A Mad Love by Vivien Schweitzer

Author:Vivien Schweitzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

FIN DE SIÈCLE DISSONANCE TO MIDCENTURY MELODY

ON STRAUSS, BERG, SHOSTAKOVICH, GERSHWIN, BRITTEN, AND OPERA IN TRANSLATION

BY THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, OPERA-GOERS had been shocked by Wagner’s R-rated sonic illustrations and by stories of lascivious gypsies, consumptive prostitutes, infanticide, and knife-wielding villagers. And then, in 1905, the German composer Richard Strauss outdid everyone with his psychodrama Salome, an X-rated opera that concludes with the heroine indulging in necrophilia. The first audience was thrilled: there were dozens of curtain calls at the premiere in Dresden in December 1905. But while Salome made Strauss a rich man, listeners weren’t unanimous in their approval. After hearing a performance in Graz in 1906, Puccini wrote in a letter to a former pupil that he found the dissonant music “terribly cacophonous”: he noted the “brilliant musical effects” but concluded that “in the end it’s very tiring.” The censors disapproved of the lurid story, and the ninety-minute opera was banned in some cities in Europe. In the British publication Musical News, an editorial declared that “the whole conception of the story is repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds,” adding, “it goes, in our opinion, beyond the limits of what is fit to be presented on the stage.” After the opera received a single outing at the Metropolitan Opera in 1907, the Met’s board (which included the financier J. P. Morgan, whose daughter was disturbed by the opera) canceled further performances. Salome wasn’t heard at the Met again until 1934.

The world premiere in Paris of an introverted, fairy-tale opera called Pelléas et Mélisande, by the hugely influential French composer Claude Debussy in 1902, also attracted mixed reviews. One critic disparaged the “impressionism” of the work; another thought the voluptuous and sensual music “sickly” and “lifeless.” In France, painters such as Monet and Renoir were focusing on mood and ambience, and Symbolist writers such as Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Maurice Maeterlinck were exploring spirituality, the imagination, and inner worlds. Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play Pelléas et Mélisande inspired Debussy, who said “the drama of Pelléas which, despite its dream-like atmosphere, contains far more humanity than those so-called ‘real-life documents.’… In it there is an evocative language whose sensitivity could be extended into music and into the orchestral decor.” There are no arias in Debussy’s Pelléas, which moves at a Wagnerian pace and whose mysterious, dreamy heroine is a polar opposite to a character like Tosca or Salome.

At the turn of the century in Germany, painters depicted emotions like grief and angst in a style known as expressionism, which emphasized negative feelings. Instead of trying to convey a realistic likeness when creating a portrait, for example, an expressionist artist focused instead on the subject’s psychological state and tried to provoke an emotional reaction in the viewer. Salome, and another Strauss opera, Elektra, are often described as expressionist operas because the dissonant music depicts insanity to chilling effect and can leave the listener feeling shell-shocked. Strauss, born in 1864 to a well-off musical family in Munich, wrote many symphonic or “tone” poems, marvelous orchestral pieces that depict subjects from literature and visual art.

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