Word: heldenleben
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...composer who could "mold a beautiful or touching or heroic tonal image, and then distort it by scrawling a bad joke somewhere on its surface." He was a man who composed a great symphonic poem about his own sometimes mean and usually money-grabbing life and called it Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life...
Richard Strauss: Ein Heldenleben (Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Reiner conducting; Columbia, 10 sides). A wag once tried to describe this fustian piece: "It is he, the Hero, and he has been drinking again. He is in E flat, and his cuffs are soiled by numerous dissonances . . . Four plain-clothes detectives come in on a sharp glissando, and, seizing the Hero, throw over his head a dark-tasting chord . . ." Performance: good. Suite from Der Rosenkavalier (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy conducting; Columbia, 6 sides). Some of the pleasantest music Richard Strauss ever wrote, pleasingly played. Recordings: good...
When Edvard Grieg first heard Amsterdam's Concertgebouw (Concert Hall) Orchestra 50 years ago, he exclaimed: "Never have I listened to a better performance." When Richard Strauss first conducted the orchestra, he was so impressed that he dedicated Ein Heldenleben...
Antheil's new symphony boomed with martial rhythms and surged with soulful tunes. It sounded successively like Richard Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, a circus parade and a Czechoslovakian weenie-roast. It was vulgar, raucous, unabashedly sentimental, as enjoyable as a baseball game or a day at Coney Island. Critics were unable to down the suspicion that Composer Antheil had paid careful attention to the music and success of Dmitri Shostakovich. In any event, the work proved what some of his friends have long suspected: that the talent Antheil has hid under a bushel of estheticism...
...Heldenleben is Hitler's favorite work. [It] depicts the life of a Hero grievously misunderstood by his fellow men and his fellow enemies. The Hero is essentially a peace maker but, thanks to the intrigues of the petty objectors . . . he is driven to war. He confounds his enemies on the battle field, and is then free to build a new order in which peace is the only supreme law, after every conscious and unconscious foe has been crushed into the dust...