Strauss: Suite from Der Rosenkavalier

Suite from DER ROSENKAVALIER Richard Strauss

(1864-1949)

For many music lovers Richard Strauss represents the very essence of 19^th century Romanticism, with his sumptuous orchestral tone poems, lavish operatic works and expressive lieder. But while his most popular works appeared before the First World War, Strauss would live the greater part of his life in the 20^th century---the precocious teenager who began his career in the age of Wagner’s PARSIFAL and the Brahms symphonies, would live to be a contemporary of such figures as Pierre Boulez, Milton Babbitt and Elliott Carter! But then the career of Richard Strauss is filled with paradox. By the time he reached the age of thirty he had become the most celebrated living composer, acclaimed by many as the hoped-for successor to Richard Wagner, while many musical conservatives considered him to be a dangerous “revolutionary.” It is interesting that Johannes Brahms himself dismissed such talk, singling out Gustav Mahler as the REAL “revolutionary,” although the true importance of Mahler’s works would only be recognized fifty years after his death, as he himself had prophesied.

For all his precocious brilliance, Richard Strauss was nearly thirty years of age when he composed his first stage work, GUNTRAM (1894) , a galumphing Wagnerian epic which sank like a stone, followed in 1901 by a rather sour comic opera, FEUERSNOT, which was only a modest success. Could it be that the composer of “Don Juan” and “Zarathustra” was ill-suited for the musical stage? But the sensational premiere of SALOME in 1905 turned everything around, transforming the career of Strauss overnight. With ELEKTRA (1909), an exploration of human depravity almost exceeding the grisly power of SALOME, Strauss was at the height of his powers, hailed as the most significant figure in German opera since Wagner, as well as joining such figures as Schoenberg, Scriabin and Debussy in leading the way in new world of early 20^th century “modernism.” Strauss seemed to have made a daring leap forward not only in the striking psychological elements in these new operas, but also with regard to his basic musical language, particularly with regard to tonality and harmony. From this point forward Strauss would make opera his primary focus, ELEKTRA being the first of a half-dozen works with texts by the great Austrian poet and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in a remarkable partnership which lasted until the poet’s death in 1929.

Strauss’ had won international notoriety as a composer of operatic horror---even New York audiences were so stunned by SALOME in 1907 that the Met waited until the 1930s to mount another production! Thus it was not surprising that news of yet another Strauss/Hoffmansthal collaboration caused sensitive souls to quake at the thought of even greater operatic shocks in store. But when DER ROSENKAVALIER was first heard in 1911 it “shocked” only by its unexpected sweetness and tuneful expressiveness. (True, there was some moralist murmuring about the opera’s first scene, which finds a married woman in bed with a strapping young eighteen year-old, but that seemed to be a problem only in London---Sir Thomas Beecham has described a “typically English compromise” with the censors, which allowed the scene to be played if NO bed appeared on the stage, leaving the text unchanged, with several references to a bed!) On the threshold of the European catastrophe of the First World War, ROSENKAVALIER was a wistful look back to the 18^th century Vienna of Mozart’s MARRIAGE OF FIGARO, complete with a poignant central female figure, and a pair of young people falling in love at first sight. Now it was the turn of musical “moralists” to take offense, attacking (as some still do to this day) Strauss’ “cowardly” turning back from the bold “modernism” of SALOME and ELEKTRA, taking “refuge” in cozy musical nostalgia. Opera lovers, on the other hand were only too happy to hear in the new work echoes of FIGARO. ROSENKAVALIER’s Marschallin seemed to be a counterpart to Mozart’s Countess, and the decision to cast the young Oktavian as a “trouser role” for mezzo-soprano was surely a glance back to Cherubino, with links with Susanna as well. And forming a nostalgic (if anachronistic) link with “Old Vienna” was Strauss’ daring decision to thread a series of luscious waltzes through the course of the work, which has helped to make ROSENKAVALIER Strauss’ most popular opera It was such an overnight success in 1911 that special trains were run to take opera-lovers to Dresden to attend the first performances.

First published in 1945, the orchestral suite from DER ROSENKAVALIER seems not to be the work of Strauss himself, but may have been prepared by the conductor Artur Rodzinski. It comprises four extended sections heard without pause, laying out key scenes spanning the entire opera, with each of the principal characters represented in turn. Chief among these is a beautiful married woman on the verge of middle age, the Marschallin (Field-Marshal’s wife), whose clandestine affair with Oktavian, a boy still in his teens, soon comes to an abrupt end over the course of the action. The Marschallin’s cousin, the boorish, impoverished Baron Ochs is the comic focus of the work, with his hopes for an arranged marriage with Sophie, an innocent young woman from a wealthy family, coming to grief when the girl falls in love at first sight with Oktavian.

The introduction to Act I of DER ROSENKAVALIER forms the opening of the suite, with a swaggering figure in the solo horn setting in motion a swirl of orchestral activity which is intended to depict a night of tempestuous love-making. When the music gives way to a mood of tenderness, the curtain rises to reveal the Marschallin and Oktavian awakening in the first light of morning. This

richly-textured tonal picture glides on to the second section, the “Presentation of the Rose” music which opens Act Two, one of the most best-loved scenes in all of opera. Here the innocent young Sophie is excitedly awaiting the arrival of the “Rose Cavalier” (who turns out to be Oktavian), who is to present her with a silver rose, the symbol of Baron Ochs’ proposal of marriage. The horncall from the first section recurs, and with ever-mounting waves of excitement the music shifts into the ripe key of F-sharp major. In a dramatic harmonic gesture Oktavian’s entrance is portrayed with music capturing the glitter of the silver rose itself, with a magical combination of high shifting harmonies for 3 flutes, 3 violins, celeste and two harps. The first tentative phrases sung by Oktavian and Sophie, here heard in instrumental guise, become a rapturous duet. Rounded out by a return of the sounds of the silver rose, the third section follows, with the boisterous and mischievous introduction to Act III, which quickly gives way to an offstage waltz-tune which in the opera forms the background to an uproarious scene in which Baron Ochs makes a bungling attempt to seduce one of the Marschallin’s “maidservants,” Mariandel---actually Oktavian, dressed in woman’s clothing! In the course of this episode is heard music famously sung by a weepy, tipsy “Mariandel” to the memorable words, “Nein, nein, ich trink’ kein Wein”…. After a second waltz the orchestra swells into a majestically expansive version of the first,which is perhaps the finest waltz not composed by Johann Strauss! (For those with a musical sweet tooth this is probably the closest musical approximation of those unforgettable Viennese pastries heaped high with “Schlagobers” [whipped cream], which ten years later would be Strauss’ title for a ballet set in Vienna!) This wonderful waltz is associated with the clownish Baron Ochs (a role written for a deep bass voice), and in a delightful instrumental touch, the Baron’s low E with which he which concludes an earlier scene, is here given to a solo tuba. The fourth and final section encapsulates the most memorable music in ROSENKAVALIER: the concluding trio sung by Oktavian, Sophie and the Marschallin, in which the older woman regretfully (if without tears) “lets go” of her young lover, giving her blessing to the union of Sophie and Oktavian. This is followed by an artless little duet sung by the young lovers when they are at last alone together. Unlike the hushed final moment of the opera, which tiptoes away in a moment of witty pantomime, the suite concludes with a noisy waltz from earlier in Act III, which had been heard over the din of Ochs being chased from the scene by creditors and small children screaming “Papa! Papa!”