Richart Strauss (1864-1949)
(b Munich, 11 June 1864; d Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 8 Sept 1949 ). German composer and conductor. He emerged soon after the deaths of Wagner and Brahms as the most important living German composer. During an artistic career which spanned nearly eight decades, he composed in virtually all musical genres, but became best known for his tone poems (composed during the closing years of the 19th century) and his operas (from the early decades of the 20th). Coming of age as a composer at a time when the duality of bourgeois and artist had become increasingly problematic, Strauss negotiated the worlds of art and society with a remarkable combination of candour and irony. Averse to the metaphysics of Wagner and indifferent to Mahler's philosophical intentions in music, Strauss exploited instead the paradoxes, inconsistencies and potential profundities to be found in modern, everyday life. The new possibilities he envisioned for music were exemplified in the eclecticism of the opera Der Rosenkavalier, in which the juxtaposition of contemporary with intentionally anachronistic elements creates a stylistic pluralism that adumbrates subsequent experimentation of the later 20th century.
1. Childhood and early career, 1864–85.
Strauss was the first of two children born to Franz Strauss (1822–1905), principal horn player in the Munich court orchestra, and Josephine Pschorr Strauss (1837–1910), daughter of Georg Pschorr, a wealthy Munich brewer. Franz Strauss was a superb musician (the ‘Joachim of the horn’, according to Hans von Bülow) whose brilliance was equalled by his dogged tenacity. These characteristics took him from lowly illegitimacy to the rank of professor at the Königliche Musikschule in 1871, and to that of Kammermusiker of the Bavarian court two years later. The same dual hallmarks of genius and diligence were to leave their imprint on the musical personality of his son.
Though often stereotyped as a successor to Wagner (Bülow dubbed him ‘Richard III’, believing that Wagner could have no direct successor), Strauss had artistic roots markedly different from those of his predecessor. If anything, in his bourgeois upbringing and classical training, with instrumental music-making central to domestic life, he was closer to Wagner's nemesis, Mendelssohn. The Strauss family lived in the heart of Munich, and Richard was able to capitalize on all that a great city had to offer. Moreover, again unlike Wagner, he was musically precocious. He began piano lessons at the age of four with August Tombo (harpist in the court orchestra), composed his first works at the age of six, took up the violin at the age of eight under his cousin Benno Walter (leader of the court orchestra) and at 11 began five years of compositional study with Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer.
Yet the most important musical influence on the young Strauss was his arch-conservative father, who brought him up on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. As late as the early 1880s Franz was still supervising his son's compositions, making comments and criticisms. The second most important youthful influence was that of Ludwig Thuille (1861–1907), who was to become a prominent composer, theorist and member of the Munich School. The orphaned Thuille was treated as one of the family in the Strauss home, and Richard's surviving letters to Thuille of the late 1870s present something of a childhood diary, including reports on composing, music lessons and the works of other composers.
Strauss's earliest compositions consisted mostly of lieder, piano pieces and chamber music. From them we can infer that though his teacher, Meyer, may have been unexceptional, he nonetheless gave the young composer a thorough grounding in harmony, classical phraseology and form. Towards the end of the 1870s Strauss demonstrated an increasing interest in orchestral music, probably linked to the fact that his father had taken over the ‘Wilde Gung'l’. This amateur orchestra, which Franz directed from 1875 to 1896, helped introduce Richard to the world of symphonic composition: he attended rehearsals and himself joined the ensemble in 1882 as a violinist. Through the Wilde Gung'l he learnt orchestration on a practical level, his father leading the way, and he wrote some of his first orchestral pieces for the group. His early orchestral works included marches, concert overtures and ultimately two symphonies, in D minor (1880) and F minor (1884), but his best remembered works from this period are the pieces for 13 woodwind (the Serenade of 1881 and Suite of 1884) and the concertos for violin (1880–82) and horn (1882–3).
In 1882 he graduated from the Ludwigs-Gymnasium and, in accordance with his father's wishes, entered the University of Munich, though only for the winter of 1882–3. As brief as his enrolment may have been, it marked the awakening of his intellectual curiosity, for what he studied of Shakespeare, art history, philosophy and aesthetics was to affect his musical growth over the next decade. He soon became interested in Schopenhauer, whose writings he discussed at length with Arthur Seidl and with his lifelong friend Friedrich Rösch. He also began to make a name for himself in 1882 with some important premières outside Munich (the Serenade and the Violin Concerto). Strauss left for Dresden, then Berlin, in December 1883. In the bustling Prussian metropolis he attended concerts and theatre, and met influential people who would help guide his future. Letters to his family and to Thuille document his activities and impressions of Berlin musical life.
Of all the musicians he observed in Berlin, Bülow made the greatest impression – as a pianist, whose ‘phrasing, touch and execution’ he admired, but even more so as a conductor, whose probing interpretations captivated him. From Bülow he gained a preoccupation with Brahms that would last the next few years. Also, while on tour in Berlin, Bülow's Meiningen orchestra performed Strauss's Serenade, and the conductor soon commissioned another woodwind piece for his orchestra. This, the Suite in B
, marked Strauss's début as a conductor, for in November 1884, when the Meiningen orchestra toured Munich, Bülow included the Suite in the programme of a special matinée concert, informing Strauss that he would be directing the ensemble without a rehearsal.
By now Strauss was maturing rapidly as an artist, and his fame spread quickly. His Second Symphony had received its first performance in the USA earlier in 1884, and its first European performance took place in Cologne the next year, which was also the year in which Bülow presented the First Horn Concerto for the first time in Meiningen. Even more important to Strauss's career was his appointment, again in 1885, as Bülow's conducting assistant in Meiningen – his first professional post and a position that took him away from family and friends in Munich. The timing was ideal, for his musical independence from his father had evolved steadily since the early 1880s. The university had opened his eyes to Schopenhauer, and before that his ears had been opened to Wagner (a composer of whom his father strongly disapproved), whose music increasingly fascinated him. In 1878 he attended performances of Die Walküre and Siegfried in Munich, and by 1879 he had heard the entire Ring as well as Tristan (he studied the score in detail in 1880) and Die Meistersinger. And of course he went to Bayreuth to hear his father play in the first production of Parsifal in 1882. The negative opinions he voiced regarding Wagner at this time must be evaluated within the context of their conservative recipients, namely his father and Thuille.
Bryan Gilliam
2. The tone poet, 1885–98.
Strauss's period in Meiningen as Hofmusikdirektor lasted only from October 1885 to April 1886, but it profoundly affected the rest of his life as composer and conductor. Apprenticed to Bülow, he learnt conducting from one of Europe's finest practitioners; he later openly credited Bülow for teaching him ‘the art of interpretation’. Beyond his own conducting duties, which included directing the local choral society, he attended all Bülow's rehearsals with score and pencil in hand. The inexperienced 21-year-old composer learnt quickly, and in December 1885 took full charge of the orchestra in the wake of Bülow's sudden resignation. Among the highlights of his Meiningen tenure were his public début as a soloist in Mozart's C minor Piano Concerto, for which he wrote his own cadenzas, and the opportunity to help prepare the orchestra for the first performance of Brahms's Fourth Symphony, with the composer conducting. He conducted his Symphony in F minor for Brahms, who reportedly advised: ‘Your symphony contains too much playing about with themes. This piling up of many themes based on a triad, which differ from one another only in rhythm, has no value’. Though Strauss claimed to have taken the master's admonition to heart, this technique, for better or worse, remained a substantive component of his compositional style.
Meiningen represented another important moment in Strauss's career as a composer, for in 1885 came his so-called conversion to the ‘music of the future’ through his acquaintance with Alexander Ritter (1833–96), an outspoken proponent of the ideals of Wagner and Liszt. Married to Wagner's niece, Ritter was both a composer and a violinist in the Meiningen orchestra, and Strauss would later credit his friend for making him a Wagnerian, though it is unlikely that Ritter alone caused such a dramatic turnaround in the younger composer. Strauss was already growing away musically from his father, who disliked Brahms as much as Wagner, and growing towards both these composers. What he called his ‘Brahmsschwärmerei’ (‘Brahms adoration’) overlapped significantly with his increasing fascination with the aura of Bayreuth, and his Wandrers Sturmlied (1884) and Burleske (1885–6) are strongly indebted to Brahms, though the latter work ‘burlesques’ Wagner as well.
Contrary to Strauss's memoirs, Ritter did not introduce the young composer to the writings of Schopenhauer, though he surely sharpened his interest. Ritter's success in expanding Strauss's knowledge of Wagner's and Hausegger's writings was the logical consequence of the composer's emerging personal style. Ritter, in short, offered Strauss – who already knew Wagner's music – an aesthetic focus. His more important (and less recognized) contribution to Strauss's development was the introduction to Liszt, especially the symphonic poems. Strauss proclaimed the slogan ‘New ideas must seek new forms’ to be the ‘basic principle of Liszt's symphonic works’, and he credited Ritter for helping him realize this central tenet of the ‘music of the future’. From then on he viewed abstract sonata form as little more than ‘a hollow shell’ filled with empty phrases. After he left Meiningen for a post as third conductor at the Munich Hofoper, his friendship with Ritter grew and intensified. Indeed, in Munich, from 1886 to 1889, Strauss and Rösch, occasionally with Thuille and Anton Seidl, met regularly in the evenings ‘to exchange noble ideas and to listen to the teachings of the Lisztian Ritter’, who had moved to Munich in September 1886.
Before taking up his Munich post the month before Ritter's arrival, Strauss spent several weeks touring Italy, and in a letter to his mother he described various sites. In the left margin he sketched ‘tonal impressions’ that he would use in his ‘first hesitant step’ into the realm of the tone poem, Aus Italien (1886). From Italy he returned to Munich, where he concentrated on this new orchestral work for most of the summer. In early August he travelled with Ritter to Bayreuth, to visit the grave of the recently deceased Liszt and to hear Tristan and Parsifal. Thereafter he was ready to take up his Munich duties. Now 22, he was brash and talented, and this combination of traits complicated his life considerably during the three years he served in Munich. On paper, the post was a step up, and he was able to return to a richer cultural centre as well. But he had operated with autonomy in Meiningen, whereas Munich required him to fit into a hierarchy that often rewarded seniority over talent. Moreover, after the death of Ludwig II, in June 1886, the opera house no longer enjoyed the same level of royal support. Worse yet, Hermann Levi, first conductor at the Hofoper, was often ill, which put the detested Franz Fischer in charge. Still worse, the Intendant, Karl Perfall, was hostile both to Strauss's music and to his ‘Bülowian’ conducting. Strauss readily admitted that because he insisted on his own tempos, his taking the baton at short notice made things difficult for singers and musicians, among them his father at first horn. Franz advised patience and moderation to his often hot-headed son, who was bored with a repertory that included Boieldieu, Auber and Donizetti.
Less preoccupied with conducting duties, Strauss spent more time thinking about music and aesthetics, and his relationship with Ritter deepened. Their friendship was complex, and one should not infer that the overbearing Ritter exerted absolute influence. His idiosyncratic fusion of Catholicism, Schopenhauer, Liszt and Wagner was surely alien to the agnostic Strauss, who probably found Ritter's religio-mystical views on the ethical properties of music hard to swallow. But they remained friends throughout the 1880s, and Ritter continued to catalyse Strauss's thoughts on music and philosophy (mostly Schopenhauer), thoughts which in 1887 found their way into the beginnings of the libretto for his first opera, Guntram (1892–3). There were more practical ramifications as well, for Strauss seriously began to reconsider his approach to musical form. Convinced of an artist's duty to create a ‘new form for every new subject’, he tried to address this problem in Macbeth (1888), for if Aus Italien had been a ‘first step’ toward programme music, Macbeth (though it was not performed until after Don Juan, 1888, and Tod und Verklärung, 1889) was his first fully fledged tone poem. Don Juan followed some eight months later.
