Christian Thielemann writes a book about Strauss
OperaThe German conductor, author of My Life with Wagner, has written another about Richard Strauss. It’s out in German next month and he has been talking about it at Salzburg, where he’s conducting Capriccio.
Of the composer’s last opera, premiered in Munich in October 1942, Thielemann says: ‘Fundamentally, the work is the greatest criticism of the regime imaginable. By setting something totally different against the circumstances and thereby ignoring them, he makes a statement. His silence says everything, basically.’
Silent complicity is not the answer to fascism.
Is silence per definition complicity? Amadeus Hartmann also kept (very) silent during WW II, and was not performed. Became he therefore complicit of fascism? And what about Walter Braunfels, who was invited to collaborate with the nazis because his music was so traditional and non-modern? He flatly refused and as a consequence his music was no longer performed (while he had made quite a career in the twenties). Also he kept very silent, and after the war he was silenced (cancelled) because he was ‘outdated’ (first punished by the nazis and later-on by the modernists, because they were both totalitarian).
The actual Nazi regime and the trend of musical modernism are not even remotely comparable in terms of totalitarianism. Musical modernists didn’t commit the Holocaust. Are you on crack?
The totalitarianism of both ideologies is quite comparable. Modernism dit not need a totalitairan government to carry-out its cancellations, its condemnations, it’s absurd historical claims, its willful construction of a fake history which put it in a inquisition position, etc. etc. The composers could do that perfectly well on their own. It clearly stems from the same mentality.
The first gatherings of Darmstadt, where the ideologies were born, saw ex-nazi members on the staff, untill the allies discovered this and removed them. The transition from fascism to modernism was a smooth one.
can’t agree more but this man is horrible except when he is in the pit conducting Wagner and certain Strauss
Have you ever met him ?
What is your point?
Or do you get your information second or third hand?
I take it you’ve never lived under state censorship. It’s very easy to be principled from your sofa, in a comfortable social democracy in the 21st century. Can you in all honesty say if you had lived in Nazi Germany you would have risen up? And if Strauss had risen up, and been killed as a result, what would that have achieved exactly? I’m glad he lived to write the music that he did, whilst also sad that so many brilliant musicians were lost to the evil of Nazism.
There is a difference between silence and silent complicity. The President of the Reichsmusikkammer was more than just silent, he was complicit. Six million people put in gas chambers and a war that killed 50 million, but of course, we hear why people should not have taken risks. Fortunately, the 32 million or so that died to stop Germany and Imperial Japan had a little more backbone.
We also see how these days people sitting on their sofas have all sorts of rationalizations for justifying silent complicity. That’s why we have Trump, Meloni in Italy, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the FPÖ in Austria, the National Rally in France, the SVP in Switzerland, and Orban in Hungary, to say nothing of xenophobic Bexiteers. It reminds of a saying my 8th grade teacher often used, “Excuses, excuses, excuses, just like asses, everybody’s got one.” Anyway, it’s always interesting to see so many anonymous SD readers showing that they have not even the backbone to use their real names on a blog. They are not people I turn to for the meaning of integrity.
So easy to say, so hard to do. Almost nobody in the free west today would have the courage to actively resist. Just like back then.
Strauss was a non political opportunist. His silance does says everything. Untill well after the war, his music did not express pain – as did Shostakovich’s under Stalin – probably because he felt non. Insted, he helped Germans pretend that all is well, and his opera just served Nazi PR.
How do you know?
Can you name a single Strauss composition during the Nazi era that demonstrates its’ horror?
Nothing like Shostakovich’s symphonies or chamber music.
Could it possibly touch his hart, but not his music?
‘The most terrible period in German history, a twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals in human history.’ Who wrote that? Richard Strauss.
. . . After the fact.
You are wrong. Metamorphosen was composed still in the war. And you give judgement about something you obviously know nothing about.
Metamorphosen was composed after Munich was bombed. Surly, Strauss was sad when war reached home. All the music he composed while war seemed a success, shaw no sorrow and no pain.
I do not condemn every German who did not activly resist. Heroism is rare.
What we are dealing here is something much more subtle: What did Strauss realy feel about events outside his social circle?
What he said after the war is known. Listening to the music he wrote during the war, must make you doubt his self-defence.
Shostakovich wrote under as harsh a dictator and was under greater personal danger than Strauss ever was. Sometimes he kept his music unpublished. Sometimes he used musical genres less likely to attract scrutiny. But his music certainly showed his fears, his sorrow, his pain, his human empathy. Nothing he has written during the war sounds as if war did not touch his soul.
I do not believe that Strauss so feared the Nazis that he did not dare write some dark quartet, or a bleak solo piece.
(he could not, of course, write an opera about Crooks who decieve the public into believing absurd claims. Carl Orf already did that with “Der Mond” – and survived)
It is much more likely, that he did not write such a piece because he just did not feel like it. It does not make him a Nazi Monster, just that kind of a human being.
Mr. Thielemann argues that pretending evil does not exist was the “greatest crticism of the regime imaginable”.
Perhaps he is not a very imaginative person.
Perhaps he does not regard instrumental music capable of conveing “criticism of the regime” (to say nothing of sadness or fear).
Perhaps he never heard of people who actually criticised the regim.
But I do not believe mr. Thielemann is an ignorant person, nor a stupid one. I suspect he knows that writting drivle during serious times needs defending – and that was the best he could manage.
