IV
Richard Strauss was born at Munich, June 11, 1864. He is the son of Franz S. Strauss, formerly first horn player in the Bavarian Court Band. His father has written studies and other compositions for his instrument; and, as his son said, “he could play most of the instruments in the orchestra.” He sat under Wagner’s stick, but was not a Wagnerian. Once he played so well that Wagner exclaimed, “I fancy after all, Strauss, you cannot be such an anti-Wagnerian as they make out, for you play my music so beautifully.” “What has that got to do with it?” answered the stubborn artist. The mother of Richard was born Pschorr, and is a daughter of the wealthy Munich brewer. The boy received his first piano lessons at the age of four and a half from his mother. Later he studied with August Tombo, a harp player, and took up the violin under Benno Walter. At the age of six he composed a three-part song, a valse, and a polka—Schneider Polka, he called the dance. Before he went to school he had tried his hand at songs, piano pieces, and an orchestral overture. Sent to the elementary schools from 1870 to 1874, the gymnasium from 1874 to 1882, and the university from 1882 to 1884, Strauss laid the foundation of a comprehensive culture, a catholicity in taste, a love of belles lettres, and a general knowledge of the world’s literature. He early mastered the technics of the piano and violin, and in 1875, with Kapellmeister Fr. W. Meyer, theory and composition. This course lasted five years. The composing went on apace. A chorus for the Electra of Sophocles and a festival chorus were given a hearing at a gymnasium concert. Three of his songs were sung in 1880; and in March, 1881, his string quartet in A, opus 2, the scherzo of which he wrote in his fifteenth year, was played by Benno Walter’s quartet, to whom it was dedicated. Four days later his first symphony was accorded a hearing under Hermann Levi, and the extreme youth of the composer called forth remonstrances. In 1883 Berlin heard his C minor overture under Radecke. Both are still in manuscript.
Of this formative period Strauss has told us that, “My father kept me very strictly to the old masters, in whose compositions I had a thorough grounding. You cannot appreciate Wagner and the moderns unless you pass through this grounding in the classics. Young composers bring me voluminous manuscripts for my opinion on their productions. In looking at them I find that they generally want to begin where Wagner left off. I say to all such, ‘My good young man, go home and study the works of Bach, the symphonies of Haydn, of Mozart, of Beethoven, and when you have mastered these art works come to me again.’ Without thoroughly understanding the significance of the development from Haydn, via Mozart and Beethoven, to Wagner, these youngsters cannot appreciate at their proper worth either the music of Wagner or of his predecessors. ‘What an extraordinary thing for Richard Strauss to say,’ these young men remark, but I only give them the advice gained by my own experience.”
Then came a stroke of luck. Von Bülow’s attention being attracted by the charmingly written and scored serenade (opus 7) in E flat for thirteen wind instruments, secured it for the repertory of the Meiningen orchestra. It is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, four horns, two bassoons, and contrabassoon (or bass tuba). His second symphony in F minor was composed during the season of 1883-1884. It was first played in New York under Theodore Thomas, December 15, 1884, and later by Walter Damrosch. It shows many traces of the young composer’s close study of Brahms. The horn concerto, opus 11, and the piano quartet, opus 13, were composed at the same period. The latter won a prize. It shows a straining for bigger effects, as if the form were too cramped for the strenuous composer. The andante and scherzo are the more agreeable movements. The Wanderer’s Sturmlied, after Goethe’s poem, beginning, “Wen du nicht Verlässest, Genius,” revealed the taste for literary themes and themes that exalt the individuality. This opus 14 is written for six-voiced chorus, two soprani, one alto, one tenor, two bassi, and orchestra. It also shows the serious influence of the Brahms Schicksalslied. A second suite for wind was first given at Munich, conducted by the composer.
“Bülow, who was very fond of my father,” says Strauss, “interested himself in me, and I have much to thank him for. He started me on my conducting career. My first experience of standing before an orchestra was in connection with the performance of a suite, in four movements, for wind instruments, which I had composed at his request. It is still in manuscript. Bülow made me conduct it without any rehearsal!” This must be the grand suite in B flat, misleadingly numbered opus 14—the same opus number as the Sturmlied. It is scored for thirteen wind instruments, and has been heard in London. The introduction and entire fourth movement are said to be the best. It is early Strauss. Strauss became music director in Meiningen, October, 1885, conducted his own F minor symphony and also made his début as pianist in Mozart’s C minor concerto. Von Bülow honored him by conducting the concerto.
