Der Rosenkavalier Research Articles

Operа in the Silent Film: The Case of “Der Rosenkavalier”

The article deals with the production history of the film “Der Rosenkavalier”, shot in 1925 by director Robert Wiene based on the popular opera of the same name by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The peculiarity of the film was that by the time of filming the musical accompaniment for it already existed. Based on an opera score, it was prepared under the supervision of Strauss by composer Otto Singer and conductor Karl Alwin. The music of the opera was shortened and rearranged, supplemented by other works by Strauss (mainly marches intended for military scenes). The film had to adapt to the musical accompaniment, which played a leading role in this film production. The article examines the relationship between opera and film: transformations of the plot, rethinking of characters, changes in the musical score. The film is not an exact reproduction of the opera. Although its main plot motifs are preserved, they are transformed and enriched with new situations. The most noticeable change is the introduction of a new character, Marshall. The film makes extensive use of the possibilities of cinema to show a variety of locations, flashbacks, and outdoor crowd scenes. Both of the most complex characters, Marshall and Baron von Ochs, appear in the film as psychologically more ordinary. The spirit of well-behaved happy ending prevails at the end of the film, where three couples unite. For the film’s score, there is an obvious desire to preserve as much as possible the individual musical characteristics, as well as the most important tonal centers of the opera. Like an opera, a film score is united by leitmotifs, but in the film some of them take on a different meaning: the emphasis shifts from the presentation of character to the affect conveyed by the theme. The changed relationship between music and action in the frame sometimes leads to a rethinking of the characters’ behavior (Ochs). The restoration of a film that was considered lost in the 2000s makes it possible to evaluate it as a one-of-a-kind experiment from the era of early cinema.

The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb

Reviewed by: The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens by Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb Langdon Hammer The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens. By Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. If a poem is like a picture, it is like an object, with the manifest presence of a thing. To say a poem is like music is to say it is like a process or performance, an event happening in time, and therefore fugitive. While pictures may or may not be mimetic, music rarely is, and that lack of external reference adds to the impression of fugitivity. When we look at a picture, we stand in a frontal, focalized orientation to an object at a certain distance from us. When we listen to music, even when we are seated in a hall, we are surrounded by an ambient phenomenon with no fixed location. Music sweeps over and through us. Arguably, because sound waves physically enter the body via the ear canal, music is present as much inside as outside of the listener. To judge from the number of books and articles on the two subjects, criticism finds it easier to discuss poetry’s relationship to visual art than its relationship to music, although, in the primacy it gives to sound and the way it unfolds in time, poetry has demonstrably more in common with music than with visual art. Stevens scholarship is not an exception, having been more focused over the years on the poet’s relationship to modern painting and visual art than on his relationship to music. Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb’s The Poetic Music of Wallace Stevens adjusts that balance with the first monograph overview of the subject. Rather than a sustained argument, the book is structured as a series of semi-independent chapters exploring diverse topics, including music and memory, melody, birdsong and the sounds of nature, and Stevens’s relationship to modern European composers. Despite this variety of approach, a unified view of Stevens emerges. Stevens’s poetry, the co-authors write, is “an art of textual performance that invites open-ended interpretive processes and embodied experiences” in the service of a “musical aesthetic of transience, ephemerality, and affective intensification” (2). This view is not entirely new: it is consistent with the American pragmatist poet represented in philosophically oriented accounts of Stevens. But the focus on music, by putting Stevens into the company of modern European composers, makes for a rich recontextualization of his aesthetic thinking and fresh reference points for the reading of individual poems. Eeckhout and Goldfarb invite us to read “Of Mere Being,” for instance, with Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs in mind. “Im Abendrot,” the last of the songs, concludes with a pair of flutes imitating birdcalls at dusk (an unusual moment of unmistakably mimetic music). The co-authors suggest that Stevens, a longtime admirer of Strauss, “might have been haunt[ed] . . . —in whatever manner: consciously, unconsciously, semiconsciously—” by those “warbling” flutes (117) when, in his last poem, he imagined a “gold-feathered” [End Page 114] bird singing “Without human feeling, a foreign song” (CPP 476). The link between Stevens’s poem and Strauss’s song is nicely worked out, but the conditional “might have been” raises questions about the status of the connection. When Eeckhout and Goldfarb go on to propose that Stevens might have been in the audience when Gustav Mahler conducted his First Symphony in New York, and that music might have informed his poem “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” some readers will balk at so much speculation. But the coauthors’ aim is less to insist on direct influence than to put Stevens’s poetry into conversation with modern orchestral music. There is no doubt Stevens tried to create poetic equivalents of certain musical effects. Referring to the presentation of the silver rose in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, he wrote, “The glancing chords haunt me and sometimes I try to reproduce the effect of them in words” (L 744). Did he perhaps imagine orchestral composers as part of the audience for his poems? He did on at least one important occasion. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” was commissioned for the sesquicentennial...

