by Peter Watson
Despite the successes, Strauss did not want any of his six children to become a musician. Johann II, born in 1825, was therefore forced to take lessons in secret, at least until his father brought scandal on the family by moving out of the conjugal home to take up with another woman, with whom he had another four children. All Vienna was agog at the scandal but it was soon overtaken by another, namely that the elder Strauss saw his position threatened by his son, who began to outshine his father before he died in 1849.20 Johann II was just nineteen when he decided to take on his father. He obtained a booking at Dommayer’s Garden Casino and Restaurant in Vienna and, on that first evening at least, he took care to end the concert with his father’s Lorelei-Rheinklänge.21 But there were no secrets in gossipy Vienna, everyone knew about the divided nature of the Strauss household, and one Viennese newspaper summed up the situation with the headline “Good night, Lanner. Good evening, Father Strauss. Good morning, Son Strauss.”
After Johann I died, Johann II merged his father’s orchestra with his own. At the height of his fame, he had six orchestras, dashing from one to the other, appearing for one or two waltzes at each venue. Eventually he gave up this exhausting routine to devote himself to composing, leaving his brother Eduard to take the baton. Now began his great series of compositions, which included “Perpetuum Mobile,” “Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald” (Tales from the Vienna Woods), “Kaiserwaltzer” (Emperor Waltz) and, not least, the “sound of the river”—“An der schönen blauen Donau” (On the Beautiful Blue Danube).22 The orchestration and rhythms of these tunes have been much admired and mark them out “as much more than ‘mere’ dance music.” No less a figure than Brahms understood this, autographing Frau Strauss’s fan one evening with a few notes of the “Blue Danube,” adding the words: “Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.” Richard Strauss called him “the laughing genius of Vienna.”23
WAGNER’S NATURAL SUCCESSOR
Some people in Vienna referred to Richard Strauss (1864–1949) as “the third Strauss” but for others—modernists—he was without question the first, the only Strauss, “the most-discussed man of European music” between Don Juan, which had its premiere in 1886, and 1911, when Der Rosenkavalier was staged. His symphonic poems were considered “the last word in shocking modernism” while Salome and Elektra (1905 and 1909) provoked riots.
In his early years, an aura of nervous energy and scandalous sensation surrounded the tall, slim Strauss. It was not just the size of his orchestras that attracted and repelled people—often at the same time—but the fact that his music was, for many, painfully dissonant and, moreover, immoral. Salome set music to a text by Oscar Wilde, who had been sent to prison for his homosexuality.
Paradoxically, Strauss was himself a solid bourgeois, with a sober—even staid—private life. Alma Mahler was at the rehearsal of Feuersnot in 1901 and confided to her diary: “Strauss thought of nothing but money. The whole time he had a pencil in his hand and was calculating the profits to the last penny.”24 His wife, Pauline, was a grasping woman, once a singer, who would scream at her husband, when he was relaxing at cards, “Richard, go compose!” Their house at Garmisch had three separate door-mats, on each of which Pauline insisted that the composer wipe his feet.
Until Der Rosenkavalier each of Strauss’s works was different, one from another, exciting and electric. “Then he seems to have hit a wall.” There is no shortage of critics and historians who dismiss all of Strauss’s post-Rosenkavalier oeuvre as a regression, mechanically repetitive and lacking in innovation.25 Ernest Newman was one of those: “A composer of talent who was once a genius,” is how he summed up the predicament. After Elektra, Newman said, “the premiere of a Strauss opera was no longer an international event.”