Strauss had already come under the influence of Alexander Ritter (1833-1896), a violinist in the Munich Orchestra who had married a niece of Wagner’s. Ritter, like von Bülow, was a man of strong magnetic personality, and both were warm-blooded Wagnerians and Lisztians. As boys they listened to that wonderful performance of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony given by Wagner at Dresden in 1849, and the two young gentlemen schoolfellows used to doff their caps every time they passed the master’s windows in the Ostra-Allee. “Ritter was exceptionally well read in all the philosophers, ancient and modern, and a man of the highest culture. His influence,” says Strauss, “was in the nature of a storm-wind. He urged me on to the development of the poetic, the expressive, in music, as exemplified in the works of Liszt, Wagner, and Berlioz. My symphonic fantasia, Aus Italien, is the connecting link with the old and the new methods.” The young composer went to Rome and Naples in the spring of 1886. Strauss tells an amusing incident. “A few days ago I was conducting this symphony at Brunswick, when a policeman appeared on the scene and stopped the performance because, as he said, some condition had not been complied with. Soon after, however, another policeman came and said the concert might proceed. This unwarrantable interruption caused great uproar, and the audience shouted anathemas against the police. At the close of the symphony I turned to the audience and said, ‘You see, ladies and gentlemen, in this Italy there are no anarchists!’”
In 1886 he left Meiningen to become third Kapellmeister under Levi and Fischer. He wrote his tone-poem Macbeth at this period, though it bears a later opus number than Don Juan. The former, after a revision and partial rewriting, was dedicated to Alexander Ritter, and first performed under von Bülow in Berlin. Strauss remained at Munich until 1890, when he received a call from Weimar. In the ducal city he shed his pupil’s skin and developed into a brilliant conductor. His radical tendencies were now beginning to be recognized, and his espousal of the music of the extreme Left caused his conducting of Wagner and Liszt to become notable. At Leipsic his influence was felt as conductor at the Liszt society. He has always warmly defended the music of Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz.
In 1892 his lungs were affected and a protracted journey to Greece, Egypt, and Sicily was necessary. He was not idle, however, for on his return his grand opera, Guntram, opus 25, and dedicated to his parents, was produced at Weimar. He married in 1894 Pauline de Ahna, the daughter of a well-known Bavarian general, and the soprano who created the Freihild in Guntram.
From Weimar Strauss returned to Munich as Court Kapellmeister, and three years later he succeeded Levi as general music director. Not satisfied with matters, he left Munich to become Kapellmeister at the Berlin Royal Opera, which position he still occupies. He had conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra of Berlin after the death of von Bülow, but the trip from Munich to Berlin was too exhausting, and Arthur Nikisch was permanently engaged. Strauss has conducted at Bayreuth, festivals at Liège, Cologne, Leipsic, Milan, Moscow. In 1897 he visited London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, and a year later Zurich and Madrid. In 1903 he conducted, in conjunction with Wilhelm Mengelberg, a series of concerts in London, a Strauss festival organized by Hugo Goerlitz. The Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, a remarkable aggregation of artists, played. His Parisian experiences were most gratifying; he appeared in the dual rôles of conductor-composer, his wife singing his lieder with exquisite taste.
As a conductor he ranks among the great ones. He is particularly sympathetic in his readings of modern works, though any one who has heard him direct a Mozart opera can never forget the impressions gleaned—the blitheness, sanity, sweetness. He is cool, never eccentric in his beat, and does not play upon his own personality, as do some other conductors.
