Richard Strauss's house

[Guido]

What are people's opinions on Metamorphosen? By rights I should love it as much as the rest of the late works, but somehow, it seems like a lesser work to me - the harmony not distinctive, the textures not as imaginative, the melodic lines rather earthbound and almost routine compared to the soaring ecstacy of his soprano cantilenas, the inspiration certainly not lacking, but not of the same level as the Four Last Songs or Capriccio. And yet everyone raves about how heartbraking the piece is. It's lovely, but I don't yet love it. Maybe its the recording I have - Karajan with Berlin Phil... is this the problem?

[jlaurson]

re: metamorphosen

maybe it's just a matter of personal taste. though it certainly can't hurt to have different versions of metamorphosen... specifically to have at least one good interpretation of the chamber version.

Like this one, for example:

R. Strauss
Metamorphosen,
Capriccio S6t
Piano Q4t

[mjwal]

I would guess so. I listened to that once and it wasn't to my taste: Karajan often cultivated a grandiose sfumato sound in Strauss & others. In this work - which of course is the diametrical opposite of "soaring ecstasy" - a kind of lucid, tormented (but earthbound, as you say) intensity is necessary, and the ear-opening experience for me personally was Gielen's recording with the Cincinnati orchestra on Vox (a superb double album including other works by Strauss, Lutoslawski and Berg). I prefer this to Klemperer or Barbirolli (my other recordings), must however confess to never having heard the famed Furtwängler version (in which I suspect that the counterpoint might get obscured by the recording technology).

[rappy]

I like the Karajan recording, I don't think that can be the sole reason.

However, I've made the experience that for people who dislike the whole Strauss, the Metamorphosen is the only work they accept. Maybe for you it's the other way around.

[Guido]

I like the Karajan recording, I don't think that can be the sole reason.

However, I've made the experience that for people who dislike the whole Strauss, the Metamorphosen is the only work they accept. Maybe for you it's the other way around.

I'm an anti-anti-Straussian! 

OK, thanks guys... I'll bear in mind those other recording suggestions.

[DarkAngel]

As much as I like Karajan's (and Kempe's) performance of Alpine Symphony, my heart belongs to Jarvi's performance with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. A riveting performance from start to finish.

In fact, I prefer Jarvi's Strauss recordings to those of Karajan, Kempe, Zinman, Previn, Haitink, Sinopoli, etc. There's something about Neeme Jarvi and the RSNO that felt so right.

MI
I have all the Strauss CDs you listed above (including Jarvi) but you are missing most important CD of all..............new remastered Karajan Alpine!



There is a Strauss thread in great recordings where this is discussed in more detail, but the Karajan Gold Alpine you show has been improve with this remaster......buy buy buy

[DarkAngel]

Here is Alpine discussion from great recordings..........
http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,2679.msg395405.html#msg395405

[Guido]

The Rosenkavalier Suite is just awful. Really bloody awful.

[Mirror Image]

MI
I have all the Strauss CDs you listed above (including Jarvi) but you are missing most important CD of all..............new remastered Karajan Alpine!



There is a Strauss thread in great recordings where this is discussed in more detail, but the Karajan Gold Alpine you show has been improve with this remaster......buy buy buy

That is the 2-CD set I own. Yes, it is a great recording.

[snyprrr]

Why is Strauss the most "decandent" Composer? I know that he shooould be, but is his music really that filthy? If it's only about the Opera subject matter, ok, I understand, but does the music itself ever exhibit that inner rot of booshwaah blah blah,...y'know what I mean, man? Does he music expel gasses? I thought Berg was more of that man in this camp?

[Guido]

Why is Strauss the most "decandent" Composer? I know that he shooould be, but is his music really that filthy? If it's only about the Opera subject matter, ok, I understand, but does the music itself ever exhibit that inner rot of booshwaah blah blah,...y'know what I mean, man? Does he music expel gasses? I thought Berg was more of that man in this camp?

Yeah in the sense that he has no problem with being vulgar and cheap with the music he writes when it needs to be. For instance the music that Salome dances to - The Dance of the Seven Veils. By most available measures this is bad music - tacky and kitch and vulgar (but then what are we expecting for this scene in an opera of Salome done in 1905?) And then the final scene in which Salome is talking to the head, the soprano line soars in ecstatic cantilenas above the incredible orchestra - this is definitely "great" music here, but should we feel uncomfortable that music of such sumptuous and decadent beauty and extraordinary affekt should be set to such a gruesome scene - inviting and encouraging us to revel in the blood bath? This frisson (surely a vulgarity, but one that many of us gladly accept) is surely part of what gives this opera such lasting appeal, and why it still fascinates and shocks us a century after it was written. Also that no moral is drawn at the end - she's just killed, there's no judgement and we're left open mouthed.