This early Munich period also saw the composition of 17 lieder (opp.15, 17 and 19) and some important premières, including those of Aus Italien in 1887 and the Violin Sonata in 1888. By the autumn of 1887 Strauss had secured numerous conducting engagements outside Munich, for example in Berlin, Dresden and Leipzig, where he first met Mahler. That year he met too another person who became central to his life: his future wife, Pauline de Ahna. The daughter of a major general, she had studied singing at the Munich Musikschule, but soon switched to private lessons with Strauss, and in 1889 followed him to Weimar, where he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. Before beginning his Weimar duties in the autumn, he worked as musical assistant at Bayreuth, where he developed and maintained a close relationship with Cosima Wagner. The major event early in his Weimar tenure – one that established him as a leading composer of his day – was the première of Don Juan. The work's provocative subject matter and musical brilliance earned him international recognition as a modernist, and that reputation was only enhanced with the premières of the Burleske and Tod und Verklärung within a year. His renown as a conductor grew rapidly too. He had become a staunch advocate of the symphonic poems of Liszt and, with the support of Cosima, worked tirelessly to make Weimar a significant centre for Wagner. His crowning glory was an uncut production of Tristan in 1892.
All this feverish activity as composer and conductor left Strauss exhausted, and by the end of the 1891–2 season he had become gravely ill. His engagement to conduct that summer in Bayreuth was cancelled, and he spent the following winter convalescing in Greece and Egypt. But he was resilient, and turned the experience into a miniature Bildungsreise, for it was during this time of solitary journey that he deepened his study of philosophy and aesthetics. His travel diaries detail an immersion in, among others, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, a preoccupation that informed his work on Guntram, which was nearing completion. These readings inspired other potential operatic ideas as well: a Don Juan, Das erhabene Leid der Könige, Der Reichstag zu Mainz and an opera based on the Till Eulenspiegel legend.
A rested Strauss returned to his Weimar duties in the autumn of 1893 with a completed Guntram scheduled for a première there the next May. This final season in Weimar saw important changes in his personal life. A dispute over the ending of Guntram, and his post-Egypt rejection of musical metaphysics, chilled relations with Ritter. Soon afterwards he lost another father figure, Bülow, who died in February 1894. The next month, during rehearsals for Guntram, Strauss was officially notified that he had been appointed Kapellmeister in Munich. That move may have helped prompt him to propose marriage to Pauline de Ahna, and they were wed on 10 September. Pauline sang the role of Freihild at the first performance of Guntram, which received reviews ranging from lukewarm to mildly favourable. The Munich première proved less equivocal: in the wake of its failure, future performances were cancelled, despite initial promises to the contrary, and for the first time Strauss had to deal head-on with strong conservative elements in the Bavarian capital.
Despite this setback he continued to make a name for himself as both composer and conductor. Before beginning his Munich duties, he finally conducted in Bayreuth (Tannhäuser, with Pauline singing Elisabeth); he then assumed responsibility for the major Wagner operas in Munich. Moreover, he was invited to conduct concerts with the Berlin PO during the 1894–5 season, and thereafter broadened his conducting engagements to various European countries, including Russia. Meanwhile he was steadily composing tone poems during this period: Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben were all written by 1898, when he signed a contract as conductor with the Berlin Hofoper. These post-Guntram tone poems reveal a composer capable of making poetic content and formal design coalesce with great brilliance.
Bryan Gilliam
3. The opera composer, 1898–1916.
Independent of Ritter, Bülow, his father and, most importantly, Munich, Strauss confidently left for Berlin with his wife and their one-year-old son Franz. The busy capital of the German empire offered an ideal cultural atmosphere in which the composer could explore new artistic directions. His early tone poems, such as Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung, were already firmly part of the German repertory, he was in constant demand as a guest conductor, and his appointment as conductor at the Hofoper was one of the most prestigious in the country. In his first season alone he conducted 25 operas in over 71 performances, including an ambitious Ring cycle. But his acknowledged excellence as an opera conductor was not yet matched by any comparable achievement as a composer in that genre. Stung by the failure of Guntram, he threw himself into a second stage project, a satirical one-act Singgedicht to pour scorn on a Munich that had rejected the earlier work.
Around the time he was composing this second opera, Feuersnot (1900–01), Strauss began working on behalf of composers' rights, and in 1903 he helped establish the first society protecting the copyrights of German composers (the Genossenschaft Deutscher Tonsetzer), which became a model for future societies. His extensive professional activity beyond his Berlin opera duties is difficult to fathom. In 1901 he was elected president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, and he took over the conducting of the Berliner Tonkünstlerverein, which toured Europe. Both posts allowed him to champion the music of his contemporaries, including Mahler, and his work as editor of the book series Die Musik gave him yet another platform for furthering the music of his day. By now all-Strauss concerts were becoming increasingly popular; the first was in Vienna in 1901, and two years later a major Strauss festival took place in London (June 1903). Months after that a Heidelberg Strauss festival was capped by the presentation of an honorary doctorate, celebrated by the first performance of Taillefer (1903), a large-scale work for soloists, chorus and orchestra.
During an earlier trip to England (May 1902) Strauss had begun work on the Symphonia domestica, which was finished the next year shortly before his first North American tour (1904) that included stops in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Chicago. He conducted the première at Carnegie Hall, and there were also lieder recitals featuring him and his wife. All the while he was working on a piece that would establish him as the leading German opera composer of his time. With the colourful, chromatic Salome he found a new, modernist voice for the stage, one that resonated throughout a Europe preoccupied with the image of the sensual femme fatale. Within a year of its 1905 Dresden première, this succès de scandale had been performed in six German cities as well as Graz, Prague and Milan, and its fame quickly spread throughout Europe and the USA.
Given Strauss's busy conducting schedule, the summer offered him the only time for serious, extended creative work, and he regularly spent his summers between 1890 and 1908 composing at the cool mountain villa of Pauline's parents in Marquarstein, Bavaria. Salome royalties augmented his income considerably and helped pay for his own villa in Garmisch, where he composed from Elektra onwards. This next opera marked the beginning of his artistic association with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, whom he had first met in Berlin in 1899. Having seen Reinhardt's riveting production of Hofmannsthal's Elektra in the autumn of 1905, Strauss was convinced the play would make a compelling opera. Not entirely sure he should compose consecutive tragedies, he nonetheless gave in to Hofmannsthal's pleading and vigorously began composing Elektra in the summer of 1906. As he had with Oscar Wilde's Salome, he set the play to music, which was finished in 1908 and given its première in 1909 as part of a Strauss opera festival in Dresden. That year his Berlin duties were augmented when he succeeded Weingartner as conductor of the Berlin court orchestra.
Elektra failed to outshine her flashier sister, but confirmed Strauss's pre-eminence among German opera composers. By the time the piece was performed, he was already working on his first real collaboration with Hofmannsthal, which soon exceeded his other operas in popularity: Der Rosenkavalier (1909–10). Its 1911 première, again in Dresden under Ernst Schuch, would prove to be his greatest operatic success. Within days there were performances in other major German cities, Vienna saw the work within three months, and in 1913 it was staged in London and New York. Once more Strauss was already on to his next operatic project, convinced that it should mark a return to tragedy. A dutiful Hofmannsthal supplied him with a scenario for Der steinere Herz, a sketch that would ultimately find its way into Die Frau ohne Schatten (1914–17). But the poet remained preoccupied with the stylized world of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially the work of Molière, which had partly inspired the Rosenkavalier libretto. The immediate result was Ariadne auf Naxos (1911–12), a theatrical hybrid combining spoken theatre – a German adaptation of Molière's Le bourgeois gentilhomme (Der Bürger als Edelmann) with incidental music – and opera. The work, first performed in Stuttgart in 1912, fell short of critical acclaim and was revised to greater success, four years later, when Strauss and Hofmannsthal replaced the play with a lively operatic prologue.
The Ariadne project proved to be far more time-consuming than either collaborator had imagined; they had thought of it as a stepping-stone to their next major work, Die Frau ohne Schatten. Strauss described this as his ‘last Romantic opera’ and rightly so. Conceived in peacetime, composed during World War I and first performed after the Treaty of Versailles, the grandiose, metaphysical Frau ohne Schatten stands as a magnificent epitaph to late Romantic music. Hofmannsthal entered military service during the European conflict, and work on the opera was often interrupted, much to Strauss's annoyance. After the war, in 1919, the composer left Berlin to become co-director, with Franz Schalk, of the newly renamed Vienna Staatsoper. His appointment was marked by the première of Die Frau ohne Schatten; its unenthusiastic reception, in the wake of military defeat, may well have reflected a society's fatigue with the pre-war era.
Bryan Gilliam
4. World War I, Vienna and the Weimar era.
Hofmannsthal savoured the geographical distance between himself and his collaborator, and thus had misgivings about Strauss's move to the Austrian capital after World War I. Many Viennese journalists feared the composer might exploit his new position for the performance of his own stage works; moreover, his extensive periods away from Vienna caused friction between him and Schalk. But Strauss enjoyed Viennese musical life. He attracted some of Europe's finest singers, reinvigorated the opera repertory with fresh productions of Mozart, and conducted new works by Pfitzner, Schreker, Zemlinsky, Weingartner and others. His love for Mozart reinforced his resolve to help establish an annual music festival in Salzburg, and with the help of Reinhardt, Schalk, Alfred Roller and Hofmannsthal this annual summer event was launched in 1920.
Shortly after arriving in Vienna he began work on his two-act ballet Schlagobers, which had its première in the spring of 1924, a period of hyperinflation and therefore not a felicitous moment for dancing pralines and pastries. And while the facile image of a successful composer out of touch with his time has proved irresistible for some commentators, it presents an erroneous view of a musician acutely aware of the business and politics of contemporary culture. Strauss was convinced that his next opera should leave behind post-Wagnerian metaphysics and move towards modern domestic comedy. Hofmannsthal was aghast, and the composer went his own way, writing the text for Intermezzo (first performance, 4 November 1924) himself. This fairly successful autobiographical marital comedy, informed by contemporary cinematic techniques, would influence later Zeitopern by Hindemith, Krenek and Schoenberg.
The year of theIntermezzo première began happily enough, with the marriage of his son Franz to Alice von Grab, daughter of a wealthy Viennese industrialist with strong musical connections; the fact that she was Jewish was to create unforeseen problems only a decade later. The 60-year-old composer was also regaled that summer with a host of Strauss-Tage in Germany and throughout Europe, but his working relationship with Schalk had deteriorated seriously. Schalk resented having to undertake the day-to-day work of directing the opera house while Strauss seemed to bask in the international spotlight, and Schalk's daily involvement with operations easily gave him the upper hand. Strauss was forced to resign, and the world première of Intermezzo was moved from Vienna to Dresden, which had not hosted a Strauss première since Rosenkavalier. Yet Strauss's involvement with Viennese musical life was hardly diminished; plans to build his winter home along the eastern edge of the Belvedere continued, in 1924, on schedule. Though the mansion was built at his own expense, he received the property (on loan for 60 years) from the city of Vienna in exchange for, among other things, the Rosenkavalier autograph score. By now he could finance his composing with freelance conducting and with royalties from published compositions. During the concert season, when he was not touring, he and his family lived in Vienna; summer months were spent in Garmisch.
The Schalk episode notwithstanding, Strauss's love for Vienna remained steadfast, and he continued there as a guest opera conductor. He also composed two left-hand piano works (Parergon zur Symphonia Domestica, 1925, and Panathenäenzug, 1927) for the Viennese pianist Paul Wittgenstein, a work for male choir (Die Tageszeiten, 1928) dedicated to the Vienna Schubertbund and a work entitled Austria (1929) for male choir and orchestra, as well as arranging Mozart's Idomeneo for the Vienna Staatsoper in 1930. But his main preoccupation after Intermezzo was Die ägyptische Helena (1923–7), the last completed collaboration with Hofmannsthal. Strauss, who never forgot the Guntram débâcle, felt insecure as librettist, and had looked forward to a renewed collaboration with Hofmannsthal, the first since World War I. Die ägyptische Helena had its première in Dresden under Fritz Busch in 1928, but though Hofmannsthal claimed it as his favourite of their works, it failed to gain a foothold in the repertory. Their next project, Arabella (1929–32), came far closer to the realm of operetta and is Strauss's best loved stage work of the 1930s. On 15 July 1929, shortly after putting the final touches to the text of the first act, Hofmannsthal suffered a fatal stroke, leaving acts 2 and 3 complete but in far from final form. Strauss was too distraught to attend the funeral, but sent a moving condolence letter to the widow: ‘This genius, this great poet, this sensitive collaborator, this kind friend, this unique talent! No musician ever found such a helper and supporter. No one will ever replace him for me or the world of music!’
