Tuesday October 13, 2009

National Repertory Orchestra
Carl Topilow, conductor
Richard Strauss: A Hero's Life, Op.40 44:49
Also, Charley talks with Colorado Ballet artistic director Gil Boggs about their production of Don Quixote, which opens Friday.

Richard Strauss (1864-1949): Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life), Opus 40
The Hero
The Hero's Adversaries
The Hero's Courship
The Hero's Battlefield
The Hero's Works of Peace
The Hero's Retreat from the World, and Fulfillment

``Beethoven's Eroica is so little liked by our conductors and, for that reason, now only rarely performed,'' wrote Strauss in 1898, ``that to fulfill a pressing need, I am composing a rather large tone poem entitled A Hero's Life, admittedly without a funeral march, but still in E flat, with lots of horns, which are always a yardstick of heroism.''
Strauss finished the work on December 27, 1898, and conducted the first performance on March 3, 1899 in Frankfurt. The audience and the critics assumed that the ``hero'' was Strauss himself. ``It is enough to know that there is a hero, fighting his enemies'' was all the composer would say.
Some amount of controversy has emerged regarding the intended program of A Hero's Life. The various sections of the work all have titles: ``The Hero,'' ``The Hero's Adversaries,'' ``The Hero's Helpmate,'' ``The Hero's Battlefield,'' ``The Hero's Works of Peace,'' and ``The Hero's Escape from the World and his Fulfillment.''
By ``adversaries,'' Strauss clearly meant his own critics. After the premiere, he wrote to his father that the critics ``spewed poison and gall, principally because they thought they could read from the analysis that the carpers and adversaries, who are thoroughly hatefully portrayed, were meant to be themselves, and the hero myself--the latter being only partly true.''
The ``helpmate'' is Pauline Strauss. The composer once said that A Hero's Life was a better introduction to his wife than any amount of handshaking. ``It's my wife I wanted to show,'' he told Romain Rolland. ``She is very complex, very feminine...never like herself, at every minute different from how she had been the moment before.''
In the section marked ``The Hero's Works of Peace,'' Strauss quotes from no fewer than nine of his own works, including Death and Transfiguration, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Macbeth and Also Sprach Zarathustra.
Reaction to the first performance of the work was mixed. One wag noted: ``This is no hero's life, but a dog's life.'' Others found the piece to be ``smug self-satisfaction'' or ``a blatant blowing of his own horns (all eight of them).''
At least one reviewer liked the music: ``It assuredly represents the peak of Richard Strauss' creative work, and displays the good qualities of his music, rather than its more controversial aspects. As always, it shows a mature composition technique. The orchestration is brilliant, and from the purely musical side, there are passages of remarkable beauty.''
The score calls for piccolo, 3 flutes, 4 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, percussion, 2 harps and strings.