Strauss - Oboe Concerto; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Orchestral Suite)

Richard STRAUSS (1864-1949)

Concerto for Oboe and Small Orchestra

Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Der Bürger als Edelmann) Orchestersuite

Alf Nilsson (Oboe)

Stockholm Sinfonietta

Neeme Järvi

Recording data: September 1-2 1989  at Stockholm Concert Hall (Oboe Concerto)

December 16-17, 1989 at Nacka Aula, Nacka, Swedden (Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme)

Despite his advanced age and the chaos surrounding him, Richard Strauss remained highly productive well into the 1940s. As the Second World War was coming to an end in 1944-45, the eighty-year-old composer was working on his Oboe Concerto and Sonatina No. 2 for winds, as well as the Metamorphosen for strings. While the latter work was an explicit response to the destruction Strauss was witnessing, in the Concerto and the Sonatina the composer seemed to be turning his mind away from the events surrounding him. There is a pastoral quality to the oboe concerto, with a highly tuneful solo part and more than occasional touches of nostalgia for the 18th century. Similarly, Strauss headed the score of the sonatina with a dedication ‘to the spirit of the immortal Mozart at the end of a life full of thankfulness’.

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After the enormous success of the 1911 opera Der Rosenkavalier, librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal returned to Baroque-era inspiration for his next collaboration with Richard Strauss. Hofmannsthal suggested reworking Molière’s comedy-ballet Le bourgeois gentilhomme, which first played for the court of King Louis XIV in 1670, with incidental music by Jean-Baptiste Lully.

The farcical plot of Le bourgeois gentilhomme follows Monsieur Jordain, a nouveau riche merchant’s son who aspires to join the aristocracy. He embarrasses himself with fancy new clothes and lessons in such lofty subjects as fencing and philosophy lessons, and schemes to marry off his daughter Lucille to a nobleman, despite her love for Cléonte, a fellow member of the bourgeoisie. Cléonte schemes to court Lucille disguised as a Turkish prince, and Jordain gets his comeuppance when he unwittingly officiates, in an absurd “Turkish” ceremony, the very union he had hoped to block.

Strauss and Hofmannsthal struggled to find the right format for their Molière adaptation. They first incorporated an abridged translation into the 1912 theater-opera hybrid Ariadne auf Naxos, but a format that embedded an entire opera within a substantial play proved cumbersome. When they revised Ariadne auf Naxos in 1916, they removed most remnants of the Molière play, including the charming incidental music Strauss had composed, some of it based on Lully’s original score. The next year, Hofmannsthal revived the Molière translation under the German title Der Bürger als Edelmann, and Strauss edited his 1912 incidental music and added new material. In its final incarnation, Strauss compiled an orchestra suite in 1920 drawn from Der Bürger als Edelmann excerpts, and it is this music that has spread most widely, under the title Le bourgeois gentilhomme.

In the overture to the first act, strings and piano dance through spry material full of unexpected harmonic shifts, saving the full weight of the winds and brass for a grand (and perhaps slightly pompous) fortissimo blast. A gracious theme introduced by the oboe ushers the movement toward a gentle conclusion. Next comes a parade of pretensions: The tentative hiccups and unsteady chromatic slurs in the Menuett suggest a hapless dance lesson; The Fencing-Master models high-energy thrusts and parries; The Entrance and Dance of the Tailors, with its elaborate violin solos, toes the line between sycophancy and mockery.

The next movements incorporate music by Lully. The Menuett and Courante are elegant dances, enlivened by Strauss’s colorful orchestration and counter-melodies. The Entrance of Cléonte is tender and sweet, casting a humble sheen on the suitor of Jordain’s daughter, although the central section, which Strauss borrowed from a different Lully work, hints at the mischievous, exotic deception he uses to win his bride.

Returning to Strauss’s wholly original music, the second-act prelude accompanies the entrance of the aristocrats Durante (who leeches off Jordain’s money) and Dorimène (Jordain’s love interest) in music Strauss marked “galant and graceful.” The suite’s boisterous finale is The Dinner, with separate musical episodes for each course that is served. Rhine salmon comes with material quoted from Wagner’s Das Rheingold; mutton pairs with sheep music from Strauss’s tone-poem Don Quixote; another self-quotation, using pastoral music from Der Rosenkavalier, accompanies the spit-roasted song birds. The raucous final course features an omelet from which a kitchen boy bursts forth to perform an erotic dance.