Charles Youmans. Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. x + 294 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-34573-8.

Reviewed by Sanna Pederson (University of Oklahoma School of Music)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)

Connections between Philosophy and Music at the End of the Nineteenth Century

The title's promise of an account of "the German intellectual tradition" informing the output of Richard Strauss--with his masterpieces in both the symphonic and operatic repertoire appearing over the course of over sixty years from the 1880s to after World War II--is vaguely grand and raises expectations of a general cultural feast. Once beyond the title and into the prologue, however, musicologist Charles Youmans states his topic somewhat differently: "The thesis of the present book is that Strauss's coming of age was an intellectual as well as a musical process, with the intellectual side of things directly affecting, in specific and sophisticated ways, all of his major works for orchestra" (p. 16). That anyone would need to prove that Strauss thought about his music in an intellectual way is partially due to the composer himself, who at times cultivated the image of a philistine, an opportunistic money grubber without any ideals about art. By examining primary documents, in particular notebooks in which Strauss made comments on the books he read, Youmans proves beyond a doubt that Strauss was thoroughly familiar with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Goethe, and that he read those authors with a view toward understanding his place as a composer in theworld, the direction of his work and the meaning of music in general. A musical Wunderkind, Strauss dropped out after one semester at the University of Munich to pursue a fast-developing career as a composer and conductor. However, Youmans emphasizes the importance of the humanistic Gymnasium education that formed Strauss into someone proud to call himself a "German Greek" (p. 21) who read and reread the complete works of Goethe as a guide to life. How then would a person with such pride in "the German intellectual tradition" come to need a book to reestablish the connection?

This question points to the problem that continues to vex all scholarship on Strauss: the problem of determining who the "real" Strauss was. Because of his multiple contradictory and ethically ambiguous actions over the courseof his career, it has been very difficult to come to a conclusion about Strauss's significance. Although his place in the canon of orchestral and operatic repertoire is secure, his role in the history of music is not. Was he really an intellectual or a philistine with pretensions? A true radical or an opportunist? Does his music have profound depths or is it all dazzling surface?

Youmans addresses this unsettled problem of what to make of Strauss's music and how to understand the way it developed by arguing more specifically (as indicated by the book's subtitle) that Strauss's path-breaking musical modernism can be traced to his rejection of metaphysics, a term Youmans uses to refer to both a metaphysical conception of music that was prevalent in the late nineteenth century and also a more general metaphysical philosophy. In the first four chapters making up part 1, "The Private Intellectual Context of Strauss's Early Career," Youmans presents evidence for his thesis by discussing Strauss's understanding of the writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Goethe. Because Strauss kept this context "private," there has been some doubt as to his understanding of these writers. The most famous case is that of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra--his 1896 orchestral work "frei nach Nietzsche." The opening measures of this work are Strauss's most instantly recognizable music--a bombastic succession of trumpet fanfares, pounding timpani and full orchestra with organ at maximum volume. How does this opening and the subsequent half hour of music relate to Nietzsche's text? From the beginning, there has been skepticism that any relationship was significant. However, Youmans uses Strauss's diary and annotated copy of Also sprach Zarathustra to argue that the work is deeply engaged with Nietzschean philosophy in general and with this book in particular. The composition and all subsequent tone poems, Youmans claims, embody a Nietzschean oscillation between existential angst and affirmative overcoming, which reflects Strauss's own ongoing philosophical crisis. In Sinfonia domestica (1903) and Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), in which Strauss portrays, respectively, family life and nature, the composer came to "a solution he could live with" (p. 113). This resolution to his philosophical issues also brought the series of tone poems to an end, Youmans claims. While his discussion of Also sprach Zarathustra is convincing, Youmans's argument that the other tone poems are all "Nietzschean" is brief and general. After reading part 1 of this book, the question remains as to why Strauss would keep his philosophical preoccupations "private"--why be so provocative as to give a piece of music the same title as a work of philosophy if he wanted to keep this aspect to himself?

Part 2, "Orchestral Composition as Philosophical Critique," departs from a focus on Strauss's formation as a musical modernist in the 1880s and 1890s. Instead, Youmans makes analytical comments about Strauss's orchestral music from his first tone poem in 1887 to his last instrumental composition in 1945. Youmans begins this section by addressing the problem that Strauss seems to have experienced his musical breakthrough with his modernism-defining early tone poems before his philosophical breakthrough. If it is true that the musical breakthrough preceded the philosophical one, the rejection of metaphysical music cannot account for the tone poem Don Juan (1889), identified by the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus and others as the beginning of musical modernism. Youmans reconciles this discrepancy rather weakly by suggesting that once Strauss had his philosophical crisis, he saw how his compositional strategies already lent themselves to a philosophical critique in music. Another shaky moment in his argument occurs when Youmans asserts that sonata form was equated with metaphysical truth. The basis for this equation is set up in the prologue of the book with an overview of music aesthetics by way of a summary of a 1929 book by Felix Gatz. Youmans passes over, however, a distinction that Gatz makes between the categories of autonomous music (which includes sonata form) and absolute music (defined by aspiration to metaphysical truth).[1] Gatz does include the possibility of a theory of music that is both absolute and autonomous, but he does not authorize Youmans's assumption that because music in general was widely understood as metaphysical, sonata form was also understood as such.