Bryan Gilliam
5. The late Strauss, 1930–49.
Though the 1930s was Strauss's most prolific decade as an opera composer, this was also a time of personal, professional and political crisis. It began with him bereft of his collaborator, and work on Arabella, not surprisingly, progressed slowly; the score was not completed until the autumn of 1932. By then he had already met someone he believed a worthy successor: Stefan Zweig, the Austrian novelist and biographer. However, events surrounding the Arabella première (1933) signalled grim political realities that would ultimately force Zweig out of the picture. Hitler had become German chancellor, and Busch, the opera's co-dedicatee, who had been chosen to conduct the première, was forced out of his Dresden post; the opera was conducted instead by Clemens Krauss. During the late 1920s Strauss's negative feelings regarding the National Socialists were known only to his close friends and colleagues, and later he could not imagine, despite their political success, that they would impede his career, especially given the fact that in the autumn of 1933 he was appointed president of the Reichsmusikkammer. By the late 1920s and early 30s, artists of various political viewpoints had become disillusioned with the Weimar government's ineptitude in cultural affairs, and in 1933–4, before the realities of Kristallnacht, it is not difficult to conceive how some, including Strauss, could have thought the Reichsmusikkammer might improve musical life. One positive consequence of Strauss's influence came early in his post as president, when he was finally able to secure full copyright protection for all German composers – something he had not achieved during the Weimar period.
It has always been difficult to gain a clear understanding of Strauss during this period; our picture of him has been obscured either by uncritical rationalizing and omission on the one hand or by simplistic accusation on the other. He was surely no political hero during the period of National Socialism, but neither was he a Nazi sympathizer or anti-Semite. He was a composer who, until 1933, had always been able to put his personal and professional life above politics. The Toscanini episode serves as an unfortunate case in point. Shortly after the deaths, in 1930, of Cosima and Siegfried Wagner, Strauss tried to repair decades of bad feelings between himself and Bayreuth. By replacing Toscanini, who had resigned in protest from the Wagner festival in 1933, Strauss saw an opportunity to make a gesture of goodwill towards the Wagner family, yet in doing so he clearly chose to ignore the fact that this played right into the hands of the National Socialists, who were eagerly seeking international legitimacy. Indeed, the more he tried to ignore political events around him, the more politics seemed to invade his world, a world he felt to be removed from the rules of the regime: refusing to call Hitler ‘der Führer’, for instance, was not so much an act of civil disobedience as an expression of artistic ego.
During the early 1930s he focussed his attention on composing Zweig's libretto Die schweigsame Frau, but as he neared completion and began thinking about future projects, he refused to accept that a Jew could no longer be his collaborator. The composer's reaction to Nazi anti-Semitism is revealing, for he dwelt not so much on its global evil but on how it affected his career. An impassioned letter to Zweig that insulted the Nazi regime was intercepted by the Gestapo, and as a result of this naive gesture Strauss was forced to resign the official post he had held for nearly two years. Die schweigsame Frau, first performed in Dresden under Karl Böhm in 1935, was banned after four performances. But Strauss did not sever his relationship with the Reich, and in various ways – by conducting his Olympische Hymne in 1936, composing the Japanische Festmusik in 1940 and cultivating relationships with specific Nazi officials – he tried to stay in the good graces of the government. Without such influence in high places, the potential for the persecution of his Jewish daughter-in-law and grandsons (officially classified as ‘grade-one half-breeds’) was indeed great. Their protection became an increasing obsession for the composer after the Schweigsame Frau scandal.
It was now clear to him that he needed to look for another librettist; Zweig had suggested, among others, his friend Joseph Gregor, a Viennese theatre historian who fancied himself a librettist. Gregor was not a Hofmannsthal, nor even a Zweig, but he was all Strauss had during a time when, in his 70s, he preferred composing opera to searching for yet another collaborator. Zweig, moreover, promised to help Gregor behind the scenes, and Strauss reluctantly agreed to take him on. The Strauss–Gregor collaboration was a unique working relationship, where the composer assumed almost total artistic control. Having learnt much from Hofmannsthal, he could be blunt and outright insulting to Gregor in order to achieve the required results: sometimes he would rewrite passages of text himself, and he never hesitated to seek outside advice, principally that of Krauss, who worked with him on his final opera, Capriccio.
Gregor, who wrote three texts for Strauss, ranks next to Hofmannsthal in libretto output for the composer. The first Gregor opera was based on a subject suggested by Zweig: the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648. This pacifist work, Friedenstag, though completed in 1936, was not performed until 1938, by which time Germany was preparing for world war; once the war had started, performances were curtailed. Shortly after finishing the final sketches for the opera, Strauss began composing a cello concerto, his first foray into this genre since the horn concerto of 1883; he never completed it. The subtitle to the planned work reflects his feelings in the wake of the Schweigsame Frau affair: ‘Struggle of the artistic spirit [solo cello] against pseudo-heroism, resignation and melancholy [orchestra]’. In the same sketchbook, drafts for two pieces ultimately not included in the Drei Männerchöre (1935) also suggest his despair and frustation with the Nazi regime. In both instances we see him as an artist internalizing social forces.
The one-act Friedenstag was planned to form a double bill with Daphne (1936–7), Gregor's only original libretto. This ‘bucolic tragedy’ was the ninth and last Strauss opera to have its première in Dresden and was dedicated to Böhm, who conducted. But the two operas went their separate ways, and Daphne, with its stirring transformation scene at the end, became one of Strauss's best-known late operas. Strauss now felt his tragic vein depleted, and he was reminded of a mythological comedy that Hofmannsthal had sketched shortly before the collaboration on Die ägyptische Helena. He asked Gregor to forge a ‘cheerful mythology’ from this fragment, but the result was a work far more serious than originally intended. Indeed, these were hardly cheerful times. During work on the new opera, Die Liebe der Danae (1938–40), Strauss's daughter-in-law was placed under house arrest in Garmisch, and Strauss appealed to Heinz Tietjen, the Berlin Intendant, who had high political connections, to help ensure her and his grandsons' safety.
Danae was scheduled for a 1944 première in Salzburg, but cancelled after a dress rehearsal by an order from Goebbels to close all theatres in preparation for total war. In the meantime Strauss composed his final opera, Capriccio (1940–41), which had its première in Munich in 1942. By then he and his extended family had been allowed to move back to their Vienna house; Alice and her children were under the unofficial protection of the Viennese Gauleiter Baldur von Schirach. But Vienna proved increasingly unsafe, and Richard and Pauline returned to Garmisch in June 1943, leaving Franz, his wife and their children behind. The composer and his wife returned a year later for a festive week of music celebrating Strauss's 80th birthday, ‘unofficially’ celebrated in the former Austrian capital where, months earlier, the Gestapo had abducted the composer's son and daughter-in-law from their Vienna residence, imprisoning them for two nights. Fame and humiliation became increasingly sharp juxtapositions for Strauss as the war progressed. In 1944, the most that he could hope was for a safe return to Garmisch, where his daughter-in-law was now under house arrest, as she was to remain until the end of the war. He withdrew increasingly from society, re-reading, among other things, the writings of Wagner and the works of Goethe. The destruction of Goethe's house in Weimar, and of the opera houses of Dresden, Munich and Vienna – monuments of his Europe – brought him to utter despair; his Metamorphosen (1945) is a moving testament to his resignation. Throughout his career he spoke of ‘liberation through work’, and his late compositional activity, as well as the writings of various artistic manifestos – plans for rebuilding post-war German cultural life – brought him out of depression from time to time.
Allied forces arrived in Garmisch in late April 1945, and Strauss's villa was declared ‘off limits’ by musically sympathetic military officers who had visited him. One of them was the American oboist John de Lancie, who inspired the Oboe Concerto of 1945. With food and fuel shortages, the coming winter looked grim for the elderly composer and his wife. Moreover, there was no stabilized currency, and Strauss's accounts and future royalties had been frozen. Forced to leave their family behind, they went to Switzerland in October 1945, staying in a hotel in Baden, near Zürich, where they were befriended by the Swiss music critic and the composer's future biographer Willi Schuh. The sale of sketchbooks and manuscripts provided loans and some income; nonetheless, the composer's health declined steadily. In October 1947 a three-week trip to London, his last foreign tour, offered both hard currency and, more important, a transfusion of sorts for the ailing composer. He heard excerpts from his operas, tone poems and a complete performance of Elektra for the BBC, and conducted Don Juan, the Burleske, waltzes from Der Rosenkavalier and the Symphonia domestica.
Shortly after his return to Switzerland he completed the Duett-Concertino (1947) for clarinet, bassoon and strings; he was also in the midst of extensive sketching for a chamber opera, Des Esels Schatten, though this was never finished. His main compositional efforts during his final years were four orchestral songs (Im Abendrot, Frühling, Beim Schlafengehen and September) completed between May and September 1948. He had also orchestrated his song Ruhe meine Seele in June of that year – the month he was cleared by a de-Nazification tribunal in Munich. In December he underwent bladder surgery and was in hospital for many weeks. His health rapidly worsened. He returned to Garmisch from Switzerland in May 1949, and on 10 June he conducted in public for the last time: the end of Act 2 of Der Rosenkavalier at the Prinzregententheater in Munich. He suffered a heart attack on 15 August and died of kidney failure shortly after 2 p.m. on 8 September. The final trio of Der Rosenkavalier was conducted by Georg Solti at a memorial service at the Ostfriedhof in Munich. Strauss's wife died eight months later.
Bryan Gilliam
6. The composer.
Strauss's compositional career was as long as it was prolific, beginning when he was six and not ending until months before his death at the age of 85. When not composing, his favourite pastime was reading or, especially when on tour, playing the South German card game Skat. He always kept his cards close to his chest, for he was a man of puzzling contradictions: aloof and phlegmatic in life, extroverted and sanguine in art. Averse to the Romantic posture of the artist set apart from worldly life, he cultivated the image of a composer who treated composition as everyday work, as a way of earning a living. But however true this may have been on one level, it was no less a pose, a persona so real to others that he could disappear behind it and gain the seclusion necessary for creative work. In short, no-one was more aware of the disjunction between man and artist than Strauss himself, who revelled in conducting his most expressive musical passages with minimal body gestures and a face devoid of emotion.
At some level, he recognised the inability of contemporary art to maintain any unified mode of expression, and from Der Rosenkavalier onwards he relished creating moments of grandeur only to undercut them, sometimes in the most jarring fashion. Unlike his contemporary Mahler or the younger Schoenberg, who both held to the 19th-century notion of music as a transcendental, metaphysical phenomenon, Strauss faced the problem of modernity straight on, and he did it in a typically dialectical way, using a Wagnerian musical language to discredit a metaphysical philosophy that gave us that very language. Music, he concluded, could be nothing more than music. His attraction to Nietzsche stemmed from a desire to debunk the Schopenhauerian notion of the ‘denial of the Will’ through music; Nietzsche provided the necessary apparatus for his joyful agnosticism.
In an essay written shortly before his death, Strauss lamented the fact that this aspect of modernity – the recognition of an unbreachable gap between the individual and the collective (Adorno's subject-object dichotomy) – went unnoticed in his works. Implicit in this remark was his realization that for a younger generation of composers a new view of modernism had emerged: one that emphasized technical progress, whereby musical style was viewed as evolving necessarily towards atonality. This Schoenbergian ideology, with its firm German-Romantic roots, was alien to Strauss, who recognised a profound disunity in modern life and saw no reason for music to be any different. He treated musical style in an ahistorical, often critical fashion, which prefigures trends of the late 20th century. Adorno and his followers preached the ‘aesthetic immorality’ of continuing to compose tonal music, which meant that Strauss, deemed guilty of musical faults, was the more easily condemned also for political ones.
