Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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More than a decade was to elapse before Strauss was to concern himself again with problems of symphonic music. Opera and ballet were to be the chief business of those activities which one may look upon as the middle period of his creative life. One may be permitted a short backward glance to account for some of his previous creations. Songs (a number of the best of them), an “Enoch Arden” setting (declamation with piano accompaniment) occupy the late years of the 19th Century and the dawn of the 20th, not to mention the choral ballad for mixed chorus and orchestra _Taillefer_. More important, however, is a second operatic venture. This opera in one act, called _Feuersnot_, is a setting of a text by the noted Ernst von Wolzogen, who was associated with the vogue of the so-called “Ueberbrettl”, a sort of up-to-date vaudeville, an “arty” movement typical of the period. _Feuersnot_ is a picture of a “fire famine” brought about by an irate sorcerer in revenge for the act of a maiden who scorned his love. Thereby all the fires of the town are extinguished! The piece is rather too long for a short opera and too short for a full-length one. But the text is rich in word play, punning satire, double meanings and topical allusions, interlarded with biting reflections on the manner in which Munich had once turned against Wagner and on the trouble the benighted burghers would have in similarly ridding themselves of the troublesome Strauss! There is not a little of the real Strauss in the music, though at that, less than one might expect from the composer of _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Ein Heldenleben_ which already lay some distance in the past. _Feuersnot_ was first staged at the Dresden Opera on November 21, 1901, under the leadership of Ernst von Schuch. And the consequence was that for years to come Strauss’s operatic premieres took place in that gracious city.

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We now come into view of a milestone of modern music drama. In 1902 Strauss attended a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play, “Salome”, at Max Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin. Gertrude Eysoldt had the title role. The Swiss musicologist, Willy Schuh, relates that the composer, after the performance was accosted by his friend, Heinrich Grünfeld, who remarked: “Strauss, this would be an operatic subject for you!” “I am already composing it,” was the reply. And the composer went on to tell: “The Viennese writer, Anton Lindner, had already sent me the play and offered to make an opera text of it for me. Upon my agreement he sent me some cleverly versified opening scenes which did not, however, inspire me with an urge to composition; till one day the question shaped itself in my mind: ‘Why do I not compose at once, without further preliminaries: Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!’ From then on it was not difficult to cleanse the piece of ‘literature’, so that it has become a thoroughly fine libretto!