Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0009/00094.txt

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$Title{Richard Strauss
Chapter IV: Songs And Choral Works}
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$Author{Newman, Ernest}
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$Date{1908}
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Title:       Richard Strauss
Author:      Newman, Ernest
Date:        1908

Chapter IV: Songs And Choral Works

     Strauss has written over a hundred songs, but a careful study of them
gives one the impression that he is not a born song writer, and that
comparatively few of his Lieder have much chance of survival.  This verdict
may surprise those who have often felt, when some fine song of his has been
sung in the interval between two of his orchestral works, that this is a
Strauss they could more readily take to their hearts than the composer of Ein
Heldenleben or Don Quixote.  Critics, too, on occasions like this, have been
known to lament that Strauss did not cultivate further his tender and charming
lyrical vein.  But the songs that have made this effect have been some
half-dozen of the very best of the hundred; and it is too hastily assumed that
all, or the majority, of the rest are of the same high quality.  As a matter
of fact, one very small volume will contain all the Lieder of Strauss that are
worth living with day by day.  Nowhere, in truth, does he show to such poor
advantage on the whole as here.  He has written some good songs, and one or
two exquisite songs, but also a number that are commonplace, or dull, or
pretentiously empty, or stupid, or downright ugly.  Only those who have
conscientiously worked through them all a few times, desirous of seeing good
in them wherever it is to be seen, can realize the woeful waste of time and
labour that the majority of them represent.

     How some of them came to be written can no doubt be easily explained.  A
composer has many "calls" to composition, and perhaps the most seductive,
siren-like call of all is that of the publisher jingling what Stevenson called
the clinking, minted quids.  When a musician can get forty of fifty pounds for
a single lyric, as Strauss now can, the temptation to believe in the theory of
his own plenary inspiration must be irresistible.  A number of his songs may
be frankly written off as not music but merchandise.  Others are failures from
various reasons.  Some of them, such as Die Frauen sind oft fromm und still
(op. 21, No. 5), are tiresomely didactic; others, such as Wozu noch Madchen
(op. 19, No. 1), Ach weh mir (op. 21, No. 4), Fur funfzehn Pfennig (op. 36,
No. 2), Hat gesagt (op. 36, No. 3), Herr Lenz (op. 37, No. 5), Bruder
Liederlich (op. 41, No. 4), Von den sieben Zechbrudern (op. 47, No. 5), Ach
was Kummer (op. 49, No. 8), and Junggesellenschwur (op. 49, No. 6), aim at a
primitive kind of facetiousness that is bad enough in any art, but intolerable
in music.  One or two of these songs, in spite of their occasional cleverness,
give us unpleasant hints of how far along the road to inanity a Teutonic
genius can travel when he is bent on being funny.  Strauss is highly commended
by some of the German critics for setting the most modern German poets to
music, such as Liliencron, Dehmel, Henckell, Bierbaum, Mackay, and
Morgenstern, in contrast with Hugo Wolf, who associated himself only with dead
writers, like Goethe, Heine, Geibel, Heyse, Morike, and Eichendorff, and,
though he was very friendly with Detlev von Liliencron, set no poem of his to
music.  Strauss is supposed to have founded a new order of song, the "social
lyric," the expression of the life of our own day.  As, however, he has chosen
to set most of these modern poems to quite uninteresting music, it is
difficult to be very grateful to him; and though the words of "Who is Sylvia?"
are shockingly old, most of us would prefer Schubert's setting of them to all
the turbid cascades of notes that Strauss has poured over the words of
"modern" poets like Bierbaum and Mackay.  There is no particular credit in
setting the poems of living writers if the poems are unsuitable for music, as
many of those which Strauss has composed undoubtedly are.

