CHAPTER ONE RICHARD STRAUSS In the collection of essays printed under the title Quasi una Fantasia, Adoro includes a section devoted to relatively brief glosses on general musical concepts and categorizations, The following notation is dated 1929: From my childhood I retain very clear impressions of the associations aroused in my mind by the name Richard Strauss. I recall the moment when, shrill and very new, it first entered my consciousness. ... To me the name of Richard Strauss suggested music that was loud, dangerous and generally bright, rather like industry, or rather what I then imagined factories to look like. It was the child’s image of modemity that was set alight by his name. What attracted me were the stories about the rumbustious plays he had composed which my parents and my aunt had heard. I was attracted even more strongly by their painful refusal to tell me the content of those operas which anyway I was still too young to understand--I had been persuaded that the head in Salome belonged toa calf, and similarly, they had tried to convince me that alll the excitement in Othello was about a handkerchief that had been mislaid, But more than all this my imagination was kindled by the word Elektra. This word was explosive and full of artificial, seductively evil smells, like a large chemical works close to the town where we lived, whose name sounded very similar. The word glittered cold and white, like electricity, after which it appeared to have been named; a piece of gleaming electrical machinery that poured out chlorine and which only adults could enter, something luminous, mechanical and unhealthy. When, at the age of fifteen, I got to know some of Strauss’s music, it had hardly any connection with that old sense of excitement I had felt. [The] latent content of a work of art may well be transmitted uniquely in the aura you enter when you touch it, without any real knowledge, whereas it is too encapsulated in the solid kernel of its form to reveal itself to us until that form is shattered. ‘Thirty-five years later, he takes up the problem of a more precise overview of the Straussian phenomenon called for at the end of his 1929 1 Theodor Adorno, Motifs, in Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 34-35.1 comments. What sets it apart from the commentaries on Strauss by a number of Adomo’s friends and contemporaries is the marked absence of the air of condescension that can be sensed, for example, in Ernst Bloch’s judgment: However vulgar, frenzied and ear-tickling, however lascivious, fulsome and eudaimonic his orchestral pyrotechnics may be, Strauss ... achieves an expressive flexibility which undoubtedly represents an artistic plus, compared to the chronic, perpetual solemnity and the Pilotian grandeur of the frowning Wagner school. For the most part, of course, Strauss only takes us by surprise becauge basically he is not developing but marking time in constantly different ways. Adomo’s essay develops along the outline of the commonly held view that Strauss, at the beginning of the century, was way ahead of his contemporaries, but that a certain lack of depth or substance prevented him from sustaining his position. But he stops short of fully accepting it. The tone of the essay can be extraordinarily severe, but it is never patronizing. The last phrase in the final sentence of the essay, "inextinguishable experience in disintegration, "3 comes close to the essence of the study. Despite everything, during the long and generally downward parabola of his "overview" Adorno never really abandons his assertion that Strauss brought something fundamentally new to music. "Had Richard Strauss never existed, 2 Emst Bloch, Essays on the Philosophy of Music, trans, Peter Palmer, with an introduction by David Drew (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37. 3 Theodor W. Adorno, "Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864," trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Perspectives of New Music (1964): 129. ‘All other references made to this essay in this chapter are inserted within the text.contemporary music might have long ago ceased to call itself ‘new.’ In its conception, his work monopolizes the word ‘modem’. . ." (14) In order to make this case, he has at least momentarily to call into question the validity, by the end of the nineteenth century at any rate, of the inherited laws of "strict" composition, "What in Strauss seems flimsy by the criteria of stringent composition revealed the legitimacy of rigorously consistent composition to be itself illegitimate. (17) These criteria, which in Beethoven's music were "informed by a desire for the realization of humanity as opposed to its mere notion. . . " (17), had become increasingly empty and formulaic. Even by Schumann’s time, this style had begun to rigidify. Drawn into the cult of inwardness, music had to fall back upon "the illusion of spontaneous song" (17). This soon became incompatible with the complexities of the material at the composer's disposal. Although Adorno cannot resist a Passing shot at Hans Pfitzner’s cult of the "Deutsche Seele," to say nothing of the actual work bearing that title, "so ostentatious and so absorbed in itself that it never properly learned how to compose" (16), his real target is the “illusion of spontaneous song." ‘Yet because art, even technified, is a protest against mounting reification, this illusion--the dregs of Romanticism--continues to be dragged along (17). In another essay, The Aging of New Music, Adorno amplifies this idea:The barbaric middle class separation of feeling from understanding is only externalized when art is set up as a nature reserve for the eternally human ». of comfortable immediacy, isolated from the process of enlightenment.