MUSIC : The Compleat Operas of Richard Strauss

“If it must be Richard,” a clever if unfriendly critic once wagged, “give me Wagner.”

“And if it must be Strauss,” he added, “make it Johann.”

Conventional wisdom, only a decade or two ago, insisted that Richard Strauss managed to write a couple of terrific little shockers near the turn of the century--”Salome” and “Elektra”--and then peaked with the mock-Viennese nostalgia of “Der Rosenkavalier.” He supposedly spent the rest of his tired, plodding, stubbornly sentimental years trying in vain to repeat past glories.

That wisdom wasn’t universally shared. In Santa Fe, N. M., of all places, John Crosby launched a brave one-man crusade on behalf of the lesser-known Strauss operas, staging one each year in the desert mirage. Most major houses eventually picked an occasional rarity out of the Strauss oeuvre like a raisin from a rice pudding. The real mecca for the dauntless, unrepentant Straussian, however, has long been the composer’s home town, Munich.

Ironically, the Bavarian capital didn’t welcome its most famous musical son with open arms and doting devotion at the outset. In 1895, Munich scorned Strauss’ first opera--a hyper-respectful flight of super-Wagnerian fantasy called “Guntram.” Never one to forget a grudge, Strauss baldly ridiculed the aesthetic myopia of the city six years later when he created his next opera, “Feuersnot.”

Revenge presumably was sweet. It would have been even sweeter if either “Guntram” or “Feuersnot” had eventually flourished as staples of the repertory. But that never happened. (“Feuersnot,” it should be noted, was introduced at Santa Fe last week, sharing a strenuous double bill with the even more daunting, equally obscure “Friedenstag” of 1938.)

Despite sweeping revisions and a fleeting Weimar revival in 1940, “Guntram” has remained essentially a curiosity for historians. “Feuersnot” has turned up in sporadic revivals in Munich, thanks to a dedicated, ever-changing team of local champions.

Few of those champions have pretended that the early opera is a bona fide masterpiece. But many have appreciated its echt -Bavarian character, its bold charm, its satiric point, its strokes of dramatic bravura and, most important, its eloquent, even ecstatic, love music.

Even in 1901, Strauss was Strauss. For all its inequities, “Feuersnot” offers compelling previews of glorious coming attractions.

While much of the world wept crocodile tears over the premature decline of Strauss’ muse, Munich began quietly to make amends for its initial lack of hospitality. Under the enlightened leadership of such musical and dramatic authorities as Clemens Krauss, Rudolf Hartmann, Hans Knappertsbusch, Karl Bohm, Joseph Keilberth, Gunther Rennert and, now, Wolfgang Sawallisch, the Bavarian State Opera has repeatedly demonstrated the vitality and pathos of the late-Strauss output.

The Muncheners found refinement and poetry, subtlety and elegance, where others had found only bombast and repetition. Iconoclasts, even here, could claim that the level of Strauss’ inspiration varied from work to work, often even from page to page. Nevertheless, the high points almost always seemed high enough to compensate for any lapses and longueurs.

Munich actually staged its first opera festival in 1875, a year before the rival Festspielhaus opened in Bayreuth. Strauss did not become officially festive here, however, until 1921, when “Ariadne auf Naxos” joined the special summer repertory. Since then, he has become to this city what Wagner is to nearby Bayreuth and what Mozart is to nearby Salzburg.

These days, the opera in general and Strauss in particular serve as magnetic attractions in a city that used to draw pilgrims primarily to its Oktoberfest.

As Munich has become more and more a cultural mecca, “Die Schweigsame Frau” at the noble 2,000-seat National Theater or “Capriccio” at the exquisite 350-seat Cuvillies Theater vies for attention with wonderful museums, monuments and towers, with the ubiquitous allure of great beer and good food, even with the diverting vision of naked sunbathers dotting the downtown banks of the Isar. Some casual nudity, incidentally, embellishes the bacchanal in Strauss’ “Die Agyptische Helena.” Only the large contingent of Americans in the audience seems to notice.

Normally, the Munich Festival offers fancy, high-priced performances of Mozart and Wagner in addition to selected Strauss. Sometimes Verdi and Orff (a lesser native son) also enrich the eclectic repertory. This year, the Staaatsoperndirektor decided to present, in one fell, unprecedented swoop, all 15 of Strauss’ operas, with John Neumeier’s tawdry staging of the maudlin “Josephs Legende” ballet thrown in for bad measure.

