Oboe Concerto in D major, TrV 292

Program notes

About the Work

When American troops reached Garmisch in the spring of 1945, Richard Strauss was eighty years old and living in his villa there. Some of the soldiers who cared about music sought him out. One was John de Lancie, a professional oboist in his twenties who would later become principal oboe of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

De Lancie later described the exchange. Thinking of all the oboe solos in the tone poems and operas, he asked Strauss whether he had ever considered writing a concerto for the instrument. “He answered ‘No,’” de Lancie recalled, “and there was no more conversation on the subject.” The question stayed with the composer all the same. Before 1945 was out he had written a Concerto in D major for oboe and small orchestra, and it was first played in Zurich on 26 February 1946, with Marcel Saillet as soloist and Volkmar Andreae conducting the Tonhalle Orchestra. De Lancie, back in the United States, was offered the American premiere but was not able to give it himself; it went to Mitch Miller, who later became famous as the host of the television show Sing Along with Mitch.

The concerto is one of the last works Strauss completed. The war had brought musical life in Europe to a standstill, and the composer of Salome and Der Rosenkavalier turned back to the Classical models of his youth: three movements in the traditional layout, and a modest orchestra of two flutes, cor anglais, two clarinets, two bassoons, two horns and strings. There are no orchestral oboes, so the soloist has the colour to himself.

Christian Thielemann sets the concerto beside Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande, a score that owes its subject to Strauss. Vienna hears the pairing three times: at a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde on 4 June and at the Philharmonic’s own subscription concerts on 5 and 6 June, all in the Musikverein.

What to Listen For

The three movements are played without a break and last about twenty-five minutes.

Allegro moderato. The cellos begin with a murmured figure of four quick notes, rocking between two pitches. It sounds like a mere preparation, but Strauss builds a good deal of the concerto from it. The oboe enters almost at once with a long, winding melody, and this opening makes heavy technical demands on the player. Listen for the way the flute and clarinet answer the soloist: much of this movement behaves like chamber music, and Strauss is more interested in the oboe’s singing voice than in display.

Andante. The rocking figure from the opening returns in the strings and becomes the accompaniment to a slow melody in B-flat major. This is the vein of the late operas, tender and a little nostalgic, with the harmony coloured by passing chromatic notes. A cadenza, punctuated by chords from the strings, leads directly into the finale.

Vivace, then Allegro. The last movement is quick and playful, with something of the high spirits of the tone poems Strauss wrote as a young man. After a second cadenza Strauss adds a surprise: a lilting, dance-like Allegro in 6/8 that works almost as a short fourth movement, and the horns help to see the piece out with good humour.