The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRichard Strauss

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofRichard StraussThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Richard StraussAuthor: Herbert F. PeyserRelease date: October 15, 2015 [eBook #50227]Most recently updated: October 22, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RICHARD STRAUSS ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: Richard StraussAuthor: Herbert F. PeyserRelease date: October 15, 2015 [eBook #50227]Most recently updated: October 22, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: Richard Strauss

Author: Herbert F. Peyser

Release date: October 15, 2015 [eBook #50227]Most recently updated: October 22, 2024

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson, Dave Morgan and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RICHARD STRAUSS ***

Richard StraussHERBERT F. PEYSERLogoWritten for and dedicated totheRADIO MEMBERSofTHE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETYof NEW YORKCopyright 1952THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETYof NEW YORK113 West 57th StreetNew York 19, N. Y.

HERBERT F. PEYSER

Logo

Written for and dedicated totheRADIO MEMBERSofTHE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETYof NEW YORK

Richard Strauss at the age of 39

The writer of a thumb-nail biography of Richard Strauss finds himself confronted with a troublesome assignment. Strauss lived well beyond the scriptural age allotted the average man. He would have been 86 had he reached his next birthday. There was nothing romantic or sensational about his passing, for he died of a complication of the illnesses of old age. There was not much truly spectacular about the course of his life, which was most happily free from the material troubles which bedeviled the existence of so many great masters; and he was not called upon to starve or to struggle to achieve the material rewards of his gifts. He had not to pass through the conflicts which embittered the lives of Wagner or Berlioz, and he was never compelled to suffer like Mozart or Schubert. There is no record of his ever humiliating himself or performing degrading chores for publishers in return for a wretched pittance. He had wealth enough without compromising his art to keep the pot boiling—and for this one can only feel devoutly thankful. What if he was taxed with sensationalism? How many of the masters of music has not had at one time or another to endure this reproach? If “Salome” and “Elektra”, “Ein Heldenleben” and “Till Eulenspiegel” were in their day scandalously “sensational” did not the whirligig of time reveal them as incontestable products of genius, irrespective of inequalities and flaws? However Richard Strauss compares in the last analysis with this or that master he contributed to the language of music idioms, procedures and technical accomplishments typical of the confused years and conflicting ideals out of which they were born. His works are most decidedly of an age, whether or not they are for all time! In a way he was almost as fortunate as Mendelssohn. Need anyone begrudge him this?

H. F. P.

ByHERBERT F. PEYSER

The late spring of 1864 brought two events which, though seemingly unrelated, actually had a kind of mystic kinship and were to stir the surfaces of music. Early in May of that year Richard Wagner was summoned to Munich to become the friend and protégé of the young Bavarian sovereign, Ludwig II, whose real mission on earth was to save the composer for the world. Hardly more than a month later there was born in the same city a boy likewise named Richard who was destined in the fullness of time to become in a sense an heir and continuator of the older master, though by no means a vain copy of his artistic and spiritual lineaments. And long before the span of his days reached its end he had taken an undisputed place in history as a seminal force in music, for all the disagreements and conflicts his art was to engender through a large part of his more than four-score years.

Richard Strauss first saw the light on June 11, 1864, in a house on the Altheimer Eck, Munich, at the center of the town and a stone’s throw from the twin steeples of the Frauenkirche. The edifice in which the future composer ofSalome,ElektraandDer Rosenkavalierwas born forms part of a complex of buildings in which a number of larger and smaller beer halls and restaurants, separated by cobbled courtyards, house the brewery of Georg Pschorr, senior, whose son, Georg Pschorr, junior, enlarged the establishment. Furthermore, he improved the quality of its products till Pschorrbrau beer became, it seemed to many (including the writer of these pages) themost incomparable refreshment this side of heaven, despite the close proximity of the Hofbrauhaus, the Löwenbrau, the Augustiner Brau and the unnumbered other Munich breweries and affiliated Bierstuben. At this point the writer ought, logically, to confess that he bases his present recollections on what he remembers from his wanderings in the Bavarian capital prior to the Second World War, since which time changes without number may well have changed the picture. But one thing is reasonably certain—if the old house at Altheimer Eck (Number 2) still stands it continues to have affixed to its wall the decorative inscription: “Am 11 Juni 1864 wurde hier Richard Strauss geboren.” (“On June 11, 1864, Richard Strauss was born here.”)