Strauss’s father was a peppery, outspoken man—Franz was “the most celebrated horn player in Germany,” who considered Wagner “subversive.” Richard, born in Munich, was a prodigy, playing the piano at four and a half, the violin shortly afterward, composing at six. Richard’s father, however, had no wish to form him into a second Mozart: it was accepted in the family that the boy would be a musician “but all in good time.” In 1882 he attended the University of Munich though he never took a degree, then spent time in Berlin, playing at musical soirees and in due course met Hans von Bülow. He showed the celebrated conductor his Serenade for Winds in E-flat, op. 7, which was snapped up for the Meiningen Orchestra. In fact, Bülow so loved the Serenade that he commissioned another piece there and then—what became the Suite for Winds in B-flat, op. 4. This, too, impressed Bülow so much so that he appointed Strauss his assistant at Meiningen (it was by then 1885). It was a heady time for the young composer and might have led Strauss in a very different direction, except that in Meiningen he met Alexander Ritter, a violinist with the orchestra. Ritter had married Wagner’s niece and introduced Strauss to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner himself, and it was the latter who encouraged Strauss to explore new forms of music. Until this point, his compositions had been along largely traditional, familiar lines. The break came in 1889, with Don Juan, his first tone poem. Premiered in Weimar on November 11, it was immediately obvious that a new voice had emerged. 26
With Don Juan, Strauss staked his claim as Liszt’s—and Wagner’s—natural successor. The score stipulated a vast orchestra and was unprecedented in its difficulty. Its bold leaps and twists of sinuous melody were also new.27 His standing as a conductor grew in parallel. In 1898 he was appointed conductor at the Royal Opera in Berlin, where he remained until 1918, at which time he took up the post as codirector of the Vienna Opera. Even Pauline was impressed.
He had his failures. “It is incredible what enemies Guntram [1894] has made for me,” he complained in a letter. “I shall shortly be tried as a dangerous criminal.”28 In 1905, however, with Salome, he at last had an opera that galvanized the public as much as his symphonic poems had done, though the scandal it provoked had as much to do with its plot as his score. Who but the most puritanical would not want to see Salome make love to the severed head of Jochanaan, or be there as she took off her seven veils one by one?29
The opera was based on Oscar Wilde’s play, which had been banned in London, but Strauss’s score “added fuel to the fire.” To highlight the psychological contrast between Herod and Jochanaan, Strauss employed the unusual device of writing in two keys simultaneously. The continuous dissonance of the score reaches its culmination with Salome’s moan as she awaits execution. This, rendered as a B-flat on a solo double bass, registers the painful drama of Salome’s plight: she is butchered by guards crushing the life out of her with their shields.
After the first night, opinions varied. Cosima Wagner was convinced the new opera was “Madness!…wedded to indecency.” The Kaiser would only allow Salome to be performed in Berlin after the manager of the opera house shrewdly modified the ending, so that a Star of Bethlehem rose at the end, a simple trick that changed everything, and the opera was performed fifty times in that one season. Ten of Germany’s sixty opera houses chose to follow Berlin’s lead so that within a few months Strauss could afford to build his villa at Garmisch in the art nouveau style. Despite its success in Germany, it was banned outright in New York and Chicago (in the former city after one night). Vienna also banned the opera, but in Graz the opening night was attended by Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, and a band of young music lovers who traveled down from Vienna, including an out-of-work would-be artist named Adolf Hitler, who later told Strauss’s relatives he had borrowed money to make the trip.
Despite the offense Salome caused in some quarters, its eventual success contributed to Strauss’s appointment as musical director of the Hofoper in Berlin. He began work there with a one-year leave of absence to complete his next opera, Elektra. This was his first major collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), whose play of the same name, realized by that magician of the German theater, Max Reinhardt, Strauss had seen in Berlin. What appealed to him was its theme, so very different from the noble, elegant, c
alm image of Greece traditionally set out in the writing of Winckelmann and Goethe.
Elektra uses a larger orchestra even than Salome, 111 players, to produce a much more dissonant, “even painful experience.” The original Clytemnestra was Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who described the early performances as “frightful…We were a set of mad women…There is nothing beyond Elektra…We have come to a full stop.” 30
Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to do two things. At the most obvious level, they were doing in musical theater what the Expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (see Chapter 27) were doing in their art, using unexpected and “unnatural” colors, disturbing distortion and jarring juxtapositions to change people’s perceptions of the world. Most scholars had inherited an idealized picture of antiquity from Winckelmann and Goethe, but Nietzsche had changed all that, stressing the instinctive, savage, irrational, and darker aspects of pre-Homeric ancient Greece (fairly obvious, for example, if one reads the Iliad and the Odyssey without preconceptions). But Elektra wasn’t only about the past.31 There can be little doubt that Hofmannsthal had read Studies in Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams. The presence of Freud’s, and Nietzsche’s, ideas on stage, undermining traditional understanding of ancient myth and the exploration of the unconscious world beneath the surface, did not make people content, but it made them think.
