Tonality As Mannerism: Structure and Syntax in Richard Strauss's Orchestral Song "Frühling"

orchestral song "Fruhling," composed in 1948 and published posthumously as the first of Strauss's Vier letzte Lieder, exemplifies in a remarkable way the phenomenon of mannerism in music. In using the term "mannerism" I refer of course not to the more specific musical meaning commonly associated with this term that of a body of music of great rhythmic complexity written in certain parts of Europe in the late fourteenth Century but rather to the more general notion of mannerism in art. One standard dictionary defines mannerism as "a marked or excessive adherence to an unusual or a particular manner";1 we might thus regard as "mannerist" any compositional habit or style that is carried to an extraordinary degree of refinement. In this connection I find helpful a distinction made by Roger Sessions in his 1961 essay "Style and 'Styles' in Music." Sessions draws the distinction between stylistic range and stylistic refinement, and identifies with the former the faculty of creating a new and unique musical world with every important work. Among the composers he cites as possessors of this faculty are the Mozart of Die Zauberflote, Figaro, and Don Giovanni and the Wagner of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, and the Ring.2 To these, I believe, could be added the name of Richard Strauss, and the operas he composed at the height of his career and of his creative powers: Salome (1905), Elektra (1908), and Der Rosenkavalier (1910). Sessions describes refinement as "the result of a process of intensification, of the vital impulse toward precision and toward genuine profile."3 The composers he cites to exemplify this phenomenon include Chopin, Schumann, Debussy, and Webern. Other candidates for this list might well include such "stylistically" disparate composers as Haydn and Bruckner: upon hearing a passage from a symphony by either of these composers, one familiar with their "styles" can immediately identify it as his work. But if my own experience is typical, it is a far more challenging task to identify the specific work than it would be in the cases of the Mozart or Wagner or Strauss operas just cited. It must be granted, however, that in the works that followed Der Rosenkavalier