The complete idiot's guide to classical music (40 page)

With the turn of the century came a shift of Strauss’ interests toward opera. His first one (
Guntram
), written in 1894, was a total disaster (except that Strauss married the leading soprano), but after a reasonable cooling-off period, the slightly bawdy
Feuersnot
did much better in 1901. “It is not seemly for men and women to talk to one another about the lewd plot,” said one critic, so naturally everybody rushed to see it. Next came
Salome,
after the Oscar Wilde play, with such a shocking plot and such sensual music, including the stripteasing “Dance of the Seven Veils,” that the Viennese censors banned it altogether. Even the presumably less prudish and more enlightened Metropolitan Opera bowed to a storm of protests and removed it after only two performances.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
The critic in
The New York Times
referred to the “moral stench with which
Salome
fills the nostrils of humanity”; a letter to the
The New York Times
called it “a detailed and explicit exposition of the most unmentionable features of degeneracy that I have ever heard, read of, or imagined”; and a minister preached a sermon to his Boston congregation railing against this “degrading, loathsome opera whose theme cannot be discussed in a mixed audience.” Needless to say,
Salome
turned into a tremendous hit.

Still on a roll in terms of offending genteel sensibilities, Strauss next turned to the cheery subject of matricide with
Elektra
in 1909. The critics had had three years to recuperate from
Salome
, but they were still shocked by the vivid musical portrayal of a sensational subject (“a prodigious orgy,” was the verdict of the critic at
The New York Times
, guaranteeing yet another sold out house). Having made his stimulating points, though, Strauss mellowed in 1911 with the witty, light, gracefully satiric
Der Rosenkavalier
(The Knight of the Rose). For once, both audiences and critics loved it. They still do.

 
Important Things to Know
Unlike many of his colleagues, Strauss did not leave Germany when the Nazis came to power, and this politically aloof musician soon found himself on the wrong side of two different fences. The Nazis, having initially embraced him as a valuable propaganda figure, were upset when he commissioned a libretto from a Jewish writer (Stefan Zweig) and even more outraged when they discovered he had a Jewish daughter-in-law. Strauss did knuckle under and write a hymn for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, but his later refusals to obey Nazi propaganda orders put him even further under a government cloud, and he sat out most of the war under virtual house arrest at his villa in Garmisch.

Everybody outside of Germany, meanwhile, went on thinking he was a Nazi collaborator, and it was not until 1948 that Strauss was officially exonerated. By then, he was in poor health and near the end of his life. Later that same year, Strauss had a final burst of musical inspiration, writing his
Four Last Songs
for soprano and orchestra. On June 11, 1949, saying that the process of dying was just as he had depicted it nearly 60 years earlier in his tone poem “Death and Transfiguration,” Strauss left this world at the age of 85.

The tone poems are an excellent way to make Strauss’ musical acquaintance because they tell stories with wit and high imagination.
Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks
is filled with little orchestral jokes; passionate throbbings indicate the major preoccupation of
Don Juan
; in
Don Quixote,
the Man of La Mancha (solo cello) and his faithful Sancho Panza (solo viola) do battle with the windmills (wind machine); and while the philosophical meanderings of
Also Spake Zarathustra
can get tiresome after a while, the spectacular opening music will be familiar from its portrayal of the dawn of civilization in the Stanley Kubrick film
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

Operawise,
Salome
is short, though not sweet, and
Der Rosenkavalier
is sweet, but not short, so you might want to start orchestrally with the former’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” and the lilting “Suite of Waltzes” from the latter. If you’re vocally inspired, try a few of Strauss’ other 11 operas, especially the fanciful
Die Frau Ohne Schatten
(The Woman Without a Shadow) or the melodramatic
Elektra.
Don’t miss the aforementioned
Four Last Songs,
either, and gradually try to hear some of the more than 100 splendid non-last songs with piano accompaniment.

Though Strauss is known mostly for his operas, songs, and tone poems, there are a few chamber and solo works definitely worth noting. Among them are his impassioned Violin

and Piano Sonata, two Horn Concertos, completed 59 years apart (in 1883 and 1942), and two examples of Strauss’ superb writing for woodwind instruments that similarly span virtually his entire creative life, the 1881 “Serenade for Thirteen Winds” and the 1948 Oboe Concerto.