A little critical and polemical literature has grown up about the Strauss case. In addition to the analytical programmes, some of them too fantastic to be of value, Hans Merian has written an extended study of Also sprach Zarathustra; Gustav Brecher, Richard Strauss; Dr. Erich Urban, Strauss contra Wagner—in which Wagner is proved to be old-fashioned; Urban has also put forth a pamphlet-essay, Richard Strauss. In his youth, writes Urban, Wagner cried exultantly, “I am a musician;” in his age he mumbled, “I am a poet.” And he really believed he had discovered in the Greek an excuse for his mutilation of drama and music. Then Urban turns to Liszt. Liszt, he said, went far, but not far enough. He grew timid when he saw the logical outcome of his experiments. He still clung to the classic, to the formal. Strauss appears. Urban thinks he showed absolutely no individual talent until his opus 14, Wanderer’s Sturmlied. His early work is Schumann, and Schumann at his worst. The learned critic does not believe that either von Bülow or Ritter counted in the formation of Strauss. He looks upon Guntram as an accident, and Heldenleben as an answer to Zarathustra. He does not believe the latter to have been inspired by Nietzsche,—Strauss composed it when he discovered that Nietzsche’s philosophy coincided with his own revolutionary programme. And as the same ideas are expressed in Heldenleben, the titles could be exchanged without any harm. Truly a Daniel come to judgment! It is in Heldenleben that Urban sees Strauss at the top notch of his ideals. Here is musical drama without the words, scenery, stage, or singers.
Brecher assigns only six periods to the development of his hero. Brahms has much to say in the early Strauss music. The critic outlines the orchestra before Strauss came: Haydn was the first real instrumental writer, one who dispensed with the vocal character; Mozart lent the orchestra freedom and beauty; Beethoven endowed it with individuality; Berlioz was all color; Liszt, patterning after Berlioz, developed thematic variety; and Wagner employed both the color of Berlioz and Liszt’s theme-weaving for his profounder and more poetically dramatic music. Strauss followed all these men, but returned to pure instrumental forms, avoiding in his later poems the stringent outlines of the absolute scheme, and being more eloquent than his predecessors. Macbeth and Don Juan belong, says Brecher, to the third period of Strauss. Death and Apotheosis is a reactionary period, as is Guntram—too much Liszt and Wagner, too much chromaticism. From opus 27 to 34 is the fifth period, nearly all songs, wonderful songs. Till Eulenspiegel belongs to this arbitrary grouping, and it closes with Also sprach Zarathustra. The sixth period opens with Don Quixote and Heldenleben. Beauty is routed by truth. Even Urban thinks Don Quixote is a colossal joke, written to astound the Philistines.
But these writers are in sympathy with the composer. The terrible Hanslick of Vienna is not. He, even at the expense of contradicting himself, praised Wagner’s melodic gifts as an offset to the more meagre thematic invention of Strauss. His criticism of Also sprach Zarathustra is not criticism—it is scarification. He heard the work in Vienna, on a programme in which figured Weber’s Euryanthe overture, and the C minor symphony of Beethoven. The good doctor is a joy to read in these days when politeness has closed critical mouths. He first drags out the memory of Liszt and stamps on it—Liszt, who begged from literature his subjects for a symphony, and “making the alms pass as music.” Strauss goes to philosophy instead of to poetry. And then he slashes to the right and left of him. It is capital reading, if not convincing. The tone-poems of Richard Strauss are a musical refutation of Hanslick’s theories. There is no “content” in music, he declares; “the egg stands, anyhow,” retorts Columbus-Strauss!
The Strauss piano music is hardly inviting to any but the most devoted. Severe in outline, sombre in hue, it leans not to the sweet intimacies of Chopin or Schumann. Opus 5 is a solo sonata in B minor, some thirty pages long. I prefer Tschaïkowsky’s effort in the same form. If it is not as klaviermässig, it is more mellow. Stern, and in the mood Doric, the several movements of the Strauss sonata are sinewy rather than plastic, though the adagio in E has some moving moments. The scherzo is light and bright in execution. The composition will never become popular. In opus 3 there are some pieces of interest,—five in all,—and here Schumann’s influence is writ plain. Dense is the pattern, while the ideas are based on a poetic idea. Two numbers from opus 9, Stimmungsbilder, will please. They are a tender Träumerei and a delicate lyrical bit called An Einsamer Quelle. In the latter the harmonic changes recall Wagner. The most ambitious piano music is the burleske in D minor for piano and orchestra. This must have been written in 1885, though it bears no opus number. It is extremely difficult in the solo part, and not especially grateful. I can recall no one but Eugen d’Albert and Herr Backhaus as having played it—the latter at the London Strauss festival of 1903. Here Brahms is to the fore, the very opening bar of the piano being the theme of Brahms’s first D minor ballade. But how different the treatment! Bitter, rather airy, more sardonic than witty, this burleske demonstrates that the Teuton often unbends as sadly and stiffly as the Briton. Compare the piece with the incomparable jesting of Scarlatti’s burlesca, that joke which begins in G minor and ends in D minor! It is the eternal difference between the Italian and the German. Crabbed I call this burleske. The ’cello and piano sonata in F is a capital composition, and so is the sonata in E flat for viola and piano. His concerto for violin and orchestra in D minor has never received the attention it deserves; and I wish for the sake of novelty that the beautiful horn concerto, opus 11, would be given. For the waldhorn Strauss has a natural sympathy.
