Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)
Symphonia Domestica, Op. 53 (1903) [46:48]
Metamorphosen (1945) [28:18]
Staatskapelle Weimar/Antoni Wit
rec. CCN Weimarhalle, Weimar, Germany, July 2005 (Metamorphosen) and
November 2007
NAXOS 8.570895 [75:11]
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