Richard Strauss. Part II

Richard Strauss. Part IIAuthor(s): Theodor W. Adorno, Samuel Weber and Shierry WeberSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1966), pp. 113-129Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832219 .

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RICHARD STRAUSS

Part II

THEODOR W. ADORNO

THAT STRAUSS'S flexibility never slips from the forming hand is his tour de force, truly a piece of magic become aesthetic. Without granting the ear an instant to contemplate the total coherence, he tirelessly connects the unconnected. One is tempted to interpret the Straussian concern with flux as compensation for the fact that after the formative power of tonality had disappeared, all that was left was the fragmentary. If twelve-tone music severed the thread between sounds and tones which thereafter could be pressed back together only through construction, then a centrifugal force is already secretly present in the details of Strauss's music, despite the latter's tonal origins-as though to demonstrate that the language of music was no longer able to sustain coherent meaning. The extreme example in music of a centrifugal phenomenon-that dissociation into individual sounds which symbolizes the contingency, the idolic aspect of an empirical life no longer held together by its animating conception- is the secco recitative. By fusing its chordal procedure with the accom- pagnato technique, Strauss introduced the musically exterritorial recitative far deeper into organized composition than even Wagner had done. Music which seeks to mirror every ramification of its subject matter becomes, in very anticlassical fashion, the medium of that contingency which dominated the idea of Life so dear to Strauss's generation. He operates with the contingency principle inside the limits of tonality. In so doing, he impressively consummates a de- structive process which began with Berlioz and which, prior to Strauss, had made emphatic claims only outside of music; Puccini's Boh-me groped towards similar effects through tonally contingent chordal combinations. Time and time again, Strauss struggled against that delight in disintegration which is so evident in his use of contingency, although it was identical with his productive power. Thus, after the beginning of Salome, the absolute surprise, Strauss ties together harmonies which at the time were felt to be disparate by

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PERSPECTIVES OF NEW MUSIC

means of the discrete background provided by a chromatically ascend- ing violin line, which illustrates the course of the moon. He gathers up that which strives to separate. Instead of the traditional motivic- thematic development, Strauss takes his motifs by the hand. This he can do all the more convincingly, the more completely he abandons himself to centrifugal principle and does not permit himself to be led astray by the command of systematic composition; his idea of unity realizes itself in disintegration. In this respect, the scene of the maid- servants in Elektra probably marks a high point which he never again equaled. It is the model for the loosely composed opening scenes of Berg's two operas, which are strung together as though out of par- ticles. Berg's sureness of form in these scenes approaches the humanity with which Strauss in a postscript of a few measures, mourns for the mistreated maids and with the brief epilogue rounds off the seemingly wildly pieced-together scene before the bass progression reaches the "Elektra chord." By comparison with this, as with much else from Elektra, Salome was still compact, even the surface of sound. Strauss's Mozart-cult was not based merely on an obligatory respect for lucid classicality. Even Mozart, who worked in a form which was anchored in the unquestioned tonal coordinate system, lost himself in widely separated musical component figures. His fearless art continually cast unity aside without scruple in order to attain it only after having playfully pursued multiplicity to the border of disintegration. It is a related compositional "civil courage" that gives Strauss's music that slender, fine-limbed quality praised by Nietzsche in his aesthetics. Disjunction puts air between the events, truly making a virtue out of necessity; the music becomes graceful through its wealth of contrast- ing figures, opposed to everything gross. Nietzsche criticized Wagner for allowing his music to perspire; Strauss was proud that, as con- ductor, he never did. And even less as composer. His technological principle of economy calls for a maximum of motion-Schuh rightly called him the "allegro composer"; his music deserves the now forgotten attribute "dashing"-with a minimum of effort; anyone who experienced him on a good day conducting one of his own pieces, such as his favorite, Die Frau ohne Schatten, was made aware of the criteria which his music itself honored as soon and as long as he was master of his powers. Its version of technique was to keep itself always disposable. It acquired a faculty never before imagined: alertness. Presence at every moment becomes the duty of compositions which scorn to place their trust not only in the recollection and anticipation of great form, but also, at their best, in a fortunate duration. Strauss's desire, and that of the new music after him, was for everything to