Music historians often look for inner unity in a composer's output, and in the broader connections between that output and the age. The extensive Straussian repertory, however, which shows a composer equally at ease in the concert hall, recital hall, ballet, cinema and opera house, is resistant to cultural biographers in this regard, especially to those clinging to notions of music as an autonomous, transcendent art. Strauss once suggested that his body of work was one ‘bridged by contrasts’, and indeed there are hardly two temporally adjacent works that continue in the same mode, tragic or comic. Ein Heldenleben is preceded by the anti-heroic Don Quixote; the hyper-symbolic Die Frau ohne Schatten is followed by the light domestic comedy Intermezzo. But in exploring these contrasts one finds intriguing connections: the two tone poems probe and criticize heroism in its various guises, and the two operas explore domestic relationships on metaphysical as well as mundane levels. If there is an important consistency in Strauss's oeuvre, it is in the desire to suggest the profundities and ambiguities in everyday life, even in the apparently banal. The sublime final trio of Der Rosenkavalier is, after all, based on a trivial waltz tune heard earlier in the opera.
Contrasts notwithstanding, there is a coherent shape to Strauss's compositional output, which begins with a focus on instrumental music: solo piano and chamber music at first, then orchestral music by the 1880s. At the turn of the century, after an intense exploration of the tone poem, Strauss moves on to the stage, and opera remains his principal preoccupation over the remaining decades. But after Capriccio (1940–41), the elderly Strauss bade farewell to the theatre and returned to the genres of his youth, such as the wind serenade and the concerto. There were also, of course, the abundant lieder interwoven throughout his career, from the naive youthful pieces to the exalted last orchestral songs. The earthbound composer wrote music that could soar, especially when catalysed by compelling textual or visual images, for he was a literary or pictorial composer in the sense that he required extra-musical images to charge his imagination or challenge his intellect to creativity.
Bryan Gilliam
7. Instrumental works.
Strauss's early period of composition, roughly from 1870 to the mid-1880s may be divided at the year 1880. The instrumental works from the 1870s, many of which remain unpublished, are mostly small-scale: pieces for solo piano, contrapuntal studies, chamber music. These works, which take us from Strauss's early childhood to his mid-teen years, are remarkably skilful, but reveal more the influence of his arch-conservative father than any artistic originality. The First Symphony (1880) was a major step forward and evinces a rapidly increasing interest in composing orchestral music; a less interesting piece from that year was the String Quartet in A. The two works stood at the end of Strauss's studies with Meyer, whose approach to counterpoint and form was rudimentary and straightforward. Nevertheless, Meyer had given Strauss a strong orthodox foundation, albeit one with which the young composer became increasingly dissatisfied. He did not produce another symphony for four years; meanwhile he composed two piano works: the op.5 Sonata and the Klavierstücke op.3. Beyond the obvious references to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in the first movement of op.5, these works, both from 1881, betray a clear homage to the early Romantic generation, especially Mendelssohn. In the same year Strauss produced his major success to date, the Serenade op.7. On hearing this work Bülow, unimpressed with the piano works, was finally convinced that the 17-year-old was far more than a mere talent.
Strauss's early works featuring a solo instrument were nearly always written with a friend or family member in mind: the op.8 Violin Concerto (1880–82) for Benno Walter, the op.6 Cello Sonata (1883) for Hans Wilhan, a friend and principal cellist of the Munich court orchestra, the Horn Concerto op.11, of course, for his father. This last piece occupies a solid position in the horn repertory and also exhibits a loosening of Meyer's firm formal grip, for, as opposed to what happens in the Violin Concerto, the three movements proceed without interruption. A year later Strauss reverted to a formal clarity reminiscent of his First Symphony with the composition of his Second, though the latter work shows a significant advance in harmonic richness, orchestration and counterpoint. That year also saw the wonderfully atmospheric Stimmungsbilder as well as another work for woodwind: the Suite in B, commissioned by Bülow.
Around this time began the ‘Brahmsschwärmerei’: an obvious fruit is the Piano Quartet in C minor, strongly influenced by Brahms's piano quartets in C minor and G minor. The end of this Brahmsian episode, as well as what is usually defined as Strauss's early period, is marked by the Burleske in D minor for piano and orchestra. Written for Bülow, who deemed the work unplayable, it was eventually dedicated to Eugène d'Albert, who gave the first performance in 1886. In this piece we first witness Strauss the fledgling modernist, for it is one of the earliest pieces to use the historical canon as a source for parody. Fully aware of the Brahms-Wagner polemic, Strauss delights in burlesquing both Brahms (the D minor and B major piano concertos) and Wagner (Tristan and Die Walküre) in remarkable juxtapositions. He was developing artistically with great rapidity, and confessed to feeling ‘trapped’ in a steadily escalating antithesis between poetic content and formal structure. Aus Italien (1886) he described as a ‘first step toward independence’, even though, unlike the tone poems to follow, it is divided into four discrete movements. The first, ‘Auf der Campagna’, is the closest to Liszt in construction; the second, ‘Im Roms Ruinen’, shows the clearest affinity to Brahms; and the third, ‘Am Strande von Sorrent’, represents Strauss's first serious attempt at musical pictorialism. The controversial fourth movement, ‘Neapolisches Volksleben’, was based, according to Strauss, on a Neapolitan folktune that turned out to be none other than the 1880 popular tune Funiculi, funicula, which commemorated the construction of the funicular on Vesuvius.
Macbeth (1888), which he described as ‘a completely new path’, was not found without detours. Indeed, the piece went through more revisions than any of his other symphonic works, and these revisions, concerned primarily with the development and recapitulation, suggest how seriously he was still struggling with the conflict between narrative content and musical structure. New path or not, Macbeth failed to find a firm place in the concert repertory, because it lacked the thematic cogency and convincing pacing of musical events so evident in the two subsequent works. And despite revisions to the orchestration, in an attempt to restrain inner voices and highlight principal themes, Macbeth still falls short of Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung in sonic clarity.
By now Strauss was composing with unprecedented speed: Macbeth was completed in January–February 1888, followed by Don Juan only eight months later. But the public first heard Don Juan in the autumn of 1889; the première of Macbeth followed a year later. So it was Don Juan, not Macbeth, that firmly established Strauss as the brash, young German modernist. In Macbeth Strauss struggled with the demands of sonata form and the requirements of the story, while in Don Juan – which elegantly merges rondo and sonata principles – narrative and structural strategies came into effortless union. This second tone poem, with its provocative subject matter, dazzling orchestration, sharply etched themes, novel structure and taut pacing, earned Strauss his international reputation as a symphonic composer. Here too he found his voice as a tone poet, the music being flagrantly pictorial, humorous and altogether irreverent. The aesthetics of Wagner and Liszt may have inspired him to embrace the extra-musical, but he refused to carry their torch for music as a sacred entity; the libertine Don (and Strauss with him) simply thumbs his nose at the world.
Cosima Wagner, Strauss admirer and self-proclaimed custodian of her late husband's ideals, sharply criticized both the subject matter of Don Juan and its explicit expression. Counselling Strauss against superficial elements and evocative themes, Cosima urged him to seek ‘eternal motives’ that could be perceived at manifold levels and in various manifestations. Strauss's response was polite: ‘I think I have understood [you] correctly, and I look forward to producing evidence next time we meet, in the form of my third symphonic work [Tod und Verklärung] … that I have perhaps already made a significant advance, even in choice of subject’. The subject is indeed more elevated, but it is doubtful whether Cosima's advice affected his artistic views in any serious way. The most metaphysical of his tone poems, Tod und Verklärung (1888–9) is based not on a literary text but on a narrative of the composer's own conception: a dying artist, obsessed by an artistic Ideal, is transfigured at death to recognize his Ideal in eternity. A poem by Ritter published in the score postdates the composition, though the musical theme for the Ideal may have been inspired by one from Ritter's symphonic waltz Olafs Hochzeitsreigen. In Tod und Verklärung death is less the issue than transfiguration, a lifelong fascination for Strauss (with its abundant musical possibilities), one that manifests itself from Rosenkavalier through to Metamorphosen.
The musical subdivisions of Tod und Verklärung are clear, though their relationship to its modified sonata form is less so. The work has a quiet, syncopated introduction (‘breathing irregularly’), then an agitated exposition (‘racked by terrible pain’), followed by an episodic developmental space: dreams of childhood, youthful passions. What follows is the principal theme of the work, that of the artistic Ideal. The restatement of this lofty melody in the extended coda is what Strauss termed the ‘point of culmination’, and it is indeed one of the most exquisite moments in all his symphonic works: even his arch-conservative father was moved. Tod und Verklärung ends the feverish tone-poem activity of the late 1880s, and Strauss was not to compose another major symphonic work for six years, during which time he was preoccupied with composing his first opera, Guntram. Its failure, after a string of successes, taught him much. Consciously or not, he realized the need to explore further the problem of narrative in a purely symphonic medium.
Most of the tone poems after this six-year hiatus are significantly longer (Ein Heldenleben is nearly three times the length of Don Juan), and the size of the orchestra increases as well, as does the composer's pleasure in graphic depiction. But Strauss had not entirely got opera out of his system. Shortly after the Guntram première he decided to compose a one-act opera Till Eulenspiegel bei den Schildbürgern, though he never got beyond an incomplete text draft. Why he scrapped the opera for a tone poem is not clear, but judging from his programme notes, the symphonic work is based on a different scenario: ‘Once upon a time there was a knavish fool named Till Eulenspiegel. He was a wicked goblin up to new tricks’. Till rides on horseback through the market, mocks religion (disguised as a cleric), flirts with women, engages in academic double talk with his philistine audience, and by the end finds himself on the scaffold, soon to be hanged. Strauss did not call Till a tone poem but rather a ‘Rondeau Form for Large Orchestra’. Richard Specht suggested this might well have been the first prank, given that the only connection with the old French forme fixe is in the spelling. Strauss later described the structure as being an ‘expansion of rondo form through poetic content’, and cited Beethoven's Eighth Symphony as his model. Given the libertine qualities of young Till, as well as the episodic nature of the work, a rondo would seem quite appropriate. But, as in Don Juan, the form is hardly conventional: the sense of rondo is achieved mostly by the return of Till's two themes to articulate his various adventures. Completed in May 1895, the compact Till Eulenspiegel was introduced with great success six months later and remains Strauss's most often performed orchestral piece. That he had learnt much about orchestral detail and nuance during the six years since Tod und Verklärung is evinced by his brilliant use of the ratchet when Till rides through the market, or by the piercing D clarinet when he whistles in the face of death.
Strauss was so taken by the subject matter that he considered, yet again, composing a Till opera, but he ultimately turned his attention to Also sprach Zarathustra, the first concrete manifestation of his rejection of Schopenhauerian metaphysics. His interest in Nietzsche had blossomed as early as the end of the Guntram project, when the philosopher had helped affirm his agnosticism as well as his lifelong belief in the individual's power to change the world around him, controlling his destiny without promise of a hereafter. Strauss originally subtitled the work ‘symphonic optimism in fin-de-siècle form, dedicated to the 20th century’. Later he substituted ‘freely after Nietzsche’, a description that aptly suggests his liberal treatment of the book's prologue and eight of its 80 subsections: ‘Of the Backworldsmen’, ‘Of Great Yearning’, ‘Of Joys and Passions’, ‘Funeral Song’, ‘Of Science’, ‘The Convalescent’, ‘The Dance Song’ and ‘The Night Wanderer's Song’. If there is some paratextual thread connecting these, Strauss's letters and sketches offer few, if any, clues. Quite probably he chose those sections that appealed most to his musical imagination; many of them refer to song or dance. However, one idea unifies the work and plays a musical-structural role, that of conflict between nature (C major) and humanity (B major). The similar preoccupation in Mahler is hardly coincidental, for Mahler set Zarathustra's ‘Drunken Song of Midnight’ in his Third Symphony in the same year, and was to revisit this conflict between finite humanity and infinite nature at greater length in Das Lied von der Erde (1908–9). But unlike Mahler, Strauss depicts a humanity not in search of eternity, but rather struggling to transcend religious superstition. Also sprach Zarathustra was first performed, to great acclaim, in 1896; by now a Strauss première had become an international event.
