A disciple of Wagner and Liszt, Richard Strauss kept the embers of late Romanticism glowing long into the 20th century. (He died in 1949, leaving as his musical epitaph the voluptuously nostalgic Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra.) Following Liszt’s lead, he established his avant-garde credentials in the late 1800s with a series of lushly orchestrated symphonic tone poems, including Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, and Ein Heldenleben, all featuring the sensuous, richly chromatic style with which he would be identified for the rest of his life. By the end of the century, Strauss was celebrated at home and abroad as Germany’s leading modernist composer, and premieres of his works were eagerly anticipated. Although he eschewed the more radical innovations of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, he continued to break new musical, dramatic, and psychological ground in the early 1900s in operas such as Salome, Elektra, Der Rosenkavalier, and Ariadne auf Naxos.
Strauss had just been appointed second kapellmeister of the Court Theater in Weimar when he conducted the premiere of Don Juan in 1889. Inspired by Nikolaus Lenau’s play about the legendary libertine, the tone poem established the 25-year-old composer’s reputation as the foremost exponent of Wagner’s “music of the future.” Yet Strauss’s embrace of the new aesthetic was hardly unqualified. On the one hand, he rejected absolute or “purely formalistic” music as meaningless “random patterns that mean nothing to either the composer or the listener.” On the other, he regarded an extramusical program as “nothing but a pretext for the purely musical expression and development of my emotions ... Those who are interested in it can use it. Those who really know how to listen to music doubtless have no need for it.” On that point, paradoxically, the composer found himself in agreement with the formidable Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, a champion of absolute music for whom Don Juan represented all that was wrong with the new music of the time. “I have seen Wagner disciples exalting the Strauss Don Juan with such enthusiasm that it seemed as though shivers of delight were running up and down their spines,” Hanslick wrote. “The tragedy is that so many of our younger composers think in foreign languages—philosophy, poetry, painting—and then translate their thoughts into the mother tongue, music.”
Today, no one would accuse Strauss of thinking in anything but purely musical terms. Don Juan, scored for a large, virtuoso orchestra, is above all a masterful demonstration of music’s unmediated power to stir the emotions. The violins’ vigorous, up-thrusting opening theme in E major, with its not-so-subtle hint of sexual bravado, is usually taken to characterize the don in full conquest mode. (Strauss sensibly refrained from providing a dramatic key to his tone poem, though he did preface the score with extracts from Lenau’s verse play.) A less rapacious side of the protagonist later emerges in a broad, noble C-major theme played by the four horns. Both melodies return in the course of the work, creating a kind of rondo structure that some commentators have taken to reflect Don Juan’s serial womanizing. The real “subject” of Strauss’s masterpiece is the antihero’s conflicting impulses, the vacillation between aggression and tenderness that ultimately propels him to his death in a duel with a jilted husband. If Don Juan’s storyline remains tantalizingly vague, there is no mistaking what musicologist James Hepokoski calls the work’s “generalized expressive shape, that of an initial erotic energy ultimately transformed into loss and disillusionment.”
Missy Mazzoli epitomizes the contemporary classical music scene, a realm that embraces the influence of everything from the masterpieces of the classical past to indie rock, and all manner of musical mash-ups and fusions. Conservatory-trained at the Yale School of Music and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, she’s equally at home in concert halls and rock clubs, where she often performs with her all-woman electro-acoustic band, Victoire. The success in 2012 of her first opera, Song from the Uproar—about the 19th-century Swiss adventurer Isabelle Eberhardt—led to further operatic commissions, including Proving Up, a bleak tale about hardscrabble homesteaders on the Nebraska frontier, and her current project, a dramatization of George Saunders’s novel Lincoln in the Bardo for the Metropolitan Opera. Mazzoli describes her voraciously eclectic style as a “blend of dreamy post-rock, quirky minimalism, and rich romanticism.”
