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Richard Strauss 1864–1949

by Rollo H. Myers

The death last month of Richard Strauss is a sharp reminder to us of the impermanence of fame. For few could deny that Strauss was as famous in his day as any musician has ever been. His day, however, was not, when all is told, a long one, though while it lasted it was spectacular enough. Indeed Strauss must be counted, along with Debussy and Sibelius, as one of the three great figures dominating nineteenth-century fin de siècle music in Europe, each of whom seemed likely to influence, in different ways, the course of music in the century to come. But somehow, unlike his compeers, Strauss failed to stay the course; although his life was prolonged far into the twentieth century, his great creative period was strictly circumscribed, and his influence on modern musicians was never comparable to that of Debussy, nor has it been so lasting. Indeed, since the production in 1911 of his most popular opera, ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, he had hardly been a force to reckoned with, though he continued to compose almost to the end of his life. And so we are faced with what must be one of the most curious cases in musical history – that of a composer, dying at the age of eighty-five, who produced all his best work roughly within a period of twenty-five years before the age of fifty. Moreover, during that period he became almost a great a ‘power’ in the world of music as Wagner and Liszt had been before him. But, unlike theirs, his power and influence were short-lived; the story of Richard Strauss is the story of the decline and fall of a genius who might have been a great artist had the quality of his mind been on the same high level as his extraordinary technical prowess. As it is, it seems certain that posterity will deny his right of admittance to the company of the Immortals; for there can be no place, one feels, in the ranks of the supreme ones for one who all his life seemed constitutionally incapable of distinguishing between the substance and the shadow. My meaning will perhaps become clear in the course of these pages. But before passing judgement on this extraordinary musician, it will be necessary first of all to look back on his career, and endeavour to trace his development step by step and see him in relation to the social and artistic background of the times in which he lived.

Richard Strauss was born at Munich on June 11, 1864. Debussy was then a baby of two; Sibelius not yet born; while Wagner was a mature artist of fifty-one, with almost another twenty years to live. Richard’s father was Franz Strauss, principal horn in the orchestra of the Munich Court Opera; his mother a daughter of a member of the family of the wealthy brewers Pschorr. So, unlike many other great composers, the young Strauss was spared a first-hand knowledge of poverty, and enjoyed the advantages of a reasonably cultured and musical home in what was then one of the great artistic centres of Europe. His aptitude for music was early revealed; from the age of five he seems to have shown a precocious talent, and before he was ten had composed works (e.g. the Festival March op. 1 and the Serenade for wind instruments op. 7) which are published, and even occasionally performed. His D minor symphony (unpublished) was written when Strauss was a youth of sixteen, and the first string quartet a year later.

His parents, however, were evidently anxious to give their gifted son a good general education, and so, in 1882, we see him entering the University of Munich where he spent at least two years. This stage accomplished, the young musician then took the step which was definitely to launch him on his professional career as composer and conductor; he became assistant to von Bülow at Meiningen, and in 1885 succeeded him there as principal conductor.

In more ways than one this appointment marked a decisive stage in Strauss’s career, for it was at Meiningen that the young composer made his first acquaintance with the ‘new’ music – the music of Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz, of which hitherto he had been apparently completely ignorant. It seems, however, to be generally agreed by Strauss’s biographers that for this initiation into the music of the moderns, which was destined to have so great an influence upon his later development, Strauss was indebted to one man above all – a certain Alexander Ritter, a Meiningen musician some thirty years older than himself who was a great enthusiast for the modern school.

It is a curious thought that the man whose name for at least a quarter of a century was to be synonymous with ‘ultra-modernity’ was content to start his career as a faithful follower of the classical-romantic Schumann-Brahms tradition; for in none of his early compositions – not, for example, in the cello and violin sonatas, the two quartets, piano pieces, and the concertos for violin (1883) and horn (1884) – do we find any revolutionary spark, any germ which might seem to presage the thunderous and portentous language of ‘Ein Heldenleben’ or ‘Zarathustra’. Whether or not the influence of Alexander Ritter can be held entirely responsible for the new orientation of Strauss’s musical development must always remain a subject for speculation. If it can be, then this would perhaps account for one, at least, of the more disconcerting traits to be found in his music – that fundamental insincerity which seems to permeate many of his major works, creating at times almost an impression of ‘tongue in cheek’. For if in truth his ‘modernism’ was a cloak assumed in order to épater, and was not, as in the case for example of Debussy or Stravinsky, an instinctive form of utterance seeking expression from the very first, then this assumption does perhaps provide us with a key to a baffling psychological problem inherent in the whole Straussian oeuvre.

