Strauss in the glory of the closing music set against the banality of the Major-Domo's announcement that supper is served, so perhaps, in Strauss’s very own sense, does art against its surrounding evil. The former certainly does not prevent the other, but nor does it necessarily submit entirely. For the music to the final scene, some of the most heartrending Strauss ever wrote, becomes all the more moving when it confronts rather than retreats from evil. Or at least when, masks or otherwise, it is made to do so. Is the mask slipping, or is it just deployed in a way that utterly convinces the listener? We should not expect – and yet we seem to do so – Strauss necessarily to know himself. Indeed, as Strauss read in Goethe’s Zahme Xenien, which he would consider setting, though instead he wrote Metamorphosen, ‘Niemand wird sich Selber kennen/sich von seinem Selbst-Ich trennen’ (‘No one can know himself/separate himself from his very self.’)

If the beauty – the Mondscheinmusik simply had to begin with a horn solo – of Strauss’s music and, of course, its irony enable us to see more clearly and to ask questions, if he stands as an object of suspicion in the eyes of conventional, whether justified or otherwise, ways of conceiving of music and morality, then we might consider him rather differently. Hans Werner Henze’s accusation that Strauss had never given a thought to the moral function of his work seems untrue; it was, rather, rare for that function to provide the intentional subject matter of his work, quite another matter. Though even that is perhaps untrue: some of the works after all not only delight artistically but are in some senses about artistic delight. For many, Strauss included, that is a moral function – and I should like to think that Henze and other decriers of Strauss would recognise that too.

The Case of Richard Strauss

(paper given at the conference on Music and Morality, Institute of Musical Research, University of London, 16 June 2009)

‘Wagner is the most highly controversial figure in the entire history of the arts.’ These words, with which Wilhelm Furtwängler opened his penetrating essay, The Case of Wagner, may still hold true; I am sure that they do for music. But should they? Germans, and German musicians in particular, are very fond of ‘cases’. Nietzsche had his Case of Wagner, the title at least consciously echoed by Furtwängler. Looking to the twentieth century, Schoenberg remains intensely controversial. A host of devotees sees him, with greater or lesser qualification, as a Moses-like figure, leading composition into an atonal and subsequently serialist, Promised Land; others see this as the point where it ‘all went wrong’. There are other questions but the Case of Schoenberg has not changed essentially from the moment of the emancipation of the dissonance. A composer who ought to be just as controversial as Wagner or Schoenberg, is Richard Strauss. The reasons for controversy are not the same, even though they may sometimes be related. I want to outline a Case of Strauss and to ask the moral terms in which much of it would be couched might tell us about some issues concerning music and morality.

A mainstay of conceptions of Strauss is that the modernist composer hurtles forward as far as Elektra, before the regression of Der Rosenkavalier, in terms of musical language and subject matter. There are many problems with this ‘case’. I should certainly question how ‘modernist’, at least in a post-Schoenbergian, ‘New Music’ sense, Salome and Elektra are. But rather than considering this in itself, let us see how it might reflect, perhaps even further, conceptions of music and morality. The teleology envisages a hero’s valour pressing him forward before that teleology is reversed or at best stunted. Others continue to go forward, whether with nostalgia (Berg), with no regrets (Webern), or somewhere in between (Schoenberg). Strauss turns back. But it is not, according to this claim, just that he turns back. He seeks refuge in an confected conflation of his name sake, the Waltz King, Johann Strauss, and post-Mozartian or sub-Mozartian parody. Still worse, he does this to please the audience, perhaps to please himself – and, it would seem, to rake in the cash, all the more shockingly when Salome had in any case purchased him his villa in Garmisch. Contrast, later, Schoenberg in American exile, suffering for his art, with the private premiere of the prologue to Capriccio at the home of Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach, who helped Strauss to secure his threatened Belvedere property in Vienna. A villa here, a villa there, even when the whipped cream has been transformed into something a little easier on the arteries. It all adds up: the property portfolio and the calories – and doesn’t the composer know it?

