 | No. 364 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast364 |
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This week’s
new montage sets up a three-day series on our pod casting channel dedicated to
the music of Richard Strauss. Curiously, an interest in writing for wind
ensemble characterized both the beginning and the end of Strauss’s long
creative life. The youthful Serenade, Op 7, and the two Sonatinas of 1943 to
1945 belong to the so-called ‘Indian Summer’ period of his last years. Today’s commentary
reuses notes I found on the three works from Hyperion’s
website.
The
Serenade in E flat major, published in 1882 and dedicated to Friedrich Meyer
(Strauss’s composition teacher in Munich), was given its first performance in
November of that year by the Dresden Court Orchestra under Franz Wüllner. Although
Strauss later considered the Serenade to represent little more than the
‘respectable work of a music student’, there is no denying the easy
Mendelssohnian charm of its thematic material and the confident handling of the
instrumental resources (two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, four
horns and contrabassoon). Ostensibly in conventional sonata form, the work
contains just a short central development section, almost improvisatory in
nature, in which overall integration is ensured by the frequent reference to
the ascending three-note figure of the second subject and a distinctive dotted
rhythm heard towards the end of the exposition.
In a letter
of 1943 to Willi Schuh, Strauss wrote that he considered his life’s work to
have ended with the opera Capriccio (1940/1). However, far from signalling a
period of compositional retirement, the 1940s in fact heralded the start of an
important final phase of Strauss’s creativity in which works such as the two
Sonatinas for wind, the Second Horn Concerto and Metamorphosen for strings
figure prominently. Strauss’s somewhat dismissive and certainly over-modest
reference to these and other works as ‘exercises for my wrist’ is clearly not
applicable.
In 1941
Strauss and his family moved to their house in Vienna. The following year he
was awarded the Beethoven Prize of the City of Vienna, and in response to this
composed the Fest musik for the city trumpeters. It was perhaps this
re-involvement with wind writing together with an atmosphere of almost
melancholic reflection on the activities of his youth (intensified by the
current horrors of war) that inspired the composition of the Sonatina No 1 in F
major for sixteen wind instruments. This was written between February and July
of 1943, initially during a period of convalescence from a bout of influenza
(hence the subtitle ‘From an invalid’s workshop’).
In the
summer of 1943 Strauss returned to Garmisch. Profoundly distressed by the
subsequent destruction of the Munich National Theatre in October of that year,
he continued to bury himself in composition. The first Sonatina had inspired
him to attempt another piece for the same combination of instruments, and he
began writing early in 1944. It is remarkable, bearing in mind these
circumstances and particularly his own worsening personal relationship with the
Nazi authorities, that he was nonetheless able to give this new work, the
Sonatina No 2 in E flat major, the subtitle ‘Happy workshop’. The title-page
bears another inscription which gives a further clue to Strauss’s feelings and
preoccupations at this time: ‘To the spirit of the divine Mozart at the end of
a life full of gratitude.’ Strauss had always revered Mozart and must have
found the creative process involved in such a homage to his great forbear an
effective palliative against the political realities surrounding him.
I think you
will love this music too.
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