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RICHARD STRAUSS-PART II

be equally near the center. That for which his contemporaries, Hofmannsthal above all, admired him, his "nervousness," has no other aim than this. "Nervous" was a catchword of the modern style. It covers what since Freud has been called "neurotic," pathogenic dis- turbances resulting from repression, as well as Ibsen's doomed utopia of hysterical women who, foreign to the reality principle and power- less, protest against the contrainte sociale. Nervousness becomes a sign of prestige, denoting the greatly intensified and differentiated reactive capacity of the person who becomes his own precision instrument, who is defenselessly abandoned to the world of sensation and who, through this defenselessness, accuses the gross way of the world. At the time, this type must have been a polemical ego-ideal opposed to the injurious health of father figures, like the similarly ambivalent no- tion of "decadence," which Strauss and other vitalists glorified, instead of rejecting it as being itself too decadent. His music feels morally obliged to better itself, to make itself more distinguished than it was to begin with; nor is this the least cause of its aura of interest. Of course, the artistic morality of nervousness is nourished by impatience of a more practical nature. It simply cannot stay put, much like big entrepreneurs who are afraid of being ruined once the volume of business is no longer on the increase. Yet since the restless person continually experiences this mode of reaction as self-induced suffering, as an illness-"neurasthenia"-he cannot bear it any more than he can the boredom from which it flees. Such suffering draws his reac- tions back to the "health" he abhors, just as Strauss colors and con- sumes the cadence only to restore it. The proud neurotic clings to a would-be nature in which he is ill at ease.

The dramaturgic formulae for Strauss's alertness are the begin- nings, where he leaps into his subject matter without preparation. His most brilliant operas have no overtures but begin with the rising curtain.8 Strauss was the master of the first 250 measures, in Salome, Elektra, even as late as the fortune-teller scene from Arabella. In return, the endings slip away from him. Some, worst of all in Die Frau ohne Schatten, are pompously inflated; others, as in Salome, mistreat the musical form for the sake of dramatic effect, as heroes mistreat vanquished slaves; these are debatable. Most frequently, however, he finds none at all. As early as the Domestica, one coda follows another. More than a subjectively deficient feeling for form is responsi-

8 Certain conductors and directors of Salome betray both crass lack of style and little understanding of the Straussian spirit when they timidly allow the scene to become visible without music and only afterwards have the clarinets play their passage, which refers not only to the serpentine gliding of the princess but also to that of the curtain, with which it must be synchronized and yet still clearly audible.

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ble. The time which informs Strauss's music is the same as that of the industrial process, physical-technical, linear, infinite temps espace. Against this his horror vacui unconsciously reacts. Stubbornly, it seeks life, one which would be immediate and have its own fulfilled time. But as arrangement, the idealized image of such time, Strauss's Life remains within the orbit of that which it would like to exorcise. Interminable, measurable time overwhelms works which cannot an- chor themselves in an immanent time and denies them that through which they coalesce to form, a conclusive end. Strauss's forms themselves are inconclusive. Their insufficiency, their futile Sisyphean re- iteration, is imposed on them by the contradiction between the content that they cite and its absence. By no means the least important function which the formal conventions and their scenic offspring performed in the economy of the work of art was to underwrite the end. Historically, this is over. The arbitrary quality of Strauss's develop- ments, however, prevents them from ever coming to a stringent con- clusion. Their immanent pathos itself, that of the unconstrained life, cannot tolerate an end since this would involve an admission of fatigue, whereas unbounded energy is supposed to be its very essence. And yet, artistic form is finite; it is compelled to end. As long as musical motion is invoked as a principle, as in Strauss, it stops by chance, like that dynamic for its own sake which he worships blindly.

Everything becomes brittle; even the Wagnerian mirror breaks. Among the arts of his predecessor, Strauss spurns the most important, that of transition. Instead, motifs-often of minimal importance-line up like pictures on an unending filmstrip, at times virtually unrecog- nizable in the background of the sound events, such as that of Clytem- nestra. It is idle to argue whether this picture-like quality, the tumult of juxtaposed elements, causes the short-windedness of the individual melodic formations, or whether it is produced by them as a peculiar feature of Strauss's musicality. The hand behind the magic lantern can change pictures so swiftly that their monadlike aspect is no longer recognizable. Strauss was a composer in the most literal sense, one who "puts together"; he controls the still pictures and the dynamic impulse is his, hardly ever that of the motifs which are stilled for the photograph. The most conspicuous aspect of his music, agitation heightened to idiosyncrasy, is also external to it; as an aesthetic traffic agent, he transports beyond the borders of the photograph. His method resembles that of the film; it was consistent for him to have abandoned Der Rosenkavalier to it. The more the expressive tension relaxes, the more inexorably the operas tend toward mere depiction, toward film-music; this begins with Arabella if not earlier. The

