Mengelberg’s Strauss: The Autocrat at Full Throttle
These recordings—Ein Heldenleben from 1941, Tod und Verklärung from the following year—arrive from a world we’ve lost. Not just the war years, though that shadow falls across everything the Concertgebouw did under German occupation. No, what’s vanished is the interpretive freedom Mengelberg claimed as his birthright, the assumption that a director who’d worked with Strauss could bend and reshape these scores like warm wax.
Mark Obert-Thorn’s transfers deserve immediate praise. Telefunken’s shellac pressings—the metal masters long since ruined by postwar neglect—have yielded surprisingly malleable source material. Yes, there’s hiss, a steady wash of it. But the orchestral image holds together with remarkable coherence, the string portamenti catching light, the brass snarls cutting through with almost startling immediacy. You hear the Concertgebouw’s legendary warmth, that burnished glow in the lower strings, even through seven decades of sonic degradation.
The Heldenleben is vintage Mengelberg—which means it’s both thrilling and occasionally maddening. He takes Strauss’s self-portrait and enlarges it further still, stretching phrases until they threaten to snap, pulling back the tempo for moments of supposed profundity that the composer never quite intended. The battle scene erupts with ferocious energy; the Concertgebouw’s brass section sounds like it’s been unleashed after months of confinement. But then Mengelberg will suddenly brake for some inner vision only he perceives, and the architecture wobbles.
His relationship with Strauss—they’d worked together extensively from 1898 onward—gave Mengelberg license he perhaps shouldn’t have taken. The portamento slides are everywhere, that scooping, swooping manner of string playing that’s become anathema to modern taste. Yet there’s undeniable conviction here, a sense that Mengelberg believed utterly in his approach. The Hero’s battle with his critics has genuine venom; you can almost see the conductor settling personal scores.
Tod und Verklärung fares better, oddly enough. Perhaps the work’s more straightforward emotional trajectory—suffering, reminiscence, transfiguration—suited Mengelberg’s broad-brush approach. The opening measures have genuine pathos, the fevered heartbeat motive pulsing with alarming irregularity. When the childhood themes emerge, Mengelberg’s tendency toward sentiment finds appropriate outlet. And the final transfiguration builds with cumulative power that’s hard to resist, even when you know he’s applying interpretive varnish Strauss never requested.
The solo violin work in Heldenleben—the Hero’s companion, Strauss’s Pauline made sound—shows the Concertgebouw’s concertmaster navigating Mengelberg’s rubato with astonishing flexibility. Those portamenti again, sliding between pitches like someone speaking rather than playing. Modern ears may recoil. But there’s communicative urgency here that our cleaner, cooler performances sometimes lack.
Should you own this? If you know only Kempe’s elegant, perfectly-proportioned Strauss, or Karajan’s sleek, commanding readings, then yes—this offers essential perspective on how these works sounded to audiences who heard them closer to their creation. Mengelberg’s interpretive liberties may offend purist sensibilities (they certainly offend mine at moments), but his orchestra’s sheer virtuosity in executing his vision remains breathtaking. They follow his most extreme tempo fluctuations without losing ensemble precision, a feat that speaks to both iron discipline and mutual understanding forged over decades.
Naxos’s budget price removes any serious obstacle. This is important historical documentation—flawed, fascinating, utterly of its moment. Mengelberg’s autocratic approach to these scores has rightly fallen from favor, but hearing it in full cry reminds us that interpretive fashions shift like sand. His Strauss won’t be everyone’s Strauss. It’s emphatically, unapologetically his own.
Richard Dyer
