Highbrow critics and musicologists spent the better part of the twentieth century writing scathing comments about Richard Strauss. For them he was not “modern” enough. After he composed his “dark operas”, Salome and Elektra, Strauss decided to write what he ironically called “Mozart Operas”. Twentieth-century musicology’s obsession with progress (i.e. a teleological vision of history in which composers whose musical language is not “forward-looking” deserve no critical attention) led many to refer to Strauss’s music as “unhistorical” and to him as a composer of nineteenth-century music who wrote in the twentieth century. Thus, they obliterated Strauss and with him his most modern musical feature, the one that has made him prevail over allegedly modern composers such as Schoenberg or Berg. The feature I refer to is Strauss’s capacity to…
Comentarios