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Straussian elan, however, is nothing but the quintessence of the stage- direction which the composer, who not without reason worked with Reinhardt, exercised over his music. The category of dlan did not simply fall from the blue; Weber's overture to Euryanthe prophesied it in Strauss. But the guiding gesture of the composer also has its pre-history in Romanticism. For the sake of the lyrical theme, the Romantics individualized single figures within movements, made them self-contained components, at the expense of that practice which in Viennese Classicism with Beethoven took its point of departure from the incompleteness, the poverty of the single figure, its unrealized being. In order to make the, as it were, all too plastic details into independent entities, a composer like Chopin already had to treat them as would a novelist who guides his heroes through the changing perspectives of their adventures. In Strauss this becomes a permanent and hence self-consuming attitude. It is the will of the composing subject alone which synthesizes the music; the elan is his and represents an idea of life through which the by then unrelated many may be conceived as the relation of everything to everything. He appropriated the category of Life, which invests everything with a meaning, however questionable, instead of searching for meaning as that of music itself. Nietzsche's critique of Wagner is fully realized in Strauss. He cured theatrical music of theatricality, its pretense to objectivity, by reminding it that it is nothing more than what the composing subject chose to put into it. The theater confesses. Much can be learned about Strauss from what the Bayreuthianer saw in Wagner. He preferred the early Wagner, not the composer whose work exacted strict coherence; in this respect, too, Strauss's modernity combines strangely with anachronistic backwardness. The paradigms of Straussian showmanship, its mixture of elan and banality, were the Venusberg music and, above all, the Prelude to the third act of Lohengrin.

As composer, on the contrary, Strauss's productive power realizes itself in pictures, tightly packed moments. His ability to compress the plenitude of emotions, including those which are incompatible, into isolated complexes, to fit the up and down oscillation of feeling into a single instant, has no prototype, with the possible exception of the paradoxical equilibrium between delight and horror at the end of the first act of Tristan. In the dissonant chord of recognition from Elektra there is concentrated a wealth of musical antagonisms truly beyond the reach of words. The stylistic near-impossibility of leaving just this complex chord trembling on the sweet Ab-major field seems to succeed, as though the energy which the chord stores up in itself

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then streams out into the resolution. Here it is not yet distorted by the element of "refreshment," with which the composer will seek to support his countless subsequent copies of this resolution field. Even earlier a related intention was manifested in the mixture of major and minor toward the end of the frequently bitonal Salome,9 after the kiss. The most extreme example of this is probably provided by the passage from Der Rosenkavalier, over the organ point Bb upon the entrance of the Marschallin in the third act as dea ex machina; already, it may be noted, the passage lacks dissonance. In this act the action finds its nocturnal kairos, identified with the heartbreaking passion of the lovers who have lost themselves senselessly. Such moments musicaux are heralds in Strauss's modernism of a future yet to be realized; at the same time, they are by no means always "advanced" in terms of their materials. In general, no direct relation prevails in Strauss between the progressiveness of the sounds and that of the ideas. In Ariadne, which is oriented to the past, and especially in the Vorspiel, he makes use of a practice which was forgotten until Berg turned to it again in Lulu: that of distinguishing dramatic figures and spheres from one another by associating them with the same timbre throughout, Ariadne with the harp and harmonium, Zerbinetta with the piano which also serves as the leading instrument for the athlete in the circus in Lulu. The vulgarity of the piano, historical product of the so-called "Parisian ensemble" of the nineteenth century, becomes an expressive value in the score. Berg learned more from Strauss than is generally suspected; sense impressions in the background, as in the field scene from Wozzeck, are contained in Salome in the inter- mittent phantasies of Herod; Strauss invested an entire generation with ideas, such as this, which already transcend the realms of psy- chology.10 The Clytemnestra scene is inexhaustible in this respect; not merely the section beginning with the words, "Ich habe keine guten Naechte" ("I have no good nights"), but the scene as a whole,

9 Study Score, p. 349, from no. 348 on. The beautifully engraved Study Scores of Strauss's four most-performed operas are far too little known; they enable every musician to become familiar with the orchestra of his mature period. The service performed by the publisher, Fuerstner Verlag, is all the greater in view of the fact that Strauss's revision of Berlioz' Treatise on Instrumentation makes only sparse contributions to the actual art of instrumentation; it remains essentially an instrument handbook. Strauss, in the industrial spirit, kept close watch over his production secrets.

10 The influence of Strauss on the following generation of composers was universal. It is present in Stravinsky no less than in Berg. The gasping, high horns of Herod (two beats after no. 300 of Salome, Fuerstner's Study Score), as well as certain expressionless octaves in the woodwinds which increase the potential of expression through negation, as though music were unequal to it and would be crippled by an excess of it (piccolo and first oboe before and after no. 355) -all this is continued in the Sacre, despite the wholly transformed general orientation.

