Suite in B flat for 13 wind instruments, Op.4

Richard Strauss (1864-1949)

Suite in B flat for 13 wind instruments, Op.4

Praeludium: allegretto

Romanze: andante

Gavotte: allegro

Introduction & Fugue: andante cantabile - allegro con brio

The first performance of the Suite in B flat on 18 November 1884 was also the occasion of Richard Strauss’s first experience as a conductor. The wind players of the Meiningen Orchestra had seen the score before but, on tour in Munich at the time, they had no time to rehearse it with the young composer, who just had to go and get on with it. “I conducted my piece in a slight state of coma,” he recalled decades later. “I can only remember today that I made no blunders. What it was like apart from that I could not say.”

The Suite was written on the suggestion of Hans von Bülow, the famous conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra, who had been impressed by Strauss’s Serenade in E flat for the same wind ensemble (two each of flutes, oboes, clarinet and bassoon, double bassoon and four horns). Bülow had even suggested what form the new work should take but by then the eager young composer had already written the first two movements and could comply with the conductor’s request only in the last two - which explains how a gavotte and a fugue came to be added to the essentially romantic first half of the work.

The usual critical comment on the Suite is that its constructions contain little or no development - as though Strauss had been writing some undergraduate exercise and found wanting. That is not the point, however. Leaving aside the question whether fully developed sonata movements would have been appropriate to the circumstances anyway, the point of the work is its freshness and its spontaneity. As the son of the distinguished principal horn of the Munich Court Orchestra, Strauss might have been expected to know something about scoring for wind instruments, but the delight he takes in doing it is even more of an asset than the technique itself. The joyful opening of the work, abundant in neatly integrated textural detail, is only the first example.

While the intervention of a solo oboe with its expressive contrasting material is a particularly attractive feature of the Praeludium, the Romanze is much the most inspired movement as far as both melodic interest and instrumental colouring are concerned. The clarinet, in its romantic introductory gesture and the wide ranging melody it sustains over the triplet arpeggios of its partner as a second subject, is fondly and effectively treated. In the meantime there is an equally idiomatic passage for horn with a fanfare-like theme that later appears as a counterpoint to the clarinet melody.

Strauss does not seem to have taken Bülow’s request for a gavotte too seriously. In spite of its title, the third movement is more a scherzo than anything else. Wittily based for the most part on its first three notes, it includes a peculiarly exotic-sounding middle section with a drone bass which, however, is soon swept aside by the three notes for a spontaneously extended reprise of the first part. The last movement is introduced by a very welcome recall of material from the Romanze, including the clarinet melody now transferred to oboe in B flat minor and sounding even more like an anticipation of a famously amorous passage in Don Juan. As for von Bülow’s fugue, it sets out bravely in B flat major as soon as the tempo changes to Allegro con brio and, although it does not sustain its formal pretensions for very long, it does culminate in a most effectively organised stretto to lead into the run-away coda.