Programme note
Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Suite in B flat major for thirteen wind instruments, Op 4 (1884)
Praeludium (Allegretto)
Romanze (Andante)
Gavotte (Allegro)
Introduction and Fugue (Andante cantabile - Allegro con brio)
Strauss began and ended his career with wind music. Though this evening’s suite was not quite the first work he ever wrote and though the second of his two wind sonatinas was not quite the last, they show between them that one of his youthful enthusiasms - the sound of a large group of woodwind instruments blended with a quartet of horns - never wholly deserted him, even if operas and symphonic poems formed the mainstream of his output.
The fact that he enjoyed conducting wind music was one reason why he enjoyed composing it. His lifelong love of Mozart was obviously another. It is unlikely that he would have produced a Suite in B-flat for thirteen wind instruments if Mozart had not already done so. True, he did not choose exactly the same instruments, nor did he write the same number of movements. But then, he was under orders from the great and irascible conductor, Hans von Bulow, who had commissioned it and had precise ideas about what he wanted. Strauss, initially unaware of this, had written the first two movements in his own romantic manner before he realised that von Bulow expected something more baroque. To conceal his error, he slapped the archaic title ‘Praeludium’ on the first movement, hoping that the conductor would thereby be duped, but knew he could do nothing about the second, which was very definitely a Romanze. In order to retrieve the situation, he completed the work with an old-fashioned gavotte and fugue, as von Bulow had stipulated.
Whatever von Bulow thought of the structurally compressed opening movement, the ravishing oboe solo in the slow movement, or the deliberately academic finale, there is no doubt that his demand for a gavotte was the stroke of genius that ensured the work’s success in Strauss’s native Munich in 1884. The tyro composer himself, as things turned out, was forced not only to conduct it himself, but to do so without benefit of rehearsal. As von Bulow impatiently insisted, there was no time for such niceties on tour.
© Conrad Wilson