What do we have here then? There is of course the ‘failure’ – an apt characterisation of the charge, even if not of the reality – to continue along a modernist line. There is a retreat, perhaps to court (relative) popularity, perhaps to maximise the financial proceeds, perhaps even so as not to engage with the world around him: the aristocratic manners of Capriccio’s eighteenth-century château might seem less than relevant to the world of 1941. (Again, I should stress that these are not necessarily my own views.) Technical, perhaps especially harmonic, innovation often tends to lead, or at least to be seen to lead, to exploration of new emotional, psychological, æsethetic, even political and societal realms. If the political had been notably absent from Elektra, the psychopathological had not. Similarly, lack of innovation tends to suggest a general lack of adventure. It is barely a step from this to seeing middle- and often late-period Strauss, with at best a few exceptions, as failing to face up to the demands of the present, whether through weakness or the composer’s own deliberate fault: a loss of nerve, incomprehension even, or more or less straightforward cynical exploitation.

Strauss admittedly did not help his case here, making bourgeois, even philistine pronouncements pour épater les anti-bourgeois. He was a profoundly cultured man, who had read – and criticised – Schopenhauer at an early age and knew his Goethe inside out. Karl Böhm relates: ‘sometimes it was quite impossible to follow Strauss in every topic of his conversation: one had to be as well up in literature as in music to be able to hold one’s own with him. He was at home in German literature as no other musician ... he knew Faust by heart. He was equally familiar with Russian literature.’ And yet, he often portrayed himself as being more interested in playing cards or counting the receipts. Karl Kraus provided the biting description – does he ever fail to draw blood? – of Strauss as ‘certainly more of a stock company than a genius’. Even in an intercepted letter to Stefan Zweig, in which Strauss came as close to an outright attack upon the Nazi regime as he ever did, he could not resist, or seemingly did not wish to resist, a financial reference. ‘For me,’ he wrote, ‘the Volk only begins to exist when it becomes the audience. It’s all the same to me if they come from China, Upper Bavaria, New Zealand, or Berlin, so long as they have paid full price at the box office.’

It has become commonplace to deplore aspects of an artist’s behaviour, whilst admiring his art. This does not seem to hold for Strauss, suggesting that something additional is at work. One often finds in Strauss’s accusers a sense of moral outrage, or at least distaste, that a composer of such gifts is, for more or less reprehensible reasons, letting them go to waste, frittering them away, acting dishonestly. One sees a school-report-like suspicion that Strauss could easily – and ‘ease’ suggests the composer’s facility – have done so much better. Carl Dahlhaus, far from an outright anti-Straussian, opines: ‘The break between self-satisfied cantabile and orchestral sophistication in Strauss ... is impossible to ignore,’ the ‘relationship between technique and expression’ being ‘precarious’. This implies a squandering of fabulous technique, an easy way out, almost because he could. Elgar or Pfitzner are, for instance, and irrespective of one’s gauging of their music’s musical worth, generally seen as ‘honest’ or ‘honourable’ conservatives. There is integrity to what they are attempting, even for those who doubt the quality of the outcome. Strauss is, in a word, irresponsible, whereas an authentic modern artist must, in post-Romantic style, shoulder responsibility, for the development of his art, and even for the moral health, instruction, and progress of the world around him. For Strauss, poets or artists should not be the legislators of the world, not because they are unimportant, but because being an artist is so much more important than being a legislator. His creed is æstheticism through and through.

This is a composer who notoriously could not understand the preoccupation with redemption evinced by Mahler, who has latterly come to be seen as the prophet of twentieth-century music. With candid honesty, Strauss could tell Otto Klemperer: ‘I don’t know from what I am to be redeemed. When I sit down at my desk in the morning and I get an idea, I don’t need redemption. What did Mahler mean by it?’ Mahler’s own claim – often misleadingly quoted – ‘The time will come, when men will see the chaff separated from the wheat – and my time will come when his [Strauss’s] is up,’ might not quite have been fulfilled; Strauss’s time has never quite been called. Nevertheless, a Mahlerian ascendancy has been achieved, whether in musicological, compositional, or performing circles, and the qualities for which Mahler is admired, be they moral, modernist, or both, tend to be viewed as lacking in Strauss. Indeed, Schoenberg, declining a request for an appreciation on Strauss’s fiftieth birthday, would claim: ‘... since I have understood Mahler (and I cannot grasp how anyone can do otherwise) I have inwardly rejected Strauss’.