“Demonic, Ecstatic Antiquity”: On the Interpretation of Myth in the Opera “Elektra” by Richard Strauss — Hugo von Hofmannsthal

The opera “Elektra” is of particular significance for Richard Strauss. It opens an ancient line in his musical and theatrical legacy and is at the same time the culmination of expressionist tendencies in his work. It also marks the start of Strauss’s collaboration with H. von Hofmannsthal as librettist. The tragedy of Hofmannsthal focuses on trends typical of the new understanding of antiquity in the second half of the 19th century. An interest in the archaic, in ancient cults and rituals representing the irrational aspects of Greek culture, is brought to the forefront. Hofmannsthal’s “Electra” was one of the first literary works to embody the new image of Greece. In the course of work on the opera, a particular role played the treatise on matriarchy in the pre-Hellenistic era “Das Mutterrecht” (1861) by J. J. Bachofen. It acquired unexpected relevance at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries when matriarchy was anxiously perceived as a resurgent world order. Hofmannsthal’s “Electra” appears as the realm of matriarchy. The concentration on the image of the title character, the embodiment on the stage of a short but key segment of her life, the raging of dark passions make Elektra a characteristic phenomenon of expressionist theatre. In Strauss’s opera the role of Elektra is further expanded. With the help of sharp stylistic contrasts in the musical characterization of the heroine, Strauss conveys the dissociation of her personality, her loss of identity. For Strauss, “Elektra” was the culmination of extreme emotional states that demanded the use of the most daring, within his style, compositional means. “Elektra” marks a turning point in the composer’s work. His next opera is “Der Rosenkavalier”, written in an entirely different style. Strauss’s subsequent operas on ancient themes are also very far from the irrationalist and innovative pathos of “Elektra”.

‘Ein sonderbar’ Ding’: Music, the Historical and the Problem of Temporal Representation in Der Rosenkavalier

AbstractDer Rosenkavalier is an opera that foregrounds time: the problem of time, as transience, passing and ultimately death for the aging Marschallin, and a potentially more redemptive quality, the category of the Augenblick associated with the young lovers Octavian and Sophie, in which the temporal intersects with the eternal. It is also a work that has traditionally marked the turning point in Strauss's relation to historical time and the idea of musical progress, as the composer supposedly retreated from the modernity of Salome and Elektra to a more conservative idiom. The temporal qualities manifested in Der Rosenkavalier invite comparison with another work from this period that similarly foregrounds the concept of time, Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. In this self-styled ‘novel of time’, Mann raises a number of problems concerning the human limitations on perceiving time and its artistic representation, especially with regard to music. Disputing the contention of the narrator of Mann's novel that music cannot ‘narrate time’, I show that Strauss's music in fact exemplifies music's capacity to express ‘the historical in time’, using Der Rosenkavalier as a case study for addressing the philosophical problem of temporal representation in art. I argue that Der Rosenkavalier – both Hofmannsthal's text and Strauss's music – is in several significant ways ‘an opera about time’ – the temporal and the eternal, the historical and what I call the ‘metahistorical’.

