To describe Richard Strauss as a “late romantic” who never felt at home in the twentieth century is grossly negligent nonsense.
More consistently than Gustav Mahler or Arnold Schönberg, the reflective ironist Strauss had renounced all romanticism and, unlike these two fundamentalists, understood that he was making art in the post-metaphysical age, because there was no longer any transcendent "background" that could guarantee art's claim to truth .
But the consequence with Strauss is not to celebrate lousy farewells, but to affirm this world without any final justification as the one in which one now has to live.
Jan Brachmann
Editor in the features section.
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Anyone who visits the Richard Strauss Days in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which was intelligently programmed by Dominik Šedivý, comes across exactly this Strauss: a man who was artistically clear-sighted, unsentimental and modern. "Just take a look at his arrangement of the great G minor symphony by Mozart: The stroke types and dynamics that he entered in the score correspond to what today - according to modern knowledge - would be called 'historical performance practice'", explains Šedivý as we stand in the study of Strauss' Garmisch villa. In Beethoven's ninth symphony, Strauss, one of the leading conductors of his time, demanded a “senza espressione” at every climax: “without expression”. The music itself was strong enough for the players to brush their sensation syrup over it.
In the evening, the Camerata Salzburg plays Beethoven's fourth symphony in the Garmisch congress center, exactly according to Richard Strauss's score, with its line types, dynamics and metronome numbers. Even if the orchestra would have needed a conductor to act more precisely and more vividly, the result is amazing: fast tempos, lively line changes, crackling electricity, bubbling clarity. The difference to the readings of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Paavo Järvi is slight, that to the Strauss contemporary Wilhelm Furtwängler enormous. Strauss shied away from grandeur that was helped. His passion came from precision, clarity and focus.
The Strauss Days in Garmisch have a huge capital: They take place in an authentic location and are philologically close to the sources. It is of course something special for the audience to gather in the morning in front of the villa where Strauss lived for forty years and then set off on a hike that the composer undertook every day with his wife Pauline. And of course the composers festival benefits from having direct access to the estate in the family archive through Dominik Šedivý. During these Strauss days there will be the world premiere of a piano piece in D minor and a concert overture in B minor, both from the composer's childhood and both very clear evidence of how strong Strauss was originally through the classicism of Carl Maria von Weber and Louis Spohr ,Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys and Franz Lachner is shaped. The tumultuous gestures of his post-Wagnerian vitalism are based on a lucid sentence technique. So he still maintains what he himself called "nerve counterpoint" and "neuro-mantic", lightness and grace. It is therefore important to make these childhood beginnings of the composer Richard Strauss public.