....and what about Strauss

The other piece in last week's concert was the Strauss four last songs.

Strauss is another composer I have problems with.

There is no doubt that he is a master of the opening gesture.  The opening of Don Juan for example is quite rightly famous - what a fabulous way of releasing energy.  Yet I find much of the rest of the piece strangely dull - I've played it a couple of times and even conducted it at a rehearsal and each time I was struck by how "manufactured" it all seemed.  Even at that early stage of his career I feel Strauss could all too easily get into autopilot mood.    In a very different context the opening of Salome is wonderfully atmospheric - but I have no desire to hear much of the rest of the opera again.

At least I have heard the whole of Salome several times.  I can't say that same of Heldenleben.  Again the whole of the first paragraph is magnificent with a complete command of gesture and a confidence and swagger which is absolutely in character.  But I must confess that after that opening I find that the music descends very quickly into bathos and I don't think that I have ever managed to sit through the piece in its entirety.     The same is true of Zarathustra.   The opening has become such a cliché that it is easy to overlook just how extraordinary it is.  But again I can't find anything else in the piece.  Incidentally the opening is a complete nightmare for a contrabassoon player.  I've only played it once and I have no desire to repeat the experience.  That low C is very exposed - indeed when I played it I felt completely on my own - I couldn't hear the basses or the organ.  And of course they don't have the problems of breathing!  Conductors like to linger on that opening pedal for an age - it is slow enough as notated without the need to need to establish "atmosphere" by sustaining it even longer.

But, almost unique in Strauss, I find that I am very drawn to the four last songs.  The first two are nothing special but the third and fourth are in a very different league. Beim Schlafengehen is gorgeous - the melismatic phrase first heard in the violin and then in the voice is one of the most purely sensuous moments in all music, but what I find interesting is the harmonic control underneath.  To me Strauss all too often simply shifted up and down through the keys without putting any real roots down.  But the harmony hear supports the vocal line and the harmonic rhythm propels the vocal line forward towards the climactic high note at the end of the phrase. Im Abendrot is by contrast the most perfect example of pure serenity in music that I know - though again from the contra players perspective those final chords to tax the lip and the breath control to the limit and beyond.


I don't find the same reaction to the other works of Strauss' Indian summer.  Indeed I find most of what I have heard boring and completely un engaging.   Strange then that at the very end of what was a long composing life Strauss somehow hit the spot.


Of course it could just be my warped musical sensibilities.......


Now if it were Johann Strauss we were talking about I would be taking a very different view - he was a complete genius.   But I've yet to find an orchestral colleague who agrees with me!