Hmm, rereading your post - what do you mean by decadent? There are other Sturn of the century composer's who do the same sort of bathing in that area between sentiment and sentimentality - Korngold, Schreker, Zemlinsky etc. These are possibly more decadent in other ways...

[snyprrr]

Yeah in the sense that he has no problem with being vulgar and cheap with the music he writes when it needs to be. For instance the music that Salome dances to - The Dance of the Seven Veils. By most available measures this is bad music - tacky and kitch and vulgar (but then what are we expecting for this scene in an opera of Salome done in 1905?) And then the final scene in which Salome is talking to the head, the soprano line soars in ecstatic cantilenas above the incredible orchestra - this is definitely "great" music here, but should we feel uncomfortable that music of such sumptuous and decadent beauty and extraordinary affekt should be set to such a gruesome scene - inviting and encouraging us to revel in the blood bath? This frisson (surely a vulgarity, but one that many of us gladly accept) is surely part of what gives this opera such lasting appeal, and why it still fascinates and shocks us a century after it was written. Also that no moral is drawn at the end - she's just killed, there's no judgement and we're left open mouthed.

Hmm, rereading your post - what do you mean by decadent? There are other Sturn of the century composer's who do the same sort of bathing in that area between sentiment and sentimentality - Korngold, Schreker, Zemlinsky etc. These are possibly more decadent in other ways...

Yea, that was kind of what I was aiming at. By all means, if you know any particular pieces by anyone where you can hear the gases being expelled from the cadaver, "lurching towards the cemetery", as they say,.... the "impressionism of decay", perhaps.

I think I'm looking for pre-Berlin/1920s examples, more like 1902-6-8-9, the first flowering of the Ultra Last Romanticism. Perhaps I'll listen to Schoenberg's Pelleas again. Perhaps Late Scriabin is what I'm thinking of,... that "classical gone syphilitic" sound,...

The French, also, became very interested in Poe and such around the same time. Weren't Debussy and Ravel into some creepy stuff, and wot not?

I could go on!

The musical equivalent of A Death in Venice. Oh, that's right,...Mahler 5, haha!

[Guido]

I know what you mean, but don't know all that much of the music. Korngold's two biggest operas - Die Todte Stadt and even more overblown, Die Wunder der Heliane, Die Gezeichniten by Schreker another opera. These are at the glitzy kitsch end, but it's a reflection of the same thing that Schoenberg was doing in Pelleas - it's just that as the modernists got harsher and less sensual, so the reactionaries who started out as roughly the same, got more sensual, whipping themselves up into ever grander and more frenziedly sensuous and erotic and sickly sound worlds. So they're the ones that cover the cadever in perfumes and scented oils. It's still a cadaver though (albeit a very beautiful one).

I like this cadaver metaphor! Berg is certainly in line with that in some of his pieces.

Strauss is sort of related to this phenomenon but only as far as Die Frau Ohne Schatten - and after that he was always searching for a lighter, more classical (after Mozart) sound (as he said "trying to strip off the Wagnerian armour") which after stumbling accross it in the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos (a masterpiece), he struggled to regain it in a truly successful way until Capriccio, his final opera, though Intermezzo, Arabella and Die Schweigsame Frau certainly point the way forward. People have said that Der Rosenkavalier is Strauss pre-empting of neoclassicsm but I think they're deluding themselves.

There is of course Die Agyptische Helena which is "Strauss' 1920s megakitsch" as one commentator called it! Similar to the Schreker/Korngold school.

Had never heard the Schoenberg Pelleas before - just looked it up - fucking fantastic! Huge pustules of gas convalescing and erupting from the putrescent and beautiful surface of the pool.

[snyprrr]

I know what you mean, but don't know all that much of the music. Korngold's two biggest operas - Die Todte Stadt and even more overblown, Die Wunder der Heliane, Die Gezeichniten by Schreker another opera. These are at the glitzy kitsch end, but it's a reflection of the same thing that Schoenberg was doing in Pelleas - it's just that as the modernists got harsher and less sensual, so the reactionaries who started out as roughly the same, got more sensual, whipping themselves up into ever grander and more frenziedly sensuous and erotic and sickly sound worlds. So they're the ones that cover the cadever in perfumes and scented oils. It's still a cadaver though (albeit a very beautiful one).

I like this cadaver metaphor! Berg is certainly in line with that in some of his pieces.