* * *

The Pschorrs apart from being excellent brewers were excellent musicians. One of the four daughters, Josephine, later Richard’s mother, a fairly accomplished pianist, taught her son piano in his fifth year. A noted harpist, August Tombo, continued the lessons and by the time the boy was seven he was administered violin instruction. Franz Strauss, Richard’s father, was an individual of a fibre as tough as Josephine Pschorr, who became his wife, was mild-mannered and sensitive. But he was an amazingly fine horn player, for the sake of whose virtuosity and musicianship greater men than he put up with his ill manners and incredible tantrums. A venomous reactionary, his particular detestation was Wagner, against whom he never hesitated to exhibit the meanest traits of which he was capable. Even when the author ofTristanexpressed himself as overjoyed with the sound of the orchestra at a first rehearsal of his work in the little Residenz Theatre Franz Strauss retorted: “That’s not true! It sounded like an old tin kettle!” He pronounced Wagner’s horn parts “unplayable” so that Wagner had to call upon Hans Richter to try out for him some passages inDie Meistersingerin order to demonstrate that they were anything but “impossible”. With the elder Strauss Hans von Bülow was repeatedly at loggerheads. And when he once attempted to thank Bülow for some favor the latter had shown young Richard Strauss Bülow exploded with the words: “You have no right to thank me! I did your son a favor not on your account but only because I consider his talent deserves it!” To the end of his days Franz Strauss remained a cantankerous individual.

Birthplace of Richard Strauss in Munich

Young Richard may not have exhibited the precocity of a Mozart or a Mendelssohn but there could be no doubt that musical impulses stirred in the child. He piled up a considerable quantity of juvenilia, beginning as a six-year-old. In 1871 he turned out a “Schneiderpolka”—a “Tailor’s Polka”. There followed dance pieces for piano, “wedding music” for keyboard and children’s instruments, some marches and more miscellany of the sort. It was related by his naturally proud relations that the lad could write notes even before he had learned the alphabet. There would be no particular point in detailing these boyish accomplishments, yet when Richard was twelve an uncle paid for the publication by Breitkopf und Härtel of a “Festival March”, which gained the distinction of appearing as “Opus 1”. It need hardly be said that he participated in domestic performances of chamber music with regularity. All the same his school work maintained a high level, even if it did not consume a needless amount of time. He also found leisure to jot in the pages of his mathematics copybook whole passages of a violin concerto which appears to have been set down during his classroom lessons. According to his biographer, Willy Brandl, the piece was written so rapidly that the student contrived a three-line staff instead of the usual five-line one.

At this period his musical tastes were colored by those of his father. Thus there is no reason for surprise that the compositions he turned out up to the end of his high school days were the customary platitudes of classical and romantic models. Especially Schumann and Mendelssohn were rather colorlessly reflected in the products the youth fashioned. Even considering his father’s poisonous detestation of Wagner it still remains hard to grasp how weak was the pressure the creator ofTristanandMeistersingerexercised on the son precisely when the Wagnerian idiom was beginning to permeate the language of music. More than that, it took time for the boy Strauss to rid his system of the ludicrous prejudices he parroted for a while. To his friend the composer, Ludwig Thuille, he confided thatLohengrin(which he heard at fifteen) was “sweet and sickly, in all but the action”; and after his first exposure toSiegfriedhe lamented that he was “more cruelly bored than I can tell!” Then he concluded with this burst of prophecy: “You can be assured that in ten years nobody will remember who Richard Wagner was!”

Young Strauss was to outlive such heresies by the sensible process of steeping himself in Wagner’s scores rather than by viewing inadequate performances as truths of Holy Writ. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the dismay of Franz Strauss as, little by little, he became aware of the turn things were taking. He who had striven to bring up his son in his own Philistine ways was gradually brought face to face with the upsetting fact that the young man might be getting out of hand! Richard was no music school or conservatory pupil, and had presumably none too many academic precepts to unlearn. One advantage of this was that nothing tempted him to cut short other phases of his education; and in the autumn of 1882 he began to attend philosophical, literary and other cultural lectures at the University of Munich, sothat there were no serious gaps in his schooling. He continued to compose industriously (a chorus in theElektraof Sophocles was one of his creations in this period); but in after years he warned against “rushing before the public with unripe efforts.” Subsequently he visited upon the works of his salad days this judgment: “In them I lost much real freshness and force.” So much for those who question even today the soundness of this early verdict.

