Music: Words and Music
The collaboration of Richard Strauss with Hugo von Hofmannsthal was as fruitful as such notable earlier partnerships as Mozart and da Ponte, and Verdi and Boito. It yielded up the operas Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die Agyptische Helena and Arabella as well as several lesser works, and was ended only by the librettist’s sudden death.
Hofmannsthal, born in 1874, was ten years younger than Strauss. When, at the age of twenty-six, he first approached the composer with an idea for a ballet, he had already written a great many poems and several plays and had, in fact, begun to settle into a comfortable and successful career. Sensitive and urbane, with apparently none of the cynical social unease of his colleague Schnitzler, Hofmannsthal’s complex nature reveals itself only rarely in his earliest poetic plays, Gestern, Der Tod des Tizian and Der Tor und der Tod, all written before he was twenty. It was some years after the poet’s first letters to him that Strauss saw a performance of Hofmannsthal’s play Elektra. His interest was immediately aroused, and it is here, in 1906, that the Correspondence (1) begins in earnest. It was to continue for a quarter of a century.
Although over the years they met often to confer, there were still long periods when either Strauss was travelling abroad or Hofmannsthal, as was his wont, preferred to collaborate at a distance. It was at such times that this workshop correspondence progressed. Strauss began to set the play Elektra to music; two years later, in January 1909, the finished opera had its premiere in Dresden, and the following month Hofmannsthal writes: ‘I have spent three quiet afternoons here drafting the full and entirely original scenario for an opera, full of burlesque situations and characters, with lively action, pellucid almost like a pantomime . . . It contains two big parts, one for baritone and another for a graceful girl dressed up as a man, à la Farrar or Mary Garden. Period: the old Vienna under the Empress Maria Theresa.’ The first prenatal stirrings of Der Rosenkavalier.
As early as this, their first real collaboration, certain differences in temperament between the two men had begun to assert themselves, though without, as yet, any real tension beneath the politeness. The Bavarian Strauss was, in many ways, almost Austrian, particularly in his amiable lack of German Ernst: but Hofmannsthal, his Austrian roots firmly embedded in the baroque past, was clearly aware of the superiority of his taste and sensibility, and conscious always of his responsibility to his art. Strauss, of course, was not only composer but professional musician whose practical common sense was often inclined to function at the expense of his aesthetic sense. At one point in the Rosenkavalier discussions Hofmannsthal (perhaps remembering certain pages of Elektra) admonishes Strauss: ‘What I would wish to avoid at all costs is to see these two young creatures [Sophie and Octavian], who have nothing of the Valkyries or Tristan about them, bursting into a Wagnerian kind of erotic screaming.’ Later, when Hofmannsthal wants to explore a minor character (the Police Officer in Act III) and to expand his dialogue, Strauss’s practical stagecraft sees the wrong-headedness of this:
‘The Police Inspector must be dealt with quickly: as a sideline. He’s of no more interest once the main characters are facing one another threateningly.’
If, despite a somewhat uneconomic libretto, as well as certain musical longeurs, Der Rosenkavalier continues to hold the stage today, one reason may well be that the character of the Marschallin has a reality beyond that of the other somewhat stock figures of the comedy, Quinquin, Ochs and the colourless Sophie. No longer in the first flush of youth, but not yet middle-aged, she is obsessed with the passing of time. Her lightly worn self-pity (‘wie alles auflöst, wonach wir greifen, alles zergeht wie Dunst und Traum’) is of the kind that audiences can easily identify with; the passage in which she confesses that sometimes she wakes in the middle of the night and, unable to bear the relentless flow of time, goes about the house stopping all the clocks, is one of Strauss’s more felicitous moments in a score which, unless, you have a taste for Schlagobers, can appear pretty sickly.
The work completed, the vexing business of negotiation, casting and rehearsal begins. It was in these periods that composer and poet tended to quarrel, or rather that Hofmannsthal tended to be at his most waspish. But by the time Strauss had finished scoring Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal was already outlining his plan to adapt Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme and to incorporate in it an operatic divertissement to be performed as a finale to the play. The opera became Ariadne auf Naxos, which was later rewritten for performance independent of Molière.
Differences of opinion during the creation of Ariadne were frequent and lively. And Hofmannsthal’s neurotic irritation began to be more easily touched off. Such jocular remarks as Strauss’s ‘Get your Pegasus saddled’ were icily received, and when Strauss, on receiving the first draft of the libretto, did not respond to it with complete enthusiasm, Hofmannsthal was piqued. Even seventeen years later he could write: ‘I shall never be able to forget how you let me send you Ariadne at the very moment when the effort to stop smoking had set you at odds with everything for several weeks!’