Stevens into Music: An Interdisciplinary Conversation

Stevens into Music: An Interdisciplinary Conversation Bart Eeckhout and Lisa Goldfarb WALLACE STEVENS’S POETRY has long been associated with music: scholars and critics have noted the musical themes, allusions, and structures in his verse, from Harmonium to The Rock and in late poems. Stevens also famously writes of the musical analogy in his prose: in his essays, aphorisms, and letters, he often discusses the music of poetry and music proper, including some of the composers he admired (Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mahler, Stravinsky), pieces of music he was fond of (symphonies by Schubert and Tchaikovsky early on, later also Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier), performers he liked (Leopold Stokowski), and concerts he attended. He had an extensive record collection, and his musical tastes were broad and lifelong: repertoire for piano solo, symphonic music, and opera, as well as more popular music (Bing Crosby, Jack Benny), were among the genres he enjoyed. Many of his poems have been set to music (most frequently, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but scores of others as well), both in his lifetime and to the present day. While he did not attend performances of music composed for his poems, Stevens delighted in composers’ musical efforts, corresponded with and occasionally met with them. In a 1955 letter to Barbara Church, less than two months before his death, he reported how the Julius Hartt School of Music in Hartford had awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree (L 887). We cannot help but think of that degree as a tacit acknowledgment of the fundamental importance of music in Stevens’s verse, and the actual music it continues to inspire. Given the ubiquitous presence of music in Stevens’s poems and prose, a few years ago the officers of the Wallace Stevens Society decided it was high time to mount an MLA roundtable on the subject, which we did in early January, 2018, with an eye to an eventual special issue. To foster as interdisciplinary a conversation as possible, we invited not only literary scholars but also a noted musicologist and a working composer to share ideas about Stevens’s musicality (thematically, structurally, and in relation to the genre of lyric), his record collection, and the relation of his work to that of the composers he admired and whose names occasionally surface [End Page 147] in his verse. The early morning roundtable (at 8:30 a.m.!) on that snowy, ice-cold Saturday in January drew an unusually numerous crowd, and we reveled in the conversation among panelists and with audience members. Aspects of these conversations appear in the pages that follow, along with new voices that we have encountered since. In titling the issue Stevens into Music, we want to highlight a distinction between our current focus and the inspiring work that has already been done on the poet’s ideas and relationship to music—notably, Barbara Holmes in her 1990 book The Decomposer’s Art: Ideas of Music in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and the long string of essays on the topic, as well as excellent broader studies of sound and the auditory imagination in his work. Anca Rosu’s The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (1995) and two special issues of this journal—Stevens and Structures of Sound, edited by Jacqueline Brogan in 1991, and Wallace Stevens and “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds,” edited by Natalie Gerber in 2009—merit special recognition. Here we aim to chart new ground in providing a musical lens alongside our usual literary one to examine Stevens’s musicality. We propose to look not only at different ways in which Stevens as a poet was himself “into” music, but also at how his poetry has been turned “into music” by composers and performers. That two-way street between the literary and the musical is what sets this special issue apart and constitutes its interdisciplinary nature, for we bring musical and literary insights together in the hope that they will illuminate each other. To highlight this interaction, we start off by discussing a musical composition—the same work that also inspires the cover image we commissioned. We are excited to present an elaborate interview with...

A Mythic Heroine in Der Rosenkavalier

This paper explores the Allomatische—Strauss and Hofmannsthal's concept of transformation by means of taking risk—through its application to Der Rosenkavalier's Marie-Therese (the Marschallin). The Allomatische’s very apparent presence throughout Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s collaborations in their “mythic” operas, urges its examination in Der Rosenkavlier. This paper explores the Marschallin's risk in context of gender, arguing that her self-acceptance as an ageing woman is an exceedingly brave act, that in-turn transforms her. In this paper, a character study of the Marschallin in Act I before the transformation, and after in Act III is presented and corroborated by interspersed musical examples. A comparison with other characters, both male and female, further establishes the gendered context of the Marschallin's risk. In conclusion, the Marschallin's brave risk of self-acceptance as an aging woman transforms her, and places her in the pantheon of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's mythic heroines.

