Richard Strauss’ late music was many things—geriatric reverie, eloquent lamentation, a hero’s retreat from the world—but foremost among them was pointed, if wounded riposte to what he regarded as the excesses of the modernist “note-placers” of the 1920s against which he often inveighed. In his twilight years, amidst the still smouldering ashes of a ruined nation, Strauss would muse that he was likely the final chapter in the history of German music. In a sense, he was right. The postwar generations, spiritual successors of the Weimar avant-garde, turned outwards for inspiration, the legacy of German music in their eyes having become compromised by its association with the horrors of World War II.
Maybe that was why the timing for the Los Angeles Philharmonic program of Strauss’ chamber music felt a bit off. With their Weimar Republic retrospective around the corner, this would have been more fitting as a ruminative postlude.
The Serenade, Op. 7 for winds was the only work on the program that did not come from the composer’s final years (obliquely though it did forecast his much later “workshop” sonatinas). “Mozart’s melody is the incarnation of the Platonic ideal,” Strauss would reflect towards the end of his life. “Sought after by all the philosophers, the ideal of Eros hovering between earth and heaven.” His youthful score’s sunny glint, with its lithe yet sensual strands of song, already bear witness to this lifelong adoration of his forebear, to say nothing of establishing Strauss’ own credentials for songcraft. The group consisting of members from the orchestra’s woodwinds and brass played with appropriate control, careful to balance the ardor of its still teenage composer’s lyricism with a sobriety that would have marveled his older self.
A lifetime later he would pen his Metamorphosen; the mature master’s melodic and contrapuntal craft channeled into the fathomless heartbreak of this elegy for the passing of the entire world he had ever known, now utterly and definitively vanquished; for the very death of culture itself. It is also marked by defiant anger rare in Strauss’ music, reflective of his embitterment with the Third Reich, then later with the Allied occupiers. “Another glorious achievement of the Nazi regime,” he fulminated in his diary weeks before the premiere of Metamorphosen. “Artists are no longer judged by their abilities, but by what Americans think of their political opinions.”
In its guise for string septet, the tragedy takes on an intimacy which becomes almost unbearable, though the Philharmonic’s string group maintained a frosty distance from its disconsolate sorrow. Polished and precise though it was, there also was a discernible sense of unease with the deeper implications of its endless melody, the ambiguous object of its memorial. Perhaps their coolness of touch bespoke of a sense of diplomacy which preferred to leave such matters unaddressed.
In its way, the curious arrangement of the Vier Letzte Lieder that was the program’s centerpiece was of a piece; its re-coloring keeping Straussian sentiment at arm’s length from the audience.
Spanish composer Amparo Edo Biol wrought a version of the work that compacted it into a string quintet with solo trombone substituting for the soprano. It was (possibly despite itself) a backhanded tribute to Strauss, stripping him of his say through Eichendorff and Hesse, and imbuing an unexpected clumsiness to its soaring vocal part.
David Rejano Cantero was the excellent soloist, but no matter how fine his playing was, nothing could disguise the fact that inserting a trombone in place of a soprano was like watching an elephant attempting to mimic the delicate flight of a hummingbird. Michael Kennedy once remarked that these songs were Strauss’ final hommages to his wife, Pauline: “His long love affair with the soprano voice, her voice, is consummated in this final masterpiece.” In its stead, the trombone blustered through its flowing and florid melodies, lending an unfortunate comic tone which was bitingly accented by a handful of flubs in the opening of “Frühling.” Bereft of its shimmering orchestral raiment and even the ability to speak for itself, the result was a kind of high-brow and exceedingly pretty gebrauchsmusik. Call it a “Weimarization” of this valedictory, if you prefer.
With typical self-deprecation, Strauss deemed his late music as having “no significance whatever for the history of music.” Judging from the outcome of her ill-fitting arrangement, it seems that Edo took his ironic quip at face value.