     His questionable taste in poetry rather implies that he is not a born
musical lyrist, for the true modern song writer, like Hugo Wolf, is prevented
from choosing bad poetic material by an instinctive sense that it cannot be
converted into good music.  Strauss, in fact, decidedly lacks that power of
harmonious and balanced structure on a small scale that is the first essential
of the song writer.  He has, as we have seen, a remarkable gift for musical
architecture on a large scale, but the smaller the ground on which he has to
work the more visibly is he hampered.  A song by Wolf can be seen at once to
be woven in a single piece; one broad conception dominates it all, and is
instinctively felt to be implicit in all the changing details as they unfold
themselves.  Many of Strauss's most ambitious songs are absolutely formless,
with no more organization than a jellyfish; the music simply wanders on from
one line to another without reason and without connection.  Play through
things like Anbetung (op. 36, No. 4), Mein Herz ist stumm (op. 19, No. 6), or
Am Ufer (op. 41, No. 3), and you will have merely a queer sense of having
drifted aimlessly through one key after another and from one part of the scale
to another, such vague emotions as have been stirred now and then being quite
unrelated to each other, and the song as a whole suggesting no general
emotional mood whatever.  In songs like this Strauss creates no vision in us
because he has had none himself to begin with; he has started off without any
central idea or feeling, and just does the best he can with each line as it
appears - living, as it were, from hand to mouth until the thing is over.  In
a communication to Friedrich von Hausegger, in 1903, he told the world his way
of writing songs.  For some time, he says, he will have no impulse to compose
at all.  Then one evening he will be turning the leaves of a volume of poetry;
a poem will strike his eye, he reads it through, it agrees with the mood he is
in, and at once the appropriate music is instinctively fitted to it.  He is in
a musical frame of mind, and all he wants is the right poetic vessel into
which to pour his ideas.  If good luck throws this in his way, a satisfactory
song results.  But often, he says, the poem that presents itself is not the
right one; then he has to bend his musical mood to fit it the best way he can;
he works laboriously and without the right kind of enthusiasm at it.  The
song, in fact, is made, not born.  This confession explains all his failures
as a lyrist.  Wolf always started from the poem; he absorbed himself so
utterly in it that for the time being he really lived it, and the music with
which it spontaneously clothed itself was simply the equivalent in tone of the
emotion that had penetrated the poet when he wrote the words.  Strauss begins
from the other end.  He sits down to read with a vague musical feeling in him
calling for expression.  If now he chances to find a poem that perfectly fits
this musical feeling, he reaches, though from the reverse direction, precisely
the point that Wolf reached.  But if the vague musical mood has to accommodate
itself, as best it can, to a poem not thoroughly propitious to it, it is
evident that there can be no particular felicity of detail, and, above all,
none of that sense of completeness, the sense of gradual and irresistible
evolution from the first bar to the last, that makes Wolf's songs so
satisfactory from the point of view of form.

     To this unfortunate lack of agreement between the poet and the musician
we owe a number of Strauss's least admirable songs.  As he feels nothing in
particular he can express nothing in particular, so he relies on a display of
pumped-up excitement that he hopes may be mistaken for genuine passion.  In
songs like Mein Auge (op. 37, No. 4), Auf ein Kind (op. 47, No. 1), and
Fruhlingsfeier (op. 56, No. 5), one would think, from the deluge of black
notes that rains upon the page, that something of the utmost significance was
being said; but when we look at the song critically we see that it all amounts
to very little or nothing at all.  There is a superfluity of this pretentious
emptiness in Strauss's songs - pounds upon pounds of notes from which we can
hardly squeeze a half-ounce of feeling or even of meaning.  And he often
experiments in his songs in audacities from which even he would shrink in his
orchestral works.  Occasionally these tricks are entertaining, as in the
charming Ich schwebe (op. 48, No. 2), where the faintly clashing progressions
have an agreeable piquancy of their own.  But in many of the songs he seems
absolutely to lose himself in jungles of his own planting; ^* there are some
pages - as for example, in Himmelsboten (op. 32, No. 5), Gluckes genug (op.
37, No. 1), and Die Ulme zu Hirschau (op. 43, No. 3) - that are sheer melodic
and harmonic nonsense.  People who take a malicious delight in dwelling upon
the uglinesses in Strauss's orchestral works should spend a day or two with
his songs; they would find sins enough against not only beauty but against
sanity to provide them with texts for a year's sermons.

[Footnote *: At a certain point in Wenn (op. 31, No. 2), Strauss adds a
facetious footnote to the effect that singers in the nineteenth century are
recommended to transpose the song, from this point onwards a semitone lower,
so that it may end in the key in which it began.  This particular modulation,
however, is quite harmless.  Whatever the nineteenth century may think of it,
the twentieth century will probably solve the problem in the simplest possible
way - by deciding that the song is not good enough to be worth singing at
all.]

     Strauss has not grown as a song writer in the way that he has grown as an
orchestral writer, gradually evolving a unique personal style of his own.
There is a long road between Ein Heldenleben and Aus Italien, and a bigger
figure at the end of it than at the beginning; but in his songs with
pianoforte accompaniment there is not very much difference between the Strauss
of 1886 and the Strauss of 1906.  The best songs of 1906 are not much better
than the best of 1886; the bad ones of 1886 are no worse than the worst of
1906; and good and bad still jostle each other cheerfully in the same opus
number.  Yet Strauss has grown in the sense that he has shaken off the
influence of Liszt that was so pronounced in his earlier songs.  In songs like
Sehnsucht (op. 32, No. 2), O warst du mein (op. 26, No. 2), and Ruhemeine
Seele (op. 27, No. 1), the manner is quite Lisztian - a way of working
conscientiously from one line to another without any thought of unity of total
effect, of padding out a rather inexpressive vocal theme with a multitude of
notes in the piano, and of dragging a simple poem out to a quite inordinate
musical length.  Liszt's songs often suffer from this kind of elephantiasis;
the delicate tissues of a little poem swell in the most alarmingly dropsical
way under the treatment of the musician.  He cannot set Die todte Nachtigall,
for instance, to music, without digging a grave for the poor little bird big
enough for a turkey.  There is something of this over-elaboration in Strauss's
earlier style; it can be seen in such songs as Hoffen und wieder verzagen (op.
19, No. 5), and Mein Herz ist stumm (op. 19, No. 6), and others, as well as in
the three already mentioned.

