Gesänge des Orients Op.77 (1928)

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Gesänge des Orients Op.77 (1928)

Ihre Augen

Schwung

Liebesgeschenke

Die allmächtige

Die Huldigung

According to no less an authority than Christine Brewer, who has so successfuly made a speciality of them, Strauss’s Gesänge des Orients are “very challenging.” They are so challenging that few other singers have ever taken them on and, indeed, it is difficult to work out what kind of voice the composer was thinking of as he wrote them. The fact that they are dedicated to Elisabeth Schumann is no real clue since she shares the dedication with her husband, the conductor Karl Alwin: the gesture was surely intended as a mark of respect for the pair of them rather than an indication that they were written specially for her to sing. Certainly, they never became part of her repertoire. They were actually first performed by a tenor, Koloman von Pataky in Berlin in 1929 – which makes sense at least in that the objects of adoration, whether wine or women, are seen from a masculine point of view in all five poems. On the other hand, the exquisitely decorative vocal line requires the kind of flexibility, though combined with a wide range and breadth of colour, associated more with the sopano than the tenor voice.

Another question is why Strauss applied himself to these “songs from the orient,” an unlikely project at any time, when he seemed to have all but lost interest in composing Lieder. A possible answer is that, having intermittently set a few Hafiz poems from Goethe’s Westöstlicher Divan over the past ten years and just having completed Die Aegyptische Helena, he now had time to give the Persian poet more consistent attention. On this occasion, however, he turned not to Goethe for a German version but to Hans Bethge, a poet he would have known at the very least for his translations from the Chinese in Die chinesische Flöte, where Mahler had found his texts for Das Lied von der Erde. Strauss selected four poems from Bethge’s Lieder der Hafis and, curiously, one from Die chinesische Flöte.

If the presence of a drinking song (Schwung) amid four love songs, and of one poem from the Chinese (Liebesgeschenke) amid four poems from the Persian, disqualifies the Gesänge des Orients from consideration as a cycle, the apparent anomalies are necessary diversions. Without them, the progressive accumulation of erotic devotion, from extravagant admiration in Ihre Augen to abject adoration in Die Allmächtige and near-masochism in Die Huldigung, would be too rich a mixture. For a similar reason perhaps Strauss avoids the lush orientalism of the kind adopted by Szymanowski in his 1911 Love Songs of Hafiz and devises his own exotic idiom from the melismaatic line characteristic of his vocal writing at the time and an elaborately decorative, harmonically oblique piano part.

The first of the love songs, Ihre Augen, is relatively modest in this respect, while the drinking song, Schwung (which makes an interesting comparison with Mahler’s orientalist Der Trunkene im Frühling) is concerned more with defiant energy than idiom. Liebesgeschenke, on the other hand, touches on the fanciful extremes of Strauss’s synthesised exoticsm, in both the voice and the piano parts, in the second and third stanzas. Die Allmächtige, a hymn to a Persian kind Turandot, veers alarmingly between the imperious and the tender, ending in melismatic ecstasy in the vocal line and a gently lyrical piano postlude. The last song, Die Huldigung, is set as a kind of scherzo although, as the last line rising on an arabesque to top C confirms, vocal ardour is not reduced even by a piano part as brilliantly irresponsible as this.