The crucial qualifier is the verb present . Sadly and somewhat evasively, Sawallisch decided not to stage the relatively unwieldy “Guntram” and “Friedenstag.” They were performed only in concert versions. Even so, the 3 1/2-week undertaking threatened to put an overwhelming strain on the financial, logistic and artistic resources of the company.

Under the circumstances, some qualitative vagaries were inevitable. Still, the inherent effort proved heroic, and the results were invariably fascinating, usually illuminating, often imposing.

Seven nights at the Munich Opera made one fact abundantly clear: Richard Strauss was a craftsman par excellence . He could be masterly even when he didn’t happen to be optimally inspired.

When he recycled Wagnerian cliches in “Guntram,” he obviously did so with appreciative elan and technical bravado. When he cranked out busy-music, it was the best busy-music in the world. When he wanted to be clever--and enjoyed the collaboration of the right librettist--no one could be more clever. When he resorted to gut-thumping, he thumped guts as if there could be no tomorrow.

In one crucial sense, there actually was no tomorrow for him. Strauss was the composer who brought emotional compulsion to the last gasps of a generous, outdated romanticism. In his best moments, he spoke with affecting tones of bittersweet nostalgia. At his best, he also savored the superhuman virtue of unabashed delicacy.

At his worst, he was, of course, a vulgarian. But what a vulgarian!

The most magical of the Munich offerings turned out to be “Die Schweigsame Frau”. Although created in 1935, within the shadow of Nazism, Stefan Zweig’s libretto exudes the sort of warmth and wit that appealed to the composer’s finest instincts. Despite some all-too-generous cuts, Munich treated this human comedy with sometimes tender, sometimes raucous, always loving care.

One wished that Sawallisch could have found a bit more light and shade in the marvelous score. Still, one appreciated his ability to balance the aggressive and introspective elements, and to bridge the lyrical and the dramatic.

The late Gunther Rennert’s marvelously detailed production of 1971 is now in the affectionate hands of Ronald H. Adler (son of the late Kurt Herbert Adler, erstwhile paterfamilias of the San Francisco Opera). The intricate patterns still look sprightly, and the essential theatrical points have lost little focus.

Kurt Moll exudes crusty bonhomie as the battle-scarred Sir Morosus, avoids all comic distortion, exults in descents to the basso basement, and, for long stretches, succeeds in making one forget Hans Hotter’s definitive performances in Salzburg some 30 years ago.

An enchanting young soprano named Julie Kaufmann--one of many Americans on the scene--personifies sweetness and purity while soaring through the vocal stratosphere as the heroine, Aminta. If Francisco Araiza could resist the occasional temptation to force, he would be a worthy successor to Fritz Wunderlich as Henry, and Margarethe Bence wins all hearts as the tough old Housekeeper.

With such artists as Alfred Kuhn, Kieth Engen, Angela Maria Blasi, Birgit Calm and Hans Gunter Nocker illuminating smaller roles, this is a nearly perfect example of ensemble theater. The only weak link in the cast involves Wolfgang Rauch, a promising novice who is vocally apt and dramatically pallid as that baritonal busybody, the Barber.

The concert performance of “Guntram” (July 18) revealed a hopelessly convoluted and swollen libretto by Strauss himself (he never repeated the mistake of writing his own text), aligned to intriguingly convoluted and chronically swollen music. The bows to Wagner were, of course, both intentional and sincere. Unfortunately, that does not make them memorable or independently valid.

The performance evolved around Klaus Konig, a somewhat unsteady but sympathetic East German quasi-Heldentenor who dared portray the Nietzschean minnesinger of the title. He survived the unreasonable marathon with honor if not with glory. In the process, he helped one to understand why Strauss subsequently favored heroes with lower tessituras.

Sabine Hass, remembered for her ardent Senta in a San Diego “Fliegende Hollander,” coped decently with the cruel, ever-ascending soprano role Strauss envisioned for his wife-to-be. Jan Hendrik Rootering, Kurt Moll and Bernd Weikl brought stellar force to the other heroic challenges.

