Romantic Dialogues

An opera about the relationship between music and words in opera?  On the face of it, this sounds like a sure recipe for disaster; yet in Richard Strauss’ hands, what started out as a treatise on music and drama became a living piece of music and drama in its own right.  In Capriccio, the characters spend a lot of time discussing what is more important in opera, the music or the words.  But the discussion is not entirely academic, as the protagonist, a beautiful young Countess, is wooed by a Poet and a Composer, and she can really use some help from art theory in making her choice between the two men.  Strauss wrote the libretto of the opera himself, in collaboration with the conductor Clemens Krauss.  Completed in 1941–42, it was the last of his fifteen operas.

Capriccio begins with a prelude scored, most unusually in opera, for a string sextet.  The inclusion of a piece of chamber music in a stage work has its own symbolic meaning.  This music is being played, as a work by the composer in the opera, to entertain the Countess and her guests (including the Theater Director, who sleeps through the entire performance).  The sextet represents “absolute” music, without words or program, which doesn’t interest the man of the theater, although the sensitive Countess is deeply moved by it.

The parts of the six string instruments in the prelude are woven together in a rich polyphonic tapestry that anticipates Strauss’ masterpiece from 1945, Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings.  The sextet is on a smaller scale, yet equally intriguing in its juxtaposition of distant chords and its combination of broad cantabile (“singing”) melodies with more tempestuous episodes.  The action of the opera takes place in a château near Paris around 1775, and the music contains numerous allusions to the music of that period.  At the same time, Strauss remained faithful to his own post-Romantic idiom, which no one handled more beautifully or more convincingly than he.

© 2026 Peter Laki

Ravel’s Sonata for violin and cello was written in memoriam Claude Debussy, who had died in 1918.  It marks an important departure from Ravel’s pre-war compositions.  Gradually turning away from his earlier “impressionism,” Ravel began to write in a crisper and wittier way, ushering in a new style that would be on full display in his last major works, the two piano concertos completed between 1929 and 1931.

The first movement has a warm and lyrical opening melody, contrasted by a second theme with a series of dissonant major seventh leaps and a syncopated third idea.  The second movement is a scherzo in an extremely fast tempo that plays ambivalent games with the major and minor modes on one hand, and duple and triple meters on the other.  There are extended bitonal passages (different keys heard simultaneously); both instruments play pizzicato (plucking the strings) for long stretches of time.  At the end, the cello’s final note, C, comes as a great surprise, since the entire movement suggested A as the main tonal center.

In the slow third movement, the main melody gradually becomes louder and faster, only to return to its initial state at the end.  At the climactic moment, the major-seventh theme from the first movement returns (we will hear it again in the finale).

The last movement is extremely lively.  It strings together several folk-dance-like tunes, some of which are in changing meter and make use of bold harmonies and several special playing techniques.  Like the second movement, the fourth ends with a surprise pizzicato C, this time played by both instruments as full C major chords.

© 2026 Peter Laki

In the last four years of his short life, Schubert began to concentrate on the major instrumental genres of piano sonata, string quartet and symphony in a way he had not done before.  He was taking on the very genres in which Beethoven had excelled, and articulating his personal response to his older contemporary.  It was a creative response, almost completely free from any direct influence; Schubert emulated Beethoven’s ambition and his uncompromising attitude but not his actual way of writing.

Schubert’s two string quartets in A minor and D minor were intended for the same Schuppanzigh Quartet who had made Beethoven’s quartets their specialty.  (Schuppanzigh, though, only ever performed the A minor work.)  These works were written at a time when Schubert suffered his first major bout of illness, as a result of the syphilis he had contracted the year before.  It was in March 1824, the very month of the D minor quartet, that Schubert wrote his often-quoted letter to his friend, the painter Leopold Kupelwieser:

Imagine a man whose health will never be right again, and whose sheer despair over this ever makes things worse and worse, instead of better; imagine a man, I say, whose most brilliant hopes have perished, to whom the felicity of love and friendship have nothing to offer but pain, at best, whom enthusiasm (at least of the stimulating kind) for all things beautiful threatens to forsake, and I ask you, is he not a miserable, unhappy being?

In the light of these desperate words, it is hardly surprising that Schubert chose one of his most tragic songs, Der Tod und das Mädchen (“Death and the Maiden”), as the basis of a set of variations in the D minor quartet.  This song was one of twelve written in 1816–17 on words by Matthias Claudius (1740–1815), an eminent poet and essayist from Northern Germany.  In two contrasted stanzas, we first hear the anguished plea of a young girl, followed by the eerie yet consoling voice of Death, assuring the girl that death is not punishment but gentle sleep.  For his variation theme in the quartet, Schubert used the austere piano introduction to the song, slightly altered.  All the other movements include their own relentlessly repeated rhythmic patterns, a technique that unifies the entire quartet and reinforces its dark, dramatic character.

© 2026 Peter Laki