Bearing this in mind as we proceed, the fact remains, and must be duly chronicled, that from now onwards – that is to say from the Meiningen period and the friendship with Alexander Ritter – the youthful Strauss turned his back on his former models, Schumann and Brahms, whose influence is so marked in the early chamber-music works, and vowed himself to new gods. Only in the songs, which we shall come to later, did this earlier influence persist; but henceforward, broadly speaking, it was the music-dramas of Wagner, the symphonic poems of Liszt that were to fire the young composer’s imagination and suggest to him the lines on which his genius was destined to develop.

It is sometimes asserted that the Straussian Tone-Poem was a logical development of Liszt’s experiments with so-called programme music; but there is surely a fundamental difference in the aesthetic of the two composers which might, roughly, be compared with the difference between epic poetry (Liszt) and descriptive or narrative poetry (Strauss). In the former what matters is the general outline and significance of the events portrayed, with the emphasis on the universal aspect of certain underlying principles; in the latter the poet relies mainly on episodic excitement and ‘picturesque’ detail to sustain the reader’s interest. One has only, for example, to compare the ‘Faust’ Symphony of Liszt with, say, ‘Death and Transfiguration’ or ‘Don Quixote’ to realize the essentially dissimilar approach of the two composers to the problem of programme music. The subject is too large a one to be discussed fully in this context; at the same time it had to be touched on in order to make clear certain fundamental aspects of Richard Strauss’s music which have to be taken into account in any critical estimate of his work. The theories he himself held on this subject, incidentally, show that to a large extent he was deceiving himself, as for example when he refused to recognize a distinction between ‘abstract’ and ‘programme’ music.

The first of the tone poems was ‘Macbeth’, produced in 1887; but it was with ‘Don Juan’, in the following year, that Strauss leapt to sudden fame. Here, it seemed, was the authentic voice of a master; the ‘new music’ had found its mouthpiece in the person of this twenty-four-year-old musician from Munich who, by his uncanny mastery of the modern orchestra, seemed at one stroke to have inaugurated a new epoch in music. Europe was dazzled. The new star that had suddenly swum into the musical firmament bade fair to eclipse the old familiar luminaries. Here, indeed, was a new accent; this might well be the music of Nietzsche’s Superman; the surging, triumphant horn call identified with Don Juan seemed to contain the promise of youth eternally renewed, and to foreshadow a world of joyous and virile achievement. To this day, this is perhaps of all Strauss’s works the one which has won the best its youthful élan seems authentic and, with the possible exception of ‘Till’ and ‘Don Quixote’, it is the least marred by the smear of sentimentality that disfigures many of the later works. Even so, it fails to achieve complete fulfilment; Strauss, even while portraying heroism and manly prowess is obsessed always with the notion of ultimate decay.

In ‘Tod und Verklärung’ (1889) the composer still further enriched his dazzling orchestral palette, and erected a gigantic edifice of sound in order to express the passage of a soul from earthly to spiritual life. Here he makes his orchestra imitate with uncanny and uncompromising realism the fluttering heart-beats of a dying man; but when he moves on to a would-be spiritual plane the sensitive listener is likely to be shocked by the essential banality and cheap second-hand quality of the composer’s musical imagination. One more example of how the Straussian muse reveals affinity with physical decay rather than with spiritual survival.

During the five years that elapsed between the production of ‘Tod und Verklärung’ and the next big orchestral work, ‘Till Eulenspiegel’, Strauss was fully engaged with his duties as an orchestral conductor who was beginning to be very much in demand. In 1889 he resigned from the assistant-conductorship of the Munich Opera and went to Weimar as deputy to Lassen at the Court Opera. Two years later he was invited by Cosima Wagner to conduct ‘Tannhäuser’ at Bayreuth.

The year 1894 was marked by several important events in Strauss’s life – his marriage to the singer Pauline de Ahna; his appointment as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in succession to von Bülow (who had died that year); and the production, at Weimar, of his first opera ‘Guntram’. Following the example of Wagner, Strauss was on this occasion his own librettist; the subject he chose was what Nietzsche had called ‘das obligat erlösende Frauenzimmer’, which has been translated as ‘the inevitable redeeming female’. ‘Guntram’, however, does not show Strauss at his best; his second opera ‘Feuersnot’ gave him much more scope and is a work that can still be heard with pleasure.

