Chapter 26 - Traditionalism

Summary

Strauss at the turn of the century was seen as an enfant terrible who used music as an instrument for candid, unsentimental, and realist explorations of the human experience. Although embraced by the public, critics attacked his works as self-indulgent; they found him glib and shallow, content with superficial drama punctuated by a desire to shock. After World War I, both the right and left dismissed his lush, hyperrealist aesthetic as a relic of a bygone era, one side lamenting that Strauss was too cosmopolitan and the other ignoring him as benignly irrelevant. When the preeminence enjoyed by radical modernism ended mid-century, a neglected historical reality came into view: the resilience of tradition. In that reassessment, Strauss’ innovations, with those of composers such as Pfitzner, Schrecker, Martinů, Korngold, Zemlinsky, Schoeck, and Braunfels, suggest an alternative formulation of the modern, one that helped define the trajectory of twenty-first-century music.