JACARANDAS IN ALBANY

1 4 1 R J A C A R A N D A S I N A L B A N Y A L A N W I L L I A M S O N One must take it lightly, with light heart and light hands. . . . Those who are not like that are punished by life and God. – Der Rosenkavalier Stay away a few weeks and you’ll miss them – The thin, lighter-than-sky blue it takes a moment to see is really emerging between the arid stucco, between the pebble-shaped leaves . . . When I walked these streets, I thought only someone else could give my life back solidity. Was my impatience guilt at how much I’d ruthlessly left behind? Evanescent blossoms – and then the anger at her for not being the one I could stay with, at myself, the rest of the time, for being alone. How it all returns, with the maddening thin blue . . . Grateful only, now, if these little emptinesses helped me find the large emptiness, and anchor there. ...

Performing Feminine Aging: The Marschallin’s Body in Der Rosenkavalier

This paper applies theories from gerontology to analyze the music and text from Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Der Rosenkavalier (1911) in order to examine the Marschallin’s attitude towards her aging female body. After illustrating the signifiers that code the Marschallin’s body as feminine, this paper incorporates Chris Gilleard’s idea from gerontology, that embracing feminine sexuality prevents the desexualizing process of aging, to examine the Marschallin’s sexual escapism. Then, with the incorporation of biographical accounts discussing reflection on past experiences and Marja Saarenheimo’s gerontological theory that memories are embodied processes, the paper analyzes how aspects of nostalgia relate to the Marschallin’s process of remembering her younger body through musical and textual repetition. The paper concludes with a brief examination of the extra-musical connotations of the waltz and an investigation of the Marschallin and waltz tempi through the lens of gerontology, which revisits the topics of sexual escapism and nostalgia. At the end of the opera, this analysis of the Marschallin shows that she accepts her aging body and exerts control over her own life.

Who Arose for Emily?

I n his 1970 Merrill Literary Casebook on William Faulkners “A Rose for Em­ ily,” M. Thomas Inge recommends a number of paper topics, perhaps the most obvious of which involves the story’s title: “Faulkner and his critics suggest various meanings for the title. How many different meanings might it have?” (126). The prompt addresses a basic interpretive problem: a rose never appears in the story, the closest references to one being the “curtains of faded rose color” and “the rose-shaded lights” in the macabre bedroom scene at the end (“Rose” 129). This apparent disconnect between title and text troubles plenty ofreaders, inspiring questions of Faulkner and an array of ingenious interpreta­ tions. Faulkner regarded the title as referring to the story itself, a fond gesture to­ ward Emily, a tribute of sorts to “a woman you would hand a rose” (Nagano 70-71). Within the story, that sort ofgesture emerges from the description ofthe “mass of bought flowers” at Emily’s funeral (129). As for the story’s critics, they focus on the cultural symbolism of the rose itself. It can represent Emily as a treasured memory (Going 54). It can refer to Homer Barron as Emily’s romantic rose, a keepsake rose; or as a memento that love once flourished in her life (Weaks 11-12; Kurtz 40). It can amount to the narrators story itselfand its timelessness; and it can ironically refer to the odorous corpse (Brown 319-20; Hagopian, item 68). The number ofliterary allusions identified in these interpretations and oth­ ers seems exhaustive, ranging, for example, from Der Rosenkavalier (Going 54) and Blake’s “The Sick Rose” (Mellard 37-39) to the “usual suspects”: Romeo and Juliet's “That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”; “O my luve is like a red, red rose, I That’s newly sprung in June” from Burns’s poem; and Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” (qtd. in Inge). The suggested allusions include even the ancient Roman custom ofsuspending a rose in a room to indi­ cate that sub rosa events, likely sexual ones, were occurring there (Scherting 404). In all of these variations, the rose represents the puzzling love between Homer and Emily and, through Oedipal implications, as a number of commentators and Faulkner himselfhave insisted, between Emily and her father (FU 184-85).1 As impressive as they are, these readings of the title’s cultural implications actually have closed off a simple but as yet unacknowledged observation that 'For examples, see Dennis Allen (59), Mary Arensberg and Sara E. Schyfter (133), Suzanne Hunter Brown (311-27), Norman Holland (18), Irving Malin (37-38), and Jack Scherting (404). Diane Brown Jones’s overview of the commentary on the title is also valuable (122-23). 101 102 Timothy O’Brien Who Arosefor Emily? finally, after well over 100 published articles on the story, needs to be aired: that the title puns on the use of “rose” as a verb, that “a rose” echoes “arose” from the narrative itself. I do not think any commentators would put it past Faulkner to employ such a pun. In a June 1957 interview, to illustrate this point, he distin­ guished between the short story and the novel in terms of the care required in wording, remarking that “almost every word has got to be almost exactly right” (FU 207). Given the variety of sexual activity in Faulkners writings, I would be just as surprised ifcritics insisted that he would close offthe puns bawdy sugges­ tion. As Richard Armour has remarked in regard to the honeysuckle-sex con­ nection in Faulkner, “the reader can expect something about sex even without any mention of honeysuckle. But this has not lessened Faulkners popularity” (74).2 More importantly, though, the pun on “a rose” and “arose” highlights a fundamental binary in the narrative. Amid all the insistence by scholars on the oppositions between past and present, stasis and progress, South and North and, perhaps most importantly, inside and outside—ofhouses and even bodies—the opposition between up and down, elevation and fall has attracted little sustained attention.3 The notion that...