Though the earliest idea for Don Quixote occurred to Strauss within months of the Zarathustra première, he did not begin composing the new work in earnest until the spring of the following year. At the time he was also considering another tone poem, ultimately named Ein Heldenleben, for which Don Quixote would serve as a comic reverse side of the coin. It makes a return to the satirical world of Till Eulenspiegel and, once again, the subtitle suggests not so much genre as form or procedure: ‘fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character for large orchestra’. The question of genre remains elusive, for the work – which features both cello and viola in solo roles – is a conglomeration of tone poem, theme and variations, and concerto. Strauss had already written a work for cello and orchestra, the Romanze of 1883, but a more obvious earlier precedent was Berlioz's Harold en Italie. Don Quixote features an introduction, ten variations and a coda, offering, respectively, a portrait of the anti-hero and his faithful Sancho Panza, their ten misadventures and the death of the Don. Once again Strauss chose selections from a major literary work, and, in the tradition of Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, Don Quixote proceeds episodically, though these episodes are now more self-contained: as each ‘chapter’ unfolds, so does a new variation. Moreover, this variation form incorporates nuances of the rondo principle found in the two preceding works. Indeed, what is varied is not so much themes as musical contexts, to make a musical analogy of the characters in their different incidents. The work had its first performance in March 1898. The reviews were mixed, more so than those of the other recent tone poems. Strauss had now reached a new level in his ability to create concrete sonic images through novel instrumental combinations and juxtapositions: bleating winds and brass to represent sheep, the wind machine for the aerial journey, snap pizzicatos to evoke the water-logged adventurers who have just fallen out of their ‘enchanted boat’. Some critics accused Strauss of competing with Cervantes rather than interpreting him; others recognized an increasing aesthetic conflict in his music between technical industry and loftier inspiration, between Strauss the artisan and Strauss the artist. Don Quixote could have reawakened Cosima Wagner's original misgivings about Don Juan.
Strauss always considered Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben as paired works, and suggested they be performed together; the first musical ideas for Heldenleben emerged while he was working on Quixote. This early Heldenleben sketch relates to the end of the piece and is labelled: ‘longing for peace after the struggle with the world, refuge in solitude: the Idyll’. The parallel with Quixote is obvious. Cervantes offered Strauss the necessary material with which to explore the anti-hero, but for his hero Strauss looked to himself: his love for Pauline, his inner and outer struggles. The six sections of the work – the hero, his adversaries, his life's companion, his deeds of war, his works of peace, his withdrawal from the world – do not go beyond this fundamental idea. Some commentators have seen the work as comprising six continuous sections, but the general contours of sonata form seem more appropriate to Strauss's plan of expository material (hero, adversaries, beloved), developmental space (struggle) and recapitulation (rejecting war, seeking solace in domestic love).
Ein Heldenleben remains one of Strauss's most controversial works, mainly because its surface elements have been overemphasized. Various critics see the work as a flagrant instance of Strauss's artistic egotism, but a deeper interpretation reveals the issue of autobiography to be far more complex. Ein Heldenleben treats two important subjects familiar from earlier works: the Nietzschean struggle between the individual and his outer and inner worlds, and the profundity of domestic love. Essential to this latter preoccupation was his wife Pauline, for the almost dizzying recollection of themes from previous tone poems, opera and lieder concerns mostly love themes related to her as the hero's partner. This effect of culmination has a broader context as well, for Ein Heldenleben marks the end of Strauss's 19th-century tone poems and reflects a composer at the height of his creative powers. The première took place in March 1899.
At the threshold of a new century, Strauss had accepted a new post of unprecedented stature in Berlin, as conductor of the Hofoper. More important than the career change, he decided to dedicate himself to composing opera, though he made at least seven later endeavours in the symphonic realm, five of which never saw completion. In 1899 he briefly toyed with the idea of a tone poem to be called Frühling; early the next year he sketched a scenario for a symphonic Künstlertragödie. Shortly after completing Salome he planned Vier Frauengestalten der National Gallery, the intended subjects being Veronese's Sleeping Girl, Hogarth's The Shrimp Girl, Reynolds's Heads of Angels and Romney's portrait of Lady Hamilton. During the mid-1920s came a mooted Trigon: Sinfonia zu drei Themen. The fifth of these unrealized projects, Die Donau (1941–2), progressed the furthest: over 400 bars of short score survive. The two major symphonic works that were seen to completion, the Symphonia domestica (1902–3) and Eine Alpensinfonie (1911–15), have been somewhat overshadowed by the operas. And though neither is designated as tone poem in either title or subtitle, both draw on the tone poems' subject matter.
The Symphonia domestica inspired at first even more controversy than Ein Heldenleben: the composer's self-stylization as hero was distasteful enough, but to cast into the symphonic medium the quotidian world of family life was worse still. A principal focus of Heldenleben, however, was domestic love, which makes the autobiographical gesture of Symphonia domestica a logical extension. Originally titled Mein Heim: ein sinfonisches Selbst- und Familienporträt, the work was always referred to by Strauss as a symphony or symphonic poem, and there are indeed four sections that correspond loosely to symphonic movements: introduction (presentation of major characters and their themes), scherzando (child at play, his parents' happiness), cradle song and Adagio (child is put to bed, thereafter a parental love scene), and finale in the form of a double fugue (a new day begins with quarrelling and happy reconciliation).
Strauss insisted that no programme be published in connection with the first performance and on various occasions tried to distance himself from the work's detailed programmatic ideas, the most famous instance being a letter to Romain Rolland in which he declared that ‘the programme is nothing but a pretext for the purely musical expression and development of my emotions, and not a simple musical description of concrete everyday musical facts’. He was probably placating Rolland, who was bewildered by a programme he felt diminished an otherwise beautiful work. But Strauss's original scenario and sketchbook annotations demonstrate that the Symphonia domestica is a novel celebration of the everyday, where Strauss sought to explore the pleasures and complexities of ordinary life. As he himself asked: ‘What could be more serious than married life? Marriage is the most profound event in life and the spiritual joy of such a union is heightened by the arrival of a child. [Married] life naturally has its humour, which I also injected into this work in order to enliven it’. As with Heldenleben, the Symphonia domestica is not pure autobiography, but rather an idealized portrait of domestic love informed by personal experience. Pure autobiography would hardly have been as attractive, for during the genesis of Domestica his marriage was on shaky ground; for a while he and his wife were separated and even contemplated divorce. In a sense, then, the work was a gesture of reconciliation, a reaffirmation of a bond that had been threatened.
Strauss's last major symphonic work represents an extension of his preoccupation with Nietzsche during the 1890s, and indeed the earliest known sketches can be traced to about 1902. Mahler's death in 1911 reawakened his interest in the project, and in his diary he wrote:The death of this aspiring, idealistic, energetic artist [is] a grave loss … Mahler, the Jew, could achieve elevation in Christianity. As an old man the hero Wagner returned to it under the influence of Schopenhauer. It is clear to me that the German nation will achieve new creative energy only by liberating itself from Christianity … I shall call my alpine symphony: Der Antichrist, since it represents: moral purification through one's own strength, liberation through work, worship of eternal, magnificent nature.
This original choice of title was no doubt inspired by Nietzsche's 1888 essay Der Antichrist, which was published in 1895, the year before Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra.
As in Zarathustra, Strauss does not portray the finite individual, jealous of eternal Nature, but rather one who celebrates, who is inspired to great deeds by his natural environment. In an unpublished diary entry (November 1915) on the Alpensinfonie, he stresses that both Judaism and Christianity – in short, metaphysics – are unhealthy and unproductive; they are incapable of embracing Nature as a primary, life-affirming source. Yet as Nietzschean as all this sounds, he did not in the event choose Antichrist as his model; instead, he turned to the alpine landscape that surrounded his home in Garmisch. The ascent and descent from an alpine mountain serve as a metaphor for the exaltation of nature. Zarathustra and the Alpensinfonie both begin at sunrise, and in the later work the composer specified 23 tableaux on a 24-hour journey: ‘Night’, ‘Sunrise’, ‘Ascent’, ‘Entry into the Forest’, ‘Wandering by the Brook’, ‘By the Waterfall’, ‘Apparition’, ‘On the Flowering Meadows’, ‘On the Pastures’, ‘Through the Thicket and Briar’, ‘On the Glacier’, ‘Dangerous Moment’, ‘On the Summit’, ‘Vision’, ‘Mists Arrive’, ‘The Sun Gradually Darkens’, ‘Elegy’, ‘Calm before the Storm’, ‘Tempest and Storm’, ‘Descent’, ‘Sunset’, ‘Echo’ and ‘Night’. Despite its philosophical roots Eine Alpensinfonie is outwardly unphilosophical, proclaiming with startling beauty the glories of the natural world. It is unparallelled in Strauss's symphonic output both in terms of duration (50 minutes) and size (requiring over 140 players, including offstage brass). Critical reaction after the October 1915 première was mixed; some went as far as to describe it negatively as ‘cinema music’, a remarkable claim given that film was still a new medium.
It is significant that the Alpensinfonie is the achievement of a project that had begun around the turn of the century, for after Salome Strauss had lost interest in composing purely orchestral music. Beyond ballets, incidental music and some occasional works, such as the various fanfares, Festliches Präludium (1913) and Japanische Festmusik (1940), he composed very little instrumental music until the 1940s. In 1924 he was commissioned to write a concertante piece by the pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost his right arm during the war. Shortly before he began work, Strauss's son suffered a severe illness, and the Parergon zur Symphonia domestica (1925) was dedicated to his recovery; it is based on Franz's theme from the Symphonia domestica. Of all the composers Wittgenstein commissioned, Strauss was the only one asked to write a second piece, and two years later he produced the Panathenäenzug. The subtitle, ‘Symphonic Etude in the Form of a Passacaglia’, refers to the repeated bass pattern above which are 18 continuous variations, framed by an introduction and finale. The neglect of both works, which explore a vast array of colours in both piano and orchestra, is partly due to the difficult technical challenges for the soloist.
In 1938 Strauss was asked to compose music for a documentary film on Munich, and though both music and film were completed the following year, the Nazi regime forbade the film's release. The musical material for the film score had been drawn from Feuersnot, a fitting idea since that opera had been set in Munich of old. Despite the ban, Strauss went ahead and published the music under the title München: ein Gelegenheitswalzer (1939); after Munich was bombed in the war the work was expanded with a new subtitle, ein Gedächtniswalzer (1945). By now Strauss had almost stopped composing, claiming that after Capriccio his career had come to a close; what followed were mere ‘wrist exercises’. Yet among these exercises are some of his finest instrumental compositions, returning to the classic genres of his youth. His two late woodwind pieces, subtitled ‘From the Workshop of an Invalid’ (1943) and ‘The Happy Workshop’ (1944–5), exemplify opposing forces of resignation and hope, a dichotomy interwoven in so many works composed around the end of his life. The Second Horn Concerto (1942) and Oboe Concerto (1945) are very much part of the modern repertory, and the delightful Duett-Concertino (1947) for solo clarinet and bassoon with string orchestra has increased in popularity. But the most profound instrumental work from this late period is Metamorphosen (1945), subtitled ‘a study for 23 strings’. There has been confusion regarding the genesis of this dark, brooding work, said by some to have been inspired by the destruction of Munich. Recent research has convincingly shown that the source was Goethe, more specifically his poem ‘Niemand wird sich selber kennen’. Rather than mourning the destruction of an opera house, Metamorphosen seeks to probe the cause of war itself, which stems from humanity's bestial nature. In short, Strauss inverts classic metamorphosis (where through self-knowledge the human subject becomes divine), realizing instead humanity's dangerous potential to indulge the basest animal instincts. In this context, the Beethoven ‘Eroica’ quotation towards the end is painfully ironic. It has even been referred to (by Alan Jefferson) as ‘possibly the saddest piece of music ever written’.
