By now Strauss was the new Hero, so acknowledged in his self-portrait in music, A Hero’s Life. Reared in and accustomed to comfort, clad in the correct clothes of a diplomat, slender and six foot three inches tall, with broad shoulders and well-cared-for hands, a soft unlined face, a mouth shaped like a child’s under a flaxen moustache and a cap of curly flaxen hair already receding from a high forehead, Strauss looked neither Promethean like Beethoven, nor poetic like Schumann, but simply like what he was: a successful prosperous artist. His works had been performed since he was twelve; as a conductor he was engaged by all the leading orchestras. He was self-possessed, conscious of superiority and comfortably rather than offensively arrogant, a consequence of being Bavarian rather than Prussian.
Bavaria’s last King, Ludwig II, who adored Wagner and died mad, had sided with Austria against Prussia in 1866, and Munich’s culture was oriented more toward Vienna than Berlin. Munich fostered the arts and considered itself the modern Athens, as opposed to the Sparta of Prussia, whose Junkers, like their ancient prototypes, despised culture as well as comfort. Bavarians, as Germany’s southerners—and largely Catholic—enjoyed the pleasures of life, physical as well as aesthetic. In Munich, Stefan George was high priest of a cult of l’art pour l’art and beginning in 1892 edited for his worshipful disciples the literary review Blätter für die Kunst, which sought the German answer to questions of art, soul and style. Humor found a corner in Munich, where the satiric journal Simplicissimus, founded in 1896, and the comic journal Lustige Blätter were published. In Munich the Überbrettl, a form of satiric café entertainment, flourished and mocked Berlin.
As a native of Munich, Strauss belonged to a culture antipathetic to Prussia, but as a German aged seven in 1871, he grew up parallel with the new nationalism of the German Empire. Born in 1864, five years younger than the Kaiser, Dreyfus and Theodore Roosevelt, he came of a family which combined beer and music, his native city’s leading occupations, in that order. His grandfather was a wealthy brewer whose musically inclined daughter married Franz Strauss, first horn of the Munich Court Orchestra and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He was said to be the only man of whom Wagner was afraid. Although he played Wagner’s music “lusciously,” he hated it and his emphatic objections to its demands on his instrument accomplished on one occasion the unique feat of rendering the Master speechless. Before a rehearsal of Die Meistersinger Wagner begged the conductor, Hans Richter, to play over the horn solo himself for fear Franz Strauss would declare it unplayable. Although Franz Strauss never became reconciled to his son’s dissonances and departures from classical form, Richard Strauss used no instrument to more marvelous capacity than the horn, as if in tribute to the man who, when asked how he could prove the boast that he was the best horn player in the world, replied, “I don’t prove it, I admit it.”
Strauss’s parents began his musical education at the piano when he was four and he began composing at six. He could read and write musical notation before he knew the alphabet. While at school he studied violin, piano, harmony and counterpoint with the conductor of the Court Orchestra. With the “superfluous vitality” that was to remain one of his most notable characteristics, he produced at the same time a flow of songs, instrumental solos and sonatas. When he was twelve his Festival March (Op. 1) was performed by his school and later published. Performance of his compositions at public concerts began with three of his songs when he was sixteen, a String Quartet in A (Op. 2) when he was seventeen and a Symphony in D minor (Op. 3) played by the Munich Music Academy to an enthusiastic audience in the same year. At eighteen, he wrote a suite for winds which received the accolade of a commission for another work of the kind from Hans von Bülow, leader of the ducal Orchestra of Meiningen and the outstanding conductor of the day. Trained by Bülow, the Meiningen was the jewel of German orchestras, whose members learned their parts by heart and played standing up like soloists. Strauss wrote a Serenade for Thirteen Winds which Bülow invited him to conduct at a matinee concert without a rehearsal. The twenty-year-old composer led the performance “in a state of slight coma,” having never conducted in public before. Becoming Bülow’s protégé, he appeared with him as solo pianist in a Mozart concerto and at the age of twenty-one was appointed music director of the Meiningen, where he studied conducting under its recognized master. In composition his adored model at the time was Mozart, and Strauss’s early quartets and orchestral pieces composed before he was twenty-one were works of great charm and style in the classical tradition.
