On March 18, 1898, Cologne heard under the baton of Franz Wüllner, a work of rather different order, Don Quixote, Fantastic Variations on a Theme of Knightly Character. It is a set of orchestral variations on two themes, the one heard in the solo cello and characterizing the Knight of the Rueful Countenance, the second (solo viola) picturing his squire, Sancho Panza. As a feat of individualizing these variations are a thing apart. The tone painting is unrivalled in its composer’s achievements up to that time. A number of special effects, which long invited attention over and above their real musical worth called forth considerably more astonishment than they really deserved. The pitiful bleatings of a flock of sheep, violently scattered by the lance of the crack-brained Don, his attacks on a company of itinerant monks, his ride through the air (amid the whistlings of a “wind machine”)—these and other effects of the sort are actually only minor phases of the score. Its memorable qualities, aside from striking pictorial conceits, are rather to be found in the moving and tender pages portraying the passing of Don Quixote as the mists clear from his poor addled brain. There are episodes of a melting tenderness in these which rank among the most eloquent utterances Strauss has attained.

Still another tone poem was to succeed—A Hero’s Life (Ein Heldenleben) performed under the composer’s direction in Frankfurt. The work is autobiographical with the composer himself as its hero and his helpmate, (obviously Frau Pauline, his “better half” as she was to be called). For a long time Ein Heldenleben passed as the prize horror among Strauss’s creations, especially its fierce and rambunctious battle scene, which some critics considered a kind of bugaboo with which to frighten the wits out of grown-up concertgoers! For its day A Hero’s Life was unquestionably strong meat. If people were horrified by the racket and cacophony of the battle scene they were no less disposed to irritation at the cackling sounds with which Strauss pilloried his benighted foes who resented his aims and accomplishments. And they were displeased by the immodesty with which he exhibited himself as a real and misprized hero by the citation of fragments from his own works. Some, among them as staunch a Strauss admirer as Romain Rolland, were disturbed not because the composer talked in his works “about himself” but “because of the way in which he talked about himself.” All the same Strauss was to boast no truer champion throughout his career than the sympathetic and keenly understanding author of Jean-Christophe.

Ein Heldenleben was the last but one of the series of tone poems which were to lead to a new phase of Richard Strauss’s career. The last of this series, the Symphonia Domestica, was completed in Charlottenburg, Berlin, on December 31, 1903. Its first public hearing took place under the composer’s direction in Carnegie Hall, New York, March 21, 1904. The Domestic Symphony, “dedicated to my dear wife and our boy” is in “one movement and three subdivisions. After an introduction and scherzo there follow without break an Adagio, then a tumultuous double fugue and finale.” The reviewers discovered all manner of programmatic connotations in this depiction of a day in Strauss’s family life though he was eventually to tell a New York reviewer that he “wanted the work to be taken as music” pure and simple and not as an elaboration of a specific program. He maintained his belief “that the anxious search on the part of the public for the exactly corresponding passages in the music and the program, the guessing as to significance of this or that, the distraction of following a train of thought exterior to the music are destructive to the musical enjoyment.” And he forbade the publication of what he sought to express till after the concert.

Richard Strauss and Family

He might as well have saved himself the trouble! There is no room here to point out even a small fraction of what the critics heard in the work, encouraged by a casual note or two the conductor found it necessary to set down at certain stages of the score. The youngster’s aunts are supposed to remark that the infant is “just like his father”, the uncles “just like his mother”. A glockenspiel announces that the time, at one point is seven in the morning. The child gets his bath and the ablutions are accompanied by shrieks and squeals. Husband and wife discuss the future of the baby and there is a lively domestic argument which ends happily. Ernest Newman, irritated like numerous other reviewers by the torrents of vain talk the piece called forth, was to complain that “Strauss behaved as foolishly over the Domestica as he might have been expected to do after his previous exploits in the same line”...

The first organization to perform the work was the orchestra of Hermann Hans Wetzler, in New York, and it took several months longer for the music to reach Germany. Mr. Newman had found the texture of the whole is “less interesting than in any other of Strauss’s works; the short and snappy thematic fragments out of which the composer builds contrasting badly with the great sweeping themes of the earlier symphonic poems ... the realistic effects in the score are at once so atrociously ugly and so pitiably foolish that one listens to them with regret that a composer of genius should ever have fallen so low.”

A page from the original score of “Elektra”

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