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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 September 1999 Issue No. 448
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Comment Focus Special Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Growing vegetables
By David Blake
Richard Strauss Memorial Concert, Cairo Symphony Orchestra. Iman Mustafa (Soprano), Alexander Kniazev (Cello). Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 18 September
He was the vegetable man of twentieth century music and his compositions have their own aroma, a whiff always of the vegetable. But in spite of his sympathy with human frailties, he was always divine. His vegetables remain more than mere potatoes and cabbages. His tones and tunes come from the primitive cult rites of creation, from the world of trees, secret melons and the gardens of Eden and Hades.
With Strauss music moved in snow-encrusted pine forests or else went for orchidacious swims in midday seas. And lying in wait for the beauties were always the blood-soaked rags of the house of Atreus and Electra's charismatic dive into madness.
He could be vulgar and sentimental. But his grandeur, coupled with the aura of the heroic vegetable world, suggests something ageless about him and richly expensive -- and he was proud of it all. He was adorable, and amiable unless crudely attacked. The swipe he could deliver was lethal. His music was mannerless but like all geniuses he made his own rules of behaviour and kept to them. He never thrashed about in blankets of self-satisfaction. He saw himself very clearly. He was fearless and exalted.
His tragedies all have the grace of irony and sombre wit. Fearless in all -- except in facing his wife, a termagant of great quality and style -- he was a musical prodigy, well into the Mozart class. Outrageously gifted, by the time he was a very young man he was at the top of the world, married, rich and properly famous.
Strauss was echte Bavarian, born in Munich 1864. A very tall son of an even taller father, Franz Strauss, considered the greatest horn player of the age and a friend of Wagner. At six years old he had written music which caught the attention of the most farseeing and sophisticated people in Europe. By 1885 he succeeded the vaunting genius of Hans von Bulow at Meinengen and later at Weimar and Berlin -- a classic journey to glory in those days. His symphonic poems began with the crazy, headstrong Don Juan, followed by Heldenleben and other tone poems, amazing the musical world with the sheer profligacy of daring and invention. He became one of the saints who uprooted classical music from its slumber of centuries.
Whatever glory these orchestral pieces had were as nothing compared to the sensation made by his second opera, Salome. Adapted from the play written for Sarah Bernhardt by Oscar Wilde, the operatic world was never to be the same again after 1905, the year of its premiere. Brazenly, the sounds of the Strauss perfume which emanated from all his operatic works began the long series of bewitchments which continue to haunt the opera houses of the world.
In spite of the hectoring, unlovely display by his critics, the works themselves poured forth from his creative reservoir. They have never lost their public appeal. War and every form of tiresome political blackmail have left the opera Rosenkavalier, Ariadne Auf Naxos, Electra and a long list of later operas filled with ideas, musical discoveries and visions of the future. His opera Capriccio, an old man's summing up of life's mysteries, rivals the late paintings of Titian. It is effervescent -- resplendent and shining with a life force above the vanities and miseries of life. The Strauss Memorial Concert, for some necrophillic reason, celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Perverse, surely, because few practicing musicians deserve a life celebrating party more than Strauss.
Anyway, the concert really was a festival in Cairo's best manner: happy, colourful, high-toned and generous. What it really celebrated was survival. Strauss's life was sliced in pieces twice -- in 1914 and 1939. He even witnessed, legend tells, his beloved National Theatre Opera House of Music burnt to ashes by allied bombs. One of his great compositions is the long, dirge-like poem of orchestral farewell to it and the world it represented. Called Metamorphosen, as its name suggests, it was also a hymn to rebirth and continuity. The music has a lot in common with the new Cairo Opera House. It too is a child of misfortune. Out of the fires came the new and here it is in its lovely garden about to face a new century of effort. There was a sense of thrill as the new Cairo Symphony Orchestra trooped to their places. And fervour. Extra brass players stationed in the galleries of the theatre, and an organ, swelled the picture. The violins were athrong, overflowing almost down into the pit. An array of woodwind in their usual place, seemingly doubled.
When it began with the Festliches Praeludium Opus 61 in an outburst of sound the arches came tumbling down. Just to hear the richesse and dazzle of the sounds, with the violins slicing through even the walls of brass from on high, was a never to be forgotten pleasure. Thank god for an opera house, an orchestra such as this and El-Saedi to ignite the occasion. Best of all festivals, the new season had begun.
Don Quixote featured Alexander Kniazev from Moscow. He really has a concerto furioso to perform. His technique dazzled, but dazzle was the least part of his playing. Kniazev was in possession because the cello became the Don himself, Alexander the medium through which the story flowed. The Strauss virtuosity of design made the principal theme a babbling outburst, from the highest orchestral register to deep dives into the entrails of the orchestra. Again, something to remember. This tune, so Straussian and new, is almost a century old. What are time and birthdays about. Death must be prepared for: this tremendous mystery must be professionally awaited. Where did the Don go? A puff of smoke of the famous theme, torn to pieces by the invisible hurricane of life. A sigh and Quixote was gone.
The sounds in Quixote had been shamelessly beautiful. What would they become in the late Strauss of the four last songs.
El-Saedi has done this music before with the same soprano, Iman Mustafa. They had done a good job, treading carefully through the Augustan life path and the composer's meditation and nostalgia as the winds of Karma bear it along, helpless. All life's trophies are hung on the wall. What remains? Strauss came to the same conclusion as Shakespeare's Prospero.
Iman Mustafa, a hard worker, always improving, interpreted the four lamentations. Her voice is changing, improving, with no sharp edges to the tones. All sopranos try these four songs, most of them fail. Strauss is hard. His adoration of the soprano voice makes him almost sadistic in demanding the impossible. These songs need a philosopher, a life commentator, an angel of prophecy, an earth mother and the world's best voice. Strauss had them all in life. Times are hard, sopranos don't float anymore. Iman Mustafa is tough. She knows what she wants to achieve and soon she will float. The voice will escape from all bodily restriction. Her innately elemental quality and genuine sentimentality are assets which will lead her to great things. The Egyptesche Hellena is waiting for her.
The concert's end was the first of Strauss's orchestral poems, Don Juan. It has all the signs of what was to come, particularly melody. The Don sounded, in this performance, bombastic and self-satisfied. Maybe all great lovers are the same. But the orchestra saw no reason for economy. It was a full blown interpretation, but not bloated. It jerked to an end -- sensual, unrepentant and without pity or care. A snap of the fingers.
So ended the festival of renewal. A very sparse house and a wonderful concert.