* To return to the Strauss essay: "Cultural conservatism answered the Straussian critique of inwardness with the reproach of ‘artifice.’ Underlying this is the philistine conception of art as an organic entity, a spontaneous growth... . In Strauss, the ‘manufactured’ aspect ventures forth boldly, pioneering, like factory smokestacks in freshly conquered country" (17). Further on, Adomo speaks of Strauss’s objectification of the emotions, linking it to the whole Jugendstil phenomenon of the early twentieth century. "The spectral synthesis of advertising and artistic adventure makes its appearance. Just as the Toulouse-Lautrec of the Montmartre posters caught the alert painter’s eye, so Strauss attracted the quick ear of the composer who was realistically attuned to changing situations and ready to react" (121). Adomo’s imagery when he writes about Strauss is full of allusions to modem industry and technology. Instead of describing specific musical techniques exploited by the composer, he constantly evokes the daring and timely aspect of the music. Adomo’s discussion of Strauss’s “technification of the expressive" is echoed in several of his longer descriptions of the Jugendstil phenomenon, especially in his discussion of the opera Feuersnot: Jugendstil was the art-exercise which ascribed to what was properly a polemical need--revulsion at the greyness of the advanced industrial age--the 4 T.W. Adorno, "The Aging of New Music (1954)", ed. and trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, Telos 77 (Fall 1988): 108.10 power to transform abstract negation into a substantial unity which would resemble the comprehensive styles of the past in which everything is supposed to have had its proper place, including art in life. Advanced liberalist society, which was both the premise and substratum of the Jugendstil, remained beyond its grasp. Strauss’s Neo-Romanticism was inspired by the same ‘new yearning for beauty’ as were the young [Stefan] George and Hofmannsthal, despite the dross which already in Strauss had distorted the ideal, stigmatized by virtue of its own unattainability. But all Impressionism had its Jugendstil aspect: it is unmistakable in the later Monet and musically, in the Debussy of the Proses Iyriques. . .. The Straussian élan transposed the Jugendstil ornament into musical lineation. Feuersnot, which is a Jugendstil work par excellence, is also rhaps the most Straussian; if any, it deserves to be performed again. The fatuous text could stand considerable revision, although it is certainly no worse than the esprit of Clemens Krauss in Capriccio. The Strauss of Feuersnot did not have to make any demands of himself which lay outside his mode of reaction, not deny himself his heart’s desire. Nature, the desire of the artist- hero for the beautiful girl, works itself up into magic, a kind of monist- transcendence. Never again did Strauss write music which was as spontaneous (123), Even more suggestive is Adomno’s much shorter allusion earlier in the essay to the ‘jet flame,’> a term applied to characteristic Straussian figures by Bernhard Sekles, with whom Adomo studied composition in Frankfurt. "The melodic-harmonic figures which may be included under this name ... are of an expressiveness which despite the most extreme intensity has little ... in common with human warmth; it is the musical equivalent of that degree of heat over which industrial technology first ... {presided] during the time of Strauss; children in the street could admire it in autogenous welding. Strauss’s jet-flame technifies the espressivo as never before; raises it far above the criterion of feeling yet alienates it from the affective realm and assigns it wholly to the productive process. Feuersnot comes very close to an awareness of this: the 5 Adomo’s ‘jet flame’ alludes to the blue-yellow flame that appears when a stove or weiding tool is turned on.W solstitial fire is extinguished at the will of the sorcerer, Kunrad--Strauss--and then allowed to flare up again; music around 1900 liked to switch on the electric light. The correlative of the jet-flame, however ... is bourgeois coolness, a lack of participation, of sympathy on the part of the aesthetic subject, in which the mute lament, ‘that’s the way it is,” can no longer be distinguished from the readily internalized indifference toward others caused by the universal principle of competition... . The unflinching victor and the man of permanent resignation are one. In the emancipation of the jet-flame from more moderate human warmth, Strauss was the first to record musically, with true ingenuity, the separation of sex from the eros of inwardness" (30-31). Strauss abandons traditional canons of expressive warmth at the cost of being scorned by an audience, which is suspicious of the seemingly cold, ‘manufactured’ nature of his works. This quality of his music persists throughout his life. Nevertheless, recognizing the cold nature of his works is a superficial observation in comparison to discovering that Strauss’s grasp of expressive meaning goes much deeper than what is found at the surface. Strauss’s "jet-flame" is evocative. It alludes to the composer's efforts to capture the spirit or aura of the action taking place onstage. It gives Strauss credit for creating music that cannot be grasped in its entirety by the listener. The music’s aura is thus at odds with the emotional conventions of the