The lieder literature is important in quality. He has written nearly a hundred songs, some of them priceless in idea and workmanship. It is in this form that his friends and enemies have agreed upon his melodic invention. This refers to the various collections numbered opus 10, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 32, and 34; but I wonder whether the later collections in opus 39 and opus 41, 43, and 44 are received with the same enthusiasm. Some of them are harmonically difficult to grasp, and many are deceptive; when Strauss seems at his simplest, he is often most irritatingly complex and recondite. But an overflowing meed of praise must be awarded the opus 15, the lovely serenade in F sharp from opus 17, several from opus 21 and 27, and all of opus 29. A critic considers O wärst du mein, from opus 26, number 2, and Sehnsucht, opus 32, as the most beautiful of all. No mood seems denied Strauss. His exposition of the most exotic is indicative of a subtle, rather than a sensuous, musical nature. Yet how simply and naturally he has indicated a primitive emotion in Jungenhexenlied, opus 39, number 2. The song is a masterpiece. The sturdy power, the sheer muscularity, of The Workman from the same set, should make it beloved of manly male singers. Its great, resounding blows in F minor stir one’s very soul. And its sentiment is that of healthy anarchy, as befits the text of the poet Richard Dehmel. Death the Releaser, Leises Lied, and To my Son complete this opus. The last has a noble ring. The Silent Longing is the capture of an exquisitely evanescent mood. There are five numbers in opus 41,—a Cradle Song; In der Campagna; On the Shore,—full of introspective beauty, a dashing, vagabondish song; Brother Good-for-nothing; and Whisp’ring Songs. In all the music seeks the emotional curve, in all is there absolute fidelity to the poetic theme—that is, fidelity as the composer conceives it. Of mere sensuous or decorative music-making there is none. Strauss is ever beset by the idea; whether dramatic, metaphysical, or romantic-lyric, the idea takes precedence of the sound that clothes it. So there is little pretence of form, little thought of vocal exigencies, while the piano accompaniments are the most difficult ever written. If he hammers out epics in his orchestral compositions, in his lyrics he is the patient, curious master of miniature, the ivory worker of shapes exotic.
Guntram, for which Strauss wrote his own book, the first opera of this composer, is not familiar to Americans. It was never a great success, despite its earnestness and indisputable depth. Modelled on Wagnerian lines, it has for a subject the doings of The Fighters for Love, an order of knights, which, Parsifal-like, in the middle of the thirteenth century wars for the Cross and Brotherly Love; but with song and not with sword. Guntram, the hero, is a Fighter for Love, and his adventures and passion for Freihild form the basis of the book. The preludes to Acts I and II have been played in this country. The first is a lovely scheme of orchestration, Wagnerian in texture, and celebrates the yearning desire which the singers have consecrated to art and to the Cross. The second prelude is a brilliant, joyous picture of a Festival of Victory. The form and development are absolutely free. It is interesting to note, on the last page of the first prelude, an essential-turn that comes straight from Götterdämmerung. Strauss employs it with skill as a pregnant motive. While it is too short for concert performance, the prelude of the last act is the embodiment of yearning and rich in harmonic life. The great duo of Guntram and Freihild and Guntram’s farewell are noble specimens of dramatic writing. Nevertheless the work lacks big wings.