But before its production (which took place in Dresden in 1901) Strauss had turned his attention again to the tone-poem, producing three of his most famous works in this form in the years 1895-6-7 – ‘Till Eulenspiegel,’ ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ and ‘Don Quixote’, in that order. The themes of the first and third of these – the story of the legendary hero-scamp of Flemish folk-lore, Owlglass, and the immortal adventures of Cervantes’s great creation, The Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance, were the best suited to Strauss’s peculiar gifts, and in these tone-poems he rose, perhaps, to his greatest heights. The same cannot be said of ‘Zarathustra’, which must be counted a failure. Lacking the concreteness of the other two stories, Nietzsche’s philosophic fantasy on the teaching of the great Persian mystic proved too much for the composer, who thought he could employ the same methods to illustrate abstract conceptions that he had used so successfully ‘to point a moral and adorn a tale’ in the case of Owlglass and Don Juan. As a result, he fell between two stools, and we feel that ‘Zarathustra’ is pretentious without being profound, and falls very far short of Nietzsche’s imaginative text.

‘Don Quixote’, on the other hand, for all its rather naïve realism, is one of Strauss’s most successful compositions. The Don (cello solo) and Sancho Panza (viola) are real musical entities; they are definite creations and live in the memory in the same way as the mocking irrepressible Till, or that other exuberant Don Juan. In these works Strauss exhibited his gifts to the full, and showed himself to be, if nothing else, a superb musical illustrator, of the same calibre as Hogarth, Cruikshank, Doyle or Tenniel.

‘Don Quixote’ was followed in 1898 by ‘Ein Heldenleben’, a work which in spite of the virtuosity of the scoring now seems to many to be merely noisy and pretentious; and then five years later, in 1903, came the last of the tone-poems in the form of the ‘Domestic Symphony’. This probably caused more ink to flow than almost any other product of the naturalistic school. The polemics it aroused seem unreal and academic to us; but the fact that it did arouse them is probably the only reason why the ‘Domestic Symphony’ is remembered at all today. The choral ballad ‘Taillefer’ also dates from this period.

In the same year, 1903, the first Strauss Festival was held in London at the old St. James’s Hall, when Strauss shared with Mengelberg the conducting of the Concertgebouw Orchestra from Amsterdam. His first visit to England had been in 1897. He was to come again in 1910 (to conduct ‘Elektra’ at Covent Garden); and in the years after the first world war he visited this country in 1923, and then again on two occasions in 1926. On the first of these, in April, he conducted the film version of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’; on the second he was guest conductor at a concert of his works broadcast by the B.B.C. In 1936 he came again to conduct some of his operas at a short German season at Covent Garden; he visited London for the last time in 1947.

Strauss was very much in demand as a conductor throughout his career (he was famous, and deservedly so, as an interpreter of Mozart); and he held some of the most important posts in Europe. Thus, from 1898 to 1910 he was conductor of the Royal Opera, Berlin; and from 1908 to 1920 he regularly conducted the State Opera Concerts. His appointment as permanent conductor of the Vienna Opera lasted from 1919 to 1924; and in 1921 he toured the United States, where he was held in great esteem.

It is now time to turn our attention to yet another aspect of Strauss’s many-sided art and consider his remarkable achievements as a composer for the theatre. It is a moot point whether he will live longest as an operatic or as a symphonic composer; certainly his operatic output was very considerable, though in quality, perhaps, less consistent than his work in the field of purely symphonic music. A point to be noted is that Strauss turned to opera relatively late in life; but once he had made his name as the composer of two of the most sensational music-dramas ever produced – ‘Salomé’ and ‘Elektra’ – he practically turned his back on ‘absolute’ music and devoted the remainder of his life to the production of operas, and these succeeded one another throughout his declining years at almost regular intervals.