* * *

One advantage he came early to enjoy—the good will of Hermann Levi, the Munich conductor (or, let us give him his more imposing official title of “Generalmusikdirektor”) who first presided in Bayreuth over Wagner’sParsifal. In 1881 the outstanding chamber music organization of the Bavarian capital performed a string quartet of young Strauss and very shortly afterwards Levi sponsored the first public hearing of a rather more ambitious effort, a symphony in D minor. Before a capacity audience the noted conductor went so far as to congratulate the high school student. It should be set down to the credit of the scarcely seventeen-year-old composer that he did not for a moment suffer the tribute to turn his head. Next morning the student was back in his classroom, as unconcerned with his triumphs of the preceding evening as if they had all been no more than an agreeable dream. The usually peppery father appears to have been somewhat less balanced than his son and a little earlier took it upon himself to dispatch Richard’sSerenade for Wind Instruments, Opus 7, to Hans von Bülow. “Not a genius, but at the most a talent of the kind that grows on every bush,” shot back the latter after a glimpse at the score of this adolescent production. But Bülow’s irritable mood softened before long and he was considerably more flattering about other of the composer’s works which came to his attention. All the same Bülow grew tolike theSerenadewell enough to make room for it on one of his programs. Meantime—on November 27, 1882—Franz Wüllner produced it in Dresden. And it was a strange quirk of fate which made of this piece the unexpected vehicle for Richard’s first exploit as a conductor! It so happened that Bülow eventually scheduled it (1884) for one of his concerts. At the eleventh hour the older musician, suffering from an indisposition, appealed to his young friend to direct his own work. Trusting to luck Richard suffered a baton to be thrust into his hands, and almost in a dream state, hardly knowing how things would turn out, piloted the players through the score. “All that I realize,” he afterwards said, “is that I did not break down!”

Young Strauss was not idling. The products of his energetic young manhood if they do not bulk large in his exploits indicate clearly how carefully he was striving to learn his craft without, at the same time, seeking to blaze trails. One finds him turning out in 1881 five piano pieces as well as the string quartet just mentioned; a piano sonata, a sonata for cello and piano, a concerto for violin and orchestra,Mood Picturesfor piano, a concerto for horn and orchestra, and a symphony in F minor. This symphony, incidentally, was first produced by Theodore Thomas, on December 13, 1884, at a concert of the New York Philharmonic Society. Perhaps more important, however, were the songs Strauss was writing at this stage. For they have preserved a vitality which Strauss’s instrumental products of that early period have long since lost. It is not easy to grasp at this date that it was the early Strauss the world has to thank for such masterpieces of song literature as the incorrigibly popular (one might almost say hackneyed),Liederas “Zueignung”, “Die Nacht”, “Die Georgine”, “Geduld”, “Allerseelen”, “Ständchen”, and a number of other such lyric specimens, many of them in thetruest tradition of the German art song. Indeed, the boldness, the diversity, declamatory, rhythmic and melodic features of Strauss’s achievements in this field might almost be said to have preceded the more sensational aspects of his orchestral works.

* * *

The songs of Strauss, the earliest specimens of which date from 1882, and which span (though in steadily diminishing numbers), the most fruitful years of his life, aggregate something like 150. If the better known ones are with piano accompaniment, not a few are scored for an orchestral one. A large number long ago became musical household words, along with theLiederof Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, though having a physiognomy quite their own. The woman who became his wife, Pauline de Ahna, was an accomplished vocalist and that circumstance goes far to account for the diversity of his efforts in this province. The joint recitals of the pair stimulated for a considerable period the composer’s lyric imagination. If his inspiration eventually sought expression in larger frames it must be noted that the slant of his genius habitually ran to larger conceptions. In any event theLieder Abendeof Strauss and his betrothed help explain the creative impulses which at this stage found so much of their outlet in song-writing. The composer was later to explain that a new song might be dashed off at any half-way idle moment—might even be scribbled down in the twinkling of an eye between the acts of an opera performance or during a concert intermission. And as spontaneously as Schubert, Richard Strauss busied himself with poems of the most varied character.

* * *

On the young man’s twenty-first birthday Hans von Bülow recommended to Duke George of Meiningen “an uncommonly gifted” musician as substitute while he himself went on a journey for his shatteredhealth. Bülow referred to the suggested deputy as “Richard III”, since after Richard Wagner, “there could be no Richard II.” Strauss arrived in Meiningen in October, 1885. The little ducal capital boasted a high artistic standing. Its theatrical company enjoyed international fame. The town, to be sure, had no opera, but the orchestra, though numbering only 48 instrumentalists, had been so trained by the suffering yet exigent Bülow that it was virtually unrivalled in Germany. The newcomer was encouraged to submit under his mentor’s eye to an intensive training. Bülow’s rehearsals ran from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon and his disciple from Munich was invariably on hand from the first to the last note. The rest of the day was devoted to score reading and to every subtlety of conductor’s technic. The young man was absolutely overwhelmed by “the exhaustive manner in which Bülow sought out the ultimate poetic content of the scores of Beethoven and Wagner.” And a favorite saying of the older musician was never to be forgotten by his disciple from Munich: “First learn to read the score of a Beethoven symphony with absolute correctness, and you will already have its interpretation.”

