No one understood with such clarity the cost and consequences of being German as Strauss. An heir to cultural sophistication and the exponent of an advanced rather than backward cultural heritage (although one that appeared endangered at the turn of the twentieth century), Strauss was a master of ironic detachment.11 Polemical and ideologically consistent approaches to modernity, whether overtly progressive (Schoenberg) or reactionary (Pfitzner) did not appeal to him. Despite his pessimistic sense of the contemporary predicament, beginning with Der Rosenkavalier Strauss sought ways to communicate through music the allure and sentiment of mortality and intimacy as well as the elusive ideals of simplicity and eloquence. He appropriated markers of the eighteenth century, an era he cherished, distorting them without making the surface of his art explicitly mirror the radical turn in history that overwhelmed his generation.
Sibelius seems never to have been drawn to the revolutionary compositional example Strauss set in the 1890s as a young star composer. Unlike many near contemporaries—Bartók, Elgar, Schoenberg, Enescu, and Szymanowski—he did not engage Strauss’s orchestral music deeply or use Strauss’s meteoric career as a marker for himself. Rather, Sibelius’s originality and significance as a composer are more striking because of the relative absence of Straussian influences in his early work. Sibelius’s distance from Strauss, however, was offset by contact with Busoni and Mahler and an interest in the music of Debussy and the influence of musical romanticism from Russia.
Sibelius found his own path out of the dominant directions of post-Wagnerian composition. He did not imitate or emulate his contemporaries. Sibelius’s appeal to audiences and composers began first in England and America in the first half of the twentieth century and then spread in the 1970s, despite the legacy of snobbery under which his reputation suffered at midcentury. This popularity becomes more explicable when his music is placed alongside that of the music Strauss wrote after 1914, when what has become termed—all too conveniently—the “long nineteenth century” came to an abrupt end. The exotic Finnish element, the aspect that provided the allure early in his career (in part through Sibelius’s use of the Kalevala, the national epic), led to fundamental innovations in form and content that were not, as in the case of Strauss, explicit stylistic deconstructions of history and tradition.
The turn-of-century consciousness of a new and uncharted historical moment—confirmed brutally after 1914—led Strauss and Sibelius, for whom music deserved a central place in culture, to ponder three issues. The first was the relationship between music and language. Second was the connection between music and nature, an issue that implied a polemical contrast between nature and the machine, in which nature was an idealized romantic category and the machine representative of a dehumanizing modernity visible in cities and industry that grew at the expense of a vanishing rural landscape.12 The third issue was the potential utility of literary and visual expressionism and naturalism against the radical, self-consciously contemporary aesthetic fashions that emerged from the rubble of world war.
Strauss and Language
Strauss was, if anything, a literary composer whose sensibility about language was acute and whose instincts regarding parallels between the musical and the linguistic was intensely cultivated. The semantic and rhetorical intent of the musical devices he developed and utilized, primarily in the orchestral music written before 1904, was literary in the Lisztean sense. Beginning in 1886, he sought to augment the potential of prose and poetic narrative in music through the use of form and orchestration. By fusing Wagnerian practices with the procedures of classical and Romantic instrumental music, Strauss generated a musical equivalent to the illusionism of literary hyper-realism (as exemplified in the novels of Flaubert, Theodor Fontane, and Thomas Mann, and audible in the 1903 Symphonia domestica) in terms of narration per se and the illustration of external events.13 Language also inspired Strauss’s virtuosic capacity to characterize, in music, conscious and unconscious meaning within the human psyche.
Strauss was inclined to think purely in music, absent text or image, in a narrative and mimetic manner parallel to language. Initially his music developed in the direction of mere illustration, allusion, and correspondence to linguistic meaning.14 But later in his career Strauss chose to confront the skepticism regarding the character and power of language in an era of mass literacy that preoccupied his contemporaries, particularly Hofmannsthal and the postwar generation of philosophers that included Wittgenstein. Faced with a deepening recognition of the abuse and limits of language, Strauss turned to more elaborate, indirect, and devious but still linguistically inspired musical strategies, using metaphor and artifice as understood in literary terms.