time, that is to say, emotions that are dominated by the listener’s idea of culture, society, and gender. Adomo also delves into the cinematographic character of Strauss's music, alluding to photography. "The hand behind the magic lantern can12 change pictures so swiftly that their monadlike aspect is no longer recognizable. Strauss was a composer in the most literal sense, one who ‘puts together’; he controls the still pictures and the dynamic impulse is his, hardly ever that of the motifs which are stilled for the photograph" (116). Strauss is able to go beyond setting up motives that correspond to emotions in the traditional sense. In place of this, the listener is presented with a stream of images. -.. Strauss's productive power realizes itself in pictures, tightly packed moments. His ability to compress the plenitude of emotions, including those which are incompatible, into isolated complexes, to fit the up and down oscillation of feeling into a single instant, has no prototype, with the possible exception of the paradoxical equilibrium between delight and horror atthe end of the first act of Tristan. In the dissonant chord of recognition from Elektra there is concentrated a wealth of musical antagonisms truly beyond the reach of words (117). Earlier, he pays Strauss an even greater compliment: Strauss’s Mozart-cult was not based merely on an obligatory respect for lucid classicality. Even Mozart, who worked in a form which was anchored in the unquestioned tonal coordinate system, lost himself in widely separated musical component figures. His fearless art continually cast unity aside without scruple in order to attain it only after having playfully pursued multiplicity to the border of disintegration. It is a related compositional ‘civil courage’ that ives Strauss’s music that slender, fine-limbed quality praised by Nietzsche in is aesthetics. Disjunction puts air between the events ... the music becomes graceful through its wealth of contrasting figures, opposed to everything gross. a4). Even in the most negative passages of the essay, Adomo devotes surprisingly little space to the generally accepted decline in quality of Strauss’s13 later works, which, significantly, he places after the Alpensinfonie and Die Frau ohne Schatten. The Alpensinfonie, always an easy target for the disdain of the younger generation, is defended. "The ideal of the program contains more than just a trace of the apocryphal, an invitation to ridicule. Young sophisticates like to giggle at the waterfall in the Alpensinfonie, as though Strauss had not previously written Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier. Into the time of his full maturity, the Master exposed himself to such sophistication” (19-20). Rather than placing the focus on the weaknesses found in Strauss’s late works, Adorno concentrates upon the great works that preceded them. He also insists upon Strauss’s influence on a younger generation which, more often than not, rigorously denied it: ‘The influence of Strauss on the following generation of composers was universal. It is present in Stravinsky no less than in Berg. The gasping, high hors of Herod (two beats after no. 300 of Salome, Fuerstner’s Study Score), as well as certain expressionless octaves in the woodwinds which increase the potential of expression through negation, as though music were unequal to it and would be crippled by an excess of it (piccolo and first oboe before and after no. 355)--all this is continued in the Sacre, despite the wholly transformed general orientation (118).° Berg learned more from Strauss than is generally suspected . . . (118) ... he set a standard of liberated and richly imaginative music which no ‘one could thereafter ignore and without which neither the late Mahler nor Schoenberg would have been possible (126). 6 This is footnote 10 in "Richard Strauss."14 Sometimes, even in the most negative passages, Adorno can be surprisingly gentle. "In retrospect, it is puzzling that the author of Salome and Elektra, whose intelligence hardly diminished, should not have been aware of the decline of his last thirty-five years, that he did not try to arrest the process, or be silent... . One need only imagine how good, in Strauss’s terms, the consonances must have tasted after the dissonances in Elektra” (126). The central point of Adomo’s criticism of Strauss in the later part of the essay returns to the legacy of so-called ‘strict’ composition, the legitimacy of which had been called into question in the opening section of the essay. If Strauss is granted the special prestige of being one of the composers who deci ely influenced the course of musical history, then it is also true that, having broken through the regressive element in this tradition, he failed to construct or even point the way toward something that could take the place of the older notions of cause and effect. ‘He never concerns himself with anything which might be beyond the end-means relation. . .. Works of art, however, only attain their truth when, as the quintessence of their moments and through the unity to which they have developed these moments, they crystallize as an autonomous entity which resists what merely is. As opposed to the unreason of the merely existent, the reason of works of art is critical by virtue of its very formation (28-29).7 This theme recurs many times in Adomo’s writings on music. In a quite different context, the famous essay The Aging of New Music, he writes: 7 Italics added.45 ‘What is referred to as the architecture of great traditional music rests precisely on these effects, not on musical relations defined by geometrical symmetry. The most powerful effects of Beethoven's form depend on the recurrence of something, which was once present simply as a theme, that reveals itself as a result and thus acquires a completely transformed sense. Often the meaning of the preceding passage is only fully established by this later recurrence. The onset of a reprise can engender a feeling of something extraordinary having occurred earlier, even if the perceived event cannot in the slightest be located at that specific point.