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including its buildup to the finale-like presto. The fact that even this scene, the climax of Strauss's work, was infiltrated, with his approval, by some of the most vulnerable passages, raises the suspicion that the mature Strauss was seized by the fear of an "ego-alien" force, which drove him far beyond what he himself would have wanted. It would be unfair to accuse him of that abominable malpractice of mature judgment, weeding out what is best, as Hindemith did with the dissonances of the Marienleben. He probably felt his ego-controls in danger of being swept away by a music which was eluding him. What once burst out in Strauss was in essence close to the dread he had of it, and as powerful. Throughout his life, such Angst expended its fury in overzealous transfigurations, and, during the end-phase, in his aversion not only to dissonance but virtually to the minor as such. Law-abiding citizens thus shrink from uttering the word "death." Its repression is the shadow in which the glaring metaphysics of Life is grounded. This dread manifests itself in even the most daring con- ceptions; in the need to hold the antiformal tendencies of Salome in check by means of an unproblematic, long drawn-out piece of music. As a means to this end, the dance offered itself by virtue of its position in the course of the whole, as well as by its independence from the poetic word. In his search, not without reason, for an absolute musical counterweight, Strauss conceived of the dance as the sonata development of the opera. The most important leitmotifs are treated as models of the individual development sections. But when he played this intermezzo to Mahler, the latter observed at once that just this piece, with all its methodical planning, had missed its mark. The motifs, designed for momentary characterization, fail to function as symphonic models, whereas the idea of the development collides with that of the dance. There is no compelling rhythmical structure created, either on a large or small scale; the movement is tediously fragmented into episodic segments to which the oriental strumming clings like ballast. The sound itself becomes sluggish and thick. Strauss's music slackens as soon as he relaxes the reins and leaves it to itself. These abortive dances were not the least important cause of Stravinsky's rebellion and the indescribable effect of the Sacre du printemps. Bombastic gestures seek in vain to conceal such weaknesses; more and more they reveal that what erupted like a revolution is only froth. Through its manner of presentation, Strauss's music passes, as it were, too quickly to the appearance of its objectification. Dread of his own daring does not leave the latter untouched; even boldness changes to "let's get it over with." He is afraid not merely of stopping--because of the flimsi- ness of many details-but of getting stuck. Invention-valid for the

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moment which it accompanies and supported by the surprise principle to such a degree that it cannot properly live itself out-wilts easily. Strauss's nervousness, which warns him against repetition and elabo- ration, reflects the guilty conscience of the composer, who must fear that his music will be caught if it does not get away quickly. The idea of elan itself, music as curve, implies a fall from the heights; what was thrown by the composing hand must sink abruptly in a meteoric arc. This was the almost visual form of Strauss's first authentic work, Don Juan; never again did he achieve the same unity of program, thematic content, and formal development.

That curve dominates both him and his work. His manner of composing, from individual themes to the so-called large forms, is in accord with the parabolic decline of his later development. The lack of consistency to which the surprise principle condemns the details spreads to them. Without any power over the original tonal materials, they become masks of what is considered "normal" according to the topoi of colloquial musical language; piquant "spots" in the peinture. Hence, they allow themselves to be easily managed; they are not binding because they are not what they sound. Of themselves they almost beg to be pushed aside. Among the dissonances the ear can still hear the regular tones. They are never themselves but always substitutes; that separates Strauss inexorably from the new music. His own aversion to it recognized this fact far more accurately than did the enthusiasm of those who observed literal similarities between some of his sounds and the later ones. The index of the Straussian "as though" is the fact that many of his scores-most obtrusively, that of Ein Heldenleben, but also that of Salome-sound simpler than they read on paper. The polyphony for which he unquestionably strove, as a means of releasing the orchestra, cloaks relatively primi- tive intervallic relationships and hence melts away in the chord pro- gressions. He seldom devised plastic counterpoints like Mahler's; he concocted certain contrapuntal formulae-often combinations of quarter notes with slurred eighth-note triplets-which are always available. Schuh's remark, made in regard to Daphne, in which he points out a harmonically simple basic framework, "expres- sively animated and invigorated by strict thematic figuration and by a free and highly personal technique consisting of incidental notes foreign to the chord,"" is not only phenomenologically correct but also unintentionally critical; it should be qualified at most only inasmuch as the primary concern is a tonal reserve of individual sounds rather than the scheme, since for Strauss it is precisely that regularity of

