Great music - terrible libretto - what is the best opera with the worst libretto.

[Master Jacques]

Strauss was a political conservative and a fairly well-heeled member of the bourgeoisie, and these are exactly the kinds of people who, first of all, didn't take much notice of the signs that an authoritarian regime was on its way, and secondly found excuses to cosy up to it once it arrived.

How would this explain Friedenstag? One of his most deeply-felt works, and banned by the Nazis for its pacifist and anti-war propaganda, as well as its criticism of Jew-hunting populist mobs. Was not this putting his neck sufficiently on the line?

[Dave2002]

A normal, human person I’d say. Buildings and objects can bring unalloyed pleasure; the same can rarely (in fact, never) be said of people.

And I don’t think Strauss was happy to make accommodations with the Nazis: he was more or less obliged to, to protect members of his own family. It’s easy to point the finger at people who lived under totalitarian regimes, but you have to ask whether you (or I) would have done things differently had it been us. Ronald Harwood’s play Collaboration is illuminating on this aspect of RGS’s life, and how awful he felt about having to abandon Zweig as a librettist.

I've not seen that Harwood play, but Taking Sides about Furtwängler presumably deals with a very similar subject, but based on a different person.

[Ein Heldenleben]

Somewhere buried in this forum is a very long Strauss rights and wrongs thread …..I think we exhausted the arguments and pored over the evidence ad nauseam.

[Mandryka]

Composers do apparently have to be careful over words. One story about Britten and Billy Budd is that he asked Michael Tippett to look at one of his earlier drafts. As he did so, it seems that Tippett burst out laughing, and said that some of the words needed to be changed. I can't remember the exact details, but the line in question was something like "Captain, there's a lot of seamen slopping around on deck" - which you have to read aloud or sing in order to see the problem.

If this is true I'd like some evidence because it's potentially a good story for dinner parties.

[RichardB]

Somewhere buried in this forum is a very long Strauss rights and wrongs thread …..I think we exhausted the arguments and pored over the evidence ad nauseam.

I think you're right.

As for Friedenstag, it was performed many times in Germany, Austria and Italy after its premiere in 1938, and a performance in Vienna in 1939 was attended by Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis. An article in the New York Times in 1937 about the recently completed opera reads: "New Strauss Opera Is Slated for Munich; Rift With Nazis Evidently Has Been Healed". Performances were only stopped after the war began. Strauss's neck was certainly not on the line.

[ChandlersFord]

I've not seen that Harwood play, but Taking Sides about Furtwängler presumably deals with a very similar subject, but based on a different person.

My own conclusion about Furtwangler, as with so many German musicians who continued to perform under the Nazi administration, was that he was a great conductor and an average man. He helped some Jewish musicians and he made a (sort of) stand over Hindemith, but when it came to the crunch, he backed down because his career was everything. Ditto Orff. I don't think these people were enthusiastic Nazis and were almost certainly contemptuous (in private) of Hitler and his gang, but they liked being where they were and didn't want to be moved. This may point to a smallness of character, though I'm hesitant to throw stones, never having lived under a dictatorship myself. In Furtwangler's case, he was also worried about being supplanted by 'that Man K', another musician who, while not a Nazi, seemed happy to play ball with the regime.

On the other hand, there were people like Rudolf Bockelmann, who certainly were completely 'with the programme', whether it would do them any professional good or not.


Harwood's play possibly lets Furtwangler off the hook too easily, but is still very good and worth seeing.

[silvestrione]

Care to expand on this? Like many operas I know or have listened to I think the libretto is quite good in a functional sort of way.

But, not knowing many operas to say the least, I can't really answer this thread's question - but I have to say, the one record that I thought of involving great music but terrible words is Tony Williams' Emergency album. But that obviously isn't opera.

'Pretentious nonsense' (in The Mask of Time) was a but strong of course, and disrespectful to those who like it and see more in it than me. Apologies. I do remember it as over-thought and over complicated, though.


'

[Master Jacques]

If this is true I'd like some evidence because it's potentially a good story for dinner parties.

It is quoted by Soden in his excellent book on Tippett, which is evidence enough for me. The actual line in the (completed) libretto which gave MT the giggles was "clear the decks of seamen!"

Britten accused him of being filthy-minded, but had the sense to get Forster and Crozier to cut the line.

[Master Jacques]

I think you're right.

As for Friedenstag, it was performed many times in Germany, Austria and Italy after its premiere in 1938, and a performance in Vienna in 1939 was attended by Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis. An article in the New York Times in 1937 about the recently completed opera reads: "New Strauss Opera Is Slated for Munich; Rift With Nazis Evidently Has Been Healed". Performances were only stopped after the war began. Strauss's neck was certainly not on the line.

Yes indeed, all that is well known, but I think the bald NYT headline obscures the important point - namely, the nature of the opera itself, which was also a conscious riposte to an Italian fascist opera by Marinuzzi entitled Palla de' Nozzi which had just enjoyed huge official approval in Munich (a lively and crude sort of affair it is too!)

