#symphonia domestica
Strauss - Symphonia Domestica (1903)
“What can be more serious than family life? I want the Symphonia domestica to be understood seriously.” For fun, friends will ask each other what their “guilty pleasure” music is, and usually I think “well, obviously none of my classical favorites count. what’s ‘guilty’ about classical music?” But that was me thinking with a kind of classical-superiority bias. There’s plenty of works that aren’t “great”, but are a lot of fun, for the sake of spectacle. In this case I’ll say that my recent 'guilty pleasure’ favorite is Richard Strauss’ last tone poem, the “Symphonia Domestica”. To me it kind of exemplifies reasons people would dislike late and post Romanticism. The “story” is a musical portrait of a daily life in a family. Specifically, Strauss’ family. He has a heroic theme for himself, the husband/father, a gorgeous Hollywood love theme for the wife/mother (the singer, Pauline), and the ferocious wailing of their crying baby. We hear the family having fun together, the baby crying, soothed by a lullaby (here quoting Mendelssohn’s Venetian Boat-Song op.19 no.6, another piece close to my heart), then an intimate scene when the parents are alone (another instance that made critics roll their eyes), then an argument or “merry dispute” in the form of a double fugue, with an over-the-top apotheosis of the themes. Filtering the model for the “traditional” family, an otherwise banal topic, with the sonic vocabulary of Wagner’s “Twilight of the Gods”, made a lot of audiences and critics roll their eyes. It also doesn’t help that the themes aren’t really transformed as much as they’re re-orchestrated. At the same time I think people are ignoring the Mozartian side of Strauss. This piece is silly, in good ways, and has charm and fun. I opened this post quoting Strauss about the music. Maybe it’s a good reminder that we can romanticize our own lives, and treat our daily struggles and interactions as being significant enough to be depicted with such lavishness. And that lavishness is why I enjoy this work, and many others by Strauss which I’m ok with admitting are “second rate” (as he said of himself, “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.”) because of the shear sounds, textures, and colors he creates with the orchestra. Hans Richter poked fun at the baby’s depictions in this piece with “All the cataclysms of the downfall of the gods in burning Valhalla do not make a quarter of the noise of one Bavarian baby in his bath.” The intense orchestral noise here, the over-abundance, is what brings me back to Strauss again and again. I especially love the last five minutes of the finale, where the themes come back with more extravagant orchestration, and with a nod toward Haydn and Beethoven’s musical humor, the piece refuses to end!
Movements:
- Introduction and development of principal themes
2. Scherzo
3. Adagio
4. Finale