With its kaleidoscopic layerings of sound, mesmerizing repetitions, and rich interplay of textures and patterns, Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is one of Mazzoli’s signature works, as well as one of her most frequently performed. Commissioned in 2014 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it’s scored for a large, colorful symphony orchestra that includes piano, synthesizer, harmonicas, and a battery of percussion. Although its subtitle suggests a cosmic theme, the piece can also be appreciated as an abstract tonal essay. “For me, writing music is a way of processing the world,” the composer told an interviewer in 2013. “It’s not a concrete thing, as in, ‘This piece is about giraffes.’ It’s much more of an emotional sort of thing. I want people to find something out about themselves through my music, something that was inaccessible before, something that they were suppressing, something that they couldn’t really confront.” Mazzoli describes the Sinfonia as “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ‘sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.”
Wagner is one of the few composers in history to have given his name to a cultural and intellectual movement. Wagnerism, as an aesthetic philosophy, dominated much of European and American musical discourse in the twilight of the Romantic era. At its core was a capacious conception of music drama (a term Wagner preferred to “opera”) as a synthesis of all the arts—music, poetry, drama, dance, and stagecraft. Although the idea dates back to the lyric dramas of ancient Greece, in the late–19th-century context it bespoke a rejection not only of traditional Italian bel canto opera, but also of contemporary French-style grand opera, as represented by the works of Wagner’s bête noire, Giacomo Meyerbeer. After struggling for years to realize his visionary Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”) in existing opera houses, Wagner succeeded in raising funds to erect a purpose-built Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. There, audiences could enjoy performances of his music dramas without distraction (even the orchestra was hidden in a “mystic abyss” beneath the stage), the better to immerse themselves in the sacral experience of the four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, Tristan und Isolde, Parsifal, and other exemplars of what Wagner called “the artwork of the future.”
The prolonged gestation of Wagner’s epic Der Ring des Nibelungen tetralogy, based on Norse mythology, began in the late 1840s. By 1851, when he started drafting the libretto of Die Walküre (The Valkyrie), the project had coalesced into a series of three evening-length works, preceded by a slightly shorter Vorabend (“preliminary evening”) that would fill in the backstory of the cycle. In writing the poetic texts, Wagner worked more or less backward from the end of the saga, from Götterdämmerung to Siegfried to Die Walküre to Das Rheingold. Die Walküre tells the story of the twins Sieglinde (soprano) and Siegmund (tenor), the mortal offspring of Wotan, king of the gods. Torn apart as children, they meet and fall in love in the forest hut of Sieglinde’s husband, Hunding (bass), with dire consequences for Siegmund and the Valkyrie Brünnhilde, who defies the gods to save the couple’s son, Siegfried. Premiered at the Court Theater in Munich in 1870, Die Walküre was repeated six years later as part of the inaugural Ring cycle in Bayreuth. The first of its three acts is essentially a self-contained love story, and as such is frequently performed on its own.
From the violent thunderstorm that opens Die Walküre, a roiling barrage of string tremolos punctuated by horn calls, to the incestuous lovers’ rapturously lyrical duet at the end of Act I, Wagner’s mastery of scene painting, musical prosody, and psychological drama is on full display. The act’s three scenes form a tightly dramatic and neatly symmetrical sequence: the newly reunited siblings’ first inklings of mutual attraction (scene 1); Hunding’s grilling of Siegmund and his promise to exact vengeance for the latter’s slaying of his kinsman (scene 2); and Siegmund and Sieglinde’s dawning recognition of their consanguinity and love (scene 3). The music is a typically Wagnerian mosaic of leitmotifs, some of which were introduced in Das Rheingold—notably the leaping “sword motif” played by the bass trumpet at the end of scene 2, which subliminally reveals the weapon buried in the ash tree that the heroic Siegmund will soon extract. Although much of the opera’s action and reflection are couched in arioso-type monologue, Act I also features more independent set pieces, such as Siegmund’s “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond” (“Winter storms have waned in the moon of May”) and Sieglinde’s “Du bist der Lenz” (“You are spring”).
—Harry Haskell