* This conception of form which has its musical roots in Viennese classicism, into which Adorno was thoroughly indoctrinated during his studies with Berg, and is not confined to music alone. In his Notes to Literature, writing of Paul Valéry’s essay Degas, danse, dessin, he writes: Valéry’s pointed contrast between technology and rationality on the one hand and mere intuition, which must be overtaken and surpassed, on the other, and his emphasis on process as opposed to the work that is finished once and for all, can be fully understood only against the background of his judgment on the broad developmental tendencies within recent art. He sees in that art a retreat of the productive forces, a surrender to sensory receptivity--in short, actually a weakening of the human powers, of the subject as a whole, to which he relates all art. In Germany, the words of leave-taking he devoted to the poetry and painting of the Impressionist period can be most readily understood if one applies them to Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, of whom they unwittingly provide a description: “A description consists of phrases that can generally be put down in any order; I can describe this room in a series of statements whose sequence is almost of no importance, The eye can wander at will. What could be truer, more natural than this go-as-you-please, since ... rruth itself is accident?. . . But if this latitude, and the habit of facility which goes with it, becomes the dominating factor, it gradually dissuades writers from employing their ability for 8 Adomo, "The Aging of New Music, 103.16 abstraction, just as it reduces to nothing the slightes, necessity for concentration on the reader’s part. . From this perspective, one can better understand Adomo’s comparison of Schoenberg and Strauss. Despite Schoenberg’s so-called “emancipation of dissonance," it was really Strauss who shattered the old notions of cause and effect, that is to say, that dissonance, understood here in its broad sense as a kind of collision, a heightening of tension, is more than pure sensation: it imposes certain responsibilities upon the composer. “Schoenberg insisted on homeostasis in music: he demanded that it resolve its tensions and honor the obligations which it incurs from the very first [measure]. Strauss refuses to worry about such matters; his music is forgetful on principle. So much the worse for the {measures}, motifs, complex sounds which he serves up; art, in accord with sound common sense, need not cause itself useless preoccupation” (28). The contrast is explored further in the essay on Valéry: [Valéry] ... knows better than anyone that it is only the least part of his work that ‘belongs’ to the artist; that in actuality the process of artistic production ... has the strict form of a lawfulness wrested from the subject matter itself, and that the much invoked creative freedom of the artist is of little consequence in comparison. Here he corcurs with another artist of his generation. . ... Amold Schoenberg, who in his last book, Style and Idea, develops the idea that great music consists of fulfilling the obligations the composer incurs with virtually the first note. | 9 Theodor W. Adomo, The Artist as Deputy, in Notes to Literature 1, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. and intro. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, European Perspectives Series (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 105-106. 10 ibid. , 104-105 (italics added).17 This is all the more striking in view of certain parallels in Adorno’s categorization of Strauss and Schoenberg, respectively, as “instinctive” composers: Strauss The selection, character, and development of the motifs are governed by the same strange utopian ideal: hitting the mark, be it external or psychological, unmistakably and with photographic accuracy ... the musical subject accumulates the inner and outer world like piles of raw material (19-20). Schoenberg Like a man with origins, fallen from heaven, a musical Caspar Hauser, he hit the bullseye unerringly. Nothing was to be allowed to recall the natural milieu to which he nonetheless belonged ... ‘musically,’ he was borne along by the language of music, like the speaker of a dialect, and in that respect comparable to someone like Richard Strauss or the Slavic composers. !1 Adomo writes that Strauss was "probably the first to transplant the notion of ‘sensation,’ already widespread in the literature of the time, to music. . ." (23) Strauss not only expells the "dregs of Romanticism," but also “refuses to worry about such matters; his music is forgetful on principle” (28). “By not accepting the autonomy of form as absolute, by belying it through the 11 Theodor W. Adomo, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, intro. Samuel Weber, with a series foreword by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: ‘The MIT Press, 1994), 151.18 introduction of heterogeneous materials which could never be entirely absorbed in music, [he] sought to retrieve for