This study examined Capriccio, the last opera of Richard Strauss, to look into how opera composers’ effort for ideal combination between poetry and music, their primary task, was manifested in individual works. This work is an opera with its motif a...
This study examined Capriccio, the last opera of Richard Strauss, to look into how opera composers’ effort for ideal combination between poetry and music, their primary task, was manifested in individual works. This work is an opera with its motif adopted from the two elements, i.e. poetry and music, to reveal controversy over the superiority of poetry or music and make the issue of ideal combination in opera come to the fore. Thus, the focus of this study was placed on the relationship between poetry and music which is the most important theme and prompts fundamental questions and answers.
The relationship between poetry and music, unveiled in Capriccio, was examined from two different perspectives. The first perspective reflects the controversy over opera aesthetics of the mid 18th century which forms the background for this work, while the second perspective relies on symbolization of characters. Richard Strauss selected the era of Christoph Willibald Gluck, who spearheaded the first reform in the history of opera genre, as the theatrical background for Capriccio. In that way, the drama drew on the era of aesthetics controversy in which the combination between poetry and music was considered important and put into practice, allowing the relationship between poetry and music to be contemplated. In addition, Richard Strauss defined the characters beyond their roles in drama to make them symbolize the two different areas of art, namely, poetry and music, thereby associating the characters with the controversy over the superiority between the two different areas. That provided insight into the relationship between poetry and music.
Thus, Capriccio, which centers around the relationship between poetry and music, was found to be a unique work that reflects the composer’s attempt to share his own ideas about the relationship between poetry and music, which he might have accumulated for a long time while composing the operas, with the audience.