Youmans needs to be able to assume that sonata form was equivalent to metaphysical truth in order to make his claim that in all of Strauss's tone poems, the "deformation" of sonata form signifies a rejection of metaphysics. Expectations of sonata form are set up and then not met: "[H]e invoked the form in order to make it fail, believing that the clarity with which he announced the paradigm would make its collapse easier to perceive" (p. 177). By making sonata form collapse, Strauss made metaphysics collapse. The problem with this type of approach is that it depends on being able to establish two things: first, what the specific formal expectations were exactly (what an "un-deformed" sonata form would be), and secondly, how the composer could have assumed that his strategy of failing to meet those expectations would have been understood as intentional and meaningful and not simply failure. Youmans himself seems ambivalent about this approach in that he repeatedly emphasizes that sonata form is not the key to the tone poems. Indeed, one of the book's most interesting topics is Strauss's attempt to provide "keys" to understanding his tone poems. There are titles and other verbal information in the score (Zarathustra, for instance, contains a quotation as preface and chapter headings taken from the Nietzsche text demarcating musical sections). Besides this, "Strauss attempted to shape the public perception of the intellectual content of his works through a carefully delimited and controlled release of information about the works. Information was communicated in only two ways" (p. 25). First, Strauss hired ghost writers to produce listener guides (Erläuterungen). Second, he planted his own remarks about his compositions in newspaper gossip columns. Such strategies seem to have been aimed at avoiding any direct admission of his intentions while at the same time trying to guide the listener. Nevertheless, Strauss often "expressed frustration that listeners did not understand him" (p. 176). Strauss's quandary concerning his audience and his elaborate solutions illustrate vividly the situation for modern composers, caught between popular and elite understanding of what constituted high art. If music was exalted as the highest of the arts, understood by composers themselves and also by the general public to have philosophical import, then composers were burdened with creating music that could be considered as such both by themselves and their audience. This context starts to explain why Strauss would simultaneously keep his erudition private and put it on display, as in the case of Zarathustra, and perhaps starts to account for Strauss's strange formal procedures.

In the final chapter, Youmans treats the final two poems, Sinfonia domestica and Eine Alpensinfonie, which he had earlier described as representing together a solution to philosophical issues through a celebration of family and nature. Youmans goes so far as to assert: "The philosophical problem that Strauss faced in his Nietzschean compositions--how to move beyond pure criticism to the creation of a positively defined worldview--was the same problem that Nietzsche himself faced and failed to solve. I would argue that Strauss found more success than Nietzsche, at least insofar as he found ways to conceptualize a life radically purged of metaphysics" (p. 222). This breathtaking claim is problematized by Youmans himself in that he observes how Strauss's credo of family and nature is destabilized by his alienating treatment of it through vulgarity, parody, intertextuality and general excess. Can it really be called arriving at a solution if Strauss continued his practice of distancing himself from any sign of sincere endorsement?

Youmans gives his characterization of Strauss's musical-philosophical solution a sudden, confusing twist in the final three paragraphs of the book. He brings up Strauss's final orchestral composition, the Metamorphosen (1945). This piece was discussed in chapter 4, and the book's concluding paragraphs make more sense as part of that chapter. Youmans apparently leaves it for the end, however, because he claims this piece shows how Strauss, in the aftermath of "Germany's cultural collapse and his own impending death, discovered that liberation from metaphysics produced nihilism" (p. 131). In his last words, Youmans makes the judgment that Strauss's rejection of metaphysics was a fatal error because it was nihilistic. Since the issue of nihilism was never raised in the discussion of any stage of Strauss's outlook, this conclusion comes as quite a surprise and leaves the reader wondering what its implications are, not least for the assertion made earlier in the chapter that Strauss had succeeded in finding a positive post-metaphysical worldview.

Despite the indication of the title, this is not a book for someone with a strong background in German intellectual history who would like to know more about Richard Strauss. It is a book for other Strauss specialists. Biographical details are taken as given. The part of the book given over to musical analysis assumes a thorough familiarity with recent secondary literature by other Strauss scholars, making it quite user-unfriendly for anyone else. For a concise account of Strauss's life and times that addresses the problems raised by Strauss and his music, including the question of the composer's relationship with the Third Reich, see the 1999 biography by Youmans's dissertation advisor, Bryan Gilliam.[2] With his thorough examination of primary documents, Youmans has provided significant information for consideration of a very complex topic; his work contributes to the evolving understanding of Richard Strauss.

Notes

[1]. Felix M. Gatz, Musik-Ästhetik in ihren Hauptrichtungen (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1929), pp. 48-50.

[2]. Bryan Gilliam, The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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Citation: Sanna Pederson. Review of Youmans, Charles, Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11663

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