11 Willi Schuh, Ueber Opern von Richard Strauss (Zurich, 1947), p. 89. * 120 ?




intervallic progression which is of little importance. His phrase, like that of almost all the composers of his generation who considered themselves polyphonic, is in principle harmonic. The interweaving of voices stands under the vertical. Sometimes it even covers up the main melodic figure, as with Salome's barely audible second main theme, the A-major presto of her entrance. The willingly enriched Straussian phrase, however, lends his music a tinsel-like quality which easily degenerates into jingle-jangle, first in the celesta chords of Der Rosenkavalier, then in those of Ariadne, from Bacchus' entrance on; accompanied by varying simplifications of the musical fibre, it ven- tures forth with ever-increasing boldness. Sounds which lack a con- structive function, detached ornaments in the broadest sense, inexorably become cheap glitter. Nearby the Grand Hotel looms the Grand Bazaar. The bold discovery of the sound dimension as one in its own right ages quickly. Hackwork, in whose studio Strauss had once flung open the windows, is smuggled back in. His banality is not only naive backwardness, uncriticized by the process of composition. It takes place within the compositional process itself. Because Strauss's innovations concern solely the idiom and not its constituents, crass raw material sticks out uncounted times. To this is added the phan- tasma of the reconciliation of art and life, cornerstone of commercial art and ideology. The spectral synthesis of advertising and artistic adventure makes its appearance. Just as the Toulouse-Lautrec of the Montmartre posters caught the alert painter's eye, so Strauss attracted the quick ear of the composer who was realistically attuned to changing situations and ready to react. Strauss walks a tightrope between vulgarity and taste; distinguished gentlemen might search out their Munich affair among the lower classes without compromising themselves. An idealized picture of the Volk sets off the chosen few, as in the Munich periodical Jugend; its "cover-girls," coquetting with audacity, often enough domesticated the Impressionistic commas as gross accents, or, in the language of the time, as "the radiance of peasant women." The Blood-and-Soil ideology was close at hand; what is astounding is how little Strauss exploited it for himself after 1933, in contrast to certain stalwarts of Simplicissimus.12 To his credit, he had involved himself too deeply in what the National So- cialists trampled under foot as "decadent" to crawl for cover to Heimatkunst; he settled instead for more or less general fanfares for the True, Good, and Beautiful of Hitlerian cultural policy.

The agglomeration of the elegant and the gross, the detached and the pastose, international up-to-dateness and the carefully preserved

12 The most prominent satirical magazine in Weimar Germany. [Trs.] 0

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remnants of a provincialism from which, in turn, the cosmopolitan effect then profited-all that suggests the analogy with the German variant of Impressionism. Such analogies, technically difficult to substantiate, awake skepticism; but the fact remains that Strauss's music pretended to paint and its original milieu was that of a painters' town. Impressionism in general is suggested by the priority of color over contour; the former shines without muddy browns. German Impressionism is characterized by a peculiar audaciousness, like that of the late Corinth who was obsessed by sensory values to the point of destroying the object depicted; on the other hand, in contrast to Debussy, there is an absence of principle which has a moderating influence. Strauss had already disposed of Debussy with the backwoods verdict of "all too aesthetic." He committed himself to no theory of perception, rifus, preformation of the material, or any strict canon of procedures. He will take anything which his productive apparatus can in any way assimilate. Because the art of arrangement possesses no criterion other than taste, his liberality, which indiscriminately brought him the wealth of the German compositional tradition, became his most sensitive deficiency. The aestheticism which bade him seek Hofmannsthal was accompanied by a hardened lack of taste; he is constantly making faux pas. This is because his style, which sup- presses coherent composition and in which everything is supposed to find a place, is a fond perdu; it is the invention of the individual will acting entirely on its own, and as such represents the excessive intensification of what already in the far more discriminating Wagner is the will-to-style; the binding stylistic principle, 6lan, is also subservient to Strauss's programmatic self-exaltation or that of the figures with whom he identifies. His contingent actuality elevated itself to the status of arbiter. Style becomes something unfounded, mere arrangement which in turn is the negation of style. This conditions that aspect of Strauss which has been criticized-and by no means solely by the devotees of Inwardness-as empty. His bourgeois solem- nity, the pathos of his minor trombones, is not a lapse. They explode the objective nonexistence of the meaning which this music desper- ately avers. The passages intended as "high style" have a conciliatory innocence of tone much like official speakers with classical citations, or a latitudinarian minister at a cremation. Strauss's antiquity is of this stamp. It is not the mythic anticlassicism of the Nietzschean, not "the wish to oppose this demonic, ecstatic Greece of the Sixth Century to Winckelmann's Roman copies and Goethe's Humanism,"'3 but

