Young Strauss was to outlive such heresies by the sensible process of steeping himself in Wagner’s scores rather than by viewing inadequate performances as truths of Holy Writ. It is hardly necessary to emphasize the dismay of Franz Strauss as, little by little, he became aware of the turn things were taking. He who had striven to bring up his son in his own Philistine ways was gradually brought face to face with the upsetting fact that the young man might be getting out of hand! Richard was no music school or conservatory pupil, and had presumably none too many academic precepts to unlearn. One advantage of this was that nothing tempted him to cut short other phases of his education; and in the autumn of 1882 he began to attend philosophical, literary and other cultural lectures at the University of Munich, so that there were no serious gaps in his schooling. He continued to compose industriously (a chorus in the Elektra of Sophocles was one of his creations in this period); but in after years he warned against “rushing before the public with unripe efforts.” Subsequently he visited upon the works of his salad days this judgment: “In them I lost much real freshness and force.” So much for those who question even today the soundness of this early verdict.
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One advantage he came early to enjoy—the good will of Hermann Levi, the Munich conductor (or, let us give him his more imposing official title of “Generalmusikdirektor”) who first presided in Bayreuth over Wagner’s Parsifal. In 1881 the outstanding chamber music organization of the Bavarian capital performed a string quartet of young Strauss and very shortly afterwards Levi sponsored the first public hearing of a rather more ambitious effort, a symphony in D minor. Before a capacity audience the noted conductor went so far as to congratulate the high school student. It should be set down to the credit of the scarcely seventeen-year-old composer that he did not for a moment suffer the tribute to turn his head. Next morning the student was back in his classroom, as unconcerned with his triumphs of the preceding evening as if they had all been no more than an agreeable dream. The usually peppery father appears to have been somewhat less balanced than his son and a little earlier took it upon himself to dispatch Richard’s Serenade for Wind Instruments, Opus 7, to Hans von Bülow. “Not a genius, but at the most a talent of the kind that grows on every bush,” shot back the latter after a glimpse at the score of this adolescent production. But Bülow’s irritable mood softened before long and he was considerably more flattering about other of the composer’s works which came to his attention. All the same Bülow grew to like the Serenade well enough to make room for it on one of his programs. Meantime—on November 27, 1882—Franz Wüllner produced it in Dresden. And it was a strange quirk of fate which made of this piece the unexpected vehicle for Richard’s first exploit as a conductor! It so happened that Bülow eventually scheduled it (1884) for one of his concerts. At the eleventh hour the older musician, suffering from an indisposition, appealed to his young friend to direct his own work. Trusting to luck Richard suffered a baton to be thrust into his hands, and almost in a dream state, hardly knowing how things would turn out, piloted the players through the score. “All that I realize,” he afterwards said, “is that I did not break down!”
Young Strauss was not idling. The products of his energetic young manhood if they do not bulk large in his exploits indicate clearly how carefully he was striving to learn his craft without, at the same time, seeking to blaze trails. One finds him turning out in 1881 five piano pieces as well as the string quartet just mentioned; a piano sonata, a sonata for cello and piano, a concerto for violin and orchestra, Mood Pictures for piano, a concerto for horn and orchestra, and a symphony in F minor. This symphony, incidentally, was first produced by Theodore Thomas, on December 13, 1884, at a concert of the New York Philharmonic Society. Perhaps more important, however, were the songs Strauss was writing at this stage. For they have preserved a vitality which Strauss’s instrumental products of that early period have long since lost. It is not easy to grasp at this date that it was the early Strauss the world has to thank for such masterpieces of song literature as the incorrigibly popular (one might almost say hackneyed), Lieder as “Zueignung”, “Die Nacht”, “Die Georgine”, “Geduld”, “Allerseelen”, “Ständchen”, and a number of other such lyric specimens, many of them in the truest tradition of the German art song. Indeed, the boldness, the diversity, declamatory, rhythmic and melodic features of Strauss’s achievements in this field might almost be said to have preceded the more sensational aspects of his orchestral works.
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The songs of Strauss, the earliest specimens of which date from 1882, and which span (though in steadily diminishing numbers), the most fruitful years of his life, aggregate something like 150. If the better known ones are with piano accompaniment, not a few are scored for an orchestral one. A large number long ago became musical household words, along with the Lieder of Schubert, Schumann and Brahms, though having a physiognomy quite their own. The woman who became his wife, Pauline de Ahna, was an accomplished vocalist and that circumstance goes far to account for the diversity of his efforts in this province. The joint recitals of the pair stimulated for a considerable period the composer’s lyric imagination. If his inspiration eventually sought expression in larger frames it must be noted that the slant of his genius habitually ran to larger conceptions. In any event the Lieder Abende of Strauss and his betrothed help explain the creative impulses which at this stage found so much of their outlet in song-writing. The composer was later to explain that a new song might be dashed off at any half-way idle moment—might even be scribbled down in the twinkling of an eye between the acts of an opera performance or during a concert intermission. And as spontaneously as Schubert, Richard Strauss busied himself with poems of the most varied character.
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On the young man’s twenty-first birthday Hans von Bülow recommended to Duke George of Meiningen “an uncommonly gifted” musician as substitute while he himself went on a journey for his shattered health. Bülow referred to the suggested deputy as “Richard III”, since after Richard Wagner, “there could be no Richard II.” Strauss arrived in Meiningen in October, 1885. The little ducal capital boasted a high artistic standing. Its theatrical company enjoyed international fame. The town, to be sure, had no opera, but the orchestra, though numbering only 48 instrumentalists, had been so trained by the suffering yet exigent Bülow that it was virtually unrivalled in Germany. The newcomer was encouraged to submit under his mentor’s eye to an intensive training. Bülow’s rehearsals ran from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon and his disciple from Munich was invariably on hand from the first to the last note. The rest of the day was devoted to score reading and to every subtlety of conductor’s technic. The young man was absolutely overwhelmed by “the exhaustive manner in which Bülow sought out the ultimate poetic content of the scores of Beethoven and Wagner.” And a favorite saying of the older musician was never to be forgotten by his disciple from Munich: “First learn to read the score of a Beethoven symphony with absolute correctness, and you will already have its interpretation.”
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Strauss made other friends and valuable connections in Meiningen. One of the most important and influential of these was an impassioned devotee of Wagner, Alexander Ritter. Like so many apostles of the creator of Parsifal at that period, Ritter was a violent opponent of Brahms. Besides he was the composer of a comic opera, “Der faule Hans”, and of a symphonic poem that once enjoyed a vogue in Germany, “Kaiser Rudolfs Ritt zum Grabe”. It was Ritter’s service to familiarize Strauss with some of the deepest secrets of the scores and writings of Wagner as well as of Liszt, and he understood how to fire his young friend with soaring enthusiasm for his own ideals. He also did much to inspire the budding conductor with a taste for the writings of Schopenhauer, an inclination he himself had inherited from Wagner. Ritter’s influence, in short, was one of the luckiest developments at this stage of Strauss’s career.