The musical world of the eighties was immersed in the party politics of classical versus romantic. New works were heard less for themselves than as upholders of the one or followers of the other. Composers, critics and public revolved in a perpetual war dance around the rival totem poles of Brahms and Wagner. To his partisans Brahms, who died in 1897, was the last of the great classicists, Wagner was anti-Christ and Liszt a secondary Satan. Lisztisch was their last word of contempt. Wagnerians on the other hand considered Brahms stuffy and tradition-ridden and their own man a combined prophet, Messiah and Napoleon of music. Strauss, as his father’s son and a disciple of Mozart, was anti-Wagner, but under Bülow became converted. Even Wagner’s seduction of his wife could not dim Bülow’s admiration for the seducer’s operas. Strauss was affected also by the preaching of Alexander Ritter, first violinist of the Meiningen, who enjoyed extra prestige as husband of Wagner’s niece and convinced Strauss that Zukunftsmusik (Music of the Future) belonged to the successors of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. “We must study Brahms,” he asserted, “long enough to discover that there is nothing in him.”
Strauss felt Ritter’s influence “like a storm wind.” It combined with the experience of a trip to Italy, whose sun and warmth acted on him as it had on Ibsen and other northerners, to inspire Aus Italien, his first work in a new form. It was called a “Symphonic Fantasia” of four movements which bore descriptive titles: “In the Campagna”; “Among the Ruins of Rome”; “By Sorrento’s Strand”; “Scenes of Popular Life in Naples.” The second movement was subtitled “Fantastic pictures of vanished splendor; feelings of melancholy and splendor in the midst of the sunny present”: and was marked allegro molto con brio, an odd way to express melancholy but molto con brio was to be characteristic of Strauss.
Aus Italien picked up where Liszt and Berlioz left off. They also had experimented in narrative and descriptive music, though within traditional patterns of theme and development. These requirements sometimes stretched program music into strange shapes, as in the case of the German composer J. J. Raff, in whose Forest Symphony, according to one critic, the shades of evening in the finale fell three times. Strauss avoided this problem by discarding traditional patterns. He described without developing, tantalizing the listener with a series of dazzling glimpses but no resolution. The result, at the first performance of Aus Italien, conducted by the composer in Munich, was hisses and catcalls, “general amazement and wrath.”
Refusing to be diverted from the path he had chosen, Strauss next produced an orchestral work on the theme of Macbeth, as Berlioz had done on King Lear and Liszt on Hamlet. Not the drama’s events but the conflict within Macbeth’s soul was his subject, expressed in the rich polyphony and fertility of musical idea which were to create his renown. Meanwhile on Billow’s resignation he had succeeded as conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra and in 1889 moved to Weimar as conductor in the post Liszt had held thirty years before. Combining classics with “madly modern” works, including Liszt’s as yet unappreciated tone poems, he presented fresh and exciting programs which drew large audiences. In a discussion with a friend who declared his preference for Schumann and Brahms, Strauss replied, “Oh, they are only imitators and will not survive. Apart from Wagner there is really only one great master and that is Liszt.”
At Weimar on November 11, 1889, he conducted the premiere of his own Don Juan. Its theme, as stated by Nicholas Lenau, author of the poem on which it was based, was not that of a “hot-blooded man
eternally pursuing women,” but of a man’s “longing to find a woman who is to him incarnate womanhood and to enjoy in one all the women on earth, whom he cannot, as individuals, possess. Because he does not find her, although he reels from one to another, disgust at last seizes hold of him and this disgust is the Devil that fetches him.”
In adopting this theme Strauss committed himself fully to the business of making music perform a non-musical function: making it describe characters, emotions, events and philosophies, which is essentially the function of literature. He was forcing instrumental music by itself, without singers or words, to do the work of opera or what Wagner called “music drama.” Given the task, no one was better equipped to accomplish it. With his knowledge, gained from conducting, of the capacities of every instrument, his bursting talent and overflow of ideas, his mastery of the techniques of composition, Strauss, like a circus trainer, could make music, like a trained seal, perform dazzling miracles against nature. Don Juan proved an enthralling seventeen minutes of music with its snatches of amorous melody, its headlong passion, its marvelous song of melancholy by the oboe, its frenzied climax and strange end on a dissonant trumpet note of disenchantment. Its undeveloped themes, however, were disconcerting and its episodic form sacrificed musical to narrative sequence. Bülow nevertheless pronounced it an “unheard of success.” Eduard Hanslick, the grand panjandrum of musical criticism who wrote for the Neue Freie Presse and other papers of Vienna and detested everything that was not Brahms or Schumann, denounced it as “ugly” with only shreds of melody and no development of musical idea.
