Part 1

Chapter 13,769 wordsPublic domain

Richard Strauss

HERBERT F. PEYSER

Written for and dedicated to the RADIO MEMBERS of THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK

FOREWORD

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

H. F. P.

RICHARD STRAUSS

_By_ HERBERT F. PEYSER

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

* * *

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

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

* * *

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

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

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