Proud Tower

by Barbara Tuchman

  In Diederich, who is always brutalizing someone beneath him while sucking up to someone above him, Mann savagely portrayed one aspect of his countrymen—the servility which was the other side of the bully. The banker Edgar Speyer, returning to his birthplace in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1886 after twenty-seven years in England, found that three victorious wars and the establishment of Empire had created a changed atmosphere in Germany that was “intolerable” to him. German nationalism had replaced German liberalism. Great prosperity and self-satisfaction acted, it seemed to him, like a narcotic on the people, leaving them content to forego their liberty under a rampant militarism and a servility to Army and Kaiser that were “unbelievable.” University professors who in his youth had been leaders of liberalism “now kowtowed to the authorities in the most servile manner.” Oppressed, Speyer gave up after five years and returned to England.

  What Speyer observed, Mommsen attempted to explain. “Bismarck has broken the nation’s backbone,” he wrote in 1886. “The injury done by the Bismarck era is infinitely greater than its benefits.… The subjugation of the German personality, of the German mind, was a misfortune that cannot be undone.” What Mommsen failed to say was that Bismarck could not have succeeded against the German grain.

  In the nineties, as a convinced believer in Übermensch, Strauss shared the general admiration for the Kaiser. Personal experience as conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera modified it. After conducting a performance of Weber’s tuneful Der Freischütz, one of the Kaiser’s favorites, he was summoned to the Imperial presence. “So, you are another of these modern composers,” stated the Kaiser. Strauss bowed. Mentioning a contemporary, Schillings, whose work he had heard, the Kaiser said, “It was detestable; there isn’t an ounce of melody.” Strauss bowed and suggested there was melody but often hidden behind the polyphony. The Kaiser frowned and pronounced, “You are one of the worst.” Strauss this time merely bowed. “All modern music is worthless,” repeated the royal critic, “there isn’t an ounce of melody in it.” Strauss bowed. “I prefer Freischütz,” stated the Kaiser firmly. Strauss deferred. “Your Majesty, I also prefer Freischütz,” he replied.

  If the Kaiser was not the hero he had supposed, Strauss was not long in finding a better one—himself. This seemed a natural subject for his next major work, unbashfully entitled Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). Since Aus Italien his subjects had never been moods or pictures, sunken cathedrals or pastoral scenes, but always Man: Man in struggle and search, seeking the meaning of existence, contending against his enemies and against his own passions, engaged in the three great adventures: battle, love and death. Macbeth, Don Juan, the nameless hero of Tod und Verklärung. Till, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, were all voyagers on the soul’s journey. A portrait of the artist now joined their company.

  Strauss’s personal experience of the two first of the three great adventures had been adequate if not epic. He had had battles with critics which left wounds, and in 1894 he had married. Pauline de Ahna, whom he met when he was twenty-three, was the daughter of a retired General and amateur baritone who gave local recitals of Wagnerian excerpts. Following his lead, the daughter had studied singing at the Munich Academy but had made little progress professionally until Strauss fell in love with her and combined instruction with courtship so effectively that in two years he introduced her to the Weimar Opera in leading soprano roles. She sang Elsa in Lohengrin, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio and the heroine of Strauss’s own opera Guntram. Once, when rehearsing Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, she fell into an argument with him over tempo, and shrieking “frightful insults,” threw the score at his head and rushed off to her dressing room. Strauss followed and members of the orchestra listened in awe to sounds of feminine rage audible through the closed door, followed by prolonged silence. Wondering which of the two, conductor or prima donna, might have killed the other, a delegation of trembling players knocked on the door and when Strauss opened it the spokesman stammered that he and his colleagues, shocked by the soprano’s behavior, felt they owed it to the honored Herr Kapellmeister to refuse in future to play in any opera in which she had a role. “That distresses me,” Strauss replied, smiling, “as I have just become engaged to Fräulein de Anna.”

