Richard Strauss

Macbeth, Op. 23

Richard Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 and died in Garmisch, Germany in 1948. He composed the first version of Macbeth between 1886-1888. He revised the work extensively and led the first performance of the new version in Weimar in 1890. The score calls for 3 flutes, piccolo, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, bass trumpet, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings. Duration is approximately 18 minutes.

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Most concert-goers know Richard Strauss through his string of brilliant, audacious, and often over-the-top tone poems. Many assume that the string began with Don Juan, which has the earliest opus number of the bunch. But it all began here, with Macbeth, a work Strauss began when he was just 22 years old.

Macbeth was an experiment. Its goal was to prove Strauss’ theories about where his music, and music generally, ought to go. Strauss believed that, sixty years after Beethoven, music based on the symphony and the sonata form had become a formula, even a “trap;” the danger was that composers might begin filling in the formula with meaningless content. He saw the solution in the joining of music and literature, not just to tell a story but to express in music the psychologies of the characters.

As an experiment, Macbeth failed more than once. Indeed, his first version of the work ended with a celebratory march for Macduff! (At the time, Strauss thought that Macduff’s Pyrrhic victory was the salient point of the play.) Conductor Hans von Bülow persuaded Strauss that to end a tale soaked in murder, betrayal, and despair with a glorious march was lunacy, and the composer radically revised the work. To Bülow the new version wasn’t much of an improvement: he called it “grey and tuneless.”

Strauss would continue to revise the work for years, mostly by re-orchestrating passages to improve their clarity. In the midst of these revisions he began and completed the score to Don Juan. Hence its earlier opus number and its assumed first place among the tone poems. Yet Don Juan would not have been as brilliant as it was without the experimentation of Macbeth.

Strauss never gave his audiences a guide to what musical motives might represent the characters of the play or the dramatic events. He knew that his audiences were familiar with the play and was content to let their imaginations follow where the music led them. Program or no, it is impossible to miss the torment (and lust for power) of Macbeth, the short-lived glory of his ascension to the throne, and the disintegration of his world thereafter.

The publication of Macbeth after the wildly successful (and more maturely realized) Don Juan led Strauss—and often, critics and audiences—to treat it as a batty uncle kept in the attic. Still, he conducted it frequently: “I just find it amusing,” he wrote, “to hear Macbeth in its new instrumentation.” Though it is performed far less often than the other tone poems, it is a revealing glimpse into Strauss’ musical laboratory.

© Mark Rohr 2008