In France Claude Debussy, too, was writing descriptive music. Rather than literal and narrative, like that of Strauss, it was elusive and shimmering, after the manner of the Impressionists in painting and the Symbolists in poetry. The Symbolist credo was to suggest, not to name, an object. Where Strauss stated, Debussy suggested. “If people insist on wanting to understand what happens in a symphonic poem, we may as well give up writing them,” he said. Literal meaning was a matter of equal unconcern to Sibelius. When asked by a friend alter listening to a recording of his Fourth Symphony what it really meant, he said after a short pause, “Play the record again.”
Debussy, however, admired Strauss, who was two years his junior, and acknowledged that the Verklärung (Transfiguration) in Tod und Verklärung “takes place before our very eyes.” When he heard Till Eulenspiegel in 1903 he thought its flouting of musical laws amounted almost “to an hour of music in a lunatic asylum.… You do not know whether to roar with laughter or groan with pain and you are filled with wonder when you find anything in its customary place.” Nevertheless he thought it a work of “genius” and was awed by its “amazing orchestral assurance” and the “mad rhythm that sweeps us along from beginning to end and forces us to share in the hero’s pranks.” What impressed him most about Heldenleben, which he also heard in 1903, was its “cyclonic energy.” The listener is no longer master of his emotions: “I say again that it is impossible to withstand his irresistible domination.” Debussy’s own orchestral prelude, L’Après-midi d’un Faune, based on Mallarmé’s poem, and his Nocturnes for orchestra, which appeared in the nineties, led Strauss to return the compliment. Debussy was “a remarkable and altogether unique genius,” he said, “within his own limited domain.”
Strauss was always rather surprised when someone else produced work of high quality. “I had no idea that anyone except myself was capable of writing such good music as this,” he remarked “charmingly and characteristically” to Beecham on hearing a work of Delius. He never listened to Puccini and did not know Manon from Tosca, or Butterfly from Bohème, although Puccini’s works were exactly contemporary with his own. Italian opera was not highly regarded in Germany. He was generous, however, in performing the works of other contemporaries. Unable to conduct modern music at the Berlin Royal Opera while the Kaiser’s taste held sway, he founded an orchestra of his own, the Tonkünstler, to encourage “progressive principles” in music. Subsidized by private patrons, the Tonkünstler played all Liszt’s tone poems in chronological order as well as Strauss’s own works and introduced to Berlin performances of Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Elgar and, if not Debussy, at least his predecessors, Charpentier and d’Indy. Once in London on a visit to the National Gallery in company with Edgar Speyer and Edward Elgar, the group stopped in front of Tintoretto’s “St. George and the Dragon” while Speyer remarked, “Here we have a revolutionary who broke ground at the very end of the glorious Venetian period. Shall we say that Tintoretto was to painting what our friend Richard Strauss is today to music?” Much struck by this remark, Strauss returned to the painting on their way back through the rooms, studied it again and exclaimed, “Speyer is right. I am the Tintoretto of music!”
From this height he could afford, and did not stint, encouragement of less renowned colleagues. On hearing a performance in Düsseldorf in 1902 of Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, based on a poem by Cardinal Newman, Strauss proposed a toast “to the welfare and success of the first English Progressive, Meister Edward Elgar, and of the young progressive school of English composers.” Such tribute from Strauss startled the musical world and aroused the usual critics’ uproar which it amused him to provoke. Though disliking the terms of the compliment all England was impressed and flattered. Strauss was no less appreciative of the ultramodern Schönberg, whose experiments in atonality so impressed him that he arranged for the young composer to be given the Liszt Fellowship and appointment as Professor of Composition in the Stern Academy in Berlin. On the occasion of the premiere of Mahler’s Third Symphony in Cologne in 1902, Strauss decided its success by going up to the platform and applauding ostentatiously. From 1900 on, as president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, founded by Liszt, he invited foreign composers to conduct their new works at the Society’s festivals. Sibelius, whom he invited to present his Swan of Tuonela in 1900, found him “extraordinarily amiable.” When Strauss himself took the podium at these concerts he was greeted by the orchestra with a threefold fanfare and by the audience rising to its feet.