The Politics of Arabella: Post-Wagnerian Opera and the German-Jewish Quest for Lyrical Individualism, 1928-1933

The joint artistic project of composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949) and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), which flourished during the turbulent years 1909-1929, resulted in six operas – all won critical resonance and some even gained wide popularity. First staged in Dresden on 26 January 1911, Der Rosenkavalier became an immediate hit and opened more than fifty times that year to packed houses – in Dresden as well as in a string of other European cities. Demand for the opera was so great that the Prussian State Railways laid on a special service of Rosenkavalier trains to usher the enthusiastic crowds from Berlin to Dresden and its opera house.1 However, as opposed to the vitality of their early joint venture, Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s last joint creation, Arabella, is stamped with the mark of a melancholy anticlimax. On 15 July 1929, before he could finish work on the libretto, Hofmannsthal died while preparing funeral rites for his son, Franz, who had committed suicide two days earlier. The libretto was edited by Strauss throughout 1932, and the opera was finally staged in Dresden on 1 July 1933, with only minor corrections – a tribute to the librettist’s artistic legacy.

Kitsch, Camp, and Opera: Der Rosenkavalier

In her celebrated essay, "Notes on Camp," Susan Sontag identifies Richard Strauss’s most famous opera, Der Rosenkavalier as forming part of the canon of "camp." What is it about this work and its relationship to fin-de-siècle Vienna which gives it over to the "camp" aesthetic? In this article, the author examines the essence of the style known as camp, as derived from kitsch, another mode of "failed seriousness." Central to this investigation is the manner in which certain aesthetic objects can inhabit the realms of "high" or "serious" art and also that of popular culture. Hermann Broch, Theodor Adorno, and others suggest that kitsch is a parasitic ingredient in bourgeois culture and that this element can invade and "negate" an aesthetic object or experience. The historical imperatives found in romantic opera, bourgeois culture, and marginalized groups form an important element in defining the creations of modernist culture. Part of our understanding of what constitutes "serious" art has at its centre ways of maintaining autonomy and refusing the prospect of "negating" itself. One way of experiencing and examining those works which "refuse the burden of autonomy" is through the categories of questionable or marginal sensibilities, in this case: kitsch and camp. Der Rosenkavalier, with its fawning tribute to eighteenth-century Vienna, overt homage to Mozart, and its heralding of the composer's withdrawal from the avant-garde, proves to be a superb example of alternative sensibilities.

Cendrillon by Jules Massenet (review)