Elektra made Strauss think too, and he abandoned the discordant line he had followed from Salome to Elektra. In doing so he left the way open for others, of whom the most innovative would be Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951).
Elektra had achieved one other thing. It had brought Strauss and Hofmannsthal together. For nigh on a quarter of a century, Strauss and Hofmannsthal collaborated—Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos(1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Arabella (1933). Their most fruitful collaboration after Elektra was Der Rosenkavalier. After the dark depths of Elektra, Strauss thought a comedy was needed (he was not wrong) and Hofmannsthal provided the idea. Although there had been no widely acclaimed German comic opera since Die Meistersinger in 1868, Der Rosenkavalier had a difficult birth. Hofmannsthal was trying to lead Strauss to a different aesthetic, lighter, more sophisticated, with no burdensome psychological archetypes. “People do not die for love in Hofmannsthal’s world.”32 Is this why, for many, Strauss appeared to stop after this opera?
In their day, three other German composers were overshadowed by Richard Strauss. Gustav Mahler was well known in his lifetime but chiefly as a conductor, as the main figure in what are remembered as the “golden years” of the Vienna Opera, the decade between 1897 and 1907. His symphonies were heard but not often. Anton Bruckner’s following was even smaller. Max Reger had his followers and there was at least a vogue for his music after he died. But not until the 1960s did Bruckner and Mahler find any kind of general popularity.33
Bruckner, born in Ansfelden, Upper Austria, in 1824, studied at the monastery of St. Florian, known for its magnificent Altdorfer altarpiece. He became choirmaster and organist there, playing for its community of Augustine monks. He was close to being a peasant. Photographs show that his head was shaven, and accounts record that his clothes were homemade. Despite this and his rural accent, he was appointed teacher of organ and theory at the Vienna Conservatory in 1868 and made full professor not long afterward; he was also given parallel appointments at the University of Vienna. These were serious positions, such that leading conductors, Mahler among them, started to pay attention to his music. But Bruckner’s problem was with the critics, not the conductors, in particular with Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s champion in the press. Bruckner always suspected that Brahms was the dark shadow behind Hanslick.34
Bruckner never lost his air of provincial awkwardness and, in the middle of his lectures, delivered in his peasant garb, he would stop everything and kneel to pray when the Angelus sounded. But he was sophisticated enough in music, and people were forced to acknowledge it. He loved slow, solemn, deliberate music, and became known in Vienna as the “Adagio-Komponist.”35 Critics said he composed the same symphony nine times, but the unhurried serenity of his music has helped it endure.
