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.