“If the roots of your art are firmly planted in your own soil,” said Ralph (or “Rafe,” as he pronounced it) Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), “you may gain the whole world and not lose your own soul.” For inspiration he turned to traditional folk tunes and choral music of the late Middle Ages. He created music for Shakespearean plays and made settings of verses by Walt Whitman. He even wrote a
Sinfonia Antarctica,
but in style and often content, he was English to the core, whether turning “Greensleeves” into a warm-hearted instrumental “Fantasia,” portraying the sights and sounds of London, complete with chimes of Westminster, or sauntering through the countryside in his three Norfolk Rhapsodies.

The son of a clergyman who died when Ralph was still a child, the boy was introduced to music through piano and harmony lessons from an aunt. He played violin and viola in his school orchestra, later held down a post as a church organist, and dreamed of greater glory as a composer.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Vaughan Williams’ family was certainly not overly encouraging about his music. “He was hopelessly bad at it,” said his Aunt Etty. “He’s been working hard all his life, yet he still can’t play the simplest thing decently.” Aunt Etty, by the way, had similarly dire predictions for the famous writer E.M. Forster, a family friend at the time. “His novels are too unpleasant for the girls to read,” she wrote to her niece. “I very much hope he will turn to something else, though I am sure I don’t know what.”

Gradually, Vaughan Williams’ skills strengthened. He studied for a while in Germany with Max Bruch, the composer of the popular “Scottish Fantasy” and another work beloved of concert violinists, the G Minor Concerto; later he went to Paris to pick up a few orchestration hints from Maurice Ravel, whose “Bolero” is practically a textbook on how to write skillfully for instruments; and all the while he was collecting the English folk songs that would form so important a part of his musical output. Traditional tunes swirl through dozens of his compositions, and even when the music is entirely original, the spirit of Britain—her history, her poets, her traditions—is strongly felt.

Vaughan Williams’ creative energies extended to the end of his long life (as did his other energies: he married the poet Ursula Wood at age 80). Two years after his marriage to Wood, he wrote a tuba concerto. His Eighth Symphony, premiered in his 83rd year, and is one of the few classical pieces to incorporate a vibraphone; and in his Ninth Symphony, premiered the following year, Vaughan Williams again defied custom by including three saxophones in the scoring (with the caution that they behave themselves and not play “like demented cats”). As did Richard Strauss, Vaughan Williams closed his life with
Four Last Songs,
dying in London on August 28, 1958, six weeks shy of his 86th birthday.

Start with some of the many pieces in which Vaughan Williams gave folk songs a chance to shine. The “Fantasia on Greensleeves” takes only four minutes or so, but it’s four minutes of bliss. Want a longer spell of ecstasy? Listen to his haunting “Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis” (a 16th century English composer), or the equally gorgeous romance for violin and orchestra evocatively titled “A Lark Ascending.”

Of the nine symphonies, the
London Symphony
(no. 2) and
Pastoral Symphony
(no. 3) are probably the most accessible with their folk-inspired portrayals of town and country; also try the “English Folksong Suite,” “Studies in English Folksong,” “From the Fen Country,” and the first of the “Norfolk Rhapsodies.”

Lovers of song and poetry will find them magically merged in dozens of individual pieces, plus such cycles as the
Songs of Travel
(Robert Louis Stevenson),
Three Poems
(Walt Whitman), and the
Five Mystical Songs
(George Herbert). For vocal ensemble enchantment, you’ll do no better than Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music” fashioned after Shakespeare, and if you like that, plunge ahead into his more substantial choral pieces, including
Magnificat
,
Te Deum,
and the Christmas cantata
Hodie
(This Day), a glowing product of the composer’s 82nd year.

Along with those early 20th century composers who carried romantic ideals to ever more expansive levels came those musicians who sought to travel a different road. Some shifted gradually away from the old forms, others exploded them with a barrage of new concepts and methods.

“I am more and more convinced,” said Claude Debussy, “that music by its very nature, is something that cannot be cast in a traditional and fixed form. It is made up of colors and rhythms. The rest is a lot of humbug invented by frigid imbeciles riding on the backs of the masters.”

Although Debussy’s own favorite painters were not Impressionists and he disclaimed the label in referring to his own compositions, history had other ideas, and the name of this notable French composer will be indelibly and forever associated with musical Impressionism. The word originated in the Parisian art world of the 1870s, so it was almost passé by the time Debussy began replacing strong musical pictures with shifting, misty images, and disturbing listeners’ harmonic expectations with what the poet Verlaine called “harmoniously dissonant chords.”