In England and the United States his renown was large and his appearances lionized. A Strauss Festival lasting three days was held in London in 1903 at which all his works from Aus Italien to Heldenleben were played. Strauss liked the English “very much,” as he once told Rolland. For one thing they made traveling comfortable in places like Egypt, so that “you can always be sure of finding clean rooms and modern conveniences.” For Strauss this proved they were a superior people and, according to the Nietzschean formula, they and not the Boers should have had Germany’s sympathy during the South African War. “The Boers are a barbarian people, backward, still living in the Seventeenth Century. The English are very civilized and very strong. It’s a thoroughly good thing that the strong should triumph.”
In London he could enjoy the hospitality of Edgar Speyer, head of the syndicate which owned Queen’s Hall and manager of its orchestra, who with his wife, a professional violinist before her marriage, made their home at Grosvenor Square a center of musical and artistic society. Here he could meet Henry James or Debussy, listen to Mme Grieg sing her husband’s songs and enjoy a sumptuous dinner in company with John Sargent, to whom painting was a profession but music and food a matter of love. Noticing a gypsy band which had been wandering around London playing Spanish music, Strauss proposed that it be hidden in the garden to play during one of the Speyer parties, with results that tantalized Sargent, who was torn between his dinner and the need to run to the window to discover the source of the music.
In America, Strauss’s compositions had been known and played ever since Theodore Thomas, conductor of the Chicago Symphony, had performed his Symphony in F minor in 1884 and the German-born Emil Paur of the Boston Symphony had played Aus Italien in 1888. Thomas and Paur, who later moved to the New York Philharmonic, continued to play Strauss’s works as they came out, and in 1904 an American premiere was arranged for his newest work, Sinfonia Domestica, as the feature of a Strauss Festival to be held in New York. The composer was invited to conduct the new piece as well as a subsequent concert of his works in Chicago. Thomas, a fervent admirer over twenty years, considered him at this point in his career “the greatest musician now living and one of the greatest musical pioneers of all times.”
With the new wealth of American business tycoons overflowing their coffers, the United States was developing a whole new audience and source of support for music and the arts. It was a time of exuberant expenditure and large ideas. When the rector of Trinity Church in New York wanted a new pulpit, he asked the senior partner of the leading architectural firm, McKim, Mead and White, to design him something “big, broad, ample and simple but rich in the right places.” When the same McKim built the Boston Public Library a plaque was put up honoring the “splendid amplitude” of his genius. Splendid amplitude was in the air. Louis Tiffany designed for himself a house with a palatial flight of stairs leading up, between walls with complete Sudanese Negro huts built into them, to a hall so vast the ceiling was invisible in the dim light. In the center of the hall a black chimney soared to infinity, four immense fireplaces blazed, each with flames of a different color, mysterious light glowed through hanging Tiffany glass lamps and an invisible organist played the prelude from Parsifal.
The several major American orchestras subsidized by copper kings, railroad barons and their kind provided an important extra source of concert fees and royalties. Strauss was delighted to come and the concert-going American public breathlessly awaited the “most eminent of living c
omposers,” who, they were told by Harper’s Weekly, uttered “imaginings of overpowering significance” and touched “the margin of the sublime.”
Sinfonia Domestica, it was apparent on first performance, touched the ridiculous. Although it was performed by the composer’s wish without program notes so that it could be listened to “purely as music,” Strauss had already told an interviewer that it illustrated “a day in my family life” in the form of a triple figure representing “Papa, Mama and Baby.” At the premiere it was presented only as Introduction and Scherzo, Adagio, Double Fugue and Finale, but, as usual, the composer soon obliged with an official analysis for subsequent performances which indicated the baby in its bath, the parents’ happiness, the quarrels of aunts and uncles over family resemblances—“Just like his Papa!” “Just like his Mama!”—and similar stuff. Although there was tender melody of Strauss’s finest in the cradle song and love duet, the dominant impression is of thumping and screaming and raucous confusion suggesting a maddened circus. If this is German home life, German history becomes understandable. Even longer than Heldenleben, the work astonished and offended most listeners. “If all the sacred elephants in India were driven into the Ganges at the same moment,” said a renowned but unnamed conductor to Beecham when the piece was played in London some months later, “they could not have made half as much noise as that one little Bavarian baby in its bath.” Gurgling bath water and ringing alarm clock were not what Wagner had meant by “the stuff of music.” The vulgarity of the new century seemed suddenly confirmed by its most eminent composer. Strauss missed the point. “I do not see why I should not compose a Symphony about myself,” he told Rolland. “I find myself quite as interesting as Napoleon or Alexander.”