  The pattern of this occasion was retained in marriage. The wife shrieked, the husband smiled and evidently enjoyed being bullied. At parties Frau Strauss did not permit him to dance with other ladies. At home she practiced housewifery with “ruthless fanaticism,” requiring her husband to wipe his feet on three different doormats before entering his own house. Every guest of no matter what age or rank was greeted by the order, “Wipe your feet.” Floors were as clean as table tops and servants who failed to leave the contents of linen closets in mathematically perfect rows were pursued by the inevitable shrieks of wrath. Enthusiastically submitting to, as well as inflicting, punishment, Frau Strauss engaged the daily services of a masseuse of the violent school during whose visits Strauss was obliged to go for a walk to avoid hearing the tortured screams of his wife. She bore him one child, a son, Franz, born in 1897, who at once expressed the family tradition of molto con brio by “screaming like hell,” according to a proud report to the child’s grandparents.

  When to her husband’s accompaniment Frau Strauss sang his songs, which usually ended with a long coda on the piano, she flourished a large chiffon handkerchief which she would fling down with a gesture at the end to keep the audience’s eyes on her instead of on the pianist. To guests she would explain in detail, while Strauss listened with an indulgent smile, how and why her marriage was a shocking mésalliance. She should have married that dashing young Hussar; now she was tied to a man whose music was not even comparable to Massenet’s. During a visit to London when Strauss conducted Heldenleben and a toast was proposed in his honor at a dinner at the Speyers’, his wife excitedly interrupted, “No, no!”—pointing to herself—“no, no! to Strauss de Ahna.” Strauss merely laughed and seemed to an observer to enjoy his wife’s claim of precedence.

  She was responsible for his orderly habits. His worktable was a model of neatness, with sketches and notebooks arranged, filed and indexed as scrupulously as the records of a law firm. His handwriting was exquisitely clear and his scores “miracles of calligraphy,” with hardly an erasure or correction. His songs might be dashed off at odd moments, sometimes during the intervals of concerts or operas when he was conducting, but his longer pieces were composed only at his summer home, first at Marquardstein in Upper Bavaria, later at his second home near Garmisch. Here in his studio he worked regularly from breakfast to lunch and often, or so he told an interviewer, through the afternoon and evening until one or two o’clock in the morning. He enjoyed writing his incredibly intricate scores, often so complicated in their excessive subdivision of groups and interweaving of melodies that the theme was beyond the reach of the listener’s ear. Discernible to the eye of an expert score-reader who would marvel at the mathematical ingenuity of the scheme, such music was called Augenmusik (eye music) by the Germans. When complimented on his skill Strauss said it was nothing compared to that of a new young man in Vienna, Arnold Schönberg, who required sixty-five staves for his scores and had to have his music paper specially printed. Strauss’s own facility was such that he said to a visitor, “Go right on and talk for I can write this score and talk at the same time.” A symphonic poem took him three or four months, with scoring usually completed in Berlin between rehearsals and conducting engagements.

  Visitors at the summer home were met by arrangements which exhibited a talent for organization on the part of Frau Strauss not inferior to that of the late Field Marshal von Moltke. A speaking tube was fixed to the gate under a sign telling the visitor to ring a bell and then put his ear to the tube. A voice over the tube demanded his name and if found acceptable, informed him the gate was now unlocked. Another sign instructed him how to open it and to be sure to close it behind him.

  Frau Strauss did not permit dawdling. If her husband should be fo
und on occasion wandering aimlessly around the house, she would command, “Richard, jetzt gehst componieren!” (Go ahead and compose!), and he would obey. If he worked too hard she would say, “Richard, put down that pencil!” and he would put it down. When he conducted the first performance in Vienna of his second opera, Feuersnot, Frau Strauss attended in the box of the Austrian conductor-composer Gustav Mahler and fumed throughout, as Frau Mahler recalled: “Nobody could like this trash; we were liars to pretend, knowing as well as she did that there wasn’t an original note in it. Everything was stolen from Wagner and a dozen others better than her husband.” The Mahlers sat in silent embarrassment not daring to agree, for “this shrew was quite capable of twisting the words in our mouths and suddenly screaming that we had made all those comments.” After enthusiastic applause and many curtain calls, Strauss, beaming, came to the box and asked, “Well, Pauksel, what do you think of my success?”

  “You thief!” she screamed. “You have the nerve to show yourself? I’m not going with you. You’re rotten.” Hurriedly pushed into Mahler’s office, she continued her berating behind closed doors until Strauss stumbled out followed by his mate who announced in awful tones that she was returning to the hotel and “I sleep alone tonight.”

  “Can’t I walk with you at least?” Strauss begged humbly.

