{"id":556,"date":"2021-01-31T13:14:00","date_gmt":"2021-01-31T18:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/?p=556"},"modified":"2022-10-26T13:17:53","modified_gmt":"2022-10-26T17:17:53","slug":"musics-long-19th-century-eroica-and-metamorphosen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/musics-long-19th-century-eroica-and-metamorphosen\/","title":{"rendered":"Music’s “Long 19th Century”: Eroica and Metamorphosen"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Historians often use the term \u201cthe long 19th century\u201d to refer to the period from the French Revolution (1789) to the First World War (1914). <\/strong> In music, this roughly corresponds with period we call \u201cRomanticism\u201d, from Mozart\u2019s late works through Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner all the way to Richard Strauss. The period ends, abruptly, with the advent of modernism, ushered in by Stravinsky\u2019s ballet \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d, and Schoenberg\u2019s atonal works. From that point on, Romanticism was pass\u00e9, no longer reflecting the spirit of the age. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a young composer, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was seen as a modernist. His operas \u201cSalome\u201d and \u201cElektra\u201d did everything modern music was supposed to: pushed the limits of harmony, expanded the size of the orchestra and shocked audiences. He did everything to the maximum. But with the arrival of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Strauss retreated from the modernist frontlines. His next opera, \u201cDer Rosenkavalier\u201d returns to the world of the 18th century with a traditional plot based on the doings of the aristocracy, peppered with audience-pleasing waltzes. He continued to write in a similar idiom all the way to the end of his life in 1949, his compositions increasingly sounding like they came from the vanished world of the nineteenth century. It\u2019s not a stretch to define \u201cthe long nineteenth century\u201d in music as beginning with Beethoven\u2019s Third Symphony, \u201cEroica\u201d, and ending with Strauss\u2019s death. Beethoven\u2019s symphony was the first to present the artist as hero (the absolute epitome of romanticism in music), and Strauss\u2019s late works were the last to hold on to the 19th century\u2019s musical values. No-one else was writing music that sounded anything like the long nineteenth century in the 1940s, and the era ended with Strauss\u2019s death. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our concert next week begins with Beethoven\u2019s \u201cEroica\u201d, and ends with one of Strauss\u2019s final works, his tone-poem \u201cMetamorphosen\u201d, written in 1945 for 23 solo string instruments. Strauss lived in an elegant villa in Garmisch, outside Munich. From the earliest moments of his career he had been seen as the greatest living German composer, his operas played in very house, his symphonic works in every concert hall. By 1945, he had watched with horror as one German city after another collapsed under the Allies\u2019 bombs. Of particular pain was watching the opera houses fall, for these had been the places of his greatest triumphs. In February 1945, Dresden was razed to the ground. Strauss despaired, writing to his librettist Gregor: \u201c…I too am in a mood of despair! The Goethehaus, the world\u2019s greatest sanctuary, destroyed. My beautiful Dresden, Weimar, Munich, all gone!\u201d Every major opera house and concert hall in Germany was now rubble. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was in this atmosphere that Strauss began \u201cMetamorphosen\u201d, the name borrowed from Goethe\u2019s ideas about plants constantly growing and changing, yet remaining the same. Strauss used Goethe\u2019s idea in relation to musical themes: melodies that can constantly change and develop, yet retain their original character. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strauss\u2019s main melody is based on nothing less than the theme from the second movement of Beethoven\u2019s \u201cEroica\u201d. That movement is a funeral march: Beethoven\u2019s depiction of the death of our hero who comes to represent all mankind. Strauss always claimed that the quotation was an accident, but whether this is true doesn\u2019t really matter to us. What more appropriate theme could there be for a German witnessing the total destruction of all he held dear? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMetamorphosen\u201d is an astonishing work, almost relentlessly despairing and grieving in anguish, all through the lens of Beethoven\u2019s funeral march. On the final page of the score, Strauss finally quotes Beethoven\u2019s melody in full, giving away his secret. Underneath it he wrote, \u201cIn Memoriam\u201d. It\u2019s almost as if the traditions of musical Romanticism and the German musical culture that had dominated the world since Bach\u2019s time, are dying with the final sighs of Strauss\u2019s music. Our concert next week begins with Beethoven\u2019s Eroica, and ends with Strauss\u2019s \u201cMetamorphosen\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMetamorphosen\u201d poses interesting questions for us. First, as Americans, it forces us to consider how much \u201cgood\u201d was destroyed during the Second World War, instead of seeing that conflict in a simplistic, binary way. As a musician, it\u2019s astonishing to witness the end of what is perhaps classical music\u2019s greatest, and certainly most-loved epoch. Perhaps \u201cMetamorphosen\u201d it is a reminder to us all, as the hymn says, that all \u201cEarth\u2019s proud empires pass away.\u201d We might do well to remember that in our lives and our politics. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Originally published in The Florida Times-Union, January 31, 2021:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

https:\/\/www.jacksonville.com\/story\/entertainment\/music\/2021\/01\/31\/conducting-electricity-strauss-piece-steeped-history\/4274988001\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Historians often use the term \u201cthe long 19th century\u201d to refer to the period from the French Revolution (1789) to the First World War (1914).  In music, this roughly corresponds with period we call \u201cRomanticism\u201d, from Mozart\u2019s late works through Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner all the way to Richard Strauss. The period ends, abruptly, with the advent of modernism, ushered in by Stravinsky\u2019s ballet \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d, and Schoenberg\u2019s atonal works. From that point on, Romanticism was pass\u00e9, no longer reflecting the spirit of the age.  As a young composer, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) was seen as a modernist. His operas \u201cSalome\u201d and \u201cElektra\u201d did everything modern music was supposed to: pushed the limits of harmony, expanded the size of the orchestra and shocked<\/p>\n

Continue readingMusic’s “Long 19th Century”: Eroica and Metamorphosen<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"nfd_image_url":"","nfd_onboarding_generated":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-556","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conducting-electricity","category-jacksonvillesymphony"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=556"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":558,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/556\/revisions\/558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=556"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=556"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.courtneylewis.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=556"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}