Richard Strauss married the soprano Pauline de Ahna in 1894.
Many of his songs were composed for her, and aspects of her formidable
personality can be perceived in several of the composer’s
soprano operatic roles. Their volatile relationship is well documented,
but they were a devoted couple nonetheless, and the
Four Last
Songs are the composer’s touching final homage to her.
Inconsolable when he died, she survived him for less than a year.
Their son, Franz, was born in 1897. Reading about their family
life - doting parents would be a gross understatement - one wonders
how Strauss managed to find the time, peace and quiet to compose
at all. Yet he did, and the
Symphonia Domestica presents
a happy picture of a single day spent in the Strauss household.
Trying to decide the extent to which the work is really a symphony
is fairly fruitless. Arguments for and against have been put
forward, but those concerned have not even been able to agree
on how many movements there are. More interesting is the fact
that it is the last work but one in the important series of tone
poems that the composer brought to an end in 1914 with the
Alpine
Symphony, devoting almost all his energies thereafter to
the composition of operas. Keith Anderson, in his excellent booklet
note, divides the work into five sections. The three members
of the family are presented in the first section, and the child
is shown to various aunts and uncles. The second section represents
the child playing happily whilst his parents, just as happily,
watch. The young Franz is bathed and put to bed in the third
section, whilst the fourth represents all that happens whilst
he is asleep - the motifs representing him are absent from this
passage - including music containing a fair erotic charge. The
final section is a ebullient scene of family happiness launched
- well, you would, wouldn’t you? - by a double fugue. Strauss
noted the programme in detail in a sketchbook and on the score,
and the more one listens the more one is able to pinpoint the
different events.
The work has its detractors, but in truth it communicates such
a notion of utter contentment that it is difficult to resist,
and as a portrait of family life is certainly worlds apart from
that which he went on to depict in the opera which occupied him
for the next two years or so,
Salome. It receives an absolutely
superb performance here from the Staatskapelle Weimar under the
Polish conductor, Antoni Wit. One is immediately struck by the
wonderful sound of the orchestra, a richness and roundness, totally
lacking in any superficial brilliance, in short, an ideal sound
for Richard Strauss. The strings are golden in tone, which takes
nothing away from the superbly characterful playing of the winds,
and the whole supported by a solid bass line of the utmost clarity.
I can find nothing to fault in Wit’s reading of the work,
nothing that I should have wanted to hear otherwise. I have only
heard one other performance on record, that by Rudolf Kempe in
Dresden from the mid-1970s. It is remarkably similar in atmosphere
to the present performance, and only loyalty to Kempe, one of
my favourite conductors, makes me favour it slightly over this
new reading. One feels very much at home with both.
The disc is completed by
Metamorphosen, a “study
for twenty-three solo strings” and perhaps one of the saddest
pieces of music ever composed. It is the composer’s appalled
response to the wartime destruction not only of places dear to
him, such as the Vienna Opera, but also of wider European culture.
There is nothing remotely nationalistic about the work, no bitterness
even, only sorrow. At the end of the manuscript the composer
wrote “In memoriam!”
I have for decades been faithful to Sir John Barbirolli’s
reading of this masterpiece. A single sweep of music of the utmost
passion, the work could have been made for him. Ensemble might
be better elsewhere, but no other performance matches his in
emotional expressiveness. Well, almost none. I reviewed recently
a Strauss collection on Eloquence which included a Dresden performance
of
Metamorphosen conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli, and pressed
- though I would have to be hard-pressed - I might have to say
that Sinopoli comes even closer to the grief-stricken world this
music is meant to evoke than Barbirolli does. I had high hopes
for the performance from Weimar, and these were, for the most
part, fulfilled. In terms of sound alone it is one of the most
beautiful readings I have heard, with those wonderful strings
so evident in the Symphony given centre stage. One hears the
part-writing with splendid clarity, a credit to the entire team,
including the recording engineers. But the conductor seems anxious
to avoid excess, and this slight restraint makes for a performance
somewhat lacking in intensity when directly compared to some
others. There are one or two questionable tempo choices too,
especially an awkward gear change at 18:05, admittedly following
the only - tiny - passage in the work where the level of inspiration
falls below the celestial. Even the final chord might have been
held a fraction longer. Let me not make too much of this: any
receptive person acquiring this superb disc for the
Symphonia
Domestica and hearing the
Metamorphosen for the first
time will undoubtedly be deeply moved by it. But there are other
performances that dig even deeper, and notably, of the many I
have heard, the two mentioned above.
William Hedley
see also review by Nick
Barnard
Staatskapelle Weimar/Antoni
Wit 