  “All right—ten steps behind me!” and she stalked off followed by the hero of the evening at a respectful distance. Later, looking subdued and exhausted, he rejoined the Mahlers for a late supper and spent the remainder of the evening with pencil and paper figuring out the royalties in the event of a major or minor success. Making money interested him as much as any aspect of his profession.

  Strauss composed Ein Hėldenleben in the summer of 1898, describing it as “a largish tone poem … with lots of horns, always expressive of the heroic.” When finished it played for forty minutes, longer than any of his previous works. Artists had often portrayed themselves before, but Strauss, reflecting the national mood, was probably the first to name his self-portrait a Hero. He conducted the premiere himself on March 3, 1899, which, considering the provocative title, the nature of the music and the program notes, displayed considerable bravado. Heldenleben was divided into six sections, dealing with “The Hero,” his “Adversaries,” his “Consort,” his “Battle,” his “Works of Peace” and finally his “Escape from the World and Fulfillment of Life.” In form it was an expanded sonata on a vast scale with recognizable statements of theme, development and recapitulation. After the Hero is proclaimed by the horns in a proud theme rising to fortissimo, the woodwinds introduce the Adversaries in busy, sniggering music that as plainly says “critics” as the bleating brasses in Don Quixote said “sheep.” The Consort is played by solo violin in a series of cadenzas, alternately seductive and shrewish, with outspoken not to say painfully frank marks of expression on the score, among them, “Heuchlerisch schmachtend” (Hypocritically gushing), plus “frivolously,” “haughtily,” “affectionately,” and at the last, in a passionate and moving love duet, “tenderly and lovingly.” Meanwhile three trumpeters have tiptoed off stage and suddenly from a distance sound the call to arms. With fiercely scurrying strings, rattling kettledrums, fanfares of brasses and thunder of bass drums, the battle rages in a confused crescendo of noise that, not unlike real war, sounds as if all the generals had blundered. To the ears of 1899 it sounded “hideous.” Through the turmoil the Hero’s theme returns triumphantly. His Works of Peace, making the autobiographical point unmistakable, are themes from the composer’s earlier works. The Hero’s final apotheosis is accomplished to muted solemn music which in later program notes Strauss designated as “funeral rites with flags and laurel wreaths lowered on a hero’s grave.”

  Listening to the second performance at Cologne a few weeks later, Romain Rolland, fresh from his own exhilarating battle at the opening of Les Loups, was transported with excitement. Although some auditors hissed and some members of the orchestra even laughed at the music, “I clenched my teeth and trembled and my heart saluted the young Siegfried resurrected.” In the “tremendous din and uproar” of the battle music, Rolland heard “the storming of towns, the terrible charge of cavalry which makes the earth tremble and our hearts beat.” He thought it “the most splendid battle that has ever been painted in music.” There were gulfs in which the musical idea disappeared for a time but emerged again, sometimes mediocre in melodic sentiment but grand in “harmonic and rhythmic invention and orchestral brilliance.” Strauss seemed to Rolland to express a will “heroic, dominating, eager and powerful to a sublime degree.” Touched too by the Nietzschean spirit, Rolland found this the reason why Strauss is noble and at the present quite unique. One feels in him the force that has dominion over men.” In the midst of admiration, however, Rolland also felt French and could not resist drawing political lessons. Now that Strauss, he decided, like Germany, had “proved his power by victory, his pride knows no limit.” In him as a man “of vital energy, morbidly overexcited, unbalanced but controlled by an effort of will power,” the Frenchman saw reflected the face of Germany. Nevertheless Rolland became his friend and celebrator.

  He had met Strauss for the first time eight years before in Bayreuth and again in January, 1899, when Strauss conducted Zarathustra in Paris. It was the Dionysus of Nietzsche let loose. “Aha!” Rolland wrote then, “Germany as the All-Powerful will not keep her balance for long. Nietzsche, Strauss, the Kaiser—giddiness blows through her brain. Neroism is in the air!” Rolland thought he could detect in the reiterated theme of Disgust in the tone poems and in the deaths that concluded them, a German “sickness hidden beneath the strength and military tautness.” He heard it again in Heldenleben.

