Prelude to Capriccio
It is the late summer of 1775, the garden salon of a chateau near Paris. Two young men stand by the door: the composer Flamand and his friend Olivier, a poet. Across the room, the theatre director La Roche snores in an armchair, but the two artists ignore him; both have their eyes fixed upon the woman each loves, the Countess Madeleine. She is sitting in the centre of the room, and, as afternoon sunlight streams through the tall windows, she is half-drowsing, half-listening to the music Flamand has written as an expression of his love – drifting from the next room, an Andante for string sextet.
So Richard Strauss opened his last opera. It was 1941; old, and increasingly frightened by the implications of his compromise with the Nazi regime, he had retreated to his mountain home at Garmisch and had turned away from the world to look back on his 50-year career, and the entire European musical culture to which he had devoted his life and which he now saw burning around him. And so he began "Capriccio", his operatic "last word", with the one thing he’d pointedly ignored throughout his whole, brilliant career - chamber music. All his sovereign mastery of instrumental colour, his super-sophisticated sense of line and harmony, his supreme gift for spinning a one-bar phrase into a soaring arc of melody, are here distilled to a ten-minute, sonata-form movement for six string instruments, in which virtuosity blends with a knowing gracefulness, and tiny shards of Mozart, Brahms and Wagner float past on iridescent harmonies. In this way the "Capriccio" sextet is a prelude not just to Strauss’s final opera but to his entire "late period" of the oboe and second horn concertos, Metamorphosen, and of course the Four Last Songs; music that is classically fresh but yearningly nostalgic, unashamedly allusive and yet utterly characteristic; questioning but wholly assured.
R.G. Bratby, 2002
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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