Strauss: Daphne

Day 252

Strauss: Daphne

Soloists

WDR symphony orchestra and chorus

Semyon Bychkov

I’m back from my holiday so no more sea-inspired pieces. Instead I want to start to fill in some of the gaps of major composers who I have not yet featured in the project. The first is Richard Strauss. I’ve never been a Strauss enthusiast - indeed I like to shock my orchestral friends and colleagues by saying that I much prefer the music of Johann Strauss to that of Richard!  To me Strauss often has dazzling ideas at the start of a piece but then rather falls into a rut. I recently played Don Juan: the opening is of course a marvel, but so much of what follows is rather routine and even manufactured. You could say the same for many of the big Strauss tone poems - Ein Heldenleben has a very striking first couple of minutes but after that I am not sure that I have ever managed to pay attention long enough to hear the whole work.

The only Strauss opera I have seen is Salome, which I have seen a couple of times - once rather incongruously in a big tent in Sheffield, though I have also heard a few of the others, Daphne however was new to me, I have to say I found it really hard going. I find Strauss’ harmonic language difficult to bear at time with its constant chromatic slipping and sliding and his orchestration is so thick and complex that is becomes glutenous far too often. The constant filigree detail in the texture and the sheer number of notes to me rapidly becomes very tiring. 

At the end of the opera the heroine gets absorbed into a tree. The transformation music is often held up as one of the great moments in the composer’s output. I certainly found it to be the most appealing part of the opera but even so I can’t say that I was gripped by it in the way that I half expected to be, judging by some of the descriptions of the music that I have read. Those very high violin figures at the end were quite hard to listen to and gave the music an edge which I don’t think that the composer could really have intended. 

I had hoped that devoting some time to this opera and giving it serious attention might have opened up the music for Strauss for me in a way that has not happened before. But alas it didn’t. Daphne is a comparatively short opera but time listening to it did seem to pass very slowly. It certainly won’t be trying out any of the longer Strauss operas any time soon.