The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (review)

Reviewed by: The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss Morten Kristiansen The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss. By Wayne Heisler. (Eastman Studies in Music, v. 64.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. (xi, 345 p. ISBN 9781580463218. $85.) Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index. Perhaps because Richard Strauss's ballet output includes just two original scores (Josephslegende and Schlagobers) and arrangements of harpsichord works by French baroque composer François Couperin— music unfamiliar to most audiences and typically dismissed by Strauss scholars—this book is the first detailed account of Strauss's lifelong engagement with ballet. Neither a rescue mission nor a product of the current project to redefine Strauss as a modernist, Heisler's excellent and original study contributes significantly to Strauss scholarship by meticulously fleshing out the sketchy accounts of his unfinished ballets and those using Couperin arrangements, placing all the projects within the context of dance history, and—perhaps most importantly—deepening our understanding of the aesthetics and ideology behind Strauss's interest in ballet and appropriation of eighteenth-century music. The book is divided into an introduction and two parts: part 1 features chapters on Die Insel Kythere (The Isle of Cythera, 1900) and Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph, 1914), part 2 on the Ballettsoirée (1923), Schlagobers (Whipped Cream, 1924), and Verklungene Feste: Tanzvisionen aus zwei Jahrhunderten (Bygone Celebrations: Dance Visions from Two Centuries, 1941). According to Heisler, these chapters "chronicle a gradual transformation from his modern-leaning, parodic conception of classical dance in the years leading up to World War I to a belated obsession with romantic-era ballet during World War II" (p. 6). To put Heisler's coverage in perspective, the most thorough account of Strauss's life and works, Norman Del Mar's Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (3 vols. [London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962-72]), spends a page and a half on Kythere, twenty-six on Josephslegende, thirteen on Schlagobers, and ten combined on the Couperin arrangements for the Ballettsoirée and Verklungene Feste (discussed as instrumental suites, not ballets). Heisler does not discuss the music comprehensively, but rather offers focused analyses to make specific points. The introduction notes the marginal status of dance in musicology, emphasizes the novelty of Heisler's multidisciplinary approach, and locates the study outside the main current of Strauss scholarship. Stating that his research centered on the genesis, premiere, and early reception of each work, he identifies his method as the book's chief asset: Perhaps the principle [sic] value of this book is the way in which Strauss's ballet collaborations . . . demand an inherently pan-disciplinary approach: the synthesis of published Strauss literature and materials . . . with unpublished and/or largely unexplored sources (scores and sketches, scenarios, production materials . . . , choreography . . . , scene and costume designs, reviews, and, if available, dance notation) in the wider context of music history and dance studies. (p. 5) The author labels his study "comfortably postrevisionist" (p. 5) and locates it outside the "revisionist" mainstream of Strauss studies seeking to elevate the composer's status from late romantic to modernist in the context of atonality and neoclassicism. This characterization of revisionism is incomplete, however. Rather than force Strauss into traditional modernist paradigms that [End Page 796] foreground musical style, "revisionism" has sought to broaden the definition of modernism to include aesthetics and other parameters. Although the opening chapter discusses ballets no one will ever experience— scenarios Strauss considered and his own unfinished Die Insel Kythere—its wide-ranging foray into virtually unexplored territory in order to explicate the meaning of ballet and the eighteenth century for Strauss in the 1890s make it the book's most original and valuable chapter. After summarizing Strauss's unrealistically complicated Kythere scenario involving eighteenth-century French aristocracy and peasants along with ancient Greece, Heisler examines scenarios by and correspondence between Strauss's would-be collaborators and the composer. Appealing to the term "classicist modernism," he concludes that they sought to rejuvenate the genre by replacing the superficial virtuosity and stories of late nineteenth-century ballet with pre-romantic dance and musical narrative dominated by set pieces. Heisler views their interest in self-conscious dance episodes and stylized classical ballet as directly influenced...

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