13 Richard Strauss, Recollections and Reflections (London, 1953), p. 115. Transla- tion changed in part. [Trs.]

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rather Boecklinian, with many pillars and cypresses; it is the Freund- liche Vision of a beauty called up out of the void and deformed by the prose of a man who can afford an elegant private house where he longs to take the girl of whom he can proudly and possessively report that "she likes him,"-is "eine, die ihn lieb hat." The composer would like to give the music its content through his own gesture. Through miming, the particular subject is able to convince his public that he possesses just that authority which, as an individual, psycho- logical being, he must lack. This is the complexion of the Jugendstil; Strauss belongs to it literally, not through the metaphors of intel- lectual history; as if to put this beyond all doubt, he took the Jugend- stil poem, "Stell auf den Tisch die duftenden Reseden," after it had become popular as a sentimental song, and set it to music a second time. Jugendstil was the art-exercise which ascribed to what was properly a polemical need-revulsion at the greyness of the advanced industrial age-the power to transform abstract negation into a substantial unity which would resemble the comprehensive styles of the past in which everything is supposed to have had its proper place, including art in life. Advanced liberalist society, which was both the premise and substratum of the Jugendstil, remained beyond its grasp. Strauss's Neo-Romanticism was inspired by the same "new yearning for beauty" as were the young George and Hofmannsthal, despite the dross which already in Strauss had distorted the ideal, stigmatized by virtue of its own unattainability. But all Impressionism had its Jugend- stil aspect: it is unmistakable in the later Monet and musically, in the Debussy of the Proses lyriques; of Debussy's works for the stage, one was composed on a text by Maeterlinck, another on one by D'An- nunzio. The Straussian elan transposed the Jugendstil ornament into musical lineation. Feuersnot, which is a Jugendstil work par excellence, is also perhaps the most Straussian; if any, it deserves to be performed again. The fatuous text could stand considerable revision, although it is certainly no worse than the esprit of Clemens Krauss in Capriccio. The Strauss of Feuersnot did not have to make any demands of himself which lay outside his mode of reaction, not deny himself his heart's desire. Nature, the desire of the artist-hero for the beautiful girl, works itself up into magic, a kind of monist-transcendence. Never again did Strauss write music which was as spontaneous. Yet his calcification, the object of unflagging ridicule, his plagiarism from his own archetypes, was not a biological phenomenon of aging. "Der Kaiser muss versteinern" ("The Kaiser must turn to stone") is the curse Keikobad places on the young hunter. Strauss's being is rigidi- fled a priori; the self-proclaimed Life, an illusion in reality strictly

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subservient to the politico-economic scheme of production for the sake of production, as deceptive as the dynamics of a society which, under the law of commodity, makes commodities out of every living being. Alban Berg observed that Strauss, who sampled styles as he did epochs, found no style for his old age; the work of his later years parodies eternal youth; the entire Impressionist generation seemed to stand under the same curse. In the old Strauss, the sensory appearance did not yield to the primacy of essence. The essence shrivelled. For appearance was its own law. The more it realized itself, the less of it remained; the more even the appearance withered to a shell. The catastrophe happened so early that one may question whether it happened in time at all and was not rather preexistent; whether it was not only the fatality of that idolized Life, which became visible through an historical process which led musically to Strauss's allergic reaction to that which fascinated him. The caesura between Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier is obvious, although the step from the Chry- sothemis passages to the latter was very small; the self-revocation of the Straussian curve was aesthetically ratified in Ariadne, a "stylish" piece, in the sense that one spoke at the time of "stylish" clothes. As a filling for Moliere's comedy, the curve archaicized itself and, even by comparison with Der Rosenkavalier, behaved in a manner both ironic and simple, a side-step out of the work as a whole. Its intended listeners could call it, disgracefully, a "tidbit," as he himself spoke, helas, of Capriccio. The renunciations of the Ariadne score, including the abandonment of its stylistic principle, remained binding for the entire later Strauss. Perhaps it was only in dream and elevation that he forgot the everyday language to which he now confined himself. After the Alpensinfonie and Die Frau ohne Schatten, however, his productive apparatus became a composing machine into which the main motifs and situations were fed and which turned them out as finished operas. The incalculable happened: the surprise principle ebbed away in the ever-sweeter delights of an ever more softly splash- ing musical stream. Even his flexibility gradually rigidified; as had happened once before, he too composed from measure to measure, as though the habits of notation were the law of progression-a sure sign of feeble impulses. Parallel to such propriety, his general position took an ominous turn to the positive. If the wild pain of an earlier time had already in Der Rosenkavalier quieted itself to the sentimentality of a lady who has not yet even begun to age, then the darker sides have now become a lighting effect, to vanish finally in the last operas before the implicit but no less unmistakable assurance that everything is for the best, in the world as in the musical cosmos. Strauss may