Reviewed by: Cendrillon by Jules Massenet John Holland Jules Massenet. Cendrillon. DVD. Bertrand de Billy/Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. With Joyce DiDonato, Alice Coote, Ewa Podles, Jean-Philippe Lafont, Eglise Gutiérrez. London: Virgin Classics, 2011, 2012. 60250995. $37.99. Massenet is supposed to have claimed that he was much more comfortable writing about bad girls than good ones, and that might have something to do with the neglect that his fourteenth opera, based on the fairy tale by Charles Perrault known to us as Cinderella, has suffered. Cendrillon has been recorded only once, and has received a few stage productions in modern times, mostly for mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade. While the role is theoretically a soprano one, the music lies mainly in the mid-range, and so is comfortable for mezzos with a good upper extension, in this case Joyce DiDonato. This production was recorded in performance at London’s Royal Opera House, although it was first presented at the Santa Fe Opera and is co-produced with the opera houses in Barcelona, Brussels, and Lille. Stage director Laurent Pelly brings his usual whimsical touch to the story, although not so heavy handed as is sometimes the case. Played on what is basically a unit set, painted with enlarged text from the Perrault tale, the production is set in no particular time or place, the costumes generally designed to identify the characters and their place in society. The one exception is the fairy godmother, who is costumed as a sort [End Page 607] of Mae West-like vamp – perhaps Pelly is trying to give Massenet his bad girl after all? No harm is done by it, or by costuming the fairy helpers as clones of Cinderella herself. The performance is very fine and in at least one respect puts the existing CD recording out of the competition. Massenet wrote the role of Prince Charming as a trouser role for mezzo-soprano. In the CBS recording, and in at least one stage production with von Stade, the role was given to a tenor. Even so intelligent and sensitive a singer as Nicolai Gedda could not compensate for the havoc this creates in the Act 3 trio, probably the finest moments in the score, in which three female voices intertwine in a way not unlike the final scene of Der Rosenkavalier. There are no such problems here, with the prince sung beautifully by Alice Coote, whose performance is as elegant as Gedda’s, and is in the correct octave. DiDonato also sings beautifully and looks exquisite even in her rags, but the role does not give her much of an opportunity to show off vocally. Eglise Gutiérrez negotiates the fairy’s coloratura effortlessly, but she seems stymied by the costume. Jean-Philippe Lafont is sadly past his vocal prime as the kindly father, but still brings a great deal of charm to the role, and contralto Ewa Podles has a field day as the overbearing stepmother, in her stunningly awful and hilarious costumes. Conductor Bertrand de Billy leads a lively and idiomatic performance. Cendrillon will never rank among Massenet’s best operas, but its wit and elegance, which this production captures, make it an enjoyable experience. It is highly recommended for all opera collections. John Holland Chicago Public Library Copyright © 2013 Music Library Association, Inc

Nineteenth-century Attitudes to Female Sexuality

The nineteenth-century medical attitude to normal female sexuality was cruel, with gynaecologists and psychiatrists leading the way designing operations for the cure of the serious contemporary disorders of masturbation and nymphomania. The gynaecologist, Isaac Baker Brown (1811-1873), and the distinguished endocrinologist, Charles Brown-Séquard (1817-1894) advocated clitoridectomy to prevent the progression to masturbatory melancholia, paralysis, blindness and even death. Even after the public disgrace of Baker Brown in 1866-7, the operation remained respectable and widely used in other parts of Europe. This medical contempt for normal female sexual development was reflected in public and literary attitudes. Or perhaps it led and encouraged public opinion. There is virtually no novel or opera in the last half of the 19th century where the heroine with “a past” survives to the end. H G Well's Ann Veronica and Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, both of which appeared in 1909, break the mould and are important milestones. In the last 50 years new research into the sociology, psychology and physiology of sexuality has provided an understanding of decreased libido and inadequate sexual response in the form of Female Sexual Disorder (FSD) or Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD). This is now regarded as a disorder worthy of treatment, either by various forms of counseling or by the use of hormones, particularly estrogens and testosterone.

LAIRD MCLEOD EASTON. The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler. (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism, number 30.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2002. Pp. xv, 497. $35.00

Harry Count Kessler, born 1868 in Paris, the son of an ennobled German banker and an Irish mother, was educated in France, England, and at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. After satisfying his military service obligation in a Guards regiment, he became a junior legal official, expecting an eventual appointment to the diplomatic service and in the meantime immersing himself in the commotion of Berlin's emerging modernism. The variety of his interests matched the diversity of his background and upbringing. His wealth enabled him to collect art and to support artists such as Aristide Maillol and Edward Munch. He helped to edit and contributed to the modernist journal Pan, which led to a long, difficult friendship, including collaborations, with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who dedicated the libretto of Der Rosenkavalier to him. A trip to North America resulted in Kessler's first book, Notizen über Mexiko (1898). Despite his obvious ability and social connections he did not receive the hoped-for diplomatic appointment, evidently being considered too much of an individualist. Between 1902 and 1906 Kessler was head of the art museum in Weimar. He engineered the appointment of Henry van de Velde as director of a new arts and crafts school, and planned to expand the Nietzsche Archive, which he already supported financially, with the goal of turning Weimar into a national force for modernism and cultural regeneration. Intrigues at the grand-ducal court led to his forced resignation, the “indecency” of an exhibition of Pierre Rodin's watercolors serving as the ostensible reason.