As Strauss responded to music and language, his visual imagination led him to the eighteenth century, during which the issue of the capacity of language and music to construct meaning and achieve a truthful correspondence to reality had been hotly debated. With that debate came intense speculation about the nature of music, a problem he explored in his final opera, Capriccio. Was music meaningful in a semantic manner analogous to language and therefore capable of attaining ethical and moral status as thought? Might music be superior, as a signifier of passion and sensibilities, with a reach beyond language? If so, music needed a logic and grammar rendering it subject to interpretation in words.
Strauss privileged music over language in a characteristic eighteenth-century fashion. Music retained a quasi-linguistic structure, but its nature allowed it to transcend ordinary thought. Strauss rejected Eduard Hanslick’s formalism, not because he did not regard music as autonomous, but because he thought music was communicative precisely because it was distinct as a life-form, however analogous to language, generating identifiable meaning about emotion, ideas, and external reality.15
An aesthetic of realism as illusion (a precursor to magic realism) emerged in the late 1880s that depended on formal conventions derived from music’s unique semantics and syntax. It led Strauss to the allegorical, decorative, and intricate practice of eighteenth-century rococo landscape and genre painting. Watteau, in particular, exemplified a subtle integration of artistic convention with covert narratives masquerading as stylized realism.16 Strauss embraced as well an eighteenth-century construct of Hellenic classicism defined in aesthetic terms by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and in politics by the Enlightenment’s recourse to Greece (and Rome) as metaphors and models. Strauss (as Brahms did in the 1870s) absorbed the mid-nineteenth-century German intellectual romance with ancient Greece (as opposed to Rome) and its identification of the nineteenth-century renascence in German culture as equivalent to the monumental achievement of ancient Greek civilization.17 Nietzsche and Goethe, whom Strauss cherished, were authors with highly cultivated Hellenic sensibilities. Their affinities in the use of the German language appealed to him. Despite Strauss’s veneration of Wagner, Nietzsche and Goethe offered a welcome contrast to the faux archaic and medieval diction of Wagner, which Strauss, after Guntram, did not choose to emulate.18 Strauss’s philosophical outlook was intensely secular and modern, free of metaphysical speculations.
By the early 1920s Mozart emerged for Strauss as representative of the ideal eighteenth-century musical achievement. Grace, transparency, and a classical sense of form and candor existed alongside philosophical and emotional depth, if not a genuine, albeit restrained romanticism. The comparison of Mozart with Goethe was also persuasive. Strauss’s career, like Goethe’s, had two overarching moments: the first, from 1886 to 1908, was dominated by the examples of Liszt and Wagner; the second, from 1908 to 1949, was marked by a return to Mozart and a classical ideal. In the predicament of post–World War I Europe, the aesthetics of Mozart pointed the way toward the baroque and neoclassical as sources of cultural survival and renewal.19
The primacy of the neoclassical, the rococo, and the baroque in Strauss’s music after 1911 coexisted in an uneasy alliance with the nineteenth-century naturalism and realism that dominated his earlier work. After Der Rosenkavalier, ho
wever, artifice in language and music became Strauss’s essential tool. This explains Strauss’s deep attachment to Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whom Harry Kessler poignantly described in 1929 as the “last of the great baroque poets.” Hofmannsthal’s approach to the expression of feelings and ideas was ceremonial and indirect, dependent on the “grafting of genuine feeling on consciously artificial matter.”20
The key to Strauss’s affection for the elaborate twists and turns in Hofmannsthal’s libretti after Elektra as the basis for music (explaining Strauss’s dismay at librettist Joseph Gregor’s inability to emulate Hofmannsthal) was the consistent elegance and classical restraint of Hofmannsthal’s language, no matter how complex its rhetoric.21 The baroque structure of the libretti he insisted on in two post-Hofmannsthal operas in the years between 1911 and 1941, Die schweigsame Frau and Capriccio, permitted Strauss free reign in the appropriation and manipulation of the widest arsenal of inherited musical semantics, syntax, and rhetoric. The emulation of baroque literary style enabled Strauss to evoke, in his scores, intimacy and psychological perception. Within his elaborate musical fabric, Strauss constantly used wistful and ironic invocations of recognizable past musical traditions. Thus recast into a contemporary idiom, their appearance functioned as sharp cultural criticism of the modern age. In the end, musical thinking preceded language, even if music remained tethered to it.
