Can one decay alive like a rotten corpse?
Can one fall apart if one is not even ill?
Fall apart wide awake like a dress eaten by moths?
She seems an allegory of Europe and the play a climax of the Schwarzseher, an apocalyptic vision of disaster. When, desperate for surcease from her dreams, Clytemnestra demands to know from Electra who must bleed and die that she may sleep at last, Electra cries in exaltation, “What must bleed? Your own throat!… and the shadows and torches shall envelop you in their black and scarlet net.”
The play was produced by Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1903, the year after Salome. Hofmannsthal was alert to its possibilities. To serve as a libretto for an opera by Strauss was then considered “to reach the summit of contemporary fame,” and he repeatedly urged Elektra on Strauss as his next project. Though attracted, Strauss hesitated because of its similarity to Salome and cast about for some other theme of human nature driven to dreadful extremes. “Something like a really wild Cesare Borgia or Savonarola would be just what I am yearning for,” he wrote to Hofmannsthal in March, 1906. Following a visit to The Hague, where he was haunted by Rembrandt’s “Saul and David,” he suggested a “raving Saul” as a possible subject. Ten days later he suddenly proposed, “How about a subject from the French Revolution for a change?” Hofmannsthal, with his drama already written, kept returning to Elektra and, although the marks of Wilde on it were obvious, he insisted that it was really very different. Eager for collaboration, he was persuasive and Strauss succumbed. Meanwhile, with one foot in the dominant camp, he composed five highly colored military marches for the Kaiser which won him the Order of the Crown, Third Class.
While Strauss was at work on Elektra a major scandal revealing rottenness in high places became public. The Eulenburg affair concerned homosexuals in the immediate circle of the Kaiser, but it was less their habits than the layers disclosed of malice, intrigue and private vendetta which shed a lurid glow on Germany. Three years earlier Fritz Krupp, head of the firm, on being accused by the Socialist paper Vorwärts of homosexual acts with waiters and valets, committed suicide. This time the central figure was Prince Philipp Eulenburg, former Ambassador to Vienna from 1894 to 1902, a suave and cultivated aristocrat who was the Kaiser’s oldest and closest friend, sang songs to him beautifully at the piano, and gave him intelligent advice. As the only courtier to exercise on the whole a beneficent influence on the sovereign, he was naturally the object of the jealousy of Bülow and Holstein, who suspected the Kaiser of intention to make him Chancellor. Initiator of the scandal was Maximilian Harden, the feared and fearless editor of the weekly Die Zukunft, of which it was said that everything rotten and everything good in Germany appeared in its pages. Cause and motive had to do with Germany’s diplomatic defeat at the Algeciras Conference which set off waves of recrimination among ministers, culminating in the removal of the spidery Holstein. He blamed Eulenburg, although in fact his removal had been secretly engineered by Bülow. Rabid for revenge, Holstein, who for years had kept secret police files on the private habits of his associates, now joined forces with Harden to ruin Eulenburg, whose influence on the Kaiser, Harden believed, was pacific and therefore malign. With Holstein’s files at his disposal, Harden opened a campaign of innuendo naming three elderly Counts, all A.D.C.’s of the Kaiser, as homosexuals and gradually closing in on the friendship of Eulenburg with Count Kuno Moltke, nicknamed Tutu, “the most delicate of generals,” commander of a cavalry brigade and City Commandant of Berlin. The Kaiser ditched his friends instantly and forced Moltke to sue Harden for libel, which was just what Harden wanted in order to ruin Eulenburg. Through four trials lasting over a period of two years, from October, 1907, to July, 1909, evidence of perversion, blackmail and personal venom was spread before a bewildered public. Witnesses including thieves, pimps and morons told of “disgusting orgies” in the Garde du Corps regiment and testified to abnormal acts of Eulenburg and Moltke twenty years in the past. A celebrated specialist in pathological conditions discoursed on medical details, Moltke’s divorced and vindictive wife was called to testify, charges of subornation and perjury were added, Chancellor Büllow was himself accused of perversion by a half-crazed crusader for the legal rights of homosexuals and forced to sue, the verdict of the first trial in favor of Harden was reversed by a second trial and re-reversed in a third at which Eulenburg, now ill, disgraced and under arrest, was brought to court in a hospital bed. The public felt uneasily that justice was being tampered with, readers of Die Zukunjt were given an impression of perversion everywhere and the prestige of Kaiser and court sank. At the same time in Vienna the Emperor’s brother, Archduke Ludwig-Viktor, known as Luzi-Wuzi, became involved in a scandal with a masseur.
