Richard Strauss – Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks (1895)

Yikes, I’m falling behind! I’m going to keep backdating posts until I catch up — which I should have time to do today.  Don’t die on me, blog project!

Last time I listened to any of the Strauss tone poems was my sophomore year of college, when I still hadn’t gotten over my teenage aversion to late Romanticism.  At the time I wasn’t too excited about Don Juan (1889) or Don Quixote (1898).  But I have a hard time imagining that I wouldn’t have liked  Till Eulenspiegel.  I mean, if anything in the 19th century could be compared to Mr. Bungle, or to the Bungle-inspired genre-bending electronic music I was writing at the time, it’s this.  It’s got motifs recast in multiple genres, like the snarky horn melody at the beginning that much later gets turned into a triumphant fanfare.  It’s got abrupt shifts of mood and style, like the passage where a violent reworking of the early nose-thumbing clarinet motif gives way to an eerie extended riff on a half-diminished seventh chord (the signature chord of the piece, and possibly of the entire late 19th century), which then suddenly turns into a perky little dance tune, which is itself suddenly cut off by brooding chordal gestures in the winds.  It’s got tweaked and messed-up versions of known styles, like the early passage in which quick staccato pairs of sixteenth notes appear over mechanically repeated viola chords, like an odd parody of middle-period Beethoven.  It uses sharp dissonance for sarcasm.  It’s even got a section that sounds a little like evil circus music.  And most startlingly, Strauss uses orchestral effects that sound an awful lot like electronic reverb:  cutting off a note played by four horns but holding the same note in the English horn, or having the oboes and English horns play a motif once after the rest of the winds have stopped playing it.

On that note:  did I say Rimsky was a great orchestrator?  Let me rephrase:  Rimsky was a highly skilled orchestrator.  Strauss is a great orchestrator.  I can’t say I’ve never heard the late Romantic orchestra used so colorfully and imaginatively, because like I said, I’ve heard early Strauss before (and then there’s Mahler…) — but I can say that I didn’t fully appreciate it until now.  The piece is alternately huge and chamber-like;  sometimes it manages to be both at once, with a single instrument suddenly coming to the foreground in the middle of an enormous texture.  Sometimes there seem to be ten things going on at once.  Doublings frequently fuse seemingly unrelated instruments into new, rich timbres.  I’d have to go through and analyze the piece in a lot more detail to say anything very specific, but I’ll give one example:  toward the end of the piece, there’s a gesture in which the winds play a half-diminished seventh chord, going down one inversion every eighth note.  It starts in the oboes, English horn and clarinet, but by the end, it’s played by the clarinet, bass clarinet and bassoons.  The transition is seamless.  It’s as if the entire wind section were a giant calliope.

Finally, a thought on program music.  I don’t think it particularly adds to the piece to interpret particular passages as representing Till flirting with girls, riding a horse or making fun of academics.  There are a few passages that clearly seem to evoke cultural iconography — especially the “academics” passage, which drips with old university pomp — but more often the connection is so tenuous that I had a hard time even finding the representations in question.  Supposedly the second half of the piece is Till being marched to the gallows and hanged;  there’s definitely a violent event toward the end, but it sounds more like a beheading than a hanging, with its multiple strokes interrupting Till’s signature motif.   The music that leads up to it is not something I would ever identify as a funeral march, and it doesn’t maintain its dark mood with any consistency.   Strauss apparently had to be pressed to say anything too specific about the narrative, and I think that was a wise decision — not least because trying to follow a written program while listening to a piece isn’t a very artistically satisfying experience, and the series of events is too long to memorize beforehand.  The only way to integrate the story into the music is to include a narrator or singer, but that risks coming across as reductive, or distracting, or just plain silly.  Luckily, the music works perfectly well without any program other than “something violent happens to a prankish protagonist,” and I’m happy to listen to it with nothing more complicated than that in mind.

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