For Strauss, the visual offered no refuge from the link between music and language. His visual sensibilities were rather restricted, limited, and nostalgic. The visual element in culture was not Strauss’s strongest suit, a trait he shared with Wagner. His lifelong affection for the baroque and mannerist in the visual arts was refined and paralleled his neoclassical taste in German prose and poetry. But, throughout, the visual remained subordinate to music and language, despite Strauss’s enthusiasm for great eighteenth-century painting.22 Strauss’s visual imagination and taste, so striking in the surroundings he created in the villa in Garmisch (Figure 1), hinted at the consequence of his prejudices and his stylistic shift after 1911: the eighteenth century became for him a metaphorical refuge from which modernity could be approached.23
The breakthrough in Strauss’s utilization of a baroque literary tradition in music to negotiate the expression of authentic thought and feeling in modernity begins at the point where most observers regarded the composer as having abandoned modernism and lost his originality, if not his muse—with Der Rosenkavalier. Alongside the much-maligned 1915 An Alpine Symphony, Der Rosenkavalier marks Strauss’s recognition that realities of the present moment could not be responded to by art in an unmediated manner. Like the young Hofmannsthal, who confronted the limits of language early in his career, Strauss by 1911 had found he could no longer use music in the unabashedly representational, evocative, descriptive, and expressive manner to which he had become accustomed.24 Only through the tortured formal procedures of baroque theatricality, and through the ironic distortion of evident markers of tradition, including myth, naturalism, classical form, and farce, could the truth about the ethical and aesthetic bankruptcy of modern age be revealed by music and language.25
The “iron cage”—the existential trap of advanced Western civilization—could not tolerate the direct illusionism of realism or expressionism, the unselfconscious continuation of a late Romantic idiom, the modernist neoclassicism of the 1920s, or even a disarmingly ascetic radical musical system such as Schoenberg’s. Even though Schoenberg’s intent was a reassertion of the autonomy of musical logic and thus neoclassical in ideology and formal ambition, it would not, for Strauss, carry meaning or reach the public.
Figure 1. Interior of Richard Strauss’s villa in Garmisch, Germany.
The musical modernism of the 1920s rejected Romanticism and monumentality in favor of directness and simplicity. Structure in music, art, and architecture was privileged at the expense of ornament. This modernist credo sought to reassert art’s function as essential to truth-telling, transcending art’s function as mere decoration and affirmative entertainment. Strauss’s response to this modernist impulse was less dismissive than ironic and contrarian. He offered a return not to the sound world of either late nineteenth-century post-Wagnerian Romanticism or early twentieth-century expressionism, but to tradition revised. He embraced ornament as a crucial part of a complex, ritualized, indirect, textured, and multilayered approach to authenticity and the truth-telling function of art, as exemplified by baroque architecture and eighteenth-century neoclassical painting and design. Decorative detail, including an almost filigree-like use of complex orchestral texture, without sacrifice to transparency, and a lightness suggestive of Mozart, became hallmarks of Strauss’s orchestration in his later operas, as he openly confessed in his “Preface” to Capriccio.26 Strauss shunned the lean, ascetic quality of modernist sonority, even in his most neoclassic final period in the years after 1945. He explicitly retained the seemingly incompatible expressive intensity of a nineteenth-century Romantic sensibility, whose impact he managed to heighten within the unexpected context of an eighteenth-century framework replete with the lavish use of inflected and brilliant detail.27
In retrospect, Strauss’s most inspired and intellectually provocative period, the high point of his critical engagement with modernity, was not his so-called modernist period, the era between Don Juan and Elektra, when Strauss was in the European vanguard. Rather, it was the years between 1911 and 1941. At the close of these, his most derided and neglected decades, the composer completed Capriccio, in which he proposed the eighteenth century and its framing of the relationship between music and language as a way of approaching the historical place of modernity.28 This was the composer’s most trenchant, honest, and persuasive period. A scathing critique of modernism and its conceits was offered with a profundity masked in irony, including the use of self-quotation. Strauss’s most philosophically powerful and personal works are not Salome or Ein Heldenleben, but rather An Alpine Symphony and the three last Hellenic operas—Die ägyptische Helena, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae.
