The life of Richard Strauss

B rya n G i l l i a m
 published by the press syndicate of the university of cambridge
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

cambridge university press

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, cb2 2ru, UK http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk
40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, USA http://www.cup.org
10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia

© Cambridge University Press 1999

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions

of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may
take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 1999

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeset in FF Quadraat 9.75/14 pt, in QuarkXPress™ [se]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data

Gilliam, Bryan Randolph.

The life of Richard Strauss / Bryan Gilliam.
p. cm. – (Musical lives)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0 521 57019 0 (hardback). – isbn 0 521 57895 7 (paperback)
1. Strauss, Richard, 1864–1949. 2. Composers – Germany – Biography.
i. Title. ii. Series.
ml410.s93g53 1999
780′.92–dc21 98-47947 cip
[b]

isbn 0 521 57019 0 hardback

isbn 0 521 57895 7 paperback
 contents

List of illustrations vi
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Musical development and early career 7
2 “Onward and away to ever-new victories”: Strauss’s
emergence as a tone poet 31
3 The rise of an opera composer 71
4 Between two empires: Strauss in the 1920s 109
5 After Hofmannsthal: personal and political crises 138
6 “Now the day has made me tired”: the War and its
aftermath 162
Notes 184
Selected further reading 190
Index 193
 illustrations

1 Franz Strauss near the end of his life 10

2 Johanna and Richard Strauss (1873). RSA 14
3 Gustav Mahler. Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien 29
4 Hans von Bülow. RSA 34
5 Strauss in 1888. RSA 45
6 Friedrich Rösch. RSA 48
7 Franz Liszt and his daughter Cosima. Richard Wagner Archive,
Bayreuth 52
8 Strauss and family in Berlin (1904). RSA 80
9 The Strausses’ villa in Garmisch. RSA 86
10 Strauss “performs” Elektra. RSA 89
11 Strauss with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. RSA 92
12 Dresden Opera house. Deutsches Theatermuseum (Munich) 95
13 Max Reinhardt: portrait by E. S. Klemperer. Max Reinhardt Archive
(Binghamton, NY) 100
14 Vienna State Opera House. Bildarchiv (Austrian National
Library) 114
15 Drawing of Franz Schalk and Richard Strauss. RSA 116
16 Richard Strauss: portrait by Ferdinand Schmutzer (1925). RSA 132
17 The Munich Opera in ruins. Bavarian State Opera, Munich 170
18 Strauss in 1949. RSA 183

Richard Strauss Archive (RSA) documents were provided, with per-

mission, by the Strauss family. Grateful thanks are due to all copyright
holders.

vi
 Introduction

Richard Strauss poses a unique challenge in modern music. His

predilection for mixing the trivial and the sublime, for under-
cutting the extraordinary with the everyday, defies our stereotype of
nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers. Indeed, Strauss
embodies a fundamental dichotomy that will be a recurring focus in
this study of the man and his music. Strauss’s world was one clearly
divided into two distinct but frequently overlapping spheres of
professional and domestic life. Beyond these two spheres, Strauss
showed little interest: he had no time for Wagnerian philandering, no
space for Brucknerian religious piety, no patience with the insecur-
ities that haunted Mahler, no understanding of the jealousies that
plagued Schoenberg. Where other composers derived their creative
spark through struggle or personal tragedy, Strauss would simply not
indulge. He did not see discipline, order, and stability as obstacles but
rather as catalysts for creativity. He once said of Wagner, whose
music he admired most of his life, that the brain that composed Tristan
und Isolde was surely as “cool as marble.” It is a statement that says far
more about Strauss than Wagner in its emphasis on technique over
emotion.
Hans von Bülow once dubbed young Strauss as Richard III
(because, after Wagner, there could be no direct successor), but that
very persistent focus on Strauss as post-Wagnerian has obscured the
fact that the role model for Strauss the man was more likely Johannes

1
2 The life of Richard Strauss

Brahms, whom he met at a crucial time in his life. Brahms, whose rise
to prominence coincided with the rise of Viennese liberalism, culti-
vated a bourgeois image; his apartment was neat and orderly, his
books, manuscripts, and printed scores were arranged with remark-
able precision. As a composer who was born in the 1830s, Brahms’s
bourgeois-artist persona was in consonance with its time, but for a
creative individual of Strauss’s generation the duality of bourgeois
and artist was one of increasing conflict. Here is where Strauss stood
apart from his contemporaries, for – to the contrary – he saw no such
conflict as he eagerly embraced the bourgeoisie of a new generation.
The culture industry that was in its infancy during the days of Brahms
had come into fruition by the early twentieth century, and no one
recognized this phenomenon any better than Strauss, the most
successful composer of his time.
On one level Strauss remains one of the most often performed,
widely recorded composers of our century, and seems therefore to be
readily accessible. Yet on another level we inevitably confront a pri-
vate, contradictory human being who seems to elude our grasp. Was
Strauss a man deeply rooted in inner antagonisms, or did he merely
wear several masks? How, indeed, does one come to terms with the
creator of temporally adjacent works such as Symphonia domestica,
with its harmless depiction of family life, and Salome, an opera that
combines oriental exoticism and sexual depravity? How do we recon-
cile the avid Bavarian card player with the man of letters who quoted
Goethe with ease? What do we make of a composer who, in
Krämerspiegel, warned that art remains vulnerable to crass business
interests, yet who himself conducted concerts at Wanamaker’s
department store in New York? And, especially important, how does
one understand the artist who claimed to embrace Wagner, yet in
practice seemed to reject him?
Strauss, the master skat player, kept those cards close to his chest at
the table and also in life; he was aloof and seemingly phlegmatic in
public, yet extroverted and sanguine in his music. The composer who
seems to reveal so much of himself in his works loathed real self-
 Introduction 3