In England the three trials of Oscar Wilde had blazed and been put out within two months; the establishment turned its back on him and destroyed him. In Germany the establishment itself was on trial. In the midst of it, in October, 1908, came the tremendous gaffe of Kaiser Wilhelm’s interview on foreign affairs in the Daily Telegraph, in which his more than usually indiscreet opinions, carelessly allowed to pass by Billow, aroused the fury and hilarity of nations and questions as to his sanity at home. Some even demanded his abdication. Billow, maneuvering neatly as he thought, virtually apologized in the Reichstag for his sovereign who never forgave him. Hurt and indignant, the Kaiser retired to the estate of his friend Prince Fürstenberg, where, in the course of an evening’s festivities, Count Hülsen-Haeseler, chief of the Military Cabinet, appeared in a pink ballet skirt and rose wreath and “danced beautifully,” affording everybody much entertainment. On finishing he dropped dead of heart failure. Rigor mortis having set in by the time the doctors came, the General’s body could only with the greatest difficulty be divested of its ballet costume and restored to the propriety of military uniform. It had not been a happy year for the Kaiser, although six months later he at least had the satisfaction of forcing the resignation of Bülow.
Damage to the image of the ruling caste caused its members to swagger more than ever. As the Kaiser’s prestige slipped, the trend of the extreme militants grew in favor of the Crown Prince, a strutting creature whose flatterers told him he resembled Frederick the Great, as indeed, facially, he did. In the eternal duel of reigning monarch and eldest son, Wilhelm II and “little Willy” felt required to outdo each other in bombast. “I stand in shining armor” and similar pronouncements of the Kaiser were of this period. The nation’s mood of conscious power could absorb unlimited bombast. Germans knew themselves to be the strongest military power on earth, the most efficient merchants, the busiest bankers, penetrating every continent, financing the Turks, flinging out a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad, gaining the trade of Latin America, challenging the sea power of Great Britain, and in the realm of intellect systematically organizing, under the concept Wissenschaft, every branch of human knowledge. They were deserving and capable of mastery of the world. Rule by the best must be fulfilled. By this time Nietzsche, as Brandes wrote in 1909, held “undisputed sway” over the minds of his countrymen. What they lacked and hungered for was the world’s acknowledgment of their mastery. So long as it was denied, frustration grew and with it the desire to compel acknowledgment by the sword. Talk of war became a commonplace. When the Kaiser’s troublesome Rhodes scholars got drunk they threatened Oxford colleagues “with invasion and castigation at the hands of the German Army.” In 1912 General Bernhardi, the leading military theorist of his day, proclaimed the coming necessity in a book of indisputable authority and conviction whose title was Germany and the Next War.
The other Germany, the Germany of intellect and sentiment, the liberal Germany which lost in 1848 and never tried again, had withdrawn from the arena, content to despise militarism and materialism and sulk in a tent of superior spiritual values. Its representatives were a caste of professors, clergy, doctors and lawyers who regarded themselves as the Geistaristokratie (aristocracy of the mind) superior to the vulgar rich, the vulgar nobility an
d the vulgar masses. Unconcerned with social problems, unengaged in politics, they were satisfied with an indoor liberalism which fought no battles and expressed itself in abstract opposition to the regime, in contempt for the Kaiser and in the anti-militarist cartoons of Simplicissimus. They were personified by a professor of philosophy, Georg Simmel, whose lectures in a room overlooking Unter den Linden coincided with the hour of the changing of the guard. At the first sound of the military band Professor Simmel would abruptly stop talking and stand motionless in “an attitude of arrogant disgust and stoical suffering until the barbaric noise had faded away.” Only then would he resume his lecture.
