Heinz Marecek - Richard Strauss: Enoch Arden (2023) Hi-Res

In a melodrama, which combines a spoken text and music that illustrates or expressively refers to it, the text content is additionally interpreted through a sound layer that “traces” the action or also interprets the emotions of the characters. The “symbols” used by the composer for this purpose, which often provide “content” clues even in pure instrumental music, can be “understood” much better through the presence of a text, and the composer will also design his music in a particularly striking way in order to draw attention to it to conduct a sound “commentary”.
If one disregards early forms of melodrama in ancient Greek tragedy and early school dramas, the concert form of this genre developed from around 1760: among other things. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Georg Anton Benda wrote their own melodramas, and individual numbers were set to music in operas as such, for example later. B. in Ludwig van Beethoven's “Fidelio” or in Carl Maria von Weber's “Freischütz”. Ignaz Seyfried, Franz Schubert and especially Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt were other important representatives of this genre, which experienced another highlight in Engelbert Humperdinck's opera “The Royal Children”.
This work, which premiered in Munich on January 23, 1897, once again drew the attention of the music world to the “melodrama that was thought to be long dead,” and one of the first to take up the suggestion was the Munich court conductor Richard Strauss. His first opera, “Guntram,” had just been a failure, so he turned primarily to symphonic poetry, but continued to search for new opera material. Then he came across the ballad “Enoch Arden” by the English poet Alfred Tennyson (in the translation by Adolf Strodtmann) and he set it to music (dated February 26th) as a melodrama - for his “boss”, the court theater director Ernst von Possart, a famous “singing actor” whose “rolling R” was legendary. The premiere performed by him and Possart on March 24, 1897 in Munich significantly improved the somewhat strained relationship between the two artists; and in the years that followed, they won triumph after triumph, even “whole streams of woman worship,” on many concert tours.
Strauss was actually rather skeptical about the genre of melodrama and described it as “casual trash” while he was still working on “Enoch Arden,” but the great success of the work made him clearly rethink his approach. He also recognized that the ballad, with its alternation between dramatic action, poetic descriptions of nature and heartfelt depictions of emotions, as in his larger-scale works, had given him ample opportunities for adequate musical “reproduction”. Its content is briefly as follows:
Enoch Arden (the orphaned son of a sailor), Philipp Ray (son of a miller) and Annie Lee (the “prettiest little girl” in the village) grow up together. Both boys see Annie as their own, but she soon falls in love with Enoch. And after he bought his own boat and built a "hut", the two of them got married, to Philipp's chagrin. After seven years a daughter was born to them and two years later a son, but soon afterwards Enoch had an accident in a distant port. During his sick bed, another weak son is born, and in order to alleviate his financial problems, Enoch accepts the offer of a trip to China as a "boatswain". But Annie, for whom he sets up a small shop, is convinced that she will never see him again. When her business goes badly and the sickly child dies, Philipp offers her his help: He ensures the education of her children, who ultimately love him dearly and call him “Father Philipp”, and after almost 12 years Enoch still hasn't returned home , Annie gives in to Philipp's wooing. When she gives birth to another child, the last doubts about whether she did the right thing disappear.
Enoch's ship was soon stranded. He was able to escape to a deserted island with two companions, but they both died and he was only rescued after ten years. When he returns home to his village, he finds out from the landlady Miriam what has happened in the meantime, sees the new family happiness through a window and decides not to disturb it. When he falls ill after a while, he reveals himself to Miriam and asks her to tell his children that he died “blessing them, praying for them and loving them.” The village then gave him a “stately burial.”
Richard Strauss, who titled the printed edition of his setting “Tennyson’s Enoch Arden for Pianoforte componirt,” had the extensive text recited unaccompanied for long stretches. During key scenes or “sensitive” elements of the action, the piano joins in, to which the composer initially entrusts the mysterious G minor prelude, which traces the surging of the sea waves, over which a simple, circling melody symbolizes a kind of “feeling of home”. The piano then takes over both “illustrations” of the scenes and (above all) a musical embodiment of the different emotions of the three people. And each of these three people is immediately assigned a characteristic motif, with which Strauss adopts the idea of Wagner's “leitmotifs” in a personal form. First we are introduced to Annie Lee with a figure rushing up, then with a parallel melody running up in E major thirds Philipp Ray and immediately afterwards Enoch Arden, whose chordal E major motif is interrupted by a pause for a sigh and then with an "exclamation" jumps into dissonance.
Depending on which of the three people is primarily affected, the following storylines are determined by these motifs, which also permeate the small interludes in terms of content. And the sound of the sea also appears along with the “circling” melody until, in view of Enoch Arden's imminent death, solemn E flat major chords and chromatic lines illuminate his last words and lead them into a quiet swan song.