* * *

Strauss made other friends and valuable connections in Meiningen. One of the most important and influential of these was an impassioned devotee of Wagner, Alexander Ritter. Like so many apostles of the creator ofParsifalat that period, Ritter was a violent opponent of Brahms. Besides he was the composer of a comic opera, “Der faule Hans”, and of a symphonic poem that once enjoyed a vogue in Germany, “Kaiser Rudolfs Ritt zum Grabe”. It was Ritter’s service to familiarize Strauss with some of the deepest secrets of the scores and writings of Wagner as well as of Liszt, and he understood how to fire his young friend with soaring enthusiasm for his own ideals. He also didmuch to inspire the budding conductor with a taste for the writings of Schopenhauer, an inclination he himself had inherited from Wagner. Ritter’s influence, in short, was one of the luckiest developments at this stage of Strauss’s career.

The first concert the youth from Munich conducted in Meiningen took place on October 18, 1885. It afforded him a chance to exploit his talents as pianist and batonist as well as composer, what with a program that included Beethoven’sCoriolanusOverture and Seventh Symphony, Mozart’s C minor Piano Concerto and that F minor Symphony of his own which Theodore Thomas had conducted the previous year in New York. Strauss had every reason to be pleased with the outcome. Bülow speaking of his debut as pianist and conductor had referred to it as “geradezu verblüffend” (“simply stunning”); even the hard-shelled Brahms, who chanced to be on hand, had deigned to encourage him with a cordial “very nice, young man!” When on December 1 of that year Bülow gave up the orchestra’s leadership, Strauss inherited the post, conducted all concerts and had to direct, sometimes on the spur of the moment, almost anything this or that high placed personage might suddenly take a fancy to hear. With the courage of despair he repeatedly attempted compositions he hardly knew or had not directed publicly. Yet he never made a botch of the job, inwardly as he may have quaked.

* * *

To this period belongs a composition which has survived and at intervals turns up on our symphonic programs—the curiousBurleskefor piano and orchestra. The piece is something of a problem but it is one of the most yeasty and original products of its composer’s youth. It possesses a type of wit and bold humor worthy of the subsequent author ofTill Eulenspiegel. If it still betrays Brahmsian influences someof those dialogues between piano and kettledrums depart sharply from the more flabby romantic effusions of the youth who still clung to the coat tails of Schumann, Mendelssohn and some lesser romantics. Rightly or wrongly the composer always harbored a dislike for theBurleskethough when he created it his original instinct led him aright, if more or less unconsciously. Not till four years later did the pianist, Eugen d’Albert, give it a public hearing in Eisenach; at that, Strauss himself never brought himself to dignify theBurleskewith an opus number and insisted he would not have consented to its publication but for his need of funds. Today the saucy little score seems more alive than certain other early efforts which were rather closer to their composer’s heart.

Meiningen had been a sort of stepping stone. Strongly against the advice of Hans von Bülow, who detested Munich from the depths of his being, Strauss, nevertheless, accepted a conductor’s post in his native city, where he had the advantage of continuing his stimulating contact with Alexander Ritter, who had followed him to the Bavarian capital. Yet he did not look forward to a Munich position with particular joy. Before entering on his duties he permitted himself a vacation in Naples and Sorrento. In Munich he found the Royal Court Theatre bogged down in a morass of routine. The musical direction of that establishment, though in the capable hands of Hermann Levi, was unfired by real enthusiasm, let alone true inspiration. The first of Strauss’s official assignments was the direction of Boieldieu’s opéra comique,Jean de Paris, and a quantity of similar old and harmless pieces. One promised duty which augured well was a production of Wagner’s boyhood opera,Die Feen. He would probably never have been promised anything so rewarding had not the conductor for whom it had been intended in the first place fallen ill. But even this unusual prize was in the end snatched fromhis grasp after he had presided over the rehearsals. At the last moment the direction of the Wagner curio was assigned to a certain Fischer. There was a managerial conference concerning the matter at which, we are told, “Strauss was like a lioness defending her young”; but the Intendant put a stop to the argument by announcing that “he disliked conducting in the Bülow style” and that, moreover, Strauss was becoming intolerable because of his high pretensions “for one of his youth and lack of experience!”