Gustav Kuhn conducted the visiting Bamberg Symphony--possibly a better orchestra than its overworked Munich Opera counterpart--with dashing conviction and dynamic flexibility.

He returned for “Feuersnot” the next night and did much to enliven Strauss’ odd combination of folksy “Meistersinger” invocation, personal polemic and blunt erotic adventure. Neither the conductor nor the stage director, Giancarlo del Monaco (son of the late Otello-paragon), could do much, however, to ease the embarrassment of Ernst von Wolzogen’s libretto.

This Medieval semi-satire recounts the plight of a mysterious sorcerer (a thinly disguised Strauss) who extinguishes all the fires in Munich because the masses have mocked him. When the initially reluctant heroine invites him into her bedchamber, however, the lights of the city are suddenly rekindled--just in time for one of Strauss’ archetypally delayed, colorfully orchestrated climaxes.

The huge, virtuosic cast included the ubiquitous, generally radiant Hass, and, in a minor role, the septuagenarian Hans Hopf. The erstwhile Wagnerian took this occasion to bid a much-celebrated farewell to the stage after 50 years of distinguished service. The central role of Kunrad reportedly had been rejected by three leading baritones and thus fell, by unfortunate default, to a game but hopelessly miscast Heldentenor, Walter Raffeiner.

“Die Agyptische Helena,” written in 1928, remains one of Strauss’ more bloated creations, an uneasy mythological melange of sweet operettic manners and grand operatic methods. Its cliched excesses were justified on July 20--well, nearly justified--by some Olympian individual performances.

Gwyneth Jones, who seems to have discovered some fountain of vocal youth, looked lovely as Helen of Troy. She sang, moreover, with stunning power and welcome steadiness. As Menelaus, Konig coped manfully with yet another tenorial endurance contest. Carmen Reppel provided a seductive foil as the exotic Aithra, when Sawallisch wasn’t encouraging the orchestra to make too mighty a noise.

The lavishly stylized production, designed in 1981 by Jorg Zimmermann, was originally staged--with the stress on fluid comic irony--by Joachim Herz. He has since asked, however, to have his name removed from the credits. One wonders why.

The concert version of “Friedenstag,” a sprawling allegory about the end of the Thirty Years’ War, was performed on July 24, a half-century to the day after the world premiere in the same theater. The libretto, suggested by Stefan Zweig but executed after his fall from political grace by Joseph Gregor, is a stodgy, somewhat ambiguous, all-purpose ode to peace. The score is an edgy 80-minute crescendo that piles climax upon climax on the way to a pompous C-major orgy of bells, blasts and unintentional screams with massive choral punctuation.

The Muncheners seemed to love its unrelenting excesses. They certainly loved the deafening and dazzling performance in which Sawallisch led the Munich Radio Orchestra and a vocal troupe that included Bernd Weikl as a somewhat undercast Commandant, Hass as his understandably strained Wife and Moll as the mellifluous Holsteiner.

The inevitable “Rosenkavalier” (July 17) proved most notable for Moll’s lusty Ochs and Jones’ sensitive Marschallin. The negative factors included the ungainly Octavian of Brigitte Fassbaender--a local favorite singing her signature role for the last time--and the clumsy conducting of Jiri Kout.

The grandiosity of “Die Frau ohne Schatten” (July 16) succumbed to generalized murk, some of it provided by the composer and some of it attributable to a tired, old production. Still, one could take comfort in the gleaming tone of Cheryl Studer as the mystical Empress.

Ironically, perhaps, the festival closes today with the wrong Richard. Tradition in Munich still dictates a valedictory “Meistersinger.”

It will be followed by a long, awkward silence and much consternation. The National Theater will be dark for seven months while the complex stage machinery, only 25 years old, is overhauled. During the interim, the company plans numerous tours, appearances in smaller theaters and a production of Borodin’s “Prince Igor” in a massive arena built for the Olympic games of 1972.

Meanwhile, Sawallisch is negotiating with an interesting outsider. According to a local paper, he wants none other than Robert Wilson--he of our ill-fated “CIVIL WarS”--to stage a new interpretation of the first Richard’s “Tannhauser.”

Even in Munich, some things aren’t sacred.

At his worst, Richard Strauss was, of course, a vulgarian. But what a vulgarian!