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WORKS FOR THE STAGE The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss. By Wayne Heisler. (Eastman Studies in Music, v. 64.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009. (xi, 345 p. ISBN 9781580463218. $85.) Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.
Perhaps because Richard Strauss's ballet output includes just two original scores (Josephslegende and Schlagobers) and arrangements of harpsichord works by French baroque composer François Couperin- music unfamiliar to most audiences and typically dismissed by Strauss scholars-this book is the first detailed account of Strauss's lifelong engagement with ballet. Neither a rescue mission nor a product of the current project to redefine Strauss as a modernist, Heisler's excellent and original study contributes significantly to Strauss scholarship by meticulously fleshing out the sketchy accounts of his unfinished ballets and those using Couperin arrangements, placing all the projects within the context of dance history, and-perhaps most importantly-deepening our understanding of the aesthetics and ideology behind Strauss's interest in ballet and appropriation of eighteenth-century music.
The book is divided into an introduction and two parts: part 1 features chapters on Die Insel Kythere (The Isle of Cythera, 1900) and Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph, 1914), part 2 on the Ballettsoirée (1923), Schlagobers (Whipped Cream, 1924), and Verklungene Feste: Tanzvisionen aus zwei Jahrhunderten (Bygone Celebrations: Dance Visions from Two Centuries, 1941). According to Heisler, these chapters "chronicle a gradual transformation from his modernleaning, parodic conception of classical dance in the years leading up to World War I to a belated obsession with romantic-era ballet during World War II" (p. 6). To put Heisler's coverage in perspective, the most thorough account of Strauss's life and works, Norman Del Mar's Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (3 vols. [London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962-72]), spends a page and a half on Kythere, twenty-six on Josephslegende, thirteen on Schlagobers, and ten combined on the Couperin arrangements for the Ballettsoirée and Verklungene Feste (discussed as instrumental suites, not ballets). Heisler does not discuss the music comprehensively, but rather offers focused analyses to make specific points.
The introduction notes the marginal status of dance in musicology, emphasizes the novelty of Heisler's multidisciplinary approach, and locates the study outside the main current of Strauss scholarship. Stating that his research centered on the genesis, premiere, and early...