Meanwhile, the composer made the most of leisure he did not really want, by occupying himself with more or less creative work. One of his editorial feats of this period was a new stage version of Gluck’sIphigénie en Tauride, manifestly inspired by Wagner’s treatment of the same master’sIphigénie en Aulide. More important still was his first really large-scale work,Aus Italien, to which he gave the subtitleSymphonic Fantasy for large Orchestra. He had completed the score in 1886 and on March 2, 1887, he conducted it at the Munich Odeon. To his uncle Horburger he wrote an amusing account of the first performance at which, it appears, moderate applause followed the first three movements and violent hissing competed with handclappings. “There has been much ado here over the performance of myFantasy” Strauss wrote his uncle “and general amazement and wrath because I, too, have begun to go my own way.” And his biographer, Max Steinitzer, told that the composer’s father, outraged by the hisses, hurried to the artist’s room to see his son and found him, far from disturbed, sitting on a table dangling his legs! One detail the composer of this symphonic Italian excursion failed to notice—namely that in utilizing the tuneFuniculi, Funiculafor the movement depicting the colorful life of Naples he was quoting, not as he fancied a genuine Neapolitan folksong, but an only too familiar tune by LuigiDenza, who lived much of his life in a London suburb!

Be all this as it may, Strauss had more to occupy his thoughts than the fortunes of his Italian impressions to which he had given musical shape. In 1886-87 he composed (besides a sonata in E flat for violin and piano and a number of fineLieder—among them the lovely and uplifting “Breit über mein Haupt”) the tone poem,Macbeth(least known of them all). He revised it in 1890 and on October 13 of that year conducted it in Weimar. ButMacbethhas been completely overshadowed by the next tone poem (of earlier opus number but later composition), the glowing, romantic, vibrantDon Juanwhich has a spontaneity and an indestructible freshness that give it a kind of electrical vitality none of the orchestral works of their composer’s early manhood quite rival, unless we except that masterpiece of humor,Till Eulenspiegel—itself a different proposition. It had been the powerful impressions made on the composer by some of the Shakespearian productions of the dramatic company in Meiningen which gave the incentive forMacbeth. In the case ofDon Juanthe moving impulse was the poem of Nikolaus Lenau (whose real name was Niembsch von Strahlenau), and who described the hero of his work as “one longing to find one who represented incarnate womanhood” in whom he could enjoy “all the women on earth whom he cannot as individuals possess.” Unable in the nature of things to achieve this tall order Lenau’sDon Juanfalls prey to “Disgust, and this Disgust is the devil that fetches him.” Strauss gave no definite meanings to specific phases of his music, though he was not to want for interpreters and one of them, Wilhelm Mauke, found it preferable to discard the model supplied by Lenau and to discover in the tone poem the various women who inhabit Mozart’sDon Giovanni. Be this as it may, the score delighted the first hearers when it was playedin Weimar; they tried to have it repeated on the spot. Hans von Bülow wrote that his protégé had, withDon Juanhad an “almost unheard-of success”; and the young composer might well have seen a good augury in the notorious Eduard Hanslick’s outcries to the effect that the score was chiefly a “tumult of dazzling color daubs” and in his shrieks that Strauss “had a great talent for false music, for the musically ugly.”

It cannot be said that he was truly happy with his Munich experiences and the disappointments which, if the truth were known, seemed for the moment to dog his footsteps. He was, to be sure, adding to his accomplishments as a composer and plans for an opera began to stir in him. Moreover, he had more and more chances to accept guest engagements as a conductor and such opportunities were taking him on more and more tours in Germany. He had striven to do his best in the city of his birth yet few seemed to be grateful for his efforts to clean up drab accumulations of routine. Bülow realized from long and heart-breaking experience what his friend was undergoing. Very few thanked the idealist for his efforts to better the musical standing of his home town.

* * *

At what might be described as a truly psychological moment of his career Strauss was approached by Bülow’s old friend, the former Liszt pupil, Hans von Bronsart, with an invitation to transfer his activities to Weimar. He had every reason to look with favor on the project. Weimar was hallowed in his eyes by its earlier literary and musical associations. It had harbored Goethe and Schiller and been sanctified in the young musician’s sight by the labors of Liszt. His Munich friend, the tenor Heinrich Zeller, who had coached Wagner roles with him, had settled there, and a young soprano, Pauline de Ahna, the daughter of a Bavarian general with strong musicalenthusiasms, soon followed him. In proper course she was to become Richard Strauss’s wife. A high-spirited, outspoken lady, never disposed to mince words, a source of innumerable yarns and witticisms, and who saw to it that her celebrated husband carefully toed the mark, Pauline Strauss was in every way a chapter by herself. And when, not very long after his death she followed him to the grave it seemed only a benign provision of fate that she should not too long survive him.