Modernism, 1910-1945. Image to Apocalypse (review)

Reviewed by: Modernism, 1910-1945. Image to Apocalypse Rüdiger Görner (bio) Jane Goldman , Modernism, 1910-1945. Image to Apocalypse. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 (Transitions Series. General Editor: Julian Wolfreys). ISBN 0-333-69620-4 (hardback); 0-333-69621-2 (paperback). The year 1910 marked the end of the Edwardian Era. It saw the Paris premiere of Stravinsky's and Diaghilev's The Firebird; the former conceived Le Sacre du printemps establishing, through Nijinsky, a new conception of movement and, with it, Russian dynamics in expression. Rilke published his modernist novel Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge; Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto continued to be serialized in European papers; and the artist group surrounding Ernst Ludwig Kirchner ('die jungen Wilden') had finally found their style in figurative abstraction, providing a complement of high originality to Picasso's experiment with form. The first Post-Impressionist exhibition in London that year masterminded by Roger Fry provided vital links between the eruptions in art on the European Continent and England with her more reserved attitude towards cultural change, even though she prided herself in continuously spearheading dramatic transformations in industrial and commercial terms. Modernism indulged, at least initially, in the art of being different. By 1910 Freud had already provided the foundations for psychoanalytical aesthetics (in Der Dichter und das Phantasieren), comparing the poet's daydreaming to a child's activity ('he creates his own world for himself […] or transposes the things of his world into a new order that pleases him'), and dissonance in music experienced a resounding emancipation. Perhaps we should add that around that time Richard Strauss, too, changed his mind, in his case about modernism in opera, which he had brought to a climax with Electra in 1909, but after [End Page 419] he decided to work on a piece of blissful regression, Der Rosenkavalier. Against this backdrop Virginia Woolf's often quoted phrase 'on or about December 1910, human character changed' sounds somewhat understated if not pathetic, unless we agree with Jane Goldman who argues that 'December 1910 may mean for Woolf material improvement for women workers, and the emergence of women from intellectual darkness into prismatic enlightenment, from obscurity into public life' (159). It may indeed mean just that. Baudelaire once identified Edgar Allan Poe as the first modernist because he was an 'écrivain des nerfs'. But it was Rimbaud's prose poem Une saison en enfer that indicated the potentially ideological dimension of what was implied by being modern: 'Il faut être absolument moderne' (1873). This claim was intended to be inclusive. Therefore a meaningful definition of modernism must appreciate its essentially transnational and intercultural dimension. In that respect Jane Goldman's study has a long way to go. Although she provides a synoptic chronology at the end of her investigation and mentions Rimbaud once and Rilke twice (but Musil not at all), her approach is decidedly insular. Vienna, after Paris the second cradle of Modernism, barely gets a look in. She is evidently unfamiliar with Jacques le Rider's and Hilde Spiel's seminal explorations of Viennese modernism. It would have been much more honest if the title of Goldman's study indicated that she is, in fact, mainly talking about Modernism in the Anglophone world. Any survey of the more recent studies on Modernism, most notably Helmuth Kiesel's masterly achievement Geschichte der literarischen Moderne. Sprache Ästhetik Dichtung im zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (C. H. Beck, Munich 2004), demonstrates just how essential it is to appreciate the European cross- and undercurrents of this persistently prominent 'ism'. The sheer scale and density of modernism's decidedly transnational interconnections, to a certain extent in response to Rimbaud's categorical aesthetic imperative to artistic practice, continue to amaze one even in the age of globalisation. Goldman is fond of categorizing. This has its merits when categories help to define the contours of often amorphous trends within modernism. But when the reader is confronted with the subtitle 'Introduction to Part I and Chapter 2' (33) the commendable will to structure turns into lamentable parody. The visual arts feature prominently in Goldman's Modernism but sadly at the expense of music. She likes Schwitters but ignores Schiele. Schoenberg gets...

