Richard Strauss
“Macbeth,” Tone poem after Shakespeare’s drama, Opus 23
RICHARD GEORG STRAUSS was born in Munich, Germany, on June 11, 1864, and died in GarmischPartenkirchen, Bavaria, on September 8, 1949. Not yet twenty-five, he composed “Macbeth” in 1887-88 but then put
it aside and did not complete a revised version until 1890. Strauss led an early reading of the original score at
Mannheim in January 1889, but it wasn’t until after he revised the work—changing the ending (see below) and
revising the orchestration—that he led the first public performance, from manuscript, on October 13, 1890, in
Weimar, after which he made further changes to the instrumentation, introducing the final version—the work’s
second performance—in a Berlin Philharmonic concert on February 29, 1892.
THE SCORE OF “MACBETH” calls for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes and English horn, two
clarinets and bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets in F, bass trumpet, three
trombones, tuba, three timpani, cymbals, tam-tam, bass drum, side drum, and strings.
Born in Munich, Richard Strauss secured his reputation with the series of orchestral tone poems that included,
between 1886 and 1903, Macbeth, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Thus
Spake Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben (“A Hero’s Life”), and—adding insult to injury as far as his
critics were concerned, after he had portrayed himself as Heldenleben’s composer-hero—the Symphonia domestica,
in which the resources of his huge orchestra were employed to depict a typical day in the life of the composer’s
family, complete with screaming baby, family feud, and an extended romantic reconciliation. It would be another
dozen years before he finished the last of his tone poems, An Alpine Symphony (1911-15), after he had turned his
attention to opera, meanwhile completing Salome, Elektra, and Der Rosenkavalier.
In the fall of 1885 the twenty-one-year-old Strauss became an assistant in Meiningen to the great German conductor
Hans von Bülow—from whom he suddenly had to take over the orchestra when Bülow resigned that December.
From 1886 to 1889 he held a contract as third conductor at the Munich Court Opera; in the summer of 1889, at
Bülow’s recommendation, he served as a rehearsal assistant at Bayreuth; and that fall he assumed the assistant
conductorship of the Weimar Opera. In hand were three projects that had been occupying him: the completed score
of Don Juan, whose premiere under his own baton at Weimar on November 11, 1889, would secure his reputation as
“the most significant and progressive German composer since Wagner”; the libretto for Guntram, his first opera; and
a rough sketch for Death and Transfiguration, which would have its premiere on June 21, 1890, at the Eisenach
Festival, with Strauss conducting.
It was during his time at Munich, as he wrote in a letter of April 9, 1889, to his friend (and perhaps lover) Dora
Wihan, that Strauss had, with the help of the German composer-violinist Alexander Ritter, an ardent Wagnerian (and
husband of Wagner’s niece Julie), “acquired a stronger viewpoint of art and life” and “joined the ranks of the
Lisztians.” Years later, in a conversation printed in the Musical Times, he said of Ritter that “his influence was in the
nature of the storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of the poetic, the expressive in music, as exemplified
in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz.... Before I knew Ritter I had been brought up in a severely classical
school [this representing the influence of the composer’s father]. I had been nourished exclusively on Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven; and then I became acquainted with Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. It is
only through Ritter that I came to understand Liszt and Wagner.”
His first essay in music of this kind was his “symphonic fantasy” Aus Italien (1886), deriving from impressions of
his first visit to Italy that summer, published as his Opus 16, and described by Strauss as “the connecting link
between the old and the new methods.” Macbeth (1887-88) followed during his time at Weimar, but would not be
publicly performed until after the premieres of Don Juan (Opus 20) and Death and Transfiguration (Opus 24). It
was published—dedicated “to my highly honored and dear friend Alexander Ritter”—as Strauss’s Opus 23 in
August 1891, in Munich, its opus number placing it deceivingly between the two other works, even though its
original conception preceded them both. And all of this speaks also to the question of why it is so rarely heard:
however distinguished by its musical ideas and treatment of the orchestra, it was significantly overshadowed by the
giant leap forward of those two other pieces composed and premiered while Macbeth was still a work-in-progress.
In that original form, Macbeth drew criticism from Hans von Bülow, to whom Strauss showed it, because it ended
with a triumphant march representing the character of Macduff, who kills Macbeth toward the end of Shakespeare’s
play. As Bülow put it: “It is all very well for an Egmont Overture to conclude with a triumphal march of Egmont,
but a symphonic poem Macbeth can never finish with the triumph of Macduff.” The composer adjusted accordingly,
leaving only suggestions of a distant triumphal march for Macduff toward the end of the piece. Final adjustments to
the instrumentation followed upon a letter sent him by his father—Franz Joseph Strauss, principal horn of the
Munich Court Opera for forty-nine years—following the Weimar premiere: “Revise Macbeth still once more with
the greatest care, and throw out the excessive instrumental padding....”
A brief introduction of just five measures presents a martial fanfare motif generally understood to suggest not only
an aspect of Macbeth’s character but the notion of royalty in general, as later when it serves to represent the arrival
of Duncan at Macbeth’s castle. Two further ideas represent Macbeth himself: one beginning with a clearly audible,
stepwise four-note ascent labeled “marcato” (“Marked, pronounced”), the other, rising upward from low strings and
bassoons, more flexibly expressive, marked “molto espressivo.” A contrasting thematic unit, marked appassionato
and starting sinuously in the winds, is clearly meant to represent Lady Macbeth, some of whose words are printed at
this point in the score: “Hie thee hither, that I may pour my spirits in thine ear, and chastise with the valour of my
tongue, all that impedes thee from the golden round, which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to have thee
crown’d withal.”
Having thereby provided what might be construed as the two main theme-units of a classical sonata-form structure,
Strauss now presents two developmental episodes suggesting, first, a dialogue between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth
that grows increasingly tense, and then, following a huge climax marked by three fortissimo statements of the
opening fanfare motif, the aforementioned arrival of Duncan at Macbeth’s castle. After another climax comes what
we might hear as the recapitulation, but which further develops Macbeth’s themes to evoke his defeat and death,
with only passing reference to Lady Macbeth. Distant fanfares mark Macduff’s victory, followed by a suggestion of
hope. The end comes suddenly, after the brooding return of a rising figure foreshadowed early on in Macbeth’s
music, and later made explicit in the dialogue between Macbeth and his Lady.
Marc Mandel
MARC MANDEL is Director of Program Publications of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
THE AMERICAN PREMIERE OF STRAUSS’S “MACBETH” was given by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on
October 25 and 26, 1901, with Theodore Thomas conducting.
THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA has played Strauss’s “Macbeth” on just two previous occasions: in
March 1911 at Symphony Hall with Max Fiedler conducting, and a single Tanglewood performance on August 14,
1964, with Max Rudolf conducting.