Music: Domestic Symphony

Few composers have ever approached Germany’s great, white-haired Richard Strauss in making music onomatopoetic. In his tone poem Don Quixote, muted wind instruments reproduce with waxwork fidelity the distant bleating of a flock of sheep. In his opera Salome, while the heroine gloats, each chop of the knife that severs the head of John the Baptist clunks with horrifying realism from the orchestra pit.. Composer Strauss once boasted that he could put anything into musical terms, even a glass of water.

Last week, while John Barbirolli and Manhattan’s Philharmonic-Symphony gave an all-Strauss program, Realist Strauss’s most realistic score, the Domestic Symphony, was revived by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Dedicated to Frau Strauss & offspring, the symphony depicts scenes in the Strauss family circle. Philadelphians marveled & chuckled as Papa & Mama Strauss bickered, pleaded and brooded over the upbringing of Offspring Strauss. The argument realistically ended with Papa Strauss banging on the table (the whole brass section) and announcing that he would do pretty much as he saw fit.

Composer Strauss, whose Domestic Symphony stands up magnificently as music pure & simple, long maintained in public that it was not meant to describe anything at all. To friends he hinted slyly that it was autobiographical. Embarrassed critics, who had hailed the work as “pure music,” complained that he was holding out on them. Wailed crotchety Britisher Ernest Newman: “With each new work of Strauss there is the same tomfoolery—one can use no milder word to describe proceedings that no doubt have a rude kind of German humor, but that strike other people as more than a trifle silly.”