     Few of his songs have the concision and the simplicity - the air of not
employing one note too many - that makes Wolf's work so admirable.  The
simple, indeed, is rather out of Strauss's reach as a rule; when he attempts
it, as in Du meines Herzens Kronelem (op. 21, No. 2), All mein Gedanken (op.
21, No. 1), Muttertandelei (op. 43, No. 2), Einkehr (op. 47, No. 4), Des
Dichters Abendgang (op. 47, No. 2), Wer lieben will (op. 49, No. 7), Mit
deinen blauen Augen (op. 56, No. 4), he is generally either dull and
charmless, or too self-consciously pretty.  Yet every now and then he has, by
a miracle, pared down his expansive style to the limits of the lyric, and then
we get the songs of his that we may be sure will live.  At first the emotion,
genuine though it is, is a little solid and beefy, as in the popular Zueignung
(op. 10, No. 1), and Allerseelen (op. 10, No. 8).  Then it grows more refined,
and in songs like Seitdem dein Aug (op. 17, No. 1), Serenade (op. 17, No. 2),
Morgen (op. 27, No. 4), Traum durch die Dammerung (op. 29, No. 1), Schlagende
Herzen (op. 29, No. 2), Nachtgang (op. 29, No. 3), Ich trage meine Minne (op.
32, No. 1), Meinem Kinde (op. 37, No. 3), Befreit (op. 39, No. 4), Die sieben
Siegel (op. 46, No. 3), Winterweihe (op. 48, No. 4), Ich schwebe (op. 48, No.
2), Blindenklage (op. 56, No. 2), and some others, his feeling is at its
purest and his technique at it best, the songs being mostly cast in one piece
throughout.  Now and then he achieves something wholly original, as in the
powerful Lied des Steinklopfers (op. 49, No. 4), and Der Arbeitsmann (op. 39,
No. 3), where the social humanism of the emotion is very thrilling.

     Like Wolf, Strauss throws much of the burden of expression in his songs
on to the accompaniment, though he rarely shows Wolf's art of blending the
piano part and the voice part in one indivisible whole.  With Strauss not only
is the voice part sometimes overshadowed by the accompaniment, but the latter
is often over-elaborated till it becomes a mere hindrance instead of a help to
the feeling.  His style, in truth, is not a piano style.  He keeps up a higher
average level of interest in his songs with orchestral accompaniment, where he
has the kind of colour he can make most suggestive and the breadth of canvas
that suits him.  Even here he can be merely noisily pretentious and fussy, as
in Nachtlicher Gang (op. 44, No. 2); but such powerful and fluent pieces of
work as the Notturno (op. 44, No. 1), Hymnus (op. 33, No. 3), and Pilgers
Morgenlied (op. 33, No. 4), give us the sensation, which so many of the
pianoforte songs do not, that here we are in the company of the greater
Strauss.  Of the whole of his large output of songs, probably not more than
twenty or twenty-five can rank as perfect or approximately perfect successes.

     Space permits only the briefest reference to Strauss's choral works.  The
early Wandrers Sturmlied (1884-6) showed him to have a thorough command of
choral polyphony; he obviously delights in the opportunities the medium
affords him for stupendous effects of vocal tone.  In its poetic feeling, its
vigour, and its ease of workmanship, it is one of the finest pieces of choral
and orchestral writing of the nineteenth century.  The orchestra is again
combined with the voices in the Taillefer (1903), in which there are solo
voices also, and in the Bardengesang (1906).  The former, though a trifle
unequal, is a most spirited piece of work.  Neither here nor in the
Bardengesang is there much attempt at subtlety in the choral writing; the
effects achieved are mostly those of sheer depth and massiveness.  The
Bardengesang is magnificently barbaric, though it slightly tries one's gravity
as the chorus thunders out the names of the tribes -

          Ha, ye Cheruseans! Ye Chattees! Ye Marsians!
               Ye Semnonians!
          Ye Brukterians! *Ye Warnians! Ye Gothonians!
               Ye Lewovians!
          Ye Reudinians! Ye Hermundurians! Ye
               Nariskians! Ye Quadees!
          Ye Trevirians! Ye Nervians! Ye Nehmetians! Ye
               Wangtonians!

and so on.

     Of the unaccompanied choruses of Strauss the most striking are the two
anthems of opus 34, written in sixteen parts.  The second is the more
beautiful of the two, but both are masterly pieces of work.  The three
male-voice choruses of opus 45 and the two of opus 42 are also for the most
part brilliant and expressive.  The Soldatenlied for male voices, published
without opus number, is merely a boisterous jeu d'esprit, no doubt greatly
relished by the German student in his more festive moments.

     This chapter seems the most appropriate place also in which to refer to
the recitation music to "Enoch Arden" (op. 38), written at the request of
Strauss's actor-friend, Possart.  The union of the speaking voice with the
pianoforte is at the best a detestable one. Strauss's highly expressive music,
however, is well worth studying on its own account.  It shows, among other
things, to what varied uses he could put a small leading motive or two.