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have done Hofmannsthal's poetry great injustice and utterly dis- graced it by his choice of the three unspeakable successors; yet Hofmannsthal, surely without intending it, paid him back bitterly. Hofmannsthal himself contributed to the taming of Strauss's music through his own development into a "Yes-man"; already in Der Rosen- kavalier he sees to it that youth finds its way to youth, and in Ariadne, the doomed woman to her new God, according to Zerbinetta's sober fabula docet. The literary elect which fancies itself so infinitely su- perior to the composer's vulgarity, the cult of transparency, the resurrection of the conversation piece in higher spheres, the nouveau riche epithet against the learned opera which "stinks" of music-all that becomes both a fetter of the Straussian music and a ready alibi to gain dispensation from the effort of composition, a dispensation which now that the times of Rossini are gone inevitably depresses musical quality. Simplification through "taste" becomes the simplistic treatment of a subject matter which by its definition demands dis- crimination. If it is true that the slogan "clarification" was never worth very much, it is utterly discredited by Strauss's development; the transparency of his later works, which crescendo at such length that finally in Capriccio there is nothing left in the glass house worth seeing, possesses no more intrinsic merit than does complexity as such. The two can be ranked solely on the basis of the exigencies of composition. The assertion that Strauss made progress after the raging orchestra of Elektra, simply because the singers could be heard and the texts understood-an understanding for which one subsequently had little desire-could come only from critics who had not understood Salome and Elektra. Of course, Hofmannsthal provided the necessary ideology; among other resentments, he cherished the layman's against all music with a claim to autonomy. The relative evaluation of the later works depends on the very "taste" which they violate in direct proportion to their zeal in choosing it as their criterion. The comedies set in a modern milieu, like Intermezzo and Arabella, are more bearable than the mythologies; they do not feign an ideal distance for the music to disgrace. The nadir is Capriccio; even the attractive idea of beginning an opera with a chamber music movement, which is unconcerned with the division between the lowered and raised curtain, is ruined by the opera's garrulous inanity. The first beats of Daphne, with which the old gentleman obviously took great pains, still succeeded in striking the bucolic tone just as exactly as his begin- nings had once done with their subjects. The whole is scarcely audible because of propped-up, sugary melodies which are stretched far beyond their endurance, or because of their surrogate, tones selected

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after due consideration of vocal ranges, designed to please the public's ear while bearing no relation to the motivic content, contemptible ends in themselves. The so-called typically Straussian "turns" are emascu- lated by speculation about the listener who will be delighted to recog- nize something halfway familiar.

In retrospect, it is puzzling that the author of Salome and Elektra, whose intelligence hardly diminished, should not have been aware of the decline of his last thirty-five years, that he did not try to arrest the process, or be silent. But the evil had its own inexorable logic. One need only imagine how good, in Strauss's terms, the consonances must have tasted after the dissonances in Elektra. The distinction between the two is left undisturbed; dissonance retains its relation to consonance instead, as in the new music, of abolishing it and itself as well. Inversely, in the last scores the exhumed consonance is already so putrified that it arouses nausea; music which has been debased to a delicacy comes to self-consciousness with revulsion. Between it and the culture industry sans fagon there prevails a prestabilized harmony. The changes which Hofmannsthal's Lucidor sketch underwent in Arabella seem to have been prescribed by a voluntary self-censorship. If Strauss's decline was teleologically anticipated in the three or four works of his best period, it nonetheless acquires an unfortunate retro- active power. The later works disgrace the early ones by caricaturing them. Very little is safe from this fate, primarily those works, such as Don Juan, which do not pretend to be anything but what they are.

To do justice to Strauss means to reject the patronizing historical observation which asserts that at the start of the century he was ahead of his contemporaries, including Mahler, that he set a standard of liberated and richly imaginative music which no one could thereafter ignore and without which neither the late Mahler nor Schoenberg would have been possible. It is entirely possible that Strauss's work may one day be more important for musical history, which would not have taken the same course without him, than it is on its own. To proclaim Strauss an inalienable asset is to pronounce judgment on him-a "cultural asset." But the ambivalence which he, like Wagner, provokes, points to a fluctuation in his objective content. This is not explained by merely citing the Straussian "as though" character. The medium of art remains a semblance from which it cannot escape; art is intrinsically bound to that decorative element which it today is seeking to cast off. The Straussian defect is rather that within his semblance too little consideration is given to that which is potentially not semblance, that on which semblance thrives and through which, by draw- ing it up into itself, it becomes more than mere semblance. His

