Beecham's Salome

Thomas Beecham had intended that his first Covent Garden season should open in February 1910 with what was bound to be a sure-fire sensation, the British premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome. There was a problem, however. The Lord Chamberlain's office, responsible for stage censorship in Britain since 1737, refused to grant it a performing license. Oscar Wilde's play of the same name, on which Strauss's libretto was based, had been similarly banned twenty-eight years earlier, on the grounds that it portrayed on stage the New Testament figure of St John the Baptist, and the current Lord Chamberlain (Earl Spencer, great-grandfather of Princess Diana) was not prepared to change his mind on the matter. Beecham opened his season with Elektra instead, but continued to do battle over Salome with the Lord Chamberlain who, nine months later, at last gave in, but at a price.

The Baptist was to be allowed back into the opera, though he was to be called, not Jokanaan or John, but ‘a Prophet’, while in the final scene the executioner was to hand Salome a blood-stained sword, rather than the saint’s head on a silver charger. Salome’s hymn to the head was to be bowdlerised and all Biblical allusions in the text eliminated. The action was to be moved from Judea to Greece and the Five Jews were to become Five Learned Men. For the sake of getting Salome produced in London at last, Strauss accepted the changes.

The opera was licensed on 1 December, one week before the opening. Tickets for its opening night sold out within eighty-five minutes of the box-office opening, and before long touts were offering seats at more than double their face value. During the final dress rehearsal Salome, the lissom Finnish soprano Aïno Ackté, found that the ‘blood’ dripping from the sword was staining her fingers and, using ‘some very drastic words in French’, wiped it off on the cloak of the nearest supernumerary. It was not a problem she had encountered in Germany, where she had held the charger bearing the head.

Beecham stopped the rehearsal and in the hope of finding a solution ordered one of his staff to make an urgent telephone call to the Lord Chamberlain's office. After a long wait the shirt-sleeved stage manager rushed to the front of the stage and knelt before Beecham, who was waiting in the orchestra pit. ‘We can use a tray instead of a sword’, he shouted, ‘so long as there is no head on it.’ The news was greeted with cheers. Comedy had finally turned into farce.

Beecham was tireless. The dress rehearsal took place in the afternoon. In the morning he had taken a three-hour rehearsal for his first concert for the Philharmonic Society, which he conducted that same evening at Queen’s Hall. The concert came at an awkward moment, but he had postponed it once already, and for the sake of future relations with the society he could hardly delay it again. It was not the only concert he conducted during the final week of Salome rehearsals.

Three nights earlier he had conducted a programme of Wagner excerpts with his orchestra at the Opera House; and on the evening before that had given a concert of eighteenth-century operatic music at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, at which Maggie Teyte sang arias by Méhul, Grétry, Paisiello, Isouard, Monsigny and Dalayrac. Teyte claimed to friends that she had an affair with Beecham, but, if true, it seems it was a brief one.

Not surprisingly, given the enormous amount of pre-publicity it had received, the first night of Salome on 8 December was a succès fou, though several reviewers found the opera less musically satisfying than Elektra (Ernest Newman took the opposite view.) The Lord Chamberlain’s office came in for a good deal of criticism. ‘Truly the ways of the Censorship are past finding out’, wrote the Times critic, who wondered how anybody in the audience could possibly have been expected to miss ‘the very striking coincidences’ between the fate of the Prophet and that of John the Baptist. ‘Of what avail was it’, asked the Sunday Times, ‘that Salome had to say “Ich will dir folgen” [“I want to follow you”] instead of “Ich will deinen Mund küssen” [“I want to kiss your mouth”], when she expressed by every fibre of her being the very abandon of amorous desire?’

In the heat of the performance some of the textual alterations were forgotten by the singers, though if these were noticed by the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s staff who were present, none of them mentioned it. Either they did not speak German or they chose to adopt a diplomatic silence.