The feuds of music were personified by Hanslick, who had worn out the world “ugly” on Wagner through a thousand repetitions until Wagner conferred immortality on him as the unpleasant Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. Hanslick pursued Bruckner, a symphonic follower of Wagner, with such virulence that when the Emperor Franz Joseph granted Bruckner an audience and asked if there was anything he could do for him, Bruckner could only mutter, “Stop Hanslick.” Strauss now emerged as another of the new breed to be scotched, and as each new work of his appeared, Hanslick and his school warmed to new degrees of invective.
But Strauss was on his way. Bülow dubbed him “Richard II” and the next year he produced a more ambitious work, Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). In this a dying man in his final fever relives his life from the innocence of childhood through the struggles and frustrations of maturity to the death agony. At the end comes “the sound of heavenly spaces opening to greet him with what he had yearningly sought on earth.” Based on an idea rather than on a literary text (although his mentor, Alexander Ritter, wrote a poem to fit the music ex post facto), it escaped the traps of the too specific and soared on great sweeping melodies supported by orchestral splendors. Strauss was twenty-five and had made Liszt look like an amateur.
He continued to conduct, to encourage and perform the works of contemporaries and to compose his first opera, Guntram, which was rejected as imitation Wagner by a public already saturated with the real thing. No rigid partisan, Strauss conducted Hänsel und Gretel with as much enthusiasm as Tristan und Isolde. When Humperdinck, then an obscure teacher at the Frankfurt Academy, sent him the score, Strauss was delighted with it and wrote the composer, “My dear friend, you are a great master who has bestowed on our dear Germans a work which they can hardly deserve.” His introduction of the opera at Weimar made Humperdinck famous overnight and rich soon afterwards.
In 1894 Strauss moved on to Munich as conductor of the Court Opera and following the death of Bülow led the Berlin Philharmonic concerts for the winter season of 1894–95. In the same year he was guest conductor at Bayreuth. “So young, so modern, yet how well he conducts Tannhaüser,” sighed Cosima Wagner. The summers Strauss devoted to his own compositions, working best, as he said, when the sun shone. During the concert season he appeared as guest conductor in different German cities and toured with the Berlin Philharmonic throughout Europe. In the years 1895–99 he conducted in Madrid and Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Zurich, Budapest, Brussels and Liège, Amsterdam, London and Moscow. Limitless in energy, he once conducted thirty-one concerts in thirty-one days. On the podium, making no show of extravagant gesture or muscular contortions, he used a firm, decided simple beat, a few hard angular movements and signaled for crescendo with a hasty bend of the knee joints. “He conducts with his knees,” said Grieg. Tyrannical in his demands on the players, he was generous in praise of a well-performed solo no matter how short, and would step down from the podium to shake hands with the player when the piece was over. He was no longer the “shy young man with a large head of hair” whom Sibelius, then a young music student in Berlin, had seen rise from a seat in the audience to acknowledge the applause at one of the early performances of Don Juan. His hair was already receding and it is doubtful if he had ever been shy. Now in his early thirties and with Bülow gone he was the most renowned conductor and exciting composer in Germany.
Between 1895 and 1898 he brought out three more new works which carried the symphonic poem to more daring feats of description and more boldly original subject matter than had so far been attempted in music. The marvels of polyphonic complexity were more stunning, the unresolved discords more disturbing and the uses of music in some places seemed deliberately provocative.