His choice of two world conquerors was indicative. In music the German assumption of superiority was by this time beginning to annoy other peoples. “German musicians always put a German arrival on a pedestal so that they can idolise it,” wrote Grieg to Delius in 1903. “Wagner is dead but they must have something to satisfy their patriotism and they would rather have ersatz than nothing at all.” In 1905 at a music festival in Strasbourg, capital of formerly French, now German, Alsace, the stated purpose was to bring French and Germans together through art. In a three-day program, however, only two French works were performed, while the first day of concerts began with Weber and ended with Wagner, the second day was devoted to Brahms, Mahler and Strauss and the last day entirely to Beethoven. The selection from Wagner of the last scene from Die Meistersinger, in which Hans Sachs denounces foreign insincerity and trivolity, suggested to one auditor a certain “lack of courtesy.”
The world’s increasing irritation with Germany appeared in the eagerness with which foreign critics seized upon evidence of a decline in Strauss’s inspiration. Everyone jumped on Sinfonia Domestica. Newman was astonished that “a composer of genius should have fallen so low” and Gilman revealed the degree to which Germany was getting on the nerves of other nations. Quoting Matthew Arnold to the effect that Teutonism tends insistently toward the “ugly and ignoble,” he wrote that “only a Teuton with a Teuton’s failure of tact” could have contrived Domestica.
The Zeitgeist did not call for Papa, Mama and Baby. A restlessness fermenting under the superabundant materialism was producing in artists a desire to shock; to rip and slash the thick quilt of bourgeois comfort. Attuned as always, Strauss responded. Sinfonia Domestica had shocked by banality, but now he felt a need to unnerve and appall and went straight from Bavarian family life to a theme of depraved and lascivious passion—Salome, in Oscar Wilde’s version.
A drama as lush and gruesome as Wilde trying hard could make it, Salome was a pursuit of sensation for its own sake, an effort to produce what Baudelaire called “the phosphorescence of putrescence.” The original play, written in French in 1891, went into rehearsal in London a year later with Sarah Bernhardt in the title role, but performance was banned by the Lord Chamberlain on the ground that its presentation of St. John the Baptist was sacrilege. Upon publication (with copies for the author’s friends bound in “Tyrian purple and tired silver”), the play was denounced by The Times as “an arrangement in blood and ferocity, morbid, bizarre, repulsive and very offensive.” In 1894 an English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas appeared, illustrated with luscious evil by the truest decadent of them all, Aubrey Beardsley. Three of his drawings, considered indecent by the publishers, had to be withdrawn. In 1896, when Wilde was in Reading Gaol, Salome was produced in Paris by the actor-manager Lugné-Poë at his Théâtre de l’Oeuvre, with himself as Herod but without Bernhardt. The quintessence of decadence was overripe and it was not a success. In Germany, however, Salome matched a craving for the horrendous and found its place. First produced in Breslau in 1901, its real success came in 1902 with a production by Max Reinhardt at his Kleines Theater in Berlin, where Strauss saw it.
More a poem than a play, Wilde’s Salome was an exercise in purple, an orgy in words, which succeeded on paper but embarrassed on the stage. It offered the spectacle of Salome pouring out her hot erotic pleas to the eyes, the hair, the limbs, the body and the love of Iokanaan, of King Herod avid for his stepdaughter, of her voluptuous dance to excite his lust and win her ghastly desire, of the black Executioner’s huge arm rising from the pit holding the bearded bloody head of the Prophet who had scorned her, of her necrophilic raptures addressed to the head on the platter and her final conquest of its dead lips, of Herod’s climactic order of horror and remorse, “Kill that woman!” and of her death crushed beneath the shields of his soldiers. Performed in flesh and blood it delighted the Berlin audience. Wilde’s moonlit fantasia, in Germany, came into its own and enjoyed a phenomenal run of two hundred performances.