By all accounts Ackté’s performance in the title-role was remarkable. She expressed emotion ‘not only by glance and gesture, but by sensuous curve of bodily movement’, said one critic, who added that although the music was ‘rather exacting’ for her (recordings suggest that the top of her voice was not her strongest point), she sang ‘skilfully’ and with ‘rare expressiveness’. It was noted with approval that, contrary to the practice in Germany, she performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ herself, rather than handing over the task to a double. Less appreciated was the silver tray, which, though it lacked a head, was filled with ‘gore’. Ackté found it ‘inartistic and rather revolting’ and, after the sixth of the ten performances, asked if it could not be covered with a cloth, so that ‘people may imagine what they want’. Company manager Archibald Archdeacon passed on Ackté’s request to the Lord Chamberlain's Comptroller, who replied that ‘Lord Spencer says “yes”, the tray can be covered with a cloth, only care must be taken not to build up a great heap in it which would look suggestive.’

So great was the ridicule poured on the Lord Chamberlain’s office for its part in the Salome affair that many imagined it could not be long before it was relieved of its licensing duties, but another fifty-eight years and two world wars were to pass before stage censorship in Britain, along with the Lord Chamberlain’s role in it, was finally abolished in 1968.

This post is adapted from Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, the acclaimed biography of Britain’s greatest conductor by John Lucas. It has been reissued in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary in March 2011 of Beecham’s death. ‘This is the best biography of a musician I have read for a very long time,’ said the International Record Review of the hardcover, while Classical Music claimed that this ‘thorough, exhaustive and often highly amusing biography will...re-establish Beecham as one of the foremost musical personalities of the last hundred years.’ The book is available now in paperback from all good booksellers.

Richard Strauss' Kometentanz

As promised at the end of Wayne Heisler Jr’s post, Mr Mlakar and Richard Strauss, here is an excerpt from The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, recently published by the University of Rochester Press:

In addition to tone poems, numerous songs, and nearly perennial operatic musings, several dance scenarios passed over Strauss’s desk (or may have done so) in the years leading up to Kythere. Here, a brief survey of this composer’s encounters with ballet in the 1890s is in order.

As early as spring 1895, the litterateur Otto Julius Bierbaum had his sights set on Strauss to compose the music for his ballet scenario Pan im Busch (Pan in the Rose Bush). However, whether or not this plan was presented formally to Strauss at that time remains unclear; in the end, Felix Mottl created a score for Pan, which had its premiere in Karlsruhe on March 20, 1900. Bierbaum was not the only writer who desired to collaborate with Strauss on a ballet during the 1890s. In February 1896, Frank Wedekind wrote to the composer proposing a ballet entitled Die Flöhe oder Der Schmerzenstanz (The Fleas, or The Dance of Pain), a text that had been in the works for several years. Although Strauss apparently took this prospect seriously (Schuh reports that the composer even began sketching music for it), he abandoned Die Flöhe shortly thereafter. Next, in March 1898, the writer Richard Dehmel offered Strauss Lucifer. From Dehmel’s surviving correspondence with the composer, the latter seems to have found the scenario promising. Strauss may even have begun one short musical sketch for Lucifer: on page 68 of the composer’s Sketchbook No. 7 (ca. 1900–1), there is a passage labeled “Ballet. Solo mit Chor. II. Akt Schluss” (Ballet. Soloist with choir. Act Two finale). The music, in C major and 6/8 meter, is not fitted to any text, but Dehmel’s project is the only one of the ballets that Strauss took into purview in the 1890s that employs choruses at the end of each of its seven acts. Nevertheless, like Wedekind’s scenario before it, Lucifer languished after initial enthusiasm.

Aside from his own Die Insel Kythere, the ballet that seems to have piqued Strauss’s interest most strongly in these years was Paul Scheerbart’s Kometentanz (Dance of the Comets). On February 25, 1900, the composer reported to his parents, “The author Paul Scheerbart sent me a very pretty sketch for a one-act ballet: Kometentanz, an astral pantomime, which I will immediately set to music. Because one at least does not have to worry about singers and can storm about in the orchestra.” This is an interesting comment given Strauss’s miserable operatic track record at the time. The composer also articulated his balletic intentions to Romain Rolland, who recorded an account of Scheerbart’s scenario as narrated to him by Strauss in his diary entry for March 9, 1900—the day on which he and Strauss visited the Louvre together. Rolland also recorded that “the maître de ballet in Berlin has turned down [Kometentanz] ‘as not serious!’” In light of this information, it is a further testimony to Strauss’s commitment to Kometentanz that he misrepresented (albeit lightheartedly) its fate in Berlin when pitching the ballet to Gustav Mahler, who was at the time director of the Vienna Court Opera:

I am in the course of writing a one- or two-act burlesque ballet . . . —naturally something departing wholly from the accustomed hopping-about—by Paul Scheerbart. Would you accept the ballet for the Vienna Opera, have the first performance and use some nice scenery? On the strength of my honest face? If there is a chance of doing it anywhere else, I should prefer not to put on the first performance here in Berlin. It will be ready to be performed about autumn 1901.

