The Twentieth-Century Symphonies of Richard Strauss

Abstract

In the oeuvre of Richard Strauss, the word symphony reads like a synonym for dead end. His first two efforts in the genre, the Symphonies in D Minor (1880) and F Minor (1884), marked the completion of his conservative apprenticeship, but not an emergence into maturity. That step required a change of direction and a new apprenticeship that Strauss embraced in spite of the considerable fame that the F Minor earned him in Germany and even in America.' His other two symphonies, the Symphonia domestica (1903) and Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), ended his mature work as an orchestral composer, belatedly, given the general recognition that his future lay in opera. The delay annoyed Strauss, who claimed while at work on the Alpensinfonie that he no longer enjoy[ed] writing symphonies.2 Still, he refused to drop the piece; over a period of sixteen years-by far the longest gestational period of any of his orchestral works-Strauss took it up again and again until by finishing it he put it to rest. Why did he persist? Why did he refuse to abandon a uniquely problematic work, thirty years after he had abandoned the genre itself? And why did he conclude his orchestral career as he had started it, with works labeled symphonies? Without their titles, of course, the Alpensinfonie and Symphonia domestica would not be subject to that question. Both works could easily have been called tone poems; obviously programmatic, they follow a sonata-based, Lisztian double-function plan and show little in style that would require a distinction as to genre.3 It is worth remembering, though, that Strauss was a stickler about nomenclature. The generic designations of the early operas range widely, from the terse Guntram in drei Aufziige, to Feuersnot (Singgedicht) to Salome (Musikdrama). Elektra is a Tragodie, Der Rosenkavalier a Komaidie; only with Ariadne auf Naxos did Strauss compose an Oper (and then he used the word with an obvious sense of detachment, in effect putting it in quotation marks). There is more than a taste for variety in these distinctions; Strauss's fussiness reflects a process of reasoning, or least of reasoned flirtation.4