revelation beyond the purely musical realm. Averse to the neo-

Romantic posture of the artist set apart from worldly life, Strauss cul-
tivated the image of a composer who treated composition as everyday
work, as a way of merely earning an income. But however true this per-
sona may have been on one level, it was no less a pose, a mask so real to
others that he could disappear behind it, allowing Strauss the artist
his necessary seclusion for creative work. In short, no one was more
aware of this man-vs.-artist (the bourgeois-artist) paradox than
Strauss himself. He was, after all, the composer who, as memoirs and
documentary film footage show, enjoyed conducting his most
moving musical passages with minimal body gestures and with a face
devoid of emotion.
As a modernist, Strauss also realized the inability of contemporary
art to maintain a unified mode of expression. From Don Juan to Der
Rosenkavalier and beyond, Strauss reveled in creating moments of
grandeur only to undercut them – sometimes in the most jarring
fashion. Unlike Mahler or Schoenberg, who both held to a Romantic
view of music as a transcendent, redemptive force, Strauss confronted
the problem of modernity head on and came to his own idiosyncratic
conclusions. Thus, in a paradoxical way, Strauss exploited a
Wagnerian musical language to criticize a metaphysical philosophy
behind that very language. His attraction to Nietzsche stemmed from
a fundamental desire to debunk the metaphysics of Schopenhauer,
specifically the denial of the Will (that primal, unknowable, life force)
through music.1 All life is su¬ering, according to Schopenhauer, and
that primal, metaphysical drive could either be quieted through aes-
thetic contemplation or entirely negated through an ascetic, Parsifal-
like saintliness. Strauss, who had no interest in saintliness or
redemption through music, embraced Nietzsche who transformed
Schopenhauer’s fatalistic “will to life” into an celebratory “will to
power.” Nietzsche, in short, sought to a~rm the very life that
Schopenhauer sought to deny, and he also provided the e¬ective appa-
ratus for Strauss’s joyful – and life-long – agnosticism in the 1890s.
In an essay written shortly before his death, Strauss lamented (in
4 The life of Richard Strauss

unmistakably Nietzschean terms) that this aspect of modernity – the

recognition of an unbreachable gap between the individual and
the collective – went largely unnoticed in his works dating back to the
1890s.2 In his late essay, Strauss refers to this dichotomy in Act iii of
Guntram, though it could apply as easily to such tone poems as Also
sprach Zarathustra. Indeed, in a sketch to the opening of this symphonic
work, Strauss writes: “The sun rises. The individual enters the world,
or the world enters the individual.” Strauss’s late essay also implies
disappointment that for a younger generation of composers a
di¬erent view of modernism had emerged – one that prized technical
progressivity, whereby musical style was viewed as an obligatory,
linear process along the axis of tonality–atonality. This Schoen-
bergian notion of an organic, unified stylistic evolution (with its obvi-
ous German-Romantic roots) was alien to Strauss, who recognized, if
anything, a profound disunity in modern life and saw no reason that
music should be any di¬erent. Strauss treated musical style in an ahis-
torical, often critical fashion that arguably prefigured trends of the
late twentieth century. He seems to foreshadow what Fredric Jameson
calls the postmodern “collapse of the ideology of style.” For
Schoenberg and his high-modernist followers there was an implicit
perception of “aesthetic immorality” in composing contemporary
music in a tonal idiom that was viewed as outworn and moribund.
This moralistic aesthetic continued until well after World War II and
could merge in and out of a political discourse with remarkable incon-
sistency, where composers such as Stravinsky or Webern, who
enjoyed an aesthetically moral high ground, were forgiven various
political sins or had their views misrepresented altogether.
Historians of music often look for an inner unity in a composer’s
repertoire and, in turn, in the broader connection between that reper-
toire and the composer’s Age. Scholars who have studied the music
dramas of Richard Wagner or the symphonies of Gustav Mahler along
such lines have been richly rewarded. Yet, the extensive Straussian
œuvre – which shows a composer equally at ease in the concert hall,
recital hall, ballet, cinema, and opera house – is far more resistant to
 Introduction 5

cultural biographers in this respect. Strauss once suggested that