Strauss almost instantly infused a new blood into the artistic life of Weimar, where he settled in 1889 and remained till 1894. The worthy old court Kapellmeister, Eduard Lassen, was sensible enough to allow his energetic new associate complete freedom of action. True, the artistic means at his disposal were relatively modest and at first they might well have given the ambitious newcomer pause. The orchestra then contained only six first violins; there was a painfully superannuated little chorus and most of the leading singers had seen better days. But the conductor from Munich was disturbed by none of these apparent handicaps. In Bayreuth he had already learned the proper way of producing Wagner, and even when the means were limited, he tolerated no concessions; all Wagnerian performances had to be done without cuts or at least with a minimum of curtailments. A wisecrack began to go the rounds: “What is Richard Strauss doing?” to which the reply was: “Strauss is opening cuts!” The moldy old settings were replaced by new ones and once when there were insufficient funds to buy new stage appointments Strauss approached the Grand Duke with a plea that he might lay out of his own pocket a thousand Marks to freshen the settings. To the credit of the ruler it should be told that he refused the offer and disbursed the sum himself. But Strauss’s reforms were far from ending there. He once confessed that in hiscomprehensive job he was not only conductor but “coach, scene painter, stage manager and tailor”—in short, a thoroughgoing Pooh-Bah. He threw himself heart and soul into the job, so much so that in spite of a small stage and limited means he produced, in the presence of none other than Cosima Wagner aLohengrinthat deeply gripped her.

* * *

He had symphonic concerts as well as operas to occupy him. At one of the former he transported his hearers with the world premiere of hisDon Juan. The date deserves to be noted—November 11, 1889. That same year he had composed another tone poem,Death and Transfiguration, and on June 21, 1889, he permitted an audience in nearby Eisenach to hear it. The work is program music, if you will; but the idea that it originally set out to illustrate the poem about the man dying in a “necessitous little room” and, after his death struggles, translated to supernal glories, is wrong. Moreover the long accepted notion, that the music is based on lines by Alexander Ritter, is fallacious. For, in the first place the composer did not aim to illustrate his friend’s word picture; and in the second, Ritter wrote the poem onlyafterbecoming acquainted with the score. This is what explains a certain incongruity between Ritter’s verses and the tones which, in reality were never conceived in slavish illustration of them. Hanslick, wrong as usual, was to write misleadingly: “Once again a previously printed poem makes it certain that the listener cannot go awry; for the music follows this poetic program step by step, quite as in a ballet scenario.” And he spoke of the score as a gruesome combat of dissonances in which the wood-wind howls in runs of chromatic thirds while the brass growls and all the strings rage!

By this time accustomed to such critical nonsense the composer did not suffer himself to be troubled.What disturbed him much more was that his old champion, von Bülow, gave indications of no longer seeing eye to eye with him. At Bülow’s suggestion Strauss had revised and newly instrumentedMacbethbut the piece was to continue a stepchild. Soon he was increasing his output of songs and enriching Liedersingers with such treasures as “Ruhe, meine Seele”, “Caecilie”, “Heimliche Aufforderung” and “Morgen”; while only a few short years ahead lay “Traum durch die Dämmerung”, “Nachtgesang” and “Schlagende Herzen”, to delight nearly two generations of recitalists.

* * *

Strauss had always been blessed with a robust health. Unlike Wagner, for instance, he never suffered from exacerbated nerves and violent extremes of unbalanced mood. But at the period of which we speak he did experience one of his rare periods of illness. What between his guest engagements, his rehearsals, the strain of composing, attending to details of publication and myriad other obligations of a traveling conductor and virtuoso, he came down in May, 1891, with a menacing grippe which sent him to bed and threatened serious complications. He was resigned to anything, even if he did confess: “Dying would not be in itself so bad, but first I should like to be able to conductTristan!” He recovered and had his wish in 1892. But in the summer he was sick once more, this time with pneumonia. Now it looked as if one lung were seriously threatened. He was granted the vacation he requested, from November, 1892, to July of the succeeding year. Taking some works and sketches he started, on the advice of his physicians, for the south.