The production of ‘Salomé’ in Dresden in 1905 is a date in musical history comparable with that of ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’ (1902) or ‘Le Sacre du Primtemps’ (1913). Never before had sensationalism in music been carried to such extremes. This German version of Oscar Wilde’s perverse but frigid rendering, in classical French, of the story of the passion conceived by Herod’s daughter for John the Baptist, over whose dead body and severed head she gloats indecently, surpassed in violence and realism anything hitherto exhibited on the serious operatic stage. The impact of Strauss’s music is physical to a rare degree; and every orchestral device is employed to paint an unforgettable and horrifying picture of blood and lust and perversity. Naturally the opera became the rage; it was presented all over Europe and in America; and Salomé’s ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ (the only example in grand opera of ‘strip-tease’?) was immensely popular with dancers of every nationality and audiences still naïve enough to enjoy the thrill of being shocked. In England the Lord Chamberlain’s Office declined to license ‘Salomé’ for production in the theatre until certain modifications had been introduced; but it was eventually performed in London in 1910 under the direction of Sir Thomas Beecham.

The name of Richard Strauss had by now acquired a new prestige. He was not slow to follow up his first real success in the theatre, and his next production, ‘Elektra’ (Dresden 1919), bade fair to rival ‘Salomé’ in its sensationalism. For this opera Strauss chose as his librettist Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, who from onwards was to collaborate with the composer in most of his important stage works.

The theme of ‘Elektra’, adapted from the tragedy of Sophocles, again gave the composer every opportunity to indulge his taste for blood and violence; but at least the dreadful vengeance of the daughter of Agamemnon had some justification which lifts the opera to a higher level than ‘Salomé’, every bar of which exhales an odour of decadence. And the music of ‘Elektra’ undeniably has power. Here again the composer attacks our nervous system by means of the sheer physical intensity of his music; whips crack, and orchestra and singers are convulsed with paroxysms of hysterical passion; but the starkness of the drama ‘comes through’, riding triumphantly on the crests of this welter of seemingly chaotic, but in reality highly organized sound. As a virtuoso of the orchestra Strauss at this period was unrivalled; but still the suspicion lurks that this terrific façade conceals a void and not a plenitude; that the whole fabrication is slightly ‘ersatz’; and that the emotional purge to which we are subjected is more akin to the bolus of the horse-doctor than to the true Aristotelian catharsis. After ‘Elektra’ the Straussian volcano subsided, and in none of the later works can any comparable eruption be observed. Realizing, perhaps, that he had pushed music as far as it would go along these sulphurous paths the composer (he was then forty-seven) executed a volte-face, and in 1911 gave opera-lovers what they had been waiting for (jam after the pill) in the form of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’. It is, of course, completely un-Mozartian, whatever illusions the composer himself may have entertained on this point, but it is a tour de force, a masterpiece of its kind and delightful entertainment.

‘Ariadne auf Naxos’, originally incorporated in Molière’s ‘Le bourgeois gentilhomme’ for which Strauss also composed incidental music was produced the following year, and marks a further return to classicism. Then in 1914, when Diaghilev was spreading his tentacles over Europe, Strauss was prevailed upon to write something for the famous Russian Ballet. The result was the miserable ‘Josefslegende’ (the Legend of Joseph) which added nothing to Strauss’s reputation, and is remembered solely as the ballet in which the young Massine made his début.

The only work of importance that came from Strauss’s pen during the first world war was the ‘Alpensymphonie’ (Alpine Symphony, 1915); but after the armistice he brought out yet another opera ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ (The Woman without a Shadow), not yet seen in this country. The ballet-pantomime ‘Schlagobers’ (‘Whipped Cream’) was produced in 1924, and this was followed a year later by ‘Intermezzo’ in which Strauss was once again his own librettist. The last pre-Hitler opera was ‘Die Aegyptische Helene’ (Egyptian Helen, 1928), and then in 1933 Strauss entered upon the last phase of his career with ‘Arabella’, which was followed in 1935 by ‘Die schweigsame Frau’ (The silent woman), adapted from Ben Jonson’s ‘Epicoene’ by Stefan Zweig. The last recorded stage productions, of which we in this country have no first-hand knowledge were ‘Friedenstag’ and ‘Daphne’, produced in Munich and Dresden respectively in 1938, and ‘Die Liebe der Danae’, 1944.