Two later compositions of Strauss, bearing the opus number 42, are for Männerchor,—Liebe and Altdeutsches Schlachtlied, both after Herder. Two sixteen-voiced mixed choruses a capella are also announced. Enoch Arden, opus 38, is a melodrama for piano and recitative. It is an interesting experiment, being melodious and effective. Written for von Possart the German tragedian, the weight of the work falls upon the reader.
At the seventy-seventh Netherrhenish Music Festival in Aix-la-Chapelle, June, 1900, Strauss produced two Grössere Gesänge, opus 44, for low voice and orchestra. Decidedly here the bust is in the orchestra, the pedestal—! The Rückert and Richard Dehmel are the poets levied upon—the first represented by his Nächtlichtergang, the other by a Notturno.
Strauss occasionally indulges in flashes of sly humor. Here is a footnote he appends to his song opus 31, number 2, Wenn:—
Should any singers think of singing this song, while the nineteenth century is still in existence, the composer would advise them to transpose it from this point, a half-tone lower (i.e. into E flat), so that the composition may thus end in the key in which it began.
Fuersnot, a Singgedicht in one act, book by Ernst von Wolzogen, music by Richard Strauss, was produced at the Royal Opera House, Dresden, November 21, 1901. The libretto is founded on a Netherland story, entitled, The Fire Famine at Oudenaerde. Emil Paur introduced several excerpts, sonorous, brilliant music, at a Philharmonic concert.
When questioned about his future plans Strauss replied: “I have made a musical setting to Uhland’s Taillefer for chorus, soli, and full orchestra. I am surprised that musicians have not availed themselves of this fresh, magnificent poem before—at least I have heard of no setting. Altogether one admires Uhland too little these days. When I was younger I neglected reading him very much; but now I find one beauty after another in his writing. I also have material for two symphonic poems, but don’t know which one I shall use—if indeed I finish any—now. It usually takes two years before a composition begins to assume form with me. At first there comes to me an idea—a theme. This rests with me for months; I think of other things and busy myself with everything but it; but the idea is fermenting of its own accord. Sometimes I bring it to mind, or play the theme on the piano, just to see how far it has progressed—and finally it is ready for use. You see, therein lies the real art of creation—to know exactly when an idea is ripe, when one can use, must use it. More and more I cling to the belief that we conscious people have no control over our creative power. For instance, I slave over a melody and encounter an obstacle which I cannot surmount, however I try. This during the course of an evening; but the next morning the difficulty has surrendered itself, just as though my creative forces had toiled at it over night. Several years ago I told a friend that I meant to compose a symphonic poem, Spring. He repeated my remark, and at the making up of the next music festival programme my Spring was placed and I was asked to conduct it! The work is not even composed yet, despite the great number of themes and sketches I have for it. In fact, I don’t know when I will compose it—if at all. Sometimes a theme occurs first to me, and I find the poetic mate to it later; but at others the poetic idea begins to take on musical form. I may even compose an opera soon. A young Vienna poet has suggested a libretto which appeals to me very much. A libretto of my own is also receiving some consideration from me.
“The old metre of poetry, the iambic and trochiac rhythms—also the rhyme—are useless in music, because the latter has an entirely different rhythm, and this must necessarily destroy that of poetry when the two are joined. According to my opinion, the most available forms are the Nibelungen verses or a free prose. Why cannot music express philosophy? Metaphysics and music are sisters. Even in music one can express a view point, and if one wishes to approach the World Riddle, perhaps it can be done with the aid of music. Is not the third act of Tristan transcendental philosophy purely? Lastly, my next tone-poem will illustrate ‘a day in my family life.’ It will be partly lyrical, partly humorous—a triple fugue, the three subjects representing papa, mamma, and the baby!” This latter is the Sinfonia Domestica of which the first performance anywhere, was announced for March 9, 1904, at Carnegie Hall, New York City.