Sibelius and the Visual
The challenges to art and culture in the same decades that prompted a decisive shift in the mature Strauss’s aesthetic strategy also triggered a comparable transition in Sibelius’s case. The works Sibelius composed from 1907 on are representative of his last and most productive period.29 In the Third Symphony, begun in 1904 and completed in 1907, and Pohjola’s Daughter, op. 49, an explicitly programmatic work from the same time based on a legend from the Kalevala, critics and scholars observed something “more organic” at work, a harbinger of “an increasingly organic way of welding movements together.”30 This tendency toward an organic formal unity would make an even more dramatic appearance beginning with the Fourth Symphony and especially in the Fifth and Seventh symphonies.
With the Third Symphony, Sibelius turned away from a reliance on programmatic inspiration, whether explicit or implied. Veijo Murtomäki suggests that the Third Symphony is an affirmative response to Busoni’s polemical 1905 call for a modernist reaffirmation of Hanslick’s view of music as autonomous and absolute, as an art form without a literary or poetic idea but defined by the interplay of moving forms.31 Whether or not one concedes this explanation of the composer’s intent (in view of the overt classicism of the work and its more economical and non-Romantic use of the orchestra), Sibelius’s renewed attention to formal design would project him from his niche as little more than a Finnish composer, a representative of the North, into broader European currents.
Sibelius’s path came not through language, but as the term “organic” suggests, through the visual.32 He experimented with how musical form fundamentally transforms the spatial experience of time and the construction of meaning, particularly in the visual imagination. Sonority—the materiality of orchestral timbres—rather than the use of motivic development as a linguistic equivalent, emerged as the basic constituent of form. Structure seemed to arise from a repetition of rhythmic figures tied to instrumental colors in
serted sequentially along a single dominant and purposeful arc. An unmistakable effort to mimic, in compact fashion, a dynamic quasi-naturalistic temporal process, a visual sense of extended structure over time, became audible. The thematic and motivic materials of all the movements in the Third Symphony were interrelated in the sense not of a literary, but of a visual construction.
In 1945 Ilmari Krohn, in a much maligned attempt to link Sibelius’s Third Symphony with Wagner, despite its somewhat smaller orchestra, located leitmotifs in the first movement, many of them visual in nature: that of the forest, sunrise, and the cuckoo.33 But the plausible suggestion of nature did not rely on such quasi–tone painting. In the Third Symphony as well as Pohjola’s Daughter, Sibelius realized that he was fashioning something new—a “fantasy,” his own “genre,” neither a symphony nor a literary Liszt-style tone poem, but a form that would permit him to break free from “the weight of tradition.”34
This new direction, strikingly audible in the coda to Pohjola’s Daughter, alters the listener’s anticipated visual image as suggested by the literary program. Instead, the music subordinates linguistic meaning to harmonic and instrumental timbre, foregrounding an atmospheric mental picture conjured by the eerie sound and deliberate pace of the coda. With these works, as Daniel Grimley has observed, Sibelius began to make the visualization of the landscape inform the musical and structural process.35 “The temporal perception of the listener” becomes “analogous to the visual perception of the viewer.” In Nightride and Sunrise, from 1908, completed shortly after the Third Symphony and Pohjola’s Daughter, Grimley locates a “temporal-spatial” strategy: “The organization of musical events in time suggests a structural parallel with the placement of landscape objects in visual space.” Of the 1914 tone poem Oceanides, Erik Tawaststjerna, Sibelius’s biographer, noted that the work “seems to mirror nature itself.”36
Jean Sibelius and His World Page 37