During the second world war Strauss seems to have confined himself, not unnaturally, to instrumental compositions. Of these the most noteworthy were the Oboe Concerto (performed first at Zürich in February 1946 and later the same year in London at a Promenade concert, with Leon Goossens as soloist) and ‘Metamorphosen’, described as a ‘study for twenty-three solo strings’, of which the Boyd Neel orchestra gave the first performance in England, also in 1946. Both these works showed clearly enough that the hand of this now octogenarian master craftsman had lost none of its cunning. The score of ‘Metamorphosen’, a fine example of string-writing in the romantic tradition, not only bears the inscription ‘In Memoriam, April 1945’, but contains free quotations from the Funeral March movement in the ‘Eroica’ – evidently a last tribute to the old Germany that expired in 1945, just as the two Sonatinas for wind instruments, composed in 1944-5 and dedicated to ‘the spirit of Mozart at the end of a happy working life’ are also a last tribute to the great musician of whom, paradoxical though it might seem, Strauss had all his life been the fervid admirer and most faithful and sympathetic interpreter. One other work of this period, the ‘Duet Concertino’ for clarinet and bassoon, string orchestra and harp, was given its first performance in London at a Promenade concert on July 29, 1949.

As to Strauss’s record during the period of National-Socialism we lack conclusive evidence; but it is certain that in the early years of the régime he was persona grata, and accepted the post of President of the Nazi Reichsmusikkammer, although in 1935 he resigned for reasons which are none too clear. It is also known that he composed a Hymn for the Olympic Games held in Berlin in 1936. Moreover, it seems clear that in spite of his official position he failed to use his influence in the right direction during the Furtwängler-Hindemith episode from which he remained unnecessarily aloof. On the other hand, he somehow induced the Nazi Government to allow him to employ the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig to write the libretto for ‘Die schweigsame Frau’. According to Zweig’s own account permission to have the opera produced in Germany was gained only after endless discussion among the Nazi Party leaders, and by a special dispensation granted by Hitler himself. But after the second performance the thunderbolt fell; everything was cancelled, and the opera banned throughout the Reich. Simultaneously it was learned that Richard Strauss had resigned the Presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer. The reason given by Zweig was that a letter to him in which the composer had expressed his own personal views too frankly had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo, whereupon the Government had insisted on Strauss’s immediate resignation, and forbidden all further performances of the opera. For the last ten years of his life Strauss lived more or less in retirement, but with his prestige undimmed as the Grand Old Man of German music.

I have left to the last any reference to Strauss as a writer of songs, though it is probable that even when his more controversial works have been forgotten he will be remembered by posterity as the composer of a handful of the most beautiful Lieder produced in Germany since Schumann and Brahms. He was writing songs – there are well over a hundred of them published – intermittently from 1882 to 1929; and of these a few, such as ‘Ständchen’, ‘Morgen’, ‘Cäcile’, ‘Heimliche Aufforderung’ and ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’, to mention only the best-known, have won for themselves a permanent place in the Lieder-singer’s repertory.

This is not the place to attempt a final estimate of the contribution to music made by Richard Strauss, or to assess his rightful place in the hierarchy of notable composers. He is one of those musicians about whom it is difficult to write impartially or objectively, as his music is likely to arouse antipathy or admiration according to the temperamental outlook of the individual critic. My own view is that he must be considered primarily as a musical phenomenon, the product to a large extent of the age and society in which he lived; but that an inherent vice in his artistic constitution caused him to use music deliberately as a vehicle for the expression of second-rate and frequently second-hand ideas decked out with all the allurements of that sensationalism to which by nature he seemed especially partial. He was always a consummate showman, even something of an exhibitionist; hence that disquieting impression of hollowness and insincerity so often produced by his music. In other words, as I remarked before, the shadow was to him as important as the substance, the glitter of tinsel as satisfying as that of gold. He therefore never made the effort to purge his work of dross and so, lacking anything that might be called, or recognized as, fineness of mind, he was content to use his great mastery over the raw material of music to construct great edifices of sound, superficially impressive, but carrying within themselves the seeds of their own decay. For what all the greatest composers have had Strauss had not: he was always disconcertingly terre-à-terre,, and never once does he speak to you with that ‘still small voice’ whose message seems to come from somewhere beyond infinity. That is why the doors of the innermost sanctum of the Immortals will always remain closed to him. He was a great technician, a wizard of the orchestra, a weaver of subtle and iridescent webs of sound, an inventor, even, of striking themes; but though he had, like Berlioz, the power to stir the physical emotions, he rarely touched the heart. The virtues of his music lie almost exclusively on the surface; stripped of the glittering exterior that actual musical content for all its immense vitality and racy vigour, will in few cases bear close scrutiny. And yet, by the death of this octogenarian composer, who fluttered so many dove-cots in the days of his prime, the world of music has lost one of the most picturesque and provocative personalities of our time. And when all is said and done he was a giant – even if his feet were of clay.

Musical Times, October 1949