In addition to the accusation of squandering gifts, there is also a sense of something unwholesome, unhealthy, degenerate even, in an interesting variation upon a German theme. There is also an abiding moral question: what is Strauss’s music for? Are we being manipulated? If so, to what end? The conclusion often seems to be shockingly nihilistic, the virtual paradox of being manipulated to no end whatsoever, unless one buys the line of financial reward. Far from the most unambiguous of modernists, Hans Werner Henze would nevertheless voice the accusation of a lack of moral purpose with particular force:

Beethoven regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress. As with Marxism, his goal is not God but Man, whereas there are other artists who have never given a thought to the moral function of their work; for instance Richard Strauss, who is for me – perhaps I’m going too far – something like a court composer to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

Picking up on the idea of degeneracy, it is worth noting that Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn contracts venereal disease from his visit to the prostitute Esmerelda following a performance of Salome. Having been infected, straining, as it were, to become Schoenberg becomes the fictional composer’s impossible penance (impossible in the sense that it was even for Schoenberg himself). Consider the following words from Adorno, which could never be applied to Strauss, whom we might consider here as Schoenberg’s antipode:

[Schoenberg’s] music denies the very thing we have been accustomed, since Shakespeare’s days, to expect from music as the magical art: consolation. In the era of music’s emancipation it claims to be nothing more than the voice of truth, without the crutches of the familiar, but also without the deception of praise and false positivity. The strength to do this, not illusion, is what is consoling about it. One could say that Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music.

If Schoenberg stands for truth, does not Strauss stand for something false, for consolation, for ‘the deception of praise and false positivity’, for illusory images? In other words, if Schoenberg is Moses, is not Strauss Aron? There is no claim to that ‘truth’ towards which Schoenberg’s, Wagner’s, Mahler’s, or Beethoven’s music strains. Nor is there a polemical anti-Romantic stance, such as Stravinsky’s, proclaiming that music cannot or should not strain towards the truth: in itself, amongst other things, a claim to truth. Perhaps this is why after a 1963 performance of Der Rosenkavalier, Stravinsky would say that Strauss could charm and delight, but never move. ‘He didn’t give a damn,’ was the damning verdict. One would certainly search in vain for a ‘message’ to take home from Elektra; to read it as a moral homily upon family breakdown would be an eccentricity too far. Whether we can agree on what Moses und Aron, Parsifal, a Mahler symphony, or the Missa solemnis might ‘mean’, many would agree that some form of argument or transformation is intended; not with Strauss.

One crucial Straussian remnant, however, is something with which moralists have long had difficulty: irony. In Kierkegaard’s words, ‘the ironist sets himself above ethics and morals. ... He renders his ego infinite.’ He may feel ‘remorse, but aesthetically not morally’. Irony has long been associated with nihilism, which again rings true for Strauss. Indeed, Leon Botstein has suggested that, in contradistinction to so many modernist composers, Strauss is content to employ irony, ornament, and detachment, not to ‘undercut wisdom,’ but rather as its instruments. I do not have time to explore the morality of detachment, the morality of ornament – which, you may recall, Schoenberg’s friend, the modernist architect, Adolf Loos, branded a ‘crime’ – or the morality of irony. However, I should like to conclude with a thought upon the latter. When Strauss’s mask drops, as in the Composer’s panegyric to Music in Ariadne auf Naxos, or in Metamorphosen, that great lament for a classical Germany in flames, Strauss proves to be one of the most moving of all composers; he actually appears to be doing what many have thought he ought. It is, I admit, very difficult not to wish that this happened more often. Yet, in the conclusion of his book, The compass of irony, Douglas Muecke writes, against Kierkegaard:

The real basis of his objections to irony is his commitment ... to a closed-world ideology. ... Since he was a believer, there was one direction in which he could not be ironical ... The business of irony is to see clearly and ask questions. ... Irony, mobile and disengaged, has always been an object of suspicion in the eyes of established authority and those who feel a need for its blessing. ... It was not only because Heine was a Jew that the Nazis attacked his works.

If Strauss enables us to see more clearly and to ask questions, if he stands as an object of suspicion in the eyes of conventional, whether justified or otherwise, ways of conceiving of music and morality, then we might consider him rather differently. Henze’s accusation that Strauss had never given a thought to the moral function of his work seems to me untrue; it was, rather, rare indeed for this function to provide the subject matter of his work. Do we really need to attack his works? The greatness of Mahler or Schoenberg will not be lessened by appreciation of Strauss. As a caution against constraints upon thinking and upon experience, against the ‘closed-world ideology’ evoked above, Strauss might prove to be a force for good after all.