'Freedom from the Earth's gravity': The ballet collaborations of Richard Strauss (Germany)

Richard Strauss is rarely thought of as a dance composer, much less a balletomane. Nevertheless, he provided artistic input and musical accompaniment to a handful of ballets, including Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph, Paris and London 1914), choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky and, later, Michel Fokine; an evening-length Ballettsoiree (Vienna 1923), choreography by Heinrich Kroller; Schlagobers (Whipped Cream, Vienna 1924), also with dances by Kroller; and Verklungene Feste: Tanzvisionen aus Zwei Jahrhunderten (Faded Celebrations: Dance Visions from Two Centuries, Munich 1941), choreography by Pia and Pino Mlakar after Baroque dances notated by Raoul Auger Feuillet (1700), and with Strauss's orchestral arrangements of keyboard pieces by Francois Couperin. The resulting scores might seem marginal in comparison with Strauss's canonical symphonic poems and operas. I demonstrate, however, that this composer was attracted to ballet throughout his career, beginning with a series of unrealized projects in the 1890s that culminated with Die Insel Kythere (The Island of Cythere, ca. 1900, unfinished). These fragmentary works effectively served as blueprints for Strauss's later, completed ballet collaborations.; Through the latter, I explore a number of issues that nuance the popular, critical and academic reception of Strauss and his relationship to modernism in music and dance: collective creation, parody and self-parody in Josephslegende (Chapter One); interwar Viennese cultural politics, kitsch and degeneration in relation to the Ballettsoiree and Schlagobers (Chapter Two); and in Verklungene Feste, music arranging, pastiche, and the fraught conceit of dance and music as transcendent art forms (Chapter Three).; When Strauss's ballet music is considered in conjunction with choreographic and scenic evidence, these collaborations chronicle his gradual aesthetic transformation, from a parodic (and characteristically modern) conception of classical dance with the Ballets russes to a belated obsession with Romantic ballet. It is this latter epoch of dance that Strauss explicitly identified as a form of escapism from the political and cultural tumult spurred on by the two world wars. Ultimately, it provided him with the setting for a modest commentary on the ephemerality of bodily movement and music---his own as well as the creations of other artists, both historic and modern.