Jean Marnold, the acute critic of the Mercure de France, calls attention to the “melody of Strauss, which is frankly diatonic, the tonal character definitely determined.” This statement will be challenged by those who take the composer’s middle period as a criterion of his chromatic tendencies. But examine the later themes, and we are forced to agree with M. Marnold. Arthur Symons finds that Strauss is cerebral. He writes: “Strauss is what the French call un cérébral, which is by no means the same thing as a man of intellect. Un cérébral is a man who feels through his brain, in whom emotion transforms itself into idea, rather than in whom idea is transfigured by emotion. Strauss has written a Don Juan without sensuality, and it is in his lack of sensuality that I find the reason of his appeal. All modern music is full of sensuality, since Wagner first set the fevers of the flesh to music. In the music of Strauss the Germans have discovered the fever of the soul. And that is indeed what Strauss has tried to interpret.” W. J. Henderson is open to conviction. He wrote:—
“It is too soon for us to say that Strauss will influence the future. He may leave us nothing but certain purely mechanical improvements in orchestral technics. Even these will have their value. Yet all recent attempts at progress in music have been in the direction of more definite expression, and Strauss may be only a stepping-stone in an advance toward that blissful epoch whose hearers will display as much imagination as its composers, that transcendent condition in which genius understands genius.”
Edward E. Ziegler discerns that Richard Strauss is “a master of music mathematics and one who is composing music for the present. It is an easy evasion,” he adds, “to shift the responsibility for what the living generation cannot easily or will not willingly grasp and to proclaim that such intricate writing is for the future. But music has ever reflected life, and no other composer has so nearly approached a musical expression of our time as has Strauss. The febrile unrest, the neurotic striving of the hour, all have their musical equivalent in his greater compositions. Plying the stress of emphasis as Strauss does is characteristic of the present as is typical his use of the enormous orchestra. All life has become agitated by the exaggeration of the hour. It needed but a master like Strauss to express this truth in music.”
August Spanuth holds that “Richard Strauss may be a monstrous phenomenon, yet he embodies the domineering spirit of modern music. For more than two centuries composers have endeavored to vindicate the cause of programme-music, which the staunch old champions of ‘absolute music’ have fought from the outset. However, after the efforts of Berlioz and Liszt, Richard Strauss has succeeded in reversing the question, making it read thus: Is there a future left for instrumental music outside of the descriptive, pictorial, illustrative, suggestive, and philosophizing music of to-day?”
Ernest Newman, in a masterly article, concludes with this telling passage:—
... This kind of music adds to our knowledge of man and the world as much as does a play of Ibsen or a novel of Tolstoy. Certainly to any one who knows Strauss’s music to Don Quixote, the story of Cervantes is henceforth inconceivable without it; the story itself, indeed, has not one tithe of the humor and the profound sadness which is infused into it by Strauss. What he has done in this work is to inaugurate the period of the novel in music. And here at last we see the subtle fitness of things that has deprived Strauss of those purely lyrical qualities, whose absence, as I have previously argued, makes it impossible for him to be an absolute creator of shapes of pure self-sustained beauty. His type of melody is now seen to be, not a failing, but a magnificent gift. It is the prose of music—a grave, flexible, eloquent prose. His style is nervous, compact, sinuous, as good prose should be, which, as it is related, through its subject-matter, more responsibly to life than is poetry, must relinquish some of the fine abandonment of song, and find its compensation in a perfect blend, a perfect compromise of logic and rapture, truth and ideality. “I can conceive,” says Flaubert, in one of his letters, “a style which should be beautiful; which some one will write one of these days, in ten years or in ten centuries; which shall be rhythmical as verse, precise as the language of science, and with undulations, modulations as of a violoncello, flashes of fire; a style which would enter into the idea like the stroke of a stiletto; a style on which our thoughts would sail over gleaming surfaces, as it were, in a boat with a good wind aft.”
No better description, it seems to me, could be had of the musical style of Strauss, with its constant adaptation to the emotional and intellectual atmosphere of the moment, and its appropriateness to the realistic description of character and milieu which is his mission in music. His qualities are homogeneous; he is not a Wagner manqué nor an illegitimate son of Liszt, but the creator of a new order of things in music, the founder of a new type of art. The only test of a literature being alive is, as Dr. Georg Brandes says, whether it gives rise to new problems, new questionings. Judged by this test, the art of Strauss is the one sign of new and independent life in music since Wagner; for it perpetually spurs us on to the discussion of fresh problems of æsthetics, of psychology, and of form.