The undercurrent of morbidity in Germany, which Rolland had already noticed, grew more apparent in the first decade of the new century. It increased in proportion as Germany’s wealth and strength and arrogance increased, as if the pressure of so much industrial success and military power were creating an inner reaction in the form of a need to negate, to expose the worms and passions writhing within that masterful, prosperous, well-behaved, orderly people. It was as if Bismarck had perforce produced Krafft-Ebing. Indeed Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis which appeared in 1886 provided a well of lurid resource on which the German drama, then the most vigorous form of national literature, could draw.
The theatre ranked with music and opera as a German pleasure and, beginning in the nineties, broke out in a surge of problem plays stemming from Ibsen and in new styles of acting and experiments in stagecraft. Proclaiming the doctrine of Realism and Naturalism, the Freie Bühne (Independent Theatre) of Berlin, copied after the Théâtre Libre of Paris, opened in 1889 with Ibsen’s Ghosts followed by Hauptmann’s first play, Before Dawn. Theatres sprouted and multiplied. Society’s masks were torn off and the “beast in man,” Zola’s objective, was enthusiastically exposed. Besides Ibsen, Strindberg’s cruel Miss Julie, Tolstoy’s Powers of Darkness, Zola’s Therèse Raquin, the symbolist and neo-romantic dramas of Maeterlinck, D’Annunzio and von Hofmannsthal, the social plays of Ibsen’s disciple Shaw, the worldly satires of Arthur Schnitzler of Vienna and a proliferation of German tragedies were performed. Student stage societies revived Oedipus Rex and Euripides, the Modern Touring Company took the new drama to the provinces, and a people’s theatre, the Freie Volksbühne, followed by the Neue Freie Volksbühne, allied it to Socialism. In Munich, the Intimes Theater was founded in 1895 by Ernst von Wolzogen, librettist of Strauss’s opera Feuersnot. To achieve the same intimate atmosphere for experimental plays, Reinhardt founded the Kleines Theater in 1902, where, besides Salome, he produced Maxim Gorky’s awful look at society’s dregs, The Lower Depths.
Tragedy was the staple of the German theatre. Social comedies with happy endings were not a German genre. German fun was confined to buffoonery, either painful or coarse. Their tragedies were not so much curative, like Ibsen’s, nor compassionate, like Chekhov’s, but obsessively focus
ed on mankind’s cruelty to man, on his bent toward self-destruction and on death. Death by murder, suicide or some more esoteric form resolved nearly all German drama of the nineties and early 1900’s. In Hauptmann’s Hannele the child heroine dies of neglect and abuse in an almshouse, in his Sunken Bell Heinrich’s wife drowns herself in a lake and he drinks a poisoned goblet, in Rose Bernd the title character, seduced and deserted, strangles her newborn child, in Henschel the title character hangs himself after betraying his dead wife by marrying a tart who lets his child die of neglect, in Michael Kramer a sensitive son is driven to suicide by an overbearing father, a popular theme in Germany rich in such fathers. In Sudermann’s Magda only the father’s fatal stroke prevents his shooting himself and his daughter, who needless to say is illegitimately pregnant, the invariable fate of the German heroine. An endless succession of them were driven in the grip of this circumstance to hysteria, insanity, crime, prison, infanticide and suicide. In Sudermann’s Sodoms Ende, which varies the pattern if not the end, a dissolute young artist, corrupted by the wife of a banker, drives his foster sister to suicide and dies himself of a hemorrhage. In Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring’s Awakening), first effort of a playwright who was to exceed all the rest, the discovery of sex by adolescents conflicting with the prurience of adults produces total catastrophe: the fourteen-year-old heroine, being with child, dies, apparently of a mismanaged abortion; the boy is expelled from school and sent to a reformatory by his parents; his friend, unable to bear life, commits suicide and reappears in a graveyard with his head under his arm in a closing scene of opaque symbolism. In the course of the action a third boy, in a scene of explicit auto-eroticism, addresses a passionate love declaration to the picture of a naked Venus which he then drops down the toilet. First produced in 1891, the play was a sensational success and in book form went into twenty-six editions.
The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 Page 44