Bryan Gilliam
8. Lieder and choral music.
Strauss's career as a composer of lieder spans the later decades of the 19th century and the early decades of the 20th, a time when the lied underwent important transformation. His more than 200 songs reflect these changes, from the early lieder firmly in the German Romantic tradition to the later orchestral Gesänge, which show the influence of opera. Nonetheless, most were composed before the turn of the century, during which period separate phases may be distinguished. The youthful songs of the 1860s and 70s are grounded in an early 19th-century style, whether strophic or through-composed and ballad-like. These were written mainly for family soirées, and many were dedicated to the composer's aunt, Johanna Pschorr.
1885 marked a significant breakthrough for Strauss as a composer of lieder. During this first year of independence from his family he wrote his op.10 songs, works that reveal unprecedented musical maturity and include several mainstays of the recital repertory (e.g. Zueignung, Allerseelen). From now until 1891, when he became preoccupied with completing Guntram, he produced a lieder opus every year (opp.15, 17, 19, 21 and 22). The texts are all by lesser-known poets who flourished around the middle of the 19th century: Herrmann von Gilm, Adolf Friedrich von Schack and Felix Dahn. Strauss did not so much need poems of high literary quality as texts with striking expressive images or situations that could ignite his imagination. There was another vital catalyst as well: Pauline. Indeed, the three-year lull after 1891 was broken by the important op.27 (Ruhe, meine Seele!, Cäcilie, Heimliche Aufforderung and Morgen!), written in celebration of their marriage. Richard and Pauline performed lieder recitals all over the world, and their programming readily demonstrates that, unlike other composers, Strauss usually did not intend a particular opus to be performed as a unit.
The post-1891 lieder suggest a greater interest in contemporary poets, such as Karl Henckel, John Henry Mackay, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Richard Dehmel, and beyond the numerous love songs of the 1890s (Traum durch die Dämmerung, Ich trage meine Minne, Ich liebe dich) were songs of social criticism, such as Der Arbeitsmann and Das Lied des Steinklöpfers. Near the turn of the century Strauss's literary interests embraced earlier poets, including Rückert, Goethe and Heine, and he also composed some orchestral songs (generally labelled Gesänge) that adumbrate his interest in opera: the 14-minute Notturno (1899) could have been a model for any number of his future operatic monologues. More evidence for that connection is the fact that, shortly after his second opera, Feuersnot (1901), he seems to have lost interest in lieder composition, though Pauline's retirement from singing in 1906 no doubt contributed.
His return to the lied in 1918 brought him into a very different postwar world, where Romantic song had become something of an anachronism. Among his works from that year was a collection of songs very much in the cynical spirit of the time, Die Krämerspiegel (1918), which is the only legitimate song cycle he wrote, using biting, satirical texts by his contemporary Alfred Kerr, highly critical of the music-publishing industry. But during these postwar years he again became equally interested in the works of earlier poets. Shortly after Krämerspiegel he composed his op.67, which includes three songs of Ophelia and three from Goethe's West-östlicher Divan. All these, with their coloratura, reflect his experience as an opera composer, experience even more evident in the Drei Hymnen (1921) of Hölderlin for voice and orchestra.
Strauss occasionally orchestrated his piano lieder, generally writing arrangements for specific performances. In 1897 four songs were orchestrated for a concert with his wife in Brussels; a few years later three more were arranged for a performance in Berlin. Other singers (such as Elisabeth Schumann) inspired him to orchestrate; for her he arranged five songs in 1918, as well as the newly composed Brentano Lieder op.68. He continued to orchestrate songs off and on until 1948, when he arranged Ruhe, meine Seele! from his wedding songs. At that time he was also composing what was later to be called his Vier letzte Lieder; it has been suggested that the earlier song might well have been intended as part of this orchestral group, which sets poems by Hermann Hesse and Eichendorff. Whatever his original intention, these autumnal, luminescent late songs, which contemplate the meaning of death, are among Strauss's finest works in any genre.
His significant choral output remains the least-known part of his repertory, much of the neglect due either to the requirements of vast musical forces or, in the case of the a cappella music, extreme technical difficulty. The Wandrers Sturmlied (1884), on a text by Goethe, belongs in the category of large-scale works. Scored for six-part chorus and orchestra, it was inspired in part by Brahms's six-part Gesang der Parzen, a connection noted by Hanslick in a review of 1892, where he lauded aspects of the work but ultimately judged it inferior to its model. The work also reveals the importance of Wagner's growing influence during Strauss's ‘Brahmschwärmerei’, for the ending betrays distinct echoes of Parsifal. 13 years separate this work from his next choral undertaking, the Zwei Gesänge for mixed chorus a cappella, followed two years later by two sets of folksong-inspired men's choruses, the Zwei and Drei Männerchöre.
Strauss returned to the large-scale with Taillefer (1903). Scored for an orchestra of over 140 players, a mammoth chorus and soloists, this 15-minute work is only rarely heard, as is the Bardengesang for male voices and orchestra, composed only two years later. One of the most impressive of his a cappella pieces is the Deutsche Motette of 1913. Based on a Rückert text, this work, with its extended range and intricate chromatic part-writing, is one of his most difficult, and requires a professional ensemble of the highest skill. The bombastic Olympische Hymne (1934) is famous for its association with the 1936 games in Berlin, but around this time Strauss was composing his lesser known but far better Drei Männerchöre as a conscious antidote. These brief and rarely heard a cappella works, again to texts by Rückert, reject heroic bombast and address themes of peace and nature.
Bryan Gilliam
9. Music for the stage.
Strauss considered his operas to be his major contribution to the 20th century, and from Salome to Capriccio he averaged a new opera every two to three years. The two operatic ventures that predate Salome, however, were less than successful. Encouraged by Ritter, he began sketching his own libretto for Guntram in late 1887, and the work, both its text and music, is unthinkable without the legacy of Wagner. But it is no mere copy of Wagner: Wagnerian literary and musical styles from various periods, from Tannhäuser to Parsifal, are often interlaced in critical fashion, and the work as a whole has a distinctly un-Wagnerian quality. Indeed the ending, where Guntram seeks redemption by abandoning his fraternal order and his art, can be read as an abandonment of Wagnerian metaphysics. That is certainly how Ritter interpreted it and, as a result, his intense friendship with Strauss was damaged irreparably. If the reception at the work's Weimar première in 1894 was lukewarm, the more important Munich première during the next season was an outright failure. Strauss was dismayed by the negative reaction of the musicians, the vehemence of the press and the duplicity of the Munich Hofoper management. This experience of the strong conservative elements in the Bavarian capital is central to an understanding of his later development, for it rekindled a dormant love-hate relationship with the city of his birth, a relationship that endured to the end. But the setback made him recognize that he was no librettist, see the danger of getting too near the Wagnerian shadow and realize the harshness of Munich's philistinism, which would serve as the subject for his next opera, Feuersnot.
This one-act work, too, is unthinkable without Wagner, especially in its clever and numerous tongue-in-cheek musical quotations; but now Strauss is engaged in the Eulenspiegel-like world of satire as he pokes fun at the citizens of medieval Munich, a setting owing much to Die Meistersinger. His librettist was Ernst von Wolzogen, a satirical playwright and later founder of the Berlin Überbrettl cabaret, who based his text on the Flemish legend The Extinguished Fire of Audenaarde, in which a young man is rejected and humiliated by the woman he tries to woo. The hero tells his woes to a magician, who extinguishes all fire in the town: only when the object of the young man's affection is herself humiliated can fire be restored. Strauss and Wolzogen moved the setting to Munich and the magician, not seen in the operatic version, became a thinly disguised Wagner, and the young man, his apprentice, an even more thinly disguised Strauss. ‘When love is united with the magic of genius’, Wolzogen remarked, ‘even the most annoying philistine must see the light’. Seldom performed outside Germany, this fascinating work features waltzes parodied in a manner that foreshadows Der Rosenkavalier, and it requires a chorus of great technical skill, especially in the difficult children's parts. It had its première in Dresden on 21 November 1901 and, given the bizarre sexual content (much of it unstageable), had trouble with the censors from the very beginning.
Censorship and scandal were the norm for innovatory art at the turn of the century, and Strauss's next opera, Salome, with its unsettling blend of oriental exoticism and sexual depravity, would not disappoint. Lust, incest, decapitation and necrophilia joined with sinuous chromaticism and dazzling orchestration to create a work that provoked simultaneous fascination and revulsion. Strauss became interested in the Wilde play as early as 1902, and seeing Gertrude Eysoldt in Max Reinhardt's Berlin production a year later strengthened his resolve. Dissatisfied with a German versified version of the text, he decided to set the play directly, in Hedwig Lachmann's translation, making his own cuts and alterations. Above all he was impressed by the text's contrasting images as well as its symmetry: Herod, Jochanaan, the Jews; Salome's three seduction songs with Herod's three persuasive speeches; Salome's ostinato ‘Ich will den Kopf des Jochanaan!’; and, of course, her erotic Dance of the Seven Veils. Salome's disturbing final monologue, where she becomes increasingly detached from the outer world, is one of the great culminating scenes in opera. Strauss remarked that it was easy to say after the fact that Wilde's play was ‘crying out for music’: ‘That [music] had to be discovered’.
In the autumn of 1905 Strauss once again saw Eysoldt in Berlin in a Reinhardt production, this time of Hofmannsthal's Elektra, a Freudian interpretation of Sophocles' tragedy. He was rivetted by its use of gesture, the concentration of action and the steadily rising tension towards Electra's dance after her father's murder has been avenged. He was immediately struck by the musical possibilities and contacted Hofmannsthal for permission to use the text. Numerous parallels have been drawn between Salome and Elektra: both works feature a strong female protagonist consumed by an idée fixe, both culminate in dance and both heroines are finally undone by their neurotic fixations. Those similarities caused Strauss, who preferred contrasting adjacent operas, to hesitate momentarily, and it took a determined Hofmannsthal to keep him on course. If Elektra is performed less often than Salome, it is because it contains Strauss's most difficult soprano role. The singer is on stage for every scene save the first, and she must do constant battle with a tumultuous orchestra, which proudly displays an ardent young composer's skill in handling leitmotifs. The opera is arch-shaped, the keystone being the central confrontation between Electra and Clytemnestra, which is the tensest scene in any Strauss work and certainly the most daring in terms of its hyperchromatic harmonic language. Years later Strauss was embarrassed that much of the singing was ‘handicapped by instrumental polyphony’, and he later suggested – tongue firmly in cheek – that it should be conducted like Mendelssohn, as ‘fairy music’.
But it was the world of Mozart, not Mendelssohn, that inspired his next opera, Der Rosenkavalier (1909–10), set in 18th-century Vienna. This was his first true collaboration with Hofmannsthal, and though the libretto bears an intentional resemblance to Da Ponte's Le nozze di Figaro it conflates a wide range of sources, including Beaumarchais, Molière, Hogarth and even Die Meistersinger. It also unites comic elements with themes of profound seriousness. Strauss chose a musical language beyond the chromaticism of Salome and the dissonance of Elektra, and, as a result, Der Rosenkavalier represents a critical multilayering of musical styles – referring to Mozart, Johann Strauss and Verdi – and a modernist preoccupation with the dilemma of history. It is an opera about time and transformation on multiple levels. In its very opening lines (‘What you were, what you are – that nobody knows, that no-one can explain’), Octavian transforms the verb ‘to be’ from the past to the present tense. In Act 1 Baron Ochs boasts that he is ‘Jupiter blessed with a thousand forms’, but it is Octavian who takes on various transformations throughout the opera: as the Marschallin's adolescent lover, as her chambermaid, as a rose cavalier and, by the end, as a wiser young man.
