More than a decade was to elapse before Strauss was to concern himself again with problems of symphonic music. Opera and ballet were to be the chief business of those activities which one may look upon as the middle period of his creative life. One may be permitted a short backward glance to account for some of his previous creations. Songs (a number of the best of them), an “Enoch Arden” setting (declamation with piano accompaniment) occupy the late years of the 19th Century and the dawn of the 20th, not to mention the choral ballad for mixed chorus and orchestra Taillefer. More important, however, is a second operatic venture. This opera in one act, called Feuersnot, is a setting of a text by the noted Ernst von Wolzogen, who was associated with the vogue of the so-called “Ueberbrettl”, a sort of up-to-date vaudeville, an “arty” movement typical of the period. Feuersnot is a picture of a “fire famine” brought about by an irate sorcerer in revenge for the act of a maiden who scorned his love. Thereby all the fires of the town are extinguished! The piece is rather too long for a short opera and too short for a full-length one. But the text is rich in word play, punning satire, double meanings and topical allusions, interlarded with biting reflections on the manner in which Munich had once turned against Wagner and on the trouble the benighted burghers would have in similarly ridding themselves of the troublesome Strauss! There is not a little of the real Strauss in the music, though at that, less than one might expect from the composer of Till Eulenspiegel and Ein Heldenleben which already lay some distance in the past. Feuersnot was first staged at the Dresden Opera on November 21, 1901, under the leadership of Ernst von Schuch. And the consequence was that for years to come Strauss’s operatic premieres took place in that gracious city.
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We now come into view of a milestone of modern music drama. In 1902 Strauss attended a performance of Oscar Wilde’s play, “Salome”, at Max Reinhardt’s Kleines Theater in Berlin. Gertrude Eysoldt had the title role. The Swiss musicologist, Willy Schuh, relates that the composer, after the performance was accosted by his friend, Heinrich Grünfeld, who remarked: “Strauss, this would be an operatic subject for you!” “I am already composing it,” was the reply. And the composer went on to tell: “The Viennese writer, Anton Lindner, had already sent me the play and offered to make an opera text of it for me. Upon my agreement he sent me some cleverly versified opening scenes which did not, however, inspire me with an urge to composition; till one day the question shaped itself in my mind: ‘Why do I not compose at once, without further preliminaries: Wie schön ist die Prinzessin Salome heute Nacht!’ From then on it was not difficult to cleanse the piece of ‘literature’, so that it has become a thoroughly fine libretto!
“Necessity gave me a really exotic scheme of harmony, which, showed itself especially in odd, heterogeneous cadences having the effect of changeable silk. It was the desire for the sharpest kind of individual characterization that led me to bitonality. One can look upon this as a solitary experiment as applied in a special case but not recommend it for imitation.”
Difficulties began with von Schuch’s first piano rehearsals. A number of singers sought to give back their parts till Karl Burrian shamed them by answering, when asked how he was progressing with the role of Herod: “I already know it by heart!” A little later the Salome, Frau Wittich, threatened to go on strike because of the taxing part and the massive orchestra. Soon, too, she began to rail against “perversity and impiety of the opera, refused to do this or that ‘because I am a decent woman’,” and drove the stage manager almost frantic. Strauss remarked that her figure was ‘not really suited to the 16-year-old Princess with the Isolde voice’ and complained that in subsequent performances her dance and her actions with Jochanaan’s head overstepped all bounds of propriety and taste.”
In Berlin, according to Strauss, the Kaiser would permit the performance of the work, only after Intendant von Hülsen had the idea of “indicating at the close by a sudden shining of the morning star the coming of the Three Holy Kings.” Nevertheless, Wilhelm II remarked to Hülsen: “I am sorry that Strauss composed this Salome. I like him, but he is going to do himself terrible harm with it!” At the dress rehearsal the famous high B flat of the double basses so filled Count Seebach with the fear of an outbreak of hilarity, that he prevailed upon the player of the English horn to mitigate the effect, somewhat, “by means of a sustained B flat on that instrument.” Strauss’s own father, hearing his son play a portion of the opera on the piano, exclaimed a short time before his death: “My God, this nervous music! It is as if beetles were crawling about in one’s clothing!” And Cosima Wagner declared after listening to the closing scene: “This is madness!” The clergy, too, was up in arms and the first performance at the Vienna State Opera in October, 1918, took place only after an agitated exchange of letters with Archbishop Piffl. The orchestra of Salome in all numbers 112 players. Strauss, however eventually arranged the opera for fewer players and Willy Schuh tells of the composer having conducted it in Innsbruck with an orchestra of only 56 players, winds in twos but highly efficient solo instrumentalists.
At all events, Strauss has been described as an inimitable conductor of Salome. Willy Schuh (whom Strauss designated late in his life as his “official” biographer, when the time came to prepare his “standard” life story) alludes to Strauss as an “allegro composer”, whose direction of Salome was of altogether remarkable “tranquillity” and finds that the real secret of his direction of this music drama was to be sought in the “restfulness” and creative aspects of his interpretation, “which avoids every excess of whipped up, overheated effects and sensationalism.” It is, therefore, illuminating to consider the modifications the years have wrought on the interpretative treatment proper to the work. Little by little the legend of the decadent, hysterical, hyper-sensual work was replaced by the assurance of its almost classical character; and the truth of Oscar Wilde’s declaration to Sarah Bernhardt when the play was new: “I aimed only to create something curious and sensual” has at length come to the fore.
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There is scarcely any need to recount in any detail the early difficulties of Salome in America, when the scandalized cries that arose after the work received a single representation at the Metropolitan Opera House, in New York, only to be shelved as “detrimental to the best interests of the institution” after a solitary representation still ranks among the notorious and less creditable legends of the American stage. Strauss soon after this taste of the operations of American puritanism accused Americans of “hypocrisy, the most loathsome of all vices.” He was handsomely avenged, however, when on January 28, 1909, Oscar Hammerstein revived the work (with Mary Garden as Salome) at his Manhattan Opera House and started it on a triumphant American career, which confounded all the ludicrous prognostications and horrified shouts with which it has been greeted only a short time earlier.
The work which followed Salome was Elektra, the text of which was the creation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Here began a collaboration between poet and musician which was to last with fruitful results until the latter’s death, and to mark some of the high points of Strauss’s achievements. The story of their joint labors is detailed in a priceless series of letters, brought out in 1925 under the editorial supervision of the composer’s son, Dr. Franz Strauss. These letters afford glimpses into the workshop of librettist and composer which rank with some of the most illuminating exchanges of the sort the history of music supplies. From them we learn that before settling on the tragedy of the house of Agamemnon the collaborators seriously pondered as operatic material Calderon’s Daughter of the Air and also Semiramis. Then, early in 1908, they seem to have agreed on Elektra. Hofmannsthal’s version of the Greek legend (based on Sophocles) had been acted in Berlin (again with Gertrude Eysolt in the title role); and no sooner had Strauss witnessed the production than he concluded that the tragedy in this form was virtually made to order for his music.