Philistines sometimes take a while for the penny to drop, especially when it suits their turn to cosy up to famous artists. And the criticism of the Nazi regime and its bellicosity in Friedenstag's libretto was too strong (stemming as it did from Zweig's early involvement) to be ignored, once the propaganda notion of "Hitler the Peacemaker" could no longer be sustained. It is certainly no stick with which to beat its composer (if he deserves beating in the first place, which seems an unkind judgement to me).

[Dave2002]

It is quoted by Soden in his excellent book on Tippett, which is evidence enough for me. The actual line in the (completed) libretto which gave MT the giggles was "clear the decks of seamen!"

Britten accused him of being filthy-minded, but had the sense to get Forster and Crozier to cut the line.

Thanks for finding the original line. That sounds about right.

[RichardB]

It is certainly no stick with which to beat its composer

This is the second time of late that I've been accused of beating composers with sticks! I do have great admiration for a lot of Strauss's music, but I don't think I'm alone or unreasonable in thinking that his spinelessness with regard to fascism is one of his less attractive qualities, and something subsequent generations should try to understand and learn from. As was mentioned on another thread not long ago, "no sound is innocent".

[Master Jacques]

I am worried by this. "No sound is innocent" is an excellent strap line, though in my opinion it needs the rider "and no sound is guilty". We can neither separate music from its socio-political context, nor condemn it for that either. Judging a composer's work in the light of his political inertia is surely no more logical than condemning a novel, play or opera because we don't happen to like any of the characters.

Unless we can pinpoint how Strauss's alleged "spinelessness with regard to fascism" creates a weakness in his music, his personal failings are not our business. It is a given that all artists put their own work and needs before political statements, however worthy; and in this case, blocking out what was going on (if that's what Strauss did) gave us Daphne.

[Ein Heldenleben]

I am worried by this. "No sound is innocent" is an excellent strap line, though in my opinion it needs the rider "and no sound is guilty". We can neither separate music from its socio-political context, nor condemn it for that either. Judging a composer's work in the light of his political inertia is surely no more logical than condemning a novel, play or opera because we don't happen to like any of the characters.

Unless we can pinpoint how Strauss's alleged "spinelessness with regard to fascism" creates a weakness in his music, his personal failings are not our business. It is a given that all artists put their own work and needs before political statements, however worthy; and in this case, blocking out what was going on (if that's what Strauss did) gave us Daphne.

I wonder if you can link Strauss’s music to his more than tacit support for the Third Reich . The quality of music he produced during these years - with the exception of Capriccio - fell away from his glory years. He then had post war a bit of a late flowering with Metamorphosen , the Oboe Concerto and The Four Last Songs. I don’t want to pursue the thesis too strongly but his artistic heart wasn’t really in the fascist project even though he was certainly a semi passive collaborator. In contrast Thomas Mann , who left , produced several masterpieces during this period.

[Master Jacques]

I wonder if you can link Strauss’s music to his more than tacit support for the Third Reich . The quality of music he produced during these years - with the exception of Capriccio - fell away from his glory years. He then had post war a bit of a late flowering with Metamorphosen , the Oboe Concerto and The Four Last Songs. I don’t want to pursue the thesis too strongly but his artistic heart wasn’t really in the fascist project even though he was certainly a semi passive collaborator. In contrast Thomas Mann , who left , produced several masterpieces during this period.

Doesn't the decline set in much earlier? And are Friedenstag, Daphne and Capriccio inferior to his Weimar republic productions after Die Frau ohne Schatten? I'd argue myself that all three (and perhaps Die Liebe der Danae too) are artistically more robust than Die ägyptische Helena, Arabella and Intermezzo, which see him fall into a vein of ornate, self-indulgent triviality.

Working in the early days of Hitler's Reich with Zweig on the Jonsonian Die schweigsame Frau (no masterpiece, for sure) seemed to put him onto a new track, a stripping-down to essentials which finally came to fruition (as we'd agree) after the War. What might we have had if he'd been able to continue working with Zweig?

[RichardB]

Judging a composer's work in the light of his political inertia

Which of course I didn't do, even if Friedenstag is pretty mediocre compared say to Salome, which to my mind is one of the masterpieces of any place and time, if that word means anything. But at a certain point he changed from being a an innovative and challenging composer to being a more or less perfunctory Kapellmeister, and at a time when plenty of other German-language opera composers (Berg, Hindemith, Krenek, Schoenberg, Schreker and Weill, to name a few very different examples) were concerned to throw light on their own time with their work in the theatre, with greater or lesser plausibility. And this was exactly the kind of uninvolved "apolitical" character the Nazis wanted as a cultural figurehead. He didn't become a fascism-friendly composer in 1933, he already was one.

If you're suggesting that a real-life composer is in any way comparable to the non-existent characters in a fiction I would have to refute it the Samuel Johnson way!

(Having said all this I do think Capriccio is a beautiful work, and one with a pretty good libretto as well.)