posted 10-04- 11:04 AM               

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"Certainly Richard Strauss had very litle to do with the twentieth century as we know it....By all the aesthetic and philosophic yardsticks that we must apply, he was not a man of our time....The great thing about the music of Richard Strauss is that it presents and substantiates an argument which transcends all the dogmatisms of art -- all questions of style and taste and idiom -- all the frivolous, effete preoccupations of the chronologist. It presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time by not being of it, who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument of individuality -- the argument that a man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes....

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"Richard Strauss seems to me to be more than the the greatest man of music of our time. He is in my opinion a central figure in today's most crucial dilemma of aesthetic morality -- the hopeless confusion that aries when we attempt to contain the inscrutible pressures of self-guiding artistic destiny within the neat, historical summation of collective chronology....In him we have one of those rare, intense figures in whom the whole process of historical evolution is defied.

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"The generation, or rather the generations, that have grown up since the early years of this century have considered the most serious of Strauss's errors to be his failure to share actively in the technical advances of his time....For these critics it is inconceivable that a man of such gifts would not wish to participate in the expansion of the musical language...

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"One could, I suppose, attempt a parallel with the last works of Beethoven by pointing to the fact that they too follow upon a dreary desert of inactivity, from which Beethoven emerged to find not only the assured step of his youth but, indeed, a means to express the mature deliberation of his later years. It is my view that the late works of Strauss afford much the same opportunity to contemplate the mating of a philisophical stance and a technical accomplishment indivisible from it. I feel that in virtually all of his late works Strauss's youthful tendency to celebrate through the techniques of art the human conquest of material order, to applaud the existential character who flings himself unquestioningly against the world -- in other words, to be the hero of Ein Heldenleben -- is now sublimated, indeed, wholly vanquished, by a technical mastery which no longer needs to prove itself, to flaunt its virility -- but which has become inseparable from those qualities of sublime resignation that are the ultimate achievements of great age and great wisdom...."

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-Glen Gould

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-Sv =FC=

WWI in SDOE!

posted 10-05- 03:32 PM               

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