The convalescent, with a finished opera libretto in his baggage went to repair his health in Italy, Greece and Egypt. In Egypt he recovered completely. In the Anhalter railway station, Berlin, he was to see for the last time the mortally sick von Bülow, likewisejourneying to Egypt in a last effort to repair his shattered constitution. Poor Bülow was not to survive the trip. The wiry frame of Strauss helped him over any threat of tuberculosis and not only defied any peril to his lungs but seemed actually to renew his creative powers. The libretto which occupied his attention was that of his opera,Guntram, the first and least known of his productions for the lyric stage.

Guntramis without question a “Stiefkind” among Richard Strauss’s operas. The average Strauss enthusiast’s acquaintance with its music may be said to be confined to the brief phrase from it cited in the section calledThe Hero’s Works of Peacein the tone poemEin Heldenleben. Nevertheless, the opera cost the composer six long years of his time. It received a performance in Weimar, July 12, 1894. On October 29, 1940, it was to be heard again, and once more in Weimar. Strauss tells in his little volume,Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, that it had “no more than asuccès d’estimeand that its failure to gain a foothold anywhere (even with generous cuts) took from him all courage to write operas.” Efforts were made late in its creator’s life to revive it, all of them as good as futile. As recently as June 13, 1942, the Berlin State Opera tried, with the help of the conductor, Robert Heger, to pump life into it. Strauss found not a little of the opera “still vital” (“lebensfähig”) and felt sure it would produce a fine effect given a large orchestra. He liked particularly in his old age the second half of the second act and the whole of the third. The book has been described as revealing the influence of Wagner. Guntram, a member of a religious order in the time of the Minnesingers, esteems the ruling duke, but kills himself, after renouncing the duchess, the object of his affection. Despite the dramatic resemblances toTannhäuserandLohengrinAlexander Ritter found in the opera a departure from Wagnerian influences.

Slowly as Strauss labored over the three acts ofGuntramhe spent no such time on the tone poems which now began to follow in rapid succession. After the ill-fated opera and a quantity of fine newLieder, superbly diversified in expressive scope and lyric moods, there followed the tone poem which, apart fromDon Juancontinues even in the present age to address itself most warmly to the public heart—Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. Analysts of one sort and another have provided the work with a program, which has long been accepted as standard. The composer himself declined to supply one, maintaining that the listener himself should seek to “crack the hard nut Till, the folk rogue of ancient tradition” had supplied his public. He himself would say nothing to clear up the secrets of the lovable knave, who came to his merited end on the gallows. If Strauss confided to his public the nature of many of Eulenspiegel’s various ribaldries and madcap adventures he might, he maintained, easily cause offense. Concertgoers could cudgel their brains all they chose, Richard Strauss would keep his own counsel! Naturally, his work acquired, rightly or wrongly, regiments of “interpreters”. If “nasty, noisome, rollicking Till, with the whirligig scale of a yellow clarinet in his brain,” as the worthy William J. Henderson eventually described him, the irrepressible “Volksnarr” was ultimately to become visualized as a kind of medieval ballet fable sporting all the benefits of story-book scenery and dramatic action. The result actually was not too remote from what Strauss originally intended. Its popular musical elements, such as the fetching polka tune (or “Gassenhauer”), the use of the folk melody (“Ich hatt’ einen Kamaraden”) and a good deal else seemed theatrically conceived. The use of the Rondeau form was ideally suited to the idea which the composer strove to formulate. At one period Strauss, conscious of the operatic elements ofTill, wasmoved to give the work a thoroughgoing dramatic setting and began to sketch the piece as a sort of lyric drama, or rather a scherzo with staging and action. But he lost interest in the scheme and did not progress beyond plans for a first act. Franz Wüllner conducted the premiere ofTill Eulenspiegelin Cologne, November 5, 1895.

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It has been pointed out that if the masculine element is idealized in Strauss’s tone poems it is rather the feminine which he gives precedence in his operas. Something of an exception to this is exemplified in the next purely orchestral work, the tone poemThus Spake Zarathustra, which followed less than a year later and was produced under its composer’s direction at one of the Museum concerts in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, November 27, 1896. The score is described as “freely after Nietzsche”. At once there arose protests that Strauss had tried to set Nietzschean philosophy to music! Actually he had aimed to do no such preposterous thing, andZarathustraposed no genuine problems. If the score is the weaker for some of its syrupy and sentimental pages it includes another, such as the magnificent sunrise picture at the beginning, which can only be placed for overpowering effect beside the passage “Let there be Light and there was Light” in Haydn’sCreation. If ever anything could testify to Strauss’s incontestable genius it is this grandiose page! Other portions, it may be conceded, lapse into commonplace, but the close in two keys at once (B and C) offered one of the early examples of polytonality that duly outraged the timid. Today this clash of tonalities has quite lost its power to frighten. In 1898 and for quite some time thereafter, it passed for hardly less than an invention of Satan! Strauss intended this juxtaposition to characterize “two conflicting worlds of ideas”. Possibly it can be made to sound sharply dissonanton the piano; the magic of Strauss’s orchestration, however, eliminates all suggestion of crude cacophony.

