Resilience Through Music

Recently I enjoyed a performance by the West Point Chamber Winds ensemble of the West Point Band. Having been reared in an Army family, I confess to a predisposition to like military music groups. The West Point Band is the oldest of the Army bands, founded in 1817. The West Point Chamber Winds ensemble of crisply uniformed, active-duty soldiers and superb musicians did not disappoint.

Their choice of two compositions by Richard Strauss (in a 1918 portrait by Max Liebermann, right) to bookend the recital was intriguing. The first was “Serenade in E-Flat Major, Op. 7,” which Strauss composed as a seventeen-year-old in 1881. The last was the less-often played “Sonatina No. 1 in F,” from 1943, only a few years before Strauss’s death in 1949 at age 85.

Richard Strauss (June 11, 1864 – September 8, 1949) began composing very young. Indeed, he was six when he wrote a Christmas carol and a polka. His father was Franz Strauss, a horn player. The elder Strauss, having lost his wife and two children to a cholera epidemic in 1853, remarried. His new wife, Josepha Pschorr, was the daughter of a wealthy Munich brewer and soon gave him a son, Richard, who would become the preeminent composer of the late Romantic period.

“Serenade in E-Flat Major” or “Serenade for 13 Winds” was composed about the time Richard Strauss entered the University of Munich. It was first performed in Dresden on November 27, 1882. But while this early work illustrates youthful brilliance, it is the later composition, “Sonatina No. 1 in F,” which shows Strauss’s resilience.

Strauss was 68 when the Nazi Party came to power in Germany in 1933. Although Strauss avoided joining the party, Adolf Hiltler nevertheless determined to use Strauss and his work to promote German art and culture. Strauss went along, even becoming (though without his prior consent) president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the State Music Bureau. (He was later dismissed after a critical letter he had written surfaced.) Strauss was criticized for his involvement with the Nazis, but he felt it was necessary to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandchildren, for Strauss’s only son, Franz, had married a Jewish woman, Alice von Grab; and the couple had two sons.

This was the backdrop against which Richard Strauss composed “Sonatina No. 1 in F.” in 1943, as the long Nazi era and the years of war were grinding on and as he was approaching 80 and ill (consequently the composer’s subtitle, “from an invalid’s workshop”). And yet, though the composition has been called nostalgic, it is full of optimism, which propels the melody in the higher notes over an undercurrent of, at times, rumbling low notes, almost as if Strauss is choosing to float above the rubble of war. In fact, Strauss would be much affected in October the same year, following the bombing of the National Theater in Munich, which Strauss wrote to his friend and biographer, Willi Schuh, was “the holy site of the first Tristan and Meistersinger performances, where I heard Freischütz for the first time 73 years ago, where my good father sat in the orchestra for 49 years at the first horn desk….”

One cannot help but believe that music provided Strauss with the resilience to persevere, and we the listening public are richer for it.

The West Point Chamber Winds recital was the 458th program of the 2011-12 season at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music on January 24, 2012. This spring the IU Opera Theater will present Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. It should be a treat not to be missed.

An American Fin de Siècle?

There are any number of good reasons to watch the popular PBS series, “Downton Abbey,” not least for the simple pleasure of enjoying Maggie Smith’s portrayal as the Dowager Countess of Grantham (photo). The Edwardian tale offers viewers a fictional, but largely accurate, glimpse into the end of an era, that age when Britain’s landed aristocracy ruled not only the nation but also the empire and therefore much of the world.

The upstairs/downstairs gap between wealth and poverty, power and subservience, is being turned on its head by World War I during the drama’s second season—and it’s probably a good thing. The war, abetted by the advent of the Industrial Age, accomplished in Britain a socioeconomic transition that was achieved elsewhere by revolutions. The disparity between rich and poor had spurred Britain’s near neighbor to the French Revolution only slightly more than a century earlier. And the Russian revolution was fermenting during the First World War as Britain looked on, and worried.

The fin de siècle for the British aristocracy was cinched by the rise of a corporate-industrial elite. In recent years Britain has again become keenly aware of a growing gap between wealth and poverty, particularly in light of recent global economic woes. As I write this the New York Times has reported on the “rising outcry over executive pay” by lower-wage workers (and the unemployed), as reflected by the Occupy London movement.

In the United States, as conservatives have pushed this country increasing away from democracy toward corporate oligarchy, the gap between the moneyed elites and the rest of us has grown alarmingly. Between 1997 and 2007 the top one percent of Americans saw their incomes rise 275 percent, while the bottom fifth gained only 20 percent. The Huffington Post, reporting on a historical study, recently headlined: “U.S. Income Inequality Higher Than Roman Empire’s Levels.”

Such disparity, in concert with the generally depressed economic climate, in part, gave rise to the Occupy Wall Street movement that spread across the nation and internationally during 2011. While the Occupy movement seems to have had its fifteen minutes in the spotlight, it is by no means defunct. Nor are the feelings of outrage that gave rise to it less intense. Economists such as Jared Bernstein and Paul Krugman have termed America’s income gap “unsustainable” and “incompatible” with democracy.

One wonders, given this dynamic, whether the United States is heading for a fin de siècle for its corporate artistocracy. And how will the transition occur? Will television viewers a century from now be watching a mirror version of “Downton Abbey,” perhaps called by some fictional version of “Trump Tower”? That the tower must fall is assured. The question is how. And will the nation fall with it or survive, and in what form?