Carl Nielsen unmasked: Art and popular musical styles in Maskarade

Although Carl Nielsen's international reputation rests on his symphonies, in his homeland he is equally beloved for his songs. Over the course of his life, the former increased in complexity as the latter grew more folk‐like, so that Nielsen developed into a Janus‐faced composer, a master of both art and popular styles. These genres typically have been studied in isolation so that, though many scholars note that Nielsen's music is full of contrast, few show that this depends on the opposition of two specific styles. Nor has a parallel been drawn between this musical tension and the conflicts Nielsen faced in his personal life, not the least of which was the insidious Law of Jante ("Thou shalt not believe thou art something") that has plagued many an artist from a “peripheral” nation. Nowhere is Nielsen's opposition of art and popular styles more effective than in Maskarade (1904–1906), arguably the Danes’ favorite among his compositions, in which the two styles represent conflicting dramatic themes and serve to distinguish between the characters. Ludvig Holberg's eighteenth‐century comedy provided Nielsen with a particularly apt and surprisingly current dramatic framework in which to play out the musical and personal tensions he experienced midway through his career. Nielsen's opera is an interdependent literary‐musical statement in which he underscored the dramatic themes and characterized the main roles with appropriate musical styles drawn from the entire range of his compositional personae. The masked ball's Utopian blurring of class distinctions is modeled musically in the symmetrical key scheme that fuses this musico‐dramatic continuum. Far from deserving international obscurity, Maskarade compares favorably with Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, whose eighteenth‐century setting and tone it predates.

The Twentieth-Century Symphonies of Richard Strauss

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

Beyond Caligari: the films of Robert Wiene

While the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari became an international film classic, its director, Robert Wiene, was disparaged and even forgotten. Wiene's oeuvre, however, exhibits a surprising versatility and quality, featuring Raskolnikov, an expressionist adaptation of Dostoevsky's novel, INRI, a monumental Bible epic, Orlac's Hands, a psychological thriller, and Der Rosenkavalier, an ambitious opera film. His last film, Ultimatum(1938), is a vehement warning of approaching war, which remains relevant today. With painstaking research of the major European film archives, the author's detailed portrait reveals a career far more differentiated than hitherto acknowledged. Caligar/i - though rated the second most important film in German film history in a recent critic's and scholar's poll - was a landmark rather than a culmination in a career that successfully oscillated between artistic and commercial interests. As the field of film studies rediscovers film history and the value of historical context for the analysis of individual films, monographs on filmmakers are increasingly valuable to scholars and students of both film history and cultural studies. Through the provocative and prolific career of Robert Wiene, a wider, more dynamic view of fantasy production in the Weimar Republic is revealed, enabling the reader to better appreciate the complex shapes of Weimar cinema, its inimitable blend of modernism and mass culture, of avant-garde enterprie, and generic production.

Der Rosenkavalier (1911)

Der Rosenkavalier (1911) Robert Baxter Robert Baxter Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 15, Issue 3, summer 1999, Pages 503–519, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/15.3.503 Published: 01 July 1999

True Confessions: Opera, Literature, History

I have suffered through an execrable performance of a Vivaldi pastiche in Nice; the production was so pitiable, I have even forgotten the name of the work. On the other hand, I have exulted in performances of Dido and Aeneas in Toronto, Tosca at the Met in New York, and Der Rosenkavalier at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Like Oblomov, the protagonist in Gonchorov's novel who cannot get the aria `Casta diva' out of his mind, I can be `shattered' by a phrase from Mozart, Donizetti, or Puccini. Oblomov falls in love with Olga because she sings `Casta diva.' I spend days letting phrases from Le Nozze di Figaro, Madama Butterfly, or Eugene Onegin drift through my mind like a private soundtrack. I have learned from Oblomov that a single aria can give access to love. This is a productive fantasy for Oblomov, for it rouses him from lethargy. It is a productive fantasy for many opera lovers.