Strauss is sort of related to this phenomenon but only as far as Die Frau Ohne Schatten - and after that he was always searching for a lighter, more classical (after Mozart) sound (as he said "trying to strip off the Wagnerian armour") which after stumbling accross it in the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos (a masterpiece), he struggled to regain it in a truly successful way until Capriccio, his final opera, though Intermezzo, Arabella and Die Schweigsame Frau certainly point the way forward. People have said that Der Rosenkavalier is Strauss pre-empting of neoclassicsm but I think they're deluding themselves.

There is of course Die Agyptische Helena which is "Strauss' 1920s megakitsch" as one commentator called it! Similar to the Schreker/Korngold school.

Had never heard the Schoenberg Pelleas before - just looked it up - fucking fantastic! Huge pustules of gas convalescing and erupting from the putrescent and beautiful surface of the pool.

Yes Yes Yes!!!

[kishnevi]

I know what you mean, but don't know all that much of the music. Korngold's two biggest operas - Die Todte Stadt and even more overblown, Die Wunder der Heliane, Die Gezeichniten by Schreker another opera. These are at the glitzy kitsch end, but it's a reflection of the same thing that Schoenberg was doing in Pelleas - it's just that as the modernists got harsher and less sensual, so the reactionaries who started out as roughly the same, got more sensual, whipping themselves up into ever grander and more frenziedly sensuous and erotic and sickly sound worlds. So they're the ones that cover the cadever in perfumes and scented oils. It's still a cadaver though (albeit a very beautiful one).

I like this cadaver metaphor! Berg is certainly in line with that in some of his pieces.

Strauss is sort of related to this phenomenon but only as far as Die Frau Ohne Schatten - and after that he was always searching for a lighter, more classical (after Mozart) sound (as he said "trying to strip off the Wagnerian armour") which after stumbling accross it in the prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos (a masterpiece), he struggled to regain it in a truly successful way until Capriccio, his final opera, though Intermezzo, Arabella and Die Schweigsame Frau certainly point the way forward. People have said that Der Rosenkavalier is Strauss pre-empting of neoclassicsm but I think they're deluding themselves.

There is of course Die Agyptische Helena which is "Strauss' 1920s megakitsch" as one commentator called it! Similar to the Schreker/Korngold school.

Had never heard the Schoenberg Pelleas before - just looked it up - fucking fantastic! Huge pustules of gas convalescing and erupting from the putrescent and beautiful surface of the pool.

The Second Viennese School as a manifestation of the cult of Cthulhu--that's actually a promising piece of fanfic, I think.

[snyprrr]

The Second Viennese School as a manifestation of the cult of Cthulhu--that's actually a promising piece of fanfic, I think.

Yea, that's what I'm getting at, the Lovecraftian aspect. The deep degeneracy at the,... the whole fin de siecle thing,...Baudelaire's putrefying corpses and wounded swans flapping their useless wings in the dust: the inbred aristocracy choking on it's own sumptuousness.

House Rot. Stinking Seething... EAPoe... the kind of horror that hasn't translated particularly well to the screen, the horror of the mind,...Froidian coke fantasies...

Then of course, with Mahler/Schoenberg VS. Schreker/Strauss, etc,...you have the Jewish "degeneracy" thing,...the need to make ugly,...and, I'm not planning a FlameOut by saying this (I'm speaking as they thought at the time ), I think as far as the German contingent of this faction goes (the others being the French (say, Caplet, Schmitt), the English (Foulds), and so forth), I do think the Blavatsky influence, the Dracula/Eastern European/Dybbukian, blah blah,... no? Golem...Ripper...

Anyhow, was Strauss a Satanist? ...the devil's maestro, and all that, haha!

[knight66]

Here is what you want Duparc 'Extase'. Mind you, Kraus could have made more of a meal of it. Too restrained, even the pianist did not seem to grasp that the piano expresses the 'climax'. Not that this has much to do with Richard Strauss.

Mike

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2Vnqa58GE&feature=related

Sur un lys pâle mon coeur dort
D'un sommeil doux comme la mort
Mort exquise, mort parfumée
Du souffle de la bien aimée ...
Sur ton sein pâle mon coeur dort
D'un sommeil doux comme la mort.

On your pale breast my heart is sleeping
A sleep as sweet as death
Exquisite death, death perfumed
By the breath of the beloved
On your pale breast my heart is sleeping
A sleep as sweet as death

[jlaurson]

...

So much written here, and so little said.

[knight66]

Seems like we need a 'Gnomic' thread here. Perhaps that should be its first post.

Mike

[jlaurson]

One of the enduring beauties of music, even familiar music, is its capacity to surprise.
For you to hear new things in a song, an aria, an orchestral work that you thought you knew well...

Great Strauss Scenes on Viva La Voce
http://www.weta.org/fmblog/?p=2319