But the main difficulty, surely, was that whereas Hofmannsthal’s libretto, for all its baroque trappings, was really about psychological types (the introvert Ariadne with her yearning for das Totenreich, set against the extravert Zerbinetta), Strauss saw in it only what his temperament led him to see, with the result that the Bacchus-Ariadne finale, written in the poet’s most mystically allusive manner, is transformed by the composer into ‘Wagnerian erotic screaming’, however attractive. Is it too flippant to suggest also that Zerbinetta, in a way, represents an aspect of Strauss (‘The part of the Composer, since the tenors are so terrible, I shall give to Mlle Artot. Only you’ll have to consider now how we might further furnish the part for her with, say, a little vocal number’)? And Ariadne, Hofmannsthal (‘Oh Lord, if only I were able to bring home to you completely the essence, the spiritual meaning of these characters . . . [your] idea for the end is truly appalling . . . Consider the lofty atmosphere which we have striven so hard to reach, rising ever higher from the beginning of the Vorspiel to the glorious opera, then the entrance of Bacchus, reaching in the duet almost mystical heights’)?
Die Frau ohne Schatten occupied the next few years. Its libretto is one of Hofmannsthal’s excursions into the higher flights of pretentiousness: small wonder that Strauss never really came to terms with it, merely coasting along on his professional skill. As soon as he’d completed it, he asked his librettist to provide him next with a ‘diplomatic love intrigue in the setting of the Vienna Congress with a genuine highly aristocratic woman spy as the principal character’. Hofmannsthal’s sardonic reply to this begins: ‘My dear Dr Strauss, I could not help having a good laugh over your letter. The things you propose to me are to my taste truly horrid and might put one off becoming a librettist for the rest of one’s life.’
The sentimental rococo world of Der Rosenkavalier (1911) had been followed by the baroque stylization of Ariadne, with Strauss’s brilliant use of a small orchestra. Nothing new was achieved with Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919). In the effort to free themselves from what they perhaps considered to be the restraints of that South German-Austrian baroque tradition from which their talents had grown, they had temporarily lost their way. Even before Die Frau had been produced on the stage, Hofmannsthal’s unexpressed dissatisfaction with it forced an unusually terse note into his letters to Strauss on other matters both of art and business: ‘Your proposals I consider beneath discussion . . . your entire remarks and “proposals” show such absolute incomprehension, indeed such diametrical anti-comprehension of what I have tried to do.’
Reacting from Die Frau, Strauss decided to try his hand at a modern-dress, domestic, autobiographical opera, and wrote his own libretto. It was not until late in 1923 that Hofmannsthal began to write a scenario on Helen of Troy, which became Die Agyptische Helena. The title role presented casting difficulties: the rival claims of Elisabeth Rethberg, Lotte Lehmann and Maria Jeritza are discussed. Strauss wants Rethberg and attempts to persuade Hofrnannsthal that she has become much more sophisticated in manner since her return from America, only to be told that ‘what goes for sophisticated among theatrical people in Germany is in any case something awful’. Lehmann prevaricates because of her chronic fear that the part will contain top notes that she can’t sing. (There is also a suggestion that she resents not having been first choice for Helen.) Jeritza wants about six times the fee they are prepared to offer. Rumours and intrigue abound. (Hofmannsthal expresses himself so violently on the subject that Strauss protests: ‘Why do you always turn so poisonous the moment artistic questions have to be discussed in a business-like manner and you don’t share my opinion?’) As the three prime donne are now living in retirement, Mdes Lehmann and Rethberg in the United States, Mde Jeritza in Vienna, it would surely be worthwhile for some musical journalist to collect from them their own reminiscences about Helen and the other Strauss operas in which they appeared.
Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s next opera was by far their finest. It was also to be their last. The libretto of Arabella could easily be performed as it stands, as a three-act sentimental comedy. Written in Hofmannsthal’s most clear and limpid style, with a fascinating hero and heroine, and set nostalgically in the 1860s, it called forth the composer’s finest powers. The homely middle-class family atmosphere of the first act, the provincial gaiety of the second, and the romantic third act in the foyer of Sacher’s make a homogeneous and well-constructed whole. When superbly staged (as for instance in the current production of the Wiener Staatsoper) with singers of the calibre of della Casa and Fischer-Dieskau as Arabella and Mandryka, it seems easily the happiest achievement of its two creators. The letters relating to it, however, show that its birth was as painful a process as any of the earlier works had been. To read the letters with a copy of the Arabella libretto handy is an instructive pleasure.
By mid-1929 the libretto was virtually complete. In July Hofmannsthal’s son Franz killed himself, and two days later, as he was about to set out for the funeral, Hofmannsthal himself died of a sudden stroke. The partnership was over, but the letters remain as tribute, explanation and valuable side-product.
Page(s) 70-73
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