Mahler’s answer followed promptly:

Your ballet is accepted in advance!—If I seem to attach a condition, it is only an elaboration of my unconditional agreement: I must have a look at the scenario mainly on account of the cost of the scenery. Could you let me see it, and also allow our set designers, wardrobe master, etc. to make a very rough estimate? In a few days you will have my answer, which you can then take as a binding acceptance. . . . I regard it as a matter of honour for the Vienna Court Opera to have the première. That you will be pleased with the production I can guarantee!

Strauss appears to have taken the possibility of a Viennese premiere for his first ever ballet quite seriously. In his Sketchbook No. 6 (ca. 1899–1911) there are approximately twenty-five pages of musical jottings for Kometentanz as indicated by textual cues, including: “with kind queries and bows to the king,” the agent for the dance performances in Scheerbart’s scenario; “the poet,” also a central character; and “nightingales and among them the contrasting music of the spheres,” referring to the two principal acoustic motives that Scheerbart specified should recur throughout the ballet. Where these sketches are identified, they seem to correspond mostly to act one of Kometentanz, and unfold in chronological order vis-à-vis the narrative. Strauss’s music is, however, far from composed; it is no surprise, then, that in the extant correspondence between him and Mahler there is no further conversation about Scheerbart’s ballet. Perhaps it did not meet Mahler’s “condition,” proving too expensive an undertaking for Vienna.

Mr Mlakar and Richard Strauss

Think of Richard Strauss and it’s the operas that spring to mind, or the tone poems, perhaps even the concertos. Strauss’s ballet music, now the subject of a fascinating new book by Wayne Heisler Jr., The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss, is something of a forgotten treasure. Here Professor Heisler describes how he discovered this music, and a historic meeting in Slovenia with two of the composer's original choreographers.

My earliest serious encounters with Richard Strauss’s music were as an undergraduate at DePaul University in Chicago (1989–1994). First, there were the many opportunities to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra—Orchestra Hall is just a short “L” ride away from DePaul’s Lincoln Park campus and the School of Music. I recall, too, many informal listening sessions with my music-major friends, including my hall- and roommate Oto Carrillo, who is now a horn player with the Chicago Symphony and a member of DePaul’s horn faculty. As a pianist, I had a collection of recordings that was dominated by piano music; not surprisingly, as a horn player Oto had a wealth of recordings of late-nineteenth-century orchestral music: Mahler, Bruckner, and, of course, Richard Strauss. My first experiences hearing and studying scores for such works as Tod und Verklärung or Till Eulenspiegel were “after hours” in the dorms.

Like most undergraduate music programs to this day, mine offered non-vocalists very little formal exposure to opera, much less ballet music. (The 'why’s' for this situation are too complex to unpack here, but suffice it to say that an almost exclusive focus on instrumental compositions in music history and theory clouds the perspectives of many audiences, performers, and composers throughout history.) It was not until I entered a master’s program in musicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that I began to research, study, and love music for the stage, including works by Richard Strauss. During my first year at Madison I took a work-study gig under Karlos Moser, then the Program Director of the University Opera. As it turned out, the big production that season was an English-language version of Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Through researching the production history of Rosenkavalier, including staging, cuts, and translations, I came to know the opera intimately. More transformative, however, were the lessons I learned about the non-linearity of history through that opera. Although I was a bit overwhelmed at the time, it was fruitful for a budding musicologist to become engaged with opera history, including Rossini and Wagner, via Rosenkavalier, and through the ears and worldviews of Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss’s ballet scores (who knew?) initially came to my attention in Professor Susan Cook’s stimulating interdisciplinary musicology seminary on dance and music in the twentieth century. Two of the topics I presented on that semester were the Ziegfeld Follies and Strauss’s 1924 ballet Schlagobers—readers of my book will see that these seemingly disparate interests turned out to be complementary!