On March 18, 1898, Cologne heard under the baton of Franz Wüllner, a work of rather different order,Don Quixote, Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character. It is a set of orchestral variations on two themes, the one heard in the solo cello and characterizing the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, the second (solo viola) picturing his squire, Sancho Panza. As a feat of individualizing these variations are a thing apart. The tone painting is unrivalled in its composer’s achievements up to that time. A number of special effects, which long invited attention over and above their real musical worth called forth considerably more astonishment than they really deserved. The pitiful bleatings of a flock of sheep, violently scattered by the lance of the crack-brained Don, his attacks on a company of itinerant monks, his ride through the air (amid the whistlings of a “wind machine”)—these and other effects of the sort are actually only minor phases of the score. Its memorable qualities, aside from striking pictorial conceits, are rather to be found in the moving and tender pages portraying the passing of Don Quixote as the mists clear from his poor addled brain. There are episodes of a melting tenderness in these which rank among the most eloquent utterances Strauss has attained.

Still another tone poem was to succeed—A Hero’s Life(Ein Heldenleben) performed under the composer’s direction in Frankfurt. The work is autobiographical with the composer himself as its hero and his helpmate, (obviously Frau Pauline, his “better half” as she was to be called). For a long timeEin Heldenlebenpassed as the prize horror among Strauss’s creations, especially its fierce and rambunctious battle scene, which some critics considered akind of bugaboo with which to frighten the wits out of grown-up concertgoers! For its dayA Hero’s Lifewas unquestionably strong meat. If people were horrified by the racket and cacophony of the battle scene they were no less disposed to irritation at the cackling sounds with which Strauss pilloried his benighted foes who resented his aims and accomplishments. And they were displeased by the immodesty with which he exhibited himself as a real and misprized hero by the citation of fragments from his own works. Some, among them as staunch a Strauss admirer as Romain Rolland, were disturbed not because the composer talked in his works “about himself” but “because of the way in which he talked about himself.” All the same Strauss was to boast no truer champion throughout his career than the sympathetic and keenly understanding author ofJean-Christophe.

Ein Heldenlebenwas the last but one of the series of tone poems which were to lead to a new phase of Richard Strauss’s career. The last of this series, theSymphonia Domestica, was completed in Charlottenburg, Berlin, on December 31, 1903. Its first public hearing took place under the composer’s direction in Carnegie Hall, New York, March 21, 1904. TheDomestic Symphony, “dedicated to my dear wife and our boy” is in “one movement and three subdivisions. After an introduction and scherzo there follow without break anAdagio, then a tumultuous double fugue and finale.” The reviewers discovered all manner of programmatic connotations in this depiction of a day in Strauss’s family life though he was eventually to tell a New York reviewer that he “wanted the work to be taken as music” pure and simple and not as an elaboration of a specific program. He maintained his belief “that the anxious search on the part of the public for the exactly corresponding passages in the music and the program, the guessing as to significance of this or that, the distraction of following a train of thought exterior to the music are destructive to the musical enjoyment.” And he forbade the publication of what he sought to express till after the concert.

Richard Strauss and Family

He might as well have saved himself the trouble! There is no room here to point out even a small fraction of what the critics heard in the work, encouraged by a casual note or two the conductor found it necessary to set down at certain stages of the score. The youngster’s aunts are supposed to remark that the infant is “just like his father”, the uncles “just like his mother”. A glockenspiel announces that the time, at one point is seven in the morning. The child gets his bath and the ablutions are accompanied by shrieks and squeals. Husband and wife discuss the future of the baby and there is a lively domestic argument which ends happily. Ernest Newman, irritated like numerous other reviewers by the torrents of vain talk the piece called forth, was to complain that “Strauss behaved as foolishly over theDomesticaas he might have been expected to do after his previous exploits in the same line”...

The first organization to perform the work was the orchestra of Hermann Hans Wetzler, in New York, and it took several months longer for the music to reach Germany. Mr. Newman had found the texture of the whole is “less interesting than in any other of Strauss’s works; the short and snappy thematic fragments out of which the composer builds contrasting badly with the great sweeping themes of the earlier symphonic poems ... the realistic effects in the score are at once so atrociously ugly and so pitiably foolish that one listens to them with regret that a composer of genius should ever have fallen so low.”

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