Your comparison of Strauss to Shostakovich is flawed for several reasons. First the obvious difference in sociopathy and neurotic traits in their personal psychology.
But maybe most important: time! The Nazi regime lasted only twelve years. The Soviet terror lasted 40 to 50 decades in its most suppressive state, Stalin‘s reign itself short of 30 years.
Everything happened comparatively quick in the years of Hitler‘s reign in Germany.
It was six years only between 33 and 39, which were the years one could make grave decisions about leaving the country etc. before war broke out and everybody tried to dig in in survival mode. Yes, Strauss might have been in denial mode then, in his backcountry hideout. But it is too easy to judge from the comfort and freedom of today‘s western liberal life reality.
People like Strauss usually despised the Nazis. Much like today‘s artistic elite in the US despises Trump…
What about Metamorphosen?
I feel sorry for those people who don’t appreciate the sublimity of Capriccio. The opera is subtitled ‘a conversation piece in music’, hence the light, conversational style, criticized by another commenter. But that writer misses the clever use of leitmotives, and the scores sudden breakouts into other styles – such as the little amorous duet scene between two of the characters. And how can anyone not be blown away by the moonlight music (orchestral interlude) and final scene, the latter surely being the most beautiful music Strauss wrote for the soprano voice. The unanswered questions about the aesthetics of opera may be viewed as avatars for deeper questions about life, Strauss’s and others.
Some might deride Strauss for spending the war years on this work. But isn’t the retreat into a fantasy world where the only thing that matters is the aesthetics of theater and opera a kind of affirmation of life and civilization in dark times?
In another art form, Strauss’s near contemporary, Matisse, spent his war years exploring a new medium, those wildly beautiful and sensual paper cut-outs, which have engendered a similar debate.
Not everyone is destined to be hero, as if anything short of membership of the White Rose group, that plotted to kill Hitler, is a sell out.
Not everyone is destined to be a hero, and of course Strauss was not. Yet Mr. Thielemann seem to describe his slance in almost heroic terms. I would love to know what Mr. T. thinks of the people who realy resisted Nazism.
“The White Rose group, that plotted to kill Hitler”…As a point of information, you are mixing up two anti-Hitler resistance movements.
The White Rose movement was led by 5 students and a professor, and engaged in anti-Nazi leafletting and grafitti until they were caught.
The attempt to kill Hitler–the “July 20 plot”–was an enterprise mainly involving officers of the German armed forces (“Wermacht”).
Theologian/Church leader Dietrich Boenhoffer was also part of this conspiracy. Because he was allowed by the Nazi government to attend international church conferences held in other countries, he was able to arrange secret meetings with government representatives in countries like the UK, inquiring about what posture allied countries would take toward a successful anti-Hitler coup.
Bienhoeffer is a fine example of someone who ran _toward_ disaster to oppose it. He was having a great time in New York City, but felt impelled to return to his country to try to do something about its evil leadership.
Though excuse me, my spelling of Bonhoeffer was (variously) wrong.
Does Richard Strauss really need secondary literature?
Away with words atempting to justify what lies beyond any living person’s knowledge.
Capriccio is one of the most bland, superficially-nice, bourgeois & corny works that Strauss ever wrote. He had spun himself into a cocoon of nostalgia because the world outside his luxurious villa was too troubling and frightening to consider seriously. The faux classicist musical language is unbearable in its thinness, in spite of its sophistication…. he tried to combine Mozartian lightness and elegance with Wagnerian long melodic lines and harmonic agility which only achieved to cancel the clear articulation points in phrasing which makes a Mozartian language so energetic. The sentimentality of plot (with that silly woman and the two even sillier men) and music go together very well but that is not a positive thing. He obviously intended to write a ‘Mozartian opera’, since his two favorite composers were Mozart and Wagner, but a true synthesis he only achieved in his masterpiece ‘Letzte Lieder’ where he did no longer willfully tried to imitate.
His much earlier ‘synthesis’ attempt: Der Rosenkavalier, bursts with life as compared with Capriccio. The former is entirely convincing while the latter is… well….
Here is Capriccio:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA8-ObiX10o
And here is Rosenkavalier:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vB7h82tqiQ
As for his relationship with the nazi regime:
https://subterraneanreview.blogspot.com/2018/10/strauss-and-nazis.html
It seems obvious to me that Capriccio is, at least partially, intended as a Gluckian, not a Mozartian homage. There’s even a literal musical quote and Gluck was also among Strauss’ favourite composers (enough for him to make an adaptation of Iphigénie en Tauride). If the opera compares unfavourably to Der Rosenkavalier, feeling much less energetic and ‘alive’, the same applies to their inspiring composers. Gluck, although a magnificent dramatist, is certainly not in Mozarts league as a creative genius…
When conductors strive for profundity, they show their profoundest stupidity.
First of all, if silence is the greatest criticism, then Strauss shouldn’t have composed anything.
Second of all, one can read anything into silence, it’s an empty space that could be filled by wishful thinking and by revisionism, which is what Thielemann is doing for Strauss to rehabilitate him.
Schlimme Kommentare.
Das Photo von CT ist garnicht auf dem Buch und offensichtlich mit Absicht „hineinkomponiert“ worden.
Was ist das für ein Niveau?
Sorry,ladies and gentlemen