While I was a Ph.D. student in musicology at Princeton University, I received grants from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) and Germanistic Society of America/Fulbright, respectively, to live and study in Germany. The latter residency, when I was a research fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, proved to be formative for my life and work. While I was in Munich, I had many experiences that would impact my study of Strauss and his ballets, both directly and indirectly: receiving guidance from Strauss specialists Dr. Reinhold Schlötterer and Dr. Roswitha Schlötterer-Traimer, who were extremely generous with their knowledge and time; spending days at the Richard-Strauss-Institut in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where my chosen work space in the institute library overlooked the composer’s beloved Zugspitze; purchasing a cheap Bayernkarte or a Schönes-Wochenende ticket and traveling to nowhere-specific on local and regional trains; taking time out to visit as many churches as possible decorated by the Asam brothers—Cosmas Damian Asam (1686–1739) and Egid Quirin Asam (1692–1750)—whose puffed up German rococo sensitized my palate for Strauss’s unfinished ballet Die Insel Kythere (1900), as well as his late ballet Verklungene Feste (1941); and, along with other scholars, getting an informal tour of Strauss’s Garmisch villa with his grandson, Dr. Christian Strauss - the unplanned capstone of a weekend-long seminar on rhythm and meter in Strauss’s music, hosted by the Strauss-Institute. This opportunity was eye-opening for me: because the Strauss villa is not open to the public, it has resisted for the most part an idealized representation of the composer, quite unlike Wagner’s Wahnfried in Bayreuth. The presence of 'everyday' objects (at least to a Bavarian of Strauss’s generation)—carved and decorated wooden crosses or mounted stag heads—alongside more ‘sublime’ Nippsachen (knick-knackery), such as eighteenth-century porcelain figurines, is quite consonant with Strauss’s musical art, I think.

Acknowledging the many people, places, and events in Germany that contributed to my research for and eventual writing of the book, the most inspirational experience during my residency there was actually a weekend in the spring of 2001 that I spent in Ljubljana, Slovenia, working in the home of Pino Mlakar (1907–2006), the last surviving collaborator of Richard Strauss. Mr. Mlakar and his wife Pia (1910–2000) were the choreographers of Verklungene Feste. Having solicited information on that largely unknown ballet via a letter, I received a warm response from Mr. Mlakar inviting me to Ljubljana. Materially, the reason for the trip was to study his personal copy of the Kinetogramm (dance score) for Verklungene Feste, notated in Labannotation. More consequential, however, was the opportunity to go over the extant materials with Mr. Mlakar himself, and learn of the many, many aspects of performance(s) that no written record can capture.

I was welcomed at the door by Veronika Mlakar, Pino and Pia’s daughter who is also a dancer. If my memory serves me correctly, she offered me coffee and got me situated at a table in the parlor with the Kinetogramm. Immediately I discovered that critical details of the musical arrangements and plot had been lost to history—as I posit in the book, this cannily follows the allegory of the ballet itself. After working for about ½ hour or so, I heard a slow shuffling coming from a hallway off the room, and after several minutes Mr. Mlakar greeted me as ‘Herr Heisler aus München’. (Although I am an American, the fact that I was visiting from Munich meant a lot to Mr. Mlakar, who had served as ballet master at the Staatsoper there for most of the 1930s, and from 1952–1954.) Although he was already in his 90s, Mr. Mlakar spent several hours with me over the next two days, even clarifying—embodying!—aspects of the dance notation with his feet, arms, and hands. In between our talks, when Mr. Mlakar disappeared once again down that hallway, Veronika assisted me and offered deep insights as she had danced in Verklungene Feste when it was revived in the 1950s. Also memorable was an impassioned conversation Mr. Mlakar, Veronika, and I had over a delicious homemade lunch about George W. Bush’s ‘election’ the previous fall. (But that would have to be the subject of a separate blog…) Ultimately, through my visit with the Mlakars I came closer to knowing the ‘heart’ behind the strange, problematic, and beautiful Verklungene Feste—and, I believe, in all of Strauss’s ballet collaborations.

The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss is available now. In coming weeks we will post a short excerpt from the book.