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The three works recorded here represent Richard Strauss at the early, middle and late stages of his long creative life, and all three may be regarded as musical commentaries on

various aspects of those multi-faceted phenomena grouped under the general heading “Love.”

The emotions depicted in Don Juan, the first of the great Strauss tone poems, are in sharp contrast to those so radiantly delineated in his operatic masterpiece, Der Rosenkavalier, and in the virtually unknown waltz Miinchen

we have something altogether different: a gesture of affection for the composer’s native city, in which he enjoyed both artistic success and personal contentment.

Strauss was in his 24th year when he composed Don Juan, making his first sketches in the fall of 1887 and completing the work the following summer; it was first performed at Weimar on November 11, 1889, under his own direction. The choice of Weimar for the premiere was not without significance: Franz Liszt, that city’s most celebrated musical resident, had died three years earlier, and here was the extraordinary young Strauss identifying himself unmistakably as his successor in the realm of the tone poem, a genre more or less invented by Liszt but refined immeasurably by Strauss in both breadth and depth.

The inspiration for Don Juan was an unfinished verse narrative by the Austro-Hungarian poet Nikolaus Lenau, the same writer whose treatment of Faust had brought forth two orchestral pieces from Liszt. As indicated by the lines Strauss chose to print on the flyleaf of his score, Lenau’s Don Juan is a reckless idealist: not a mindless lecher but a com- pulsive seeker after an impossible ideal. There is no excess of which he is incapable in his pursuit, and ultimately his cumulative disgust with the world, himself and the very men and women he has injured (under the motto ‘Grieving the one, that all I may enjoy’’) is so great that he welcomes a duel in which he allows himself to be run through by Don Pedro, the avenging brother of a woman Juan seduced and son of a man he killed. |

The exuberance and impetuosity of Don Juan himself, portrayed in the very opening of the work, are contrasted with episodes of tenderness and several feminine themes, all going by in what Richard Specht called (in his foreword to the score) ‘“‘an intoxicating carnival procession.’ The heroic theme given to the horns (and subsequently quoted by Strauss in Ein Heldenleben) betrays, for all its nobility, an element of despair, and the dissolute hero’s end is portrayed unceremoniously in the bleak reaches of E minor.

If the young Strauss appeared as the successor to Liszt in Don Juan, there was no hyperbole in the comparisons with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro evoked by Der Rosenkavalier when it was first performed in Dresden. on January 26, 19l1. Looking back to a fairy-tale Vienna in the time of Maria Theresa, Der Rosenkavalier is more voluptuous, more opulent, even

more rife with intrigue than Figaro, but also more indulgent: even its cynicism is mit Schlag, ornamented and sweetened with waltz rhythms that, while they may be anachronisms in terms of the setting, are gloriously apposite to the character of the work. Who can imagine a Vienna without waltzes, after all, and what matter if the waltz had yet to make its appear- ance in the sterbende Marchenstadt of Maria Theresa? So much the worse for actuality!

In the opera the dominant personality is that of the Marschallin, whose commanding presence is felt constantly, even though she makes no appearance from the end of Act I to the middle of Act III. In the orches- tral suite the emphasis is quite different, reminding us that the title is

Stereo Loge 3 135

Der Rosenkavalier Suite Don Juan

Miinchen (Commemorative W altz)

London Symphony Orchestra + André Previn, Conductor Produced by Peter Dellheim e Recording Engineer: James Lock

Der Rosenkavalier, not Die Marschallin, and following Octavian (who 1s the ‘Knight of the Rose’’) from the Marschallin’s boudoir to the meeting with Sophie, the comic encounters with Baron Ochs and the final ecstatic duet, ‘“‘Jst en Traum.” The accent in the suite, in other words, is on youth and its joys, with little reference to age and its sacrifices.

There have been several orchestral suites drawn from this opera, including one by Strauss himself based on the film version of 1926. The suite recorded here (perhaps more properly called a fantasia, since it is not in separate movements) is the now-standard one, which was approved by the composer for publication in 1945. It comprises the prelude to Act I, the presentation of the silver rose, arrival of Ochs and waltzes from Act II and the trio, duet, and great waltz from Act ITI.

The famous waltzes in Der Rosenkavalier are by no means the only ones Strauss wrote. In 1939 he composed an affectionate waltz titled Miinchen (Munich) for a film about the Bavarian capital. The film was never shown, and the music was never heard, but six years later Strauss

prepared .a oad version of the waltz, which he then subtitled Ein Gedachiniswalzer (A Memorial Waltz), with a middle section marked ‘‘In

Memoriam.”’ Less than three months before Strauss’ death his 85th birth- day (June 11, 1949) was marked by numerous celebrations, and on that occasion he presented the score of Miinchen (in which he inscribed “‘Miin- chen! Miin-chen! Miin-chen!’? under the three lilting horn calls that open the work) to the Bavarian State Library with a dedication. The work was first performed on March 31, 1951, in Vienna and has had few perform- ances anywhere since then. This premiere recording, then, offers the

listener at home an opportunity he is not likely to encounter in the con- cert hall—an opportunity to ‘“‘discover’’ and enjoy a charming valedictory work by a major composer in his lightest vein.

Another aspect of love in these three works that has yet to be cited is one that is part of the music itself (instead of what the music is ‘“‘about’’). It is Strauss’ lifelong fondness for the horn, an instrument which figures conspicuously i in so many of his compositions—not surprisingly, perhaps, since his father was a renowned horn player. For these recorded perform- ances conductor André Previn and producer Peter Dellheim decided. to. double the horn parts, a practice Strauss was known to have approved (whenever it was feasible, horn players of the required skill never having been easy.to come by). That ‘“‘heroic”’ passage in the second half of Don Juan, which Strauss scored for four horns in unison, is played here by eight—a liberty well within the bounds of interpretive license, serving to underscore the glimmer of nobility in the hero’s (or anti-hero’s) character.

— RICHARD FREED

Other RCA recordings by André Previn and the London Symphony:

. LSC-3114

Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 7 oS aloes Heather Harper; The Ambrosian Singers; Sir Ralph Richardson . LSC-3066

Rimsky-Korsakoff: Scheherazade; ‘Tsar Saltan—March, Flight of the Bumblebee LSC-3042

LSC-2899

Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 6 and 8 .

Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2.

Library of Congress Card Number 74-750883 applies to this recording.

Cover painting: Doug Johnson

Timings: Side 1—23:23 (ASCAP) Side 2—17:15 (BMI); 9:35 (ASCAP) 2 TMK(S) ® by RCA Corporation

© 1970, RCA Records, New York, N.Y. ¢ Printed in U.S.A.

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