To Hofmannsthal the miracle of life is that an old love can die, while a new one can arise from its ashes; yet in this transformation, which requires us to forget, we still preserve our essence. How is it that – in the same body – we are what we once were, now are and will become? This great mystery of life is, in one way or another, a theme that permeates much of Hofmannsthal's work. The Marschallin ponders this enigma in her poignant monologue ending Act 1, one of the opera's great moments in both score and libretto. Beyond the monologue, the delightfully anachronistic 19th-century waltzes, the magical presentation of the rose in Act 2 and the sublime final trio of Act 3 constitute some of Strauss's best-loved music. Yet the popularity of excerpts, independent of the whole, has overshadowed the theatrical brilliance and modernity of the work. Strauss, the lover of parody, pastiche and contrasts, had found his ideal librettist.
Ariadne auf Naxos (1911–12, rev. 1916), like Der Rosenkavalier, is a remarkably modern theatrical piece which, in its historicism, exploits an established canon as a source of parody. The opera forges a new relationship between composer, performer and audience, for without the audience's knowledge of tradition, parody cannot function. If in Rosenkavalier Strauss alludes to the style of other composers, Ariadne quotes specific musical works: Harlequin's song (‘Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen’) is based on the opening theme of Mozart's A major Piano Sonata k331, and the melody of the Nymphs' trio (‘Töne, töne, süsse Stimme’) comes from Schubert's Wiegenlied (‘Schlafe, schlafe, holder, süsser Knabe’). Although Zerbinetta's famous coloratura aria makes no direct quotations, Strauss's letters to Hofmannsthal make it clear from the outset that he looked to Bellini, Donizetti and others as stylistic models.
The opera within the opera juxtaposes the worlds of opera seria and commedia dell'arte, and the vivacious prologue of the revised version presents a behind-the-scenes view of the operatic stage. The work's mix and fragmentation of elements (e.g. the everyday world of the Prologue against the loftier Opera) foreshadows opera that other composers were to write in the 1920s: it offers a complex amalgam of contrasting literary and musical styles that, at face value, appear to undermine its coherence. In the hands of lesser artists, uniting these jarring contrasts might have proved an impossible task. But Strauss's penchant for accommodating the trivial alongside the exalted made him the ideal match for Hofmannsthal, whose chief aim in Ariadne was to ‘build on contrasts, to discover, above these contrasts, the harmony of the whole’. Ariadne continues Hofmannsthal's preoccupation with the mystery of transformation: through Ariadne's love, Bacchus is transfigured, and Ariadne, who had longed for death in the wake of Theseus's departure, is herself transformed by embracing Bacchus and life.
Strauss's incidental music for the Molière play of the first version of Ariadne was not wasted, for it was used in a revised adaptation of the play that included pantomime and dance, though it is heard most often in the form of an orchestral suite. Gesture and dance were two modes of artistic expression of central importance to both Strauss and his collaborator. Indeed, Hofmannsthal's very first letter to the composer (11 November 1900) concerned a possible ballet scenario: at the time Strauss was already at work on a ballet of his own, Kythere, though it was never finished. Thus it was probably inevitable that Hofmannsthal, who viewed gesture as the purest form of communication, would ultimately approach Strauss with another ballet proposal, first Orest und die Furien (which Strauss rejected in 1912) and then Josephslegende (1912–14). The Joseph project, which included the significant collaboration of Hofmannsthal's friend Harry Graf Kessler, was planned for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, with Nizhinsky in the title role and choreography by Fokine. By the time of the staging Nizhinsky had fallen out with the company, and the Paris première of 1914 featured Leonid Massine as Joseph. The exotic, oriental extravagance of the score recalls Salome, as does the erotic conflict between the chaste Joseph and the seductress Potiphar's Wife. The score, which incorporates material from Strauss's unfinished Kythere, foreshadows some of the more exotic moments in Die Frau ohne Schatten, especially in its timbral qualities, with the use of harp, celesta and first violins in three parts.
Serious work on Die Frau ohne Schatten began in the same year, 1914. In its dense orchestration, rich polyphony and intricate symbolism, this is Strauss's most complex stage work yet in many ways also his most personal. Though the subject concerns the shadowless Empress's search for humanity, the subplot of the Dyer, his wife and their troubled marriage touched Strauss more deeply than any other aspect of the story. His own marriage was troubled during this time, and Hofmannsthal hinted at this domestic friction when he suggested that the Dyer's wife could be modelled ‘in all discretion’ after Strauss's. Significantly, the ‘symphonic fantasy’ derived from the opera in 1946 presents themes related primarily to this aspect of the plot. Die Frau ohne Schatten is as difficult to cast as it is to stage, for it requires an ensemble of strong singers and is both complex and expensive to produce. But after the composer's death this work, always among his favourites, finally earned its deserved international acclaim.
Die Frau ohne Schatten was followed by three ballet projects: the unfortunate Schlagobers (1921–2), the Couperin Tanzsuite (1923, only choreographed as part of Verklungene Feste in 1941) and a reworking of Beethoven's Die Ruinen von Athen (1924).
Strauss seems to have wearied of late Romanticism. ‘Let us resolve’, he wrote to Hofmannsthal as early as 1916, ‘that Die Frau ohne Schatten will be the last Romantic opera. Hopefully you will have a fine, happy idea that will definitely help set me out on the new road’. But Strauss was to go that road alone, to Intermezzo (1918–23), a comedy that again featured his wife Pauline as model for the leading female role. The work was based on an incident that occurred when Pauline mistakenly accused her husband of philandering while on tour. Strauss called his work a ‘bourgeois comedy with symphonic interludes’ and firmly believed that he had established a new operatic genre (Spieloper) for the 20th century, so much so that he felt compelled to write a preface to the score. The innovatory aspects of the work lay in its realistic, contemporary subject matter, in its separation of conversational and lyrical impulses (by putting the latter in the interludes), and in its quasi-cinematic dramaturgy (13 short scenes in just two acts). Opinions among contemporary critics were mixed, but most praised the delightful interludes, which became so popular that Strauss published four of them in a concert arrangement nine years after the opera's première.
The two-act Die ägyptische Helena (1923–7) completes Strauss's trilogy of marriage operas and, in doing so, returns to the more elevated world of Greek myth. But the composer, encouraged by his comic Intermezzo and feeling destined to become, in his own words, the ‘Offenbach of the 20th century’, this time sought not tragedy but mythological operetta, and Hofmannsthal, eager to lure him away from Wagnerian ‘erotic screaming’, was all in favour. Especially in its densely symbolic second act, however, the work was to prove far removed from La belle Hélène. Indeed, it explores many important themes central to Ariadne and Die Frau ohne Schatten: memory, marital fidelity and the restoration of trust. Hofmannsthal considered Helena to be his finest libretto and, though it has been ridiculed by many commentators, it remains underrated. Moreover, as in Die Frau ohne Schatten, Strauss renders complicated myth on a powerful human level. The work was composed during his Vienna period, and he had specific Staatsoper singers in mind, such as Maria Jeritza, though she did not in fact sing the title role at the première. The second act was revised for a revival in Salzburg in 1933, but the work has never become part of the basic repertory.
Strauss and Hofmannsthal's final collaboration, Arabella (1929–32), was a different matter. Helena had failed to satisfy Strauss's desire for lightness: he believed he still had within him another Viennese comedy, without the ‘mistakes and longueurs’ of Der Rosenkavalier, which he nonetheless considered his high-water mark. Arabella marks a return to Vienna, but to the Vienna of the 1860s, the ‘Ringstrasse period’ when the Austrian capital experienced its final upsurge. In constructing his libretto, Hofmannsthal returned to two earlier works: an unfinished play, Der Fiaker als Graf, and a short story, Lucidor. The play provided setting and atmosphere (especially the Fiaker ball), but the essence of the story came from Lucidor which, however, focussed attention more on Arabella's younger sister than on Arabella herself. Strauss sensed this problem in the first libretto draft and asked that the title character be given a soliloquy to close Act 1. Hofmannsthal's solution (‘Mein Elemer’) delighted the composer, who immediately sent a telegram of congratulations to his librettist. But the telegram remained unopened. Hofmannsthal had suffered a fatal stroke the day it arrived.
Work on Arabella then progressed slowly, and the stunned composer felt artistically isolated, even disorientated. Though Act 1 was in good shape, Acts 2 and 3 were doubtless to have been further refined, and Strauss could not bring himself to alter what he considered Hofmannsthal's ‘final bequest’. Dramaturgical problems in Act 2 notwithstanding, Strauss created an opera of compelling lyricism and poignancy. The Arabella-Zdenka duet of Act 1, infused with the flavour of Hungarian folk music, is one of Strauss's finest. Act 2 features another memorable Hungarian duet, for Arabella and Mandryka, as well as some remarkable coloratura from the Fiakermilli. But the greatest moment of all is the final scene of the work, which opens with a downward sweep in the orchestra in a gesture recalling the song Allerseelen (1885). Arabella descends the staircase to offer a glass of pure water to her betrothed, a ‘Hungarian custom’ invented by Hofmannsthal, just as the ‘Viennese tradition’ of the silver rose had been his device. Yet, despite her gesture of submission, Arabella is a woman fully in control of her surroundings throughout the work, ‘an entirely modern character’, according to Hofmannsthal. Indeed, in the final line of the opera she informs Mandryka that she can only be herself: ‘Nimm mich wie ich bin’.
As with so many of Strauss's collaborations with Hofmannsthal, Arabella changed as it was being made, and though not without its humorous moments, it is not the light comedy he intended. Indeed, his only work in the true buffa tradition was his next, Die schweigsame Frau (1933–4). And where Arabella was composed during some of Strauss's darkest personal moments, this next project found him at his brightest. Not since Der Rosenkavalier had he shown such unbridled enthusiasm for an operatic project, and he declared Zweig's libretto, based on Ben Jonson's The Silent Woman (1609), a ‘born comic opera … more suitable for music than even Figaro and the Barber of Seville’. However, the text's closest affinity is to Donizetti's Don Pasquale. Both Don Pasquale and Morosus, the leading male figure in Die schweigsame Frau, are crotchety old bachelors upon whom friends and relatives play abundant good-natured tricks. There are numerous and amusing allusions to Italian operas, in both words and music, throughout a work that contains some of Strauss's lightest music for the stage. Indeed, the consistent parlando style, with only rare moments of lyricism, has made this opera, especially for non-German-speaking audiences, somewhat tedious. Strauss nonetheless was delighted with the result and always considered it one of his finest stage comedies.
Zweig, unable to work again with Strauss, proved true to his promise to help Gregor in writing the libretto for the composer's next opera, Friedenstag (1935–6): the idea was his, and he offered advice right up to the final revision. Friedenstag, Strauss's first one-act opera since Elektra, occupies a unique place in his output. Inspired chiefly by the female voice, Strauss now found himself writing mostly for male singers, and he no doubt drew on his earlier experience of composing for men's choruses. The music of Friedenstag is dark and brooding, lacking the warmth of his other operas; the only exception is the role of Marie, the wife of the steadfast Commandant and the only solo soprano in the opera. Ironic allusions to the march, in a distinctly Mahlerian guise, suggest the distance between Strauss and his military material, for what had attracted him to the libretto was its hope of peace between opposing German forces. After the two rival commandants embrace, Strauss composed an extended C major choral finale, a conscious allusion to the end of Fidelio. With its paucity of stage action and extensive choral treatment, the work is perhaps as much a scenic cantata as an opera, and its rare performances have usually been in concert form.
Daphne (1936–7), its intended partner, marks a return to a theme dear to Strauss's heart, that of transformation. Unlike the Empress in Die Frau ohne Schatten, who desires humanity, the nature-worshipping Daphne disdains it, and by the end of the opera she is transformed into a laurel tree. The flaws in the unwieldy first version of the libretto were immediately clear to Strauss: with its lack of focus, human conflict and sense of shape, it failed to suggest felicitous musical possibilities. But after extensive revision and outside advice from Zweig, Krauss and others, a usable libretto was crafted. Even Gregor's beloved final chorus was scrapped, for Strauss was far more interested in the process of transformation than in a stiff choral finale. The splendid music he wrote for this scene develops into a miniature tone poem with wordless vocal obbligato, combining a seemingly effortless interweaving of returning motifs with skilful harmonic pacing. The enchanting orchestral sound is at once rich and refined – a hallmark of Strauss's late period.