At the centenary celebration of the University of Berlin in 1910, the two Germanys met when the academic community found itself invaded by their fierce-moustachioed monarch in the golden cuirass and golden-eagled helmet of the Garde du Corps, with retinue in gorgeous uniform, heralded by the terrific blasts of a trombone choir. Satisfied that the Kaiser “looked even worse than his caricatures,” the audience consoled itself with the thought that such an intrusion could not trouble their halls again for another hundred years.
Strauss completed the score of Elektra in September, 1908, with his publishers taking it from him page by page. Anticipating the prospect of another succès de scandale, they paid $27,000 for it, almost double the $15,000 paid for Salome, making Strauss’s income from music in 1908 $60,000. The German public’s appetite for sensation had become a habit and four cities competed for the honor of the premiere. Grateful to Schuch, Strauss gave it to Dresden, which in honor of the occasion scheduled a Strauss festival to include Salome, Feuersnot, Sinfonia Domestica and two performances of Elektra—five evenings of Strauss in succession.
Rehearsals of the new opera took place in an atmosphere of uproar; everything was larger, noisier, more violent than life. The score called for the biggest orchestra yet, sixty-two strings including eight bass cellos, forty-five winds including six bass trumpets and a contra-bass tuba, six to eight kettledrums as well as a bass drum, in all a total of about one hundred and twenty. The opera was performed in a single act lasting two hours without intermission with Electra on stage the entire time. Her part was longer than Brünhilde’s in all of The Ring put together and her vocal intervals were considered “unsingable.” The role of Clytemnestra was created by Mme Schumann-Heink, who, finding it “such a desperate one that it nearly killed me,” never sang it again. In places where she was required to sing over the orchestra at fortissimo, Strauss, listening from the stalls, would scream over the din and crash, “Louder, louder, I say! I can still hear the Heink’s voice!”
For a legendary drama set in 1500 B.C. he wanted everything to be “exact and realistic,” insisting on real sheep and bulls for Clytemnestra’s sacrifice. “Gott in Himmel! Strauss, are you mad?” howled the stage director in terror. “Imagine the cost! And the danger! What will they do when your violent music begins?” They would stampede, crash into the orchestra, kill the musicians, even wreck valuable instruments. Strauss was adamant. Von Schuch was called in to add his protest. Only after terrific arguments was Strauss persuaded to yield on the bulls and be content with sheep. Equally realistic in his music, he virtually took the role of words away from von Hofmannsthal. The tinkling of Clytemnestra’s bracelets is heard in the percussion; when Chrysothemis speaks of a stormy night the storm rages in the orchestra; when the beasts are driven to sacrifice the noise of their hoofs makes the listener want to get out of the way; when the slippery pool of blood is described the orchestra gives a picture of it. The composer’s mastery of his technical resources seemed superhuman and his breaking of musical laws more reckless than ever. As he put it, “I went to the uttermost limits of harmony and psychic polyphony and of the receptive capacity of present day ears.”
When the evening came for the premiere on January 25, 1909, an international audience was assembled including opera directors from every country on the continent and, according to a possibly overwhelmed reporter, “200 distinguished critics.” “All Europe is here,” the hotel porter said proudly to Hermann Bahr, who came from Vienna.
Without overture or prelude the curtain rose as the orchestra thundered out Agamemnon’s theme like the hammer of doom pounding on the great lion gate of Mycenae. No opera had ever opened so stunningly before. When the curtain fell after two hours of demonic intensity the audience sat for some seconds in stupefied silence until the “Straussianer” recovered and began to applaud. An opposition group hissed but most of the audience was too cowed to do anything until the claque won the upper hand and wrung curtain calls and ultimately cheers for the composer. The brutality of the libretto and the outrages upon musical form provoked the usual controversy. To some the music of Elektra seemed no longer music. “Indeed, many serious minded people consider Richard Strauss insane,” wrote one benumbed listener. But on second hearing and at further performances which followed in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt within four weeks of the premiere, the mastery of Strauss’s score in conveying dread and impending horror leading up to the final murder was undeniable.
