Capriccio (1942)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Capriccio (1942)

Prelude

Closing scene arranged by David Matthews

In 1775, in which year Strauss’s last opera is set, there was no such thing as a string sextet and, even if there had been, it would not have sounded like the Prelude to Capriccio. But Capriccio, which wears its anachronisms as unconcernedly as Der Rosenkavalier, is not about authenticity. Distantly based on Casti’s libretto for Salieri’s Prima la musica e poi la parole, it is about the age-long conflict between music and words - the former represented by the composer Flamand, the latter by the poet Olivier, his rival for the symbolic favours of the Countess Madeleine.

The string-sextet Prelude, appropriately scaled for performance in her Château near Paris, is Flamand’s tribute to the Countess and, on Strauss’s part, an inspired alliance of his own late-romantic style with classical form and classical values - just as the the Oboe Concerto and the Second Horn Concerto were to be. It is based on one of those infinitely flexible little themes so characteristic of late Strauss. Introduced by first violin in the opening bars, it is immediately developed in elaborate but always spontaneous counterpoint. That theme is still there, repeated as an ostinato on the first cello, when the more extended and more expressive second subject makes its entry. Except in an oddly stormy episode of orchestral tremolandos at the beginning of the development, it is all very civilised and conscientiously observant of the conventions of sonata form.

At the end of the opera, equally attracted to Flamand and Olivier, Madeleine is unable to choose between them. Nor can she decide how the opera they are writing, about the triangular situation in the Château, should end. The last scene begins with a magical introduction, the Countess standing alone on a balcony on the moonlight while a solo horn recalls a melody - heard in earlier scenes in the opera - which Strauss had first used in his Krämerspiegel song cycle 22 years earlier. In fact, the whole scene, which is virtually a soprano solo, is a sustained study in nostalgia featuring a series of musical memories, the most prominent among them being the sonnet which Flamand and Olivier have written for her and which she sings to her own harp accompaniment. Questioning herself in the mirror, “Can there be an ending,” she asks, “which is not trivial?”