Nothing so clever, so comic, so flashing and surprising as Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks had ever been heard. The brisk twinkling motif of the horn carries the medieval folk hero, Germany’s Peer Gynt, on his picaresque progress, with every kind of instrumental device portraying his adventures as he gallops through the marketplace scattering pots and pans, disguises himself as a priest, makes love, and comes to a bad end in court with a long drum roll announcing the death sentence. An impudent twitter of the clarinet voices his final defiance on the gallows and a faint trill carries off his last breath as his feet swing in air. Strauss’s program notes this time were more specific: “That was an awful hobgoblin,” he noted over one passage, or, “Hop! on horseback in the midst of the market women,” or, “Liebegluhend” (Burning with Love). The Till motif, becoming familiar as it came and went in different disguises, charmed the audience. It was music full of enchanting tricks, like the performance of a superlatively witty and nimble magician. It delighted if it did not move. It expressed a bubbling imagination and unsurpassed skill, though not of course to Hanslick, who, using the favorite censure of outraged orthodoxy, pronounced it “the product of decadence.”
For his next subject Strauss moved to the core of his time. By 1896, the world had discovered Friedrich Nietzsche. Living in solitude, disillusionment and chronic drug-blurred battle against insomnia, this other German had produced a body of work around the central idea of the Superman, which was to reverberate down the corridors of his country’s life. Responding early to its influence, Strauss determined to make Also Sprach Zarathustra the subject of a tone poem.
Nietzsche’s alluring concept of “rule by the best,” of a new aristocracy which would lead humanity to a higher plane, of man rising to superior fulfillment to become Übermensch, seduced the imagination of Europe. It stirred both the yearning hope of human progress as well as the beginning disillusionment with democracy. Nietzsche rejected the democratic idea of equal rights for all men as hampering natural leaders from realizing their full capacities. Where Lord Salisbury had feared democracy as leading to political, and Charles Eliot Norton to cultural, debasement, Nietzsche saw it as a ball and chain holding man back from his highest attainment. He saw the dominant weight of mass tastes, opinions and moral prejudices as a “slave morality.” Mankind’s leaders should live by a “master morality” above common concepts of good and evil. The goal of human evolution was the Übermensch, the higher man, the “artist-genius” who would be to ordinary man as ordinary man was to the monkey.
Through Also Sprach Zarathustra and its sequels, Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power and the final Ecce Homo, Nietzsche roamed wildly. His ideas rolled and billowed
like storm clouds, beautifully and dangerously. He preached Yes to the promptings of energy as good per se, regardless of conflict with conventional morality. Law and religion which discouraged such promptings frustrated man’s progress. Christianity was a sop for the weak, the meek and the poor. The Superman had no need of God but was a law unto himself; his task was self-fulfillment not self-denial; he shook off the chains of tradition and history as the intolerable burden of the past. Nietzsche stated his credo, not in logical declarative language, but in a kind of prose poetry like the Psalms, meandering and obscure, full of mountain tops and sunrises, the singing of birds and dancing of girls, perorations to Will, Joy and Eternity and a thousand colored metaphors and symbols carrying Zarathustra on his soul’s quest toward the goals of humankind.
When he published in the eighties no one listened. Despising the Germans for their failure to appreciate his work, Nietzsche drifted to France, Italy and Switzerland, working himself up, as Georg Brandes said, “to a positive horror of his countrymen.” It was a foreigner, Brandes, a Dane and a Jew, who discovered him and whose articles on him, translated and published in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1890 introduced him to Germany and began the spread of his fame. By this time Nietzsche was mad and Max Nordau, the author of Degeneration, discovering this, naturally seized on him as a prime example of his case and lavished on him some of his most excoriating pages. Since Nordau’s book was translated and read all over Europe and in the United States, it helped to make Nietzsche known. He was lauded as a seer, denounced as an Anarchist, examined and discussed by the reviews, English and French as well as German. His aphorisms were quoted as verse titles and chapter headings, he became the subject of doctoral dissertations, the model of a train of imitators, the focus of a whole literature of adulation and attack. Because of his abuse of the Germans as vulgar, materialist and philistine, he was particularly welcomed in France, but this did not prevent his becoming a cult in his native land. The sap was rising in Germany and Germans responded eagerly to Nietzsche’s theory of the rights of the strong over the weak. In his writings these were hedged about with a vast body of poetic suggestion and exploration, but taken crudely as positive precepts they became to his countrymen both directive and justification. By 1897 the “Nietzsche Cult” was an accepted phrase. In a bedroom in Weimar a man leaning against a pillow, staring at an alien world out of sad lost eyes, had bewitched his age.
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