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semblance was that of civilization immediately before it unleashed its own barbarism and condemned itself as wrecked. Hence, apologetics must also be shunned: the assertion that Strauss gave the so-called spirit of the time its most exact musical embodiment, that he was a chronicler who, out of devotion to his epoch, sacrificed his own via- bility in order to become its unadulterated echo. Such merit could be claimed by the Siegesallee and every popular song long before Strauss. What must be salvaged is his idiosyncrasy, his hate of everything which, in his own words, was "rigid." This conditioned his indiffer- ence to "ideas" and thematic development, his tolerance for the banal, and that cavalier disdain for work which provokes the catchword of "superficiality." It is this-the scandalous aspect of Strauss-which is crucial. He rebels against that sphere of the German spirit which self- righteously arrogates the epithet "substantial," the indefatigable shop- keepers; he shoves it aside with a degoait which would not have been unworthy of Nietzsche. He delights in change for its own sake, what Wagner's Fricka imputed to her husband. The Don Juan who in the symphonic poem of the same title did not disdain to place the brutal sound of military music next to the most astounding mixtures,14 still managed to vindicate himself in the spirit of the monogamic-patri- archal taboos which are indispensable to his class. For the latter, Strauss was an unreliable ally. His specific image of life, the driving force of every one of his beats, is phantasmagorial: the image of an entity which is nonexistent; socially, of what was lost in the course of rationalization, through the repetition of what is always the same, and being lost, transfigured itself to the ideal it never was because it never truly realized itself. The tempestuous, lively Life which Strauss staged and directed is not the reflection it would like to be but rather something unmitigatedly imaginary, which cannot grant itself in a positive form to art no matter how greatly the latter would like it. His music is illusory inasmuch as it is the semblance of a life which itself does not exist. Where it fails to succeed, it is in revenge for its grandiose audacity in envisioning a utopian immanence which would be so vital as to be more than merely immanent. Chance, the negation of a negative, means in Strauss that which is unregimented, and yet in the society which gave his music its meaning it is only the blind spot of lawfulness. It delivers everything which crosses its path up to a

14 To cite only one, cf. p. 65 of the miniature score. The episodic theme introduced by the oboe then passes to the clarinets. Two flutes and a bassoon accompany it with an organlike pianissimo. The harp doubles the fauxbourdon sixths in the middle register. It changes their coloration entirely, takes away their rigidity without thicken- ing them, yet is not obtrusive and keeps itself free of that stickiness which so easily becomes troublesome in a solo harp. Strauss's works are a compendium of such arts, which anyone wanting to compose after him must master.

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meaningless fate. Such is Strauss's contingency, refuge for the fugitive and empty cell in one. His semblance is Baudelaire's praise of the lie elevated to a universal form principle; he fabricates an absent meaning out of the rubble of a reality which already rules over the genius who cannot survive in it. His music abandons itself as semblance. The spots are not simply impressionistic devices, disruptive acts within the rattling rationality of the tonal system. In their very conception they tend to be indissoluble, like the dreamed of life which gathers imperceptibly in them. They returned in the new music; its aging can be described as their obliteration.15 Yet they express the truth about that life. Whereas Strauss utilized death as a dark con- trasting color alongside other "values," it nestled into the representa- tive and still-incommensurable tadches which permeate his music and, against its will, accuse its hedonism. Nothing could testify more au- thentically to this entanglement of complete semblance with truth than the moments of Strauss's memoire involontaire. Unexpected, they flash through even the weak scores. When in the first act of Arabella the sled of the three counts awaits the highly disagreeable heroine, a djda vu flares up, the irrevocably departed childhood feeling of bells, glistening snow, and cuddly fur. It sounds as though it would redeem the whole rest of life if one could only have it once more. But such moments are artificial in Strauss, righteous lies for the sake of the ens realissimum. Hofmannsthal's words touched on this in the famous scene with the silver rose from Der Rosenkavalier. "Wo war ich schon einmal und war so selig?" ("Where was I once and was so blissful?") sing the two as the rose scent fills the air, and in all innocence Octavian tells of the artificial flower, "Ja, ist ein Tropfen persischen Rosenoels dareingetan" ("Yes, there's a drop of Persian rose-oil in it"). Spontaneity produced by technique, this is the Straussian magic formula; yet the na'ivet6 with which he lays his cards on the table and revokes the act of illusion reconciles. It is the childlike speech of the dying. "Denn alles gefaellt jetzt, / Einfaelltiges aber / Am meisten" ("For everything delights now, / Yet simple things / Most")."' The Goethian frivolity which Hofmannsthal had in mind in the buffo scenes of Ariadne was also dear to Strauss, just as his illustrations were the Goethian dregs of the absurd. Senile and infantile, his music responds through mimesis to the universal domination of the calcu- lated effect in which it became ensnared; it thumbs its nose at the

15 Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, "Das Altern der Neuen Musik," in Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt, 2nd expanded edition (Goettingen, 1958), pp. 120-43. For a rough paraphrase in English see The Score, xvHi (December, 1956), 18-29. [Trs.]

16 Hoelderlin, Friedensfeier, Saemtliche Werke III, Kleine Stuttgarter Ausgabe, p. 431.

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censors. It does not take part, however, in the process of self-preser- vation. The life which celebrates itself in this music is death; to understand Strauss would be to listen for the murmur beneath the roar, which, inarticulate and questioning, becomes audible in the final measures of Don Juan and is his truth-content. Solely in decline, perhaps, is there a trace of what might be more than mortal: in- extinguishable experience in disintegration.

[Translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber]

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Documents

Richard Strauss. Part II