  When on this occasion he called on Strauss at his apartment in Charlottenburg, Berlin’s fashionable suburb, he found him more Bavarian than Nietzschean, with “a certain humorous buffoonery, paradoxical and satirical like that of Till Eulenspiegel.” Like Till he delighted to scandalize the philistines. He alternated between energy and bouts of “laziness, softness and ironic indifference.” Though cordial and well-behaved toward Rolland, he could be short with others, scarcely listening to what was said to him and occasionally muttering, “Was? Ach, so so.” He behaved badly at table, sitting with his legs crossed at the side, holding his plate under his chin to eat and stuffing himself with sweets. In the drawing room he might lie down on a sofa, punching the cushions with his fists, and “insolently indifferent to those around him,” fall asleep with his eyes open.

  It was difficult to decide whether he was Till or Superman. In an article for the Revue de Paris Rolland presented him as “the artist-type of this new Germany, the reflection of a heroic pride close to delirium, of a Nietzschean egoism which preaches the cult of force and disdain for weakness.” But he had to admit the picture was overdrawn. Rolland suffered from the same difficulty as Matthew Arnold’s niece in Max Beerbohm’s cartoon who was forced to ask, “Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why, will you not be always wholly serious?” Strauss would not live up to his image either and was quite prepared to admit it. “You’re right,” he wrote to Rolland. “I’m no hero; I haven’t got the necessary strength; I’m not made for battle.… I don’t want to make the effort. At the moment all I want is to make sweet and happy music. No more heroics.” The fact was that in the surrounding Nietzschean ethos, Heldenleben had seemed like the thing to do; it reflected the national mood more than his own.

  Strauss was a string plucked by the Zeitgeist. Although he had never known any but the most comfortable bourgeois circumstances, he sensed and expressed the revolutionary rumble of the working class in two of his finest songs so effectively that one, “Der Arbeitsmann” (The Workingman) became an anthem of the Socialist party. Another, “Das Lied des Steinklopfers” (Song of the Stonecutter), was his own favorite among his songs. When these were sung by Germany’s leading concert baritone, Ludwig Wüllner, with the composer at the piano, they had such dramatic power that “hearing these grim defiant sounds
,” wrote a critic, “was like hearing the Marseillaise of tomorrow.” Of another of his songs for the male voice, the “Nächtlicher Gesang” (Night Song), it was said that it could “make one shudder in broad daylight.”

  In Heldenleben, however, convinced admirers began to detect evidence of a deep-seated flaw in the composer. Ernest Newman believed Strauss had enriched music with more new ideas than anyone since Wagner and had “put into music a greater energy, a greater stress of feeling and a greater weight of thinking than any other composer of the day.” Yet he did not seem able to restrain an unworthy desire to “stagger humanity.” His technical facility and command over ideas was such that he could do anything he wanted and there was no limit to his inventiveness, but he could not keep it within bounds. Newman would willingly have left the hall during the “sniggering, snarling and grunting” of the Adversaries in Heldenleben, which he considered “freak” music like the sheep in Don Quixote. He felt a failure of taste, a streak of vulgarity in a man willing to spoil “two of the finest scores of the Nineteenth Century” with such “monstrosities” as these. Such reactions merely stimulated Strauss to further freaks as a sign of his contempt for what were claimed to be the “eternal” laws of beauty in music. The fact that he insisted on making the critics pay for their seats, causing “screams of agony” all over the Continent, did not help matters.

  To the younger critics Strauss’s discords and dissonances were not as distressing as his freaks. Lawrence Gilman, an American, thought the dissonance of the Battle music, like that depicting the mental confusion of Don Quixote, was “eloquent and meaningful” and quite different from that other kind achieved, as Whistler said, “by the simple expedient of sitting on the keyboard.” Apart from the freaks there were enough marvels of music in Strauss’s work to have put him above the sneers and carping; it was the non-musical aspect of his work—that is, the didactic realism of his program notes—which kept him in the center of critical furor. In the same spirit in which Philip Ernst, having omitted the tree from his picture, decided it must be cut down, Strauss insisted on painting the tree and then hanging a sign on it saying, “This is a tree.” As a result critics leaped to take issue, as when Newman said of a trombone passage in Zarathustra labeled “Disgust,” which followed “Delights and Passions,” that “it no more suggests disgust than it does the toothache.” It was no defence by his friends to insist that Strauss wanted his music to be listened to as music and that he added the program notes only under the urgent pressure of colleagues and publishers. An artist certain of his standards would not have made the concession and in any case the literary labels were in his mind and scribbled on his scores when he composed.