music some of the freedom it had been forced to relinquish by the law of its reason" (21). The problem, for Adorno, is that “effect becomes the formal principle of composition itself, relativizing everything else; its outward orientation for others, becomes its tacit a priori, that which constitutes its ‘being in itself. . . .” The effect is totally calculated and thoroughly planned... . His music is not merely for the theatre, it is theatre, applause included” (28). In the earlier part of his career, "His music deserves the now forgotten attribute ‘dashing’. . . . Its version of technique was to keep itself always disposable. It acquired a faculty never before imagined: alertness. . . . Strauss's desire, and that of the new music after him, was for everything to be equally near the center. That for which his contemporaries, Hofmannsthal above all, admired him, his ‘nervousness, has no other aim than this. .. . Nervousness becomes a sign of prestige, denoting the greatly intensified and differentiated reactive capacity of the person who becomes his own precision instrument” (114-5). In this respect, Strauss is unequaled: "That Strauss’s flexibility never slips from the forming hand is his tour de force, truly a piece of magic becomes aesthetic" (113). But the decline after the pinnacle of Salome is almost inevitable: ‘The idea of @lan itself, music as curve, implies a fall from the heights; what was thrown by the composing hand must sink abruptly in a meteoric arc. This was the almost visual form of Strauss’s first authentic work, Don Juan; never again did he achieve the same unity of program, thematic content, and formal development. That curve dominates both him and his work. His manner of composing, from individual themes to the so-called large forms, is in accord19 with the parabolic decline of his later development. The lack of consistency to which the surprise principle condemns the details spreads to them. Without any power over the original tonal materials, they become masks of what is considered ‘normal’ according to the topoi of colloquial musical language. . Hence, they allow themselves to be easily managed; they are not binding because they are not what they sound. Of themselves they almost beg to be pushed aside. Among the dissonances the ear can still hear the regular tones. They [i.e., the dissonances] are never themselves but always substitutes; that separates Strauss inexorably from the new music (120). It is not surprising that Adorno, the modemist, should find fault with Strauss’s syntax; but he remembers that without the example of Strauss’s music (and specifically Strauss’s music) Schoenberg's achievements from 1908 on would have been inconceivable. With the passage of time, however, Strauss’s surprisingly conventional attitude towards dissonance veered towards an all too easy reconciliation with the worst shortcomings of his era. "It is founded in the uncommonly primitive idea, extrapolated from textbook harmony that in music dissonance, if not polyphony as such, corresponds to tension and negativity, whereas simplicity, euphony, consonance signify the good and desirable. This divides the musical spirit into sheep and goats, and the unrest of the dissatisfied, the drive to become, is included among the at times unavoidable goats. . . ." (29) It took the form of simply not listening carefully to the implications of his own music: After the Alpensinfonie and Die Frau ohne Schatten, however his productive apparatus became a composing machine into which the main motifs and situations were fed and which tuned them out as finished operas. The incalculable happened: the surprise principle ebbed away in the ever-sweeter delights of an ever more softly splashing musical stream. Even his flexibility gradually rigidified; as had happened once before, he too composed from measure to measure, as though the habits of notation were the law of20 progression. . . . Parallel to such propriety, his general position took an ‘ominous turn to the positive (124). The tone of this essay, with its mixture of exhilaration and disgust, is surely autobiographical to a degree. Far more than being a conventional modernist attack on the composer who ushered in and then tumed his back upon modem. music, it casts a backward glance at the illusory splendors of his youth, and, with it, the last composer of unquestionable stature whose relationship with his public might be termed ‘normal that is, progressing in a traditional way from the status of much derided rebel to that of an authentic grand old man; the last great composer whose music was thoroughly at home in the traditional concert hall, mastering its exigencies as perhaps no music ever had before. The composer, in short, who was circumscribed by the process: "Strauss, the arch- liberal, was infected by that bourgeois progress which, as [is the case with] the particular progress of the ruling interests, contained regression. This social line of development repeated itself in him, What is untrue in him is the truth about the epoch" (17). What must be salvaged is his idiosyncrasy, his hate of everything which, in his own words, was ‘rigid.’ This conditioned his indifference to ‘ideas’ and thematic development, his tolerence for the banal, and that cavalier disdain for work which provokes the [cliché] of ‘superficiality.’ It is this--the scandalous aspect of Strauss--which is crucial. He rebels against that sphere of the German spirit which self-righteously arrogates the epithet ‘substantial’... he shoves it with a dégoar which would not have been unworthy of Nietzsche (127).