The roots of his next opera, Die Liebe der Danae (1938–40), reach back to 1920, when, after the tortuous Frau ohne Schatten, Strauss wanted to write a lighter, more cheerful work. Hofmannsthal had responded with a scenario, Danae oder Vernunftheirat, that conflated two myths, Danae's visitation by Jupiter in the guise of golden rain and the legend of Midas's golden touch. As much as Strauss admired many details of the sketch, there were too many insurmountable dramaturgical problems, and he became increasingly preoccupied with his own Intermezzo. Hofmannsthal's next offering to Strauss was to be a ‘light mythology’ based on an entirely different source, Die ägyptische Helena. Danae was soon forgotten. But by 1936 the Thirty Years War and Greek tragedy had taken their toll on Strauss, who asked Gregor to work up the Hofmannsthal sketch, even though Gregor had earlier shown the composer a Danae scenario of his own. The fragile satire of Hofmannsthal's draft was beyond Gregor's grasp, whose job was further complicated by the very dramaturgical problems that had vexed Strauss in 1920. After long, diligent work, and much outside assistance, a libretto was finally forged.
With its numerous transformations and sizable vocal demands on a large singing cast, Die Liebe der Danae is a challenge to stage and cast, and therefore rarely performed. The title role was written for Krauss's wife, Viorica Ursuleac, and there are ample instances of the quiet, sustained high-range singing that made her famous. The role of Jupiter is a tour de force among Strauss's baritone roles, for not only is the range rather high (certain sections are routinely transposed) but the music demands great vocal agility, especially in the final ‘Maia Erzählung’, one of Strauss's best baritone monologues. Despite the work's various contributors – Gregor, Zweig, Krauss, Wallerstein – one detects the spirit of Hofmannsthal in its broad themes. Not unlike Die ägyptische Helena, the opera focusses on marriage, fidelity and memory. Moreover, neither opera turned out to be the mythological operetta that was first envisioned. In the end Danae chooses love over money and power; Jupiter renounces earthly things and, after blessing the union of Danae and Midas, he returns to Olympus. In 1944 an aged, resigned Strauss strongly identified with his Jupiter, and after the dress rehearsal, on August 16, he even suggested that the ‘sovereign gods of Olympus’ should have called him up as well.
Though he often referred to Danae as his last opera, his final completed work for the stage was a ‘Conversation Piece for Music’, Capriccio (1940–41) – a work that was intended neither for the regular opera house nor for the normal opera audience. Inspired by a libretto (Casti's Prima la musica, dopo le parole) that Zweig had come across in the 1930s, the work is an extended one-act debate about words and music. The issue of textual audibility became an increasing preoccupation for Strauss throughout his operatic career, and from Elektra to Daphne he had come a long way in his self-described ‘struggle’ for balance between singers and orchestra. Those two works call for orchestras of similar size, but the latter – emphasizing clarity, lyricism and transparency – is far from the turbulent sonic realm of the former. Important milestones along the way in this evolution include Ariadne, Intermezzo and Die schweigsame Frau.
Set during the time of the Querelle des Bouffons, Capriccio is rich in both historical allusions and self-references: we hear quotations from Gluck, Piccinni and Rameau, textual references to Metastasio, Pascal and Ronsard and self-borrowings from Ariadne, Daphne and Die Krämerspiegel. Moreover, the characters are all allegorical: Flamand (music), Olivier (words), La Roche (stage direction), Clairon (acting) and the Count and Countess (patrons). The title-page suggests that the libretto was a collaboration between Strauss and Krauss, but there were other unmentioned ingredients in the final recipe: Zweig, who rediscovered the Casti text, Gregor, who tried and failed to carry it out, and Hans Swarovsky, who found the Ronsard sonnet on which the work centres. Not unlike Act 3 of Die Meistersinger, where we witness the genesis of Walther's Prize Song, Capriccio also offers a view of compositional process. First the Count reads the sonnet alone; then it is read by its ‘author’, Olivier, while Flamand improvises at the keyboard; finally Flamand sings it to the Countess. The last of the 13 scenes marks the sonnet's final destination in its upward journey from prosaic baritonal readings through a musical setting sung by a tenor to Strauss's favourite medium, the soprano voice. But before we arrive there we must get through the pivotal ninth scene, which Strauss labels ‘Fuge (Diskussion über das Thema: Wort oder Ton)’. The centrepiece of this scene is La Roche's monologue, where he asks, and Strauss with him: ‘Where is the [modern] masterpiece that speaks to the hearts of people, in which their souls are seen reflected? Where is it? I cannot discover it, although I keep searching. They make fun of the old and create nothing new’. An extended orchestral introduction (the ‘moonlight music’) brings us to the last scene, where the Countess must finally choose between poet and composer. To make up her mind she sings through the sonnet one last time. Whom will she choose? Strauss's final curtain seems to leave the question open. Yet this final scene, one of his great soprano monologues, radiates with some of his finest composition, proclaiming clearly that it is not words but music that reigns supreme.
Bryan Gilliam
Writings
W. Schuh, ed.: Richard Strauss: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Zürich, 1949, enlarged 2/1957; Eng. trans., 1953/R) [collected essays]
Aus Italien [analysis] (307), 1889; †Tannhäuser-Nachklänge (308), 1892; Tagebuch der Griechenland- und Ägyptenreise (309), 1892; Über mein Schaffen (310), 1893; Rundschreiben über die Parsifal-Schutzfrage (311), 1894; Handschreiben zur Reform des Urheberrechtsgesetzes von 1870 (312), 1898; Autobiographische Skizze (313), 1898; †Einleitung zu Die Musik: Sammlung illustrierter Einzeldarstellungen (314), 1903; †rev., enlarged: Instrumentationslehre von Hector Berlioz (316–17), 1904–5; Zum Tonkünstlerfeste: Begrüssung anlässlich des Tonkünstlerfestes des Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikvereins (318), 1905; Bemerkungen über amerikanische Musikpflege (319), 1907; †Gibt es für die Musik eine Fortschrittspartei? (320), 1907; Salomes Tanz der sieben Schleier (320A), ?1908; Zum Salome-Verbot in Amerika (320B), 1908; Rechtfertigung der Aufführung der Symphonia domestica im Warenhaus Wannemaker (320C), 1908; Elektra: Interview für den Berliner Lokalanzeiger (320D), 1908
†Geleitwort zu Leopold Schmidt: Aus dem Musikleben der Gegenwart (321), 1908; Die hohen Bach-Trompeten (322), 1909; †Persönliche Erinnerungen an Hans von Bülow (324), 1909; Dementi zu falschen Pressenotizen über die neue Oper Ochs von Lerchenau (Der Rosenkavalier) (327), 1909 or 1910; †Gustav Mahler (328), 1910; Die Grenzen des Komponierbaren (329), 1910; Der Rosenkavalier (330), 1910; †Mozarts Così fan tutte (331), 1910; Erwiderung auf Angriffe gegen den ‘Programm-Musiker’ (331A), 1911; Antwort auf die Rundfrage ‘Worin erblicken Sie die entscheidende Bedeutung Franz Liszts für die Entwicklung des deutschen Musiklebens?’ (331B), 1911; †Zur Frage des Parsifal-Schutzes: Antwort auf eine Rundfrage (332), 1912; †Offener Brief an einen Oberbürgermeister (333), 1913; †Städtebund-Theater: eine Anregung (334), 1914; Eine Kundgebung Richard Strauss’ (335), 1919; Begrüssungsansprache des neuen Wiener Operndirektors Richard Strauss (336), 1919; †The Composer Speaks, pr. in D. Ewen, ed.: The Book of Modern Composers (New York, 1942, 3/1961 as The New Book of Modern Composers) (336A), 1921; †Novitäten und Stars: Spielplanerwägungen eines modernen Operndirektors (337), 1922; Einleitung zu Schlagobers (338), 1924; †Vorwort zu Intermezzo (2 versions) (339–40), 1924; †Über Johann Strauss (341), 1925; †Gedächtnisrede auf Friedrich Rösch (342), 1925
†Die 10 goldenen Lebensregeln des hochfürstlichen bayerischen Kammerkappelarius Hans Knappertsbusch, Monachia (343), 1927; Der Dresdner Staatsoper zum Jubiläum (344), 1928; †Interview über Die ägyptische Helena (345), 1928; †Die Münchener Oper (346), 1928; Über Schubert: ein Entwurf (347), ?1928; †Über Komponieren und Dirigieren (348), 1929; Die schöpferische Kraft des Komponisten (349), 1929; †Vorwort zu Hans Diestel: Ein Orchestermusiker über das Dirigieren (350), 1931; Die ägyptische Helena (351), 1931; Über den musikalischen Schaffensprozess (352), 1931; Gedenkworte für Alfred Roller (353), 1933; Über Richard Wagner (354), 1933; An die Schriftleitung Musik im Zeitbewusstsein (355), 1933; †Zeitgemässe Glossen für Erziehung zur Musik, für einen befreundeten Pädagogen (356), 1933; Ansprache des Präsidenten der Reichsmusikkammer Dr Richard Strauss anlässlich der Eröffnung der ersten Arbeitstagung der Reichsmusikkammer (357), 1934; Appell zum ‘Schutz der ideelen Interessen am Kunstwerk’ (358), 1933 or 1934; Ansprache bei der öffentlichen Musikversammlung am 17. Februar in der Berliner Philharmonie (359), 1934; Ansprache am ersten Komponistentag in Berlin (359A), 1934; Zur Urheberrechtsreform (359B), 1934; Musik und Kultur (360), 1934; †Dirigentenerfahrungen mit klassischen Meisterwerken (361), 1934; Anmerkungen zur Aufführung von Beethovens Symphonien (362), ?1934
Über die Besetzung der Kurorchester (363), 1934; Brief anstelle eines Vorwortes zu Joseph Gregor: Richard Strauss [: Der Meister der Oper] (363A), 1935; Geschichte der Schweigsamen Frau (364), 1935; Arabella (365), 1937; †Bemerkungen zu Richard Wagners Gesamtkunstwerk und zum Bayreuther Festspielhaus (366), 1940; Bemerkungen zu Wagners Oper und Drama (367), ?1940; †Erinnerungen an meinen Vater (325), c1940; †Aus meinen Jugend- und Lehrjahren (326), c1940; †Vom melodischen Einfall (368), c1940; Omaggio a Giuseppe Verdi (368A), 1941; Anstelle eines Vorwortes zu Anton Berger: Richard Strauss als geistige Macht (369), 1941; †Zur Josephslegende (370), 1941; †Meine Werke in guter Zusammenstellung (371), 1941; Mozart, der Dramatiker (373), 1941; Glückwunsch für die Wiener Philharmoniker (374), 1942; †Geleitwort zu Capriccio (375), 1942; †Erinnerungen an die ersten Aufführungen meiner Opern von Guntram bis Intermezzo (376), 1942; Vorwort zu Divertimento (377), 1942; Über Wesen und Bedeutung der Oper (†rev. version) (378, 385), 1943, 1945; Geleitwort zu Willi Schuh: Das Bühnenwerk von Richard Strauss (379), 1944; †Über Mozart (380), 1944; Zum Kapitel Mozart (381), 1944; Über die Generalprobe der Oper Die Liebe der Danae (382), 1944; Gedanken über die Weltgeschichte des Theaters und Entwurf eines Briefes an Josef Gregor, den Verfasser (383), 1945; †Brief über das humanistische Gymnasium an Professor Reisinger (384), 1945; Geschichte der Oper Die Liebe der Danae (386), 1946; Pauline Strauss-de Ahna (387), 1947; †Glückwunsch für die sächsische Staatskapelle (388), 1948; Garmischer Rede am 85. Geburtstag (389), 1949; Letzte Aufzeichnung (390), 1949