Listening to the music Hermann Bahr felt it expressed something sinister about the present time, a pride born of limitless power, a defiance of order “lured back toward chaos,” and a yearning in Chrysothemis for some simple tranquil feeling. Though deeply disturbed he felt it had been a “marvelous evening” and returned to Vienna excited and uplifted. This was what Nietzsche had prescribed.
When it reached London a year later, in February, 1910, notoriety preceded it and musical warfare raged before a note had been heard. Strauss came himself to conduct two performances at a fee of £200 for each. The Daily Mail critic was struck by the sobriety of his gestures. “A tall pale man with smooth brow” whose steel-blue eyes flashed from time to time at singers or musicians, he conducted with head immobile and elbows as if riveted to his body. “He seemed a mathematician writing a formula on a blackboard neatly with supreme knowledge.” After the performance The Times found the opera “unsurpassed for sheer hideousness in the whole of operatic literature,” while the Daily Telegraph reported that “Covent Garden had never previously witnessed a scene of such unfettered enthusiasm.” The rising controversy created a public demand that required Beecham to extend his season. From his point of view it was, excepting the death of King Edward VII some months later, “the most discussed event of the year.” The truth was that by this time it could no longer be heard outside Germany without political overtones. George Bernard Shaw, believing that anti-German hysteria was responsible for the attacks on Elektra, leaned backward to the opposite extreme: In an article in the Nation he wrote that if once he could have said that “the case against the fools and the money changers who are trying to drive us into war with Germany consists in the single word, Beethoven, today I should say with equal confidence, Strauss.” He called Elektra “the highest achievement of the highest art” and its performance “a historic moment in the history of art in England such as may not occur again in our lifetime.”
Strauss recognized that in the style of Salome and Elektra he had gone as far as he could go. Suddenly, as after Heldenleben, having enough of the grand manner, he decided to give the public a comic opera for a change, in the style of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, to prove that Strauss could do anything. As librettist Hofmannsthal approved and early in 1909 was at work drafting an “entirely original” scenario set in Eighteenth-Century Vienna, “full of burlesque situations and characters” with opportunity for lyrical melody and humor. On receiving the opening scene, Strauss found it delightful and replied, “It will set itself to music like oil and melted butter.” Collaborating by correspondence through 1909 and the first half of 1910, librettist and composer constructed a new opera to be called Der Rosenkavalier.
The juvenile lead was to be sung by a woman dressed as a man. Hosenrolle (trouser parts) for women were a convention which Mozart himself had used for Cherubino but the Hofmannsthal-Strauss concept of Octavian was a rather different
matter, not devoid of a desire to titillate. When Strauss’s prelude to the opera describes with characteristic realism the pleasures of the sex act and the curtain rises on the Marschallin and her young lover still in bed, the discovery that both are women was likely to produce in the audience a peculiar sensation of which the authors were certainly aware. The idea was originally Hofmannsthal’s. Strauss later claimed that the device was necessary because no man young enough to sing Octavian would have had the experience necessary to be an accomplished actor. “Besides,” he added more frankly, “writing for three sopranos was a challenge.” He met it, especially when the three sing together in the last act, with exquisite song, In Elektra the men’s parts had been of small account and in Rosenkavalier the only male part was that of a coarse lecher who appears either as unpleasant or ridiculous. Baron Ochs represented the German idea of the comic. As Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal during the composition, he missed “a genuinely comic situation—everything is merely amusing but not comic.” He wanted the audience to laugh; “Laugh! not just smile or grin.”
The inevitable animals made their appearance in the form of a dog, a monkey and a parrot. When Strauss demanded from Hofmannsthal a love scene between Sophie and Octavian to which he could write a duet “much more passionate,… as it reads now it is too tame, too mannered and timid,” Hofmannsthal replied pettishly that these two young creatures “have nothing of the Valkyrie or Tristan and Isolde about them” and he wished to avoid at all costs having them “burst into a kind of Wagnerian erotic screaming.” This was hardly tactful and incompatibilities of temperament between composer and librettist were becoming evident. A touch of Tristan in fact appeared, not to mention some borrowing from Mozart and even from Johann Strauss. With bland anachronism a Viennese waltz, unknown in the Eighteenth Century, was a main theme.
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