Mahler was the opposite. For many of his critics, his music is much too neurotic, though Mahler afficionados are, if anything, even more fanatical than those of Bruckner. Mahler, a patient of Freud’s, was typical of one kind of Viennese, who took life seriously, anxious to make sense out of their circumstances.36 The difference between Beethoven’s struggles and Mahler’s has been well put: Beethoven was a titan and a heroic figure, Mahler was a “psychic weakling,” a sentimentalist, a “manic-depressive with a sadistic streak,” who took four-hour walks with Freud as a form of therapy. His orchestras respected him but rarely enjoyed the experience. His music has been attacked as “monotonous.”37
Born in Kalist, Bohemia, in 1860, Mahler was master of all he surveyed for ten years in Vienna. To his credit, his approach—unpopular though it was—worked; under him the opera was revitalized and cleared of debt. Avant-garde productions proliferated and so did the furors. Mahler was pointed out in the street to visitors by cabdrivers who referred to him simply as “Der Mahler!” He was essentially a Romantic composer (especially in the Third and Eighth Symphonies), less harsh than Wagner and less progressive than Strauss.38
THE EMANCIPATION OF THE DISSONANCE AND THE MUSICAL EQUIVALENT OF E=MC2
Richard Strauss was ambivalent about Arnold Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off “shovelling snow” than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship (the revenue of the Liszt Foundation was used to help composers or pianists). Born in 1874 into a poor family, Arnold Schoenberg—like Brahms and Bruckner—always had a serious disposition and was largely self-taught. A small, wiry man, “easily unimpressed,” who went bald early on, Schoenberg was strikingly inventive—he carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Wassily Kandinsky was a fan), and built a typewriter for music.39 In Vienna he frequented the cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl, where Karl Kraus, Theodor Herzl, and Gustav Klimt were great friends. He mixed with the philosophers of the Vienna Circle.40
Schoenberg’s autodidacticism served him well. While other composers made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth, Schoenberg was more impressed by the Expressionist painters who were trying to make visible the distorted and raw forms unleashed by the modern world and analyzed and ordered by Freud. His aim was to do something similar in music. The term he himself liked was “the emancipation of the dissonance.” 41
Schoenberg once described music as “a prophetic message revealing a higher form of life toward which mankind evolves.” However, he found his own evolution slow and painful. Though his early music owed a debt to Wagner, Tristan especially, it had a troubled reception in Vienna, its high seriousness out of place in a city that was, in Alex Ross’s words, “forced to glitter.”42 In addition to his difficulties with the public, Schoenberg had problems in his private life. In the summer of 1908, the very moment of his first atonal compositions, his wife, Mathilde, abandoned him for a friend. Rejected by his wife, isolated from Mahler, who was in New York, Schoenberg was left with nothing but his music. But in that year he composed his Second String Quartet, based on the “esoteric and remote” poems of Stefan George.43
The precise point at which atonality arrived, his “voyage to the other side,” according to Schoenberg himself, was during the writing of the third and fourth movements of the string quartet.44 He was using George’s poem “Entrückung” (Ecstatic Transport) when he suddenly left out all six sharps of the key signature. As he completed the part for the cello, he abandoned completely any sense of key, to produce a “real pandemonium of sounds, rhythms and forms.” As luck would have it, the stanza ended with the line, “Ich fühle Luft von anderen Planeten” (I feel the air of other planets). It could not have been more appropriate. The Second String Quartet was finished toward the end of July. Between then and its premiere, on December 21, one more personal crisis shook the Schoenberg household. In Nove
mber the painter for whom his wife had left him hanged himself after failing to stab himself to death. Schoenberg took back Mathilde, and when he handed the score to the orchestra for the rehearsal, it bore the dedication “To my wife.”
The premiere of the Second String Quartet turned into one of the great scandals of musical history.45 After the lights went down, the first few bars were heard in respectful silence. But only the first few. Most people who lived in Vienna then carried whistles attached to their door keys. If they arrived home late at night, and the main gates of the building were locked, they would use the whistles to attract the attention of the concierges. On the night of the premiere, the audience got out its whistles en masse. A wailing chorus arose in the auditorium to drown out what was happening onstage. Next day one newspaper labeled the performance a “Convocation of Cats,” and the New Vienna Daily printed their review in the “crime” section of the paper.46
Years later Schoenberg conceded that this was one of the worst moments of his life, but he wasn’t deterred. Instead, in 1909, continuing his emancipation of the dissonance, he composed Ewartung, a thirty-minute opera, the story line for which is so minimal as to be almost absent: a woman goes searching in the forest for her lover; she discovers his body not far from the house of the rival who has stolen him. The story does not so much tell a story as reflect the woman’s moods—joy, anger, jealousy. In addition to the minimal narrative, it never repeats any theme or melody. Since most forms of music in the “classical” tradition usually employ variations on themes, and since repetition, lots of it, is the single most obvious characteristic of popular music, Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet and Ewartung stand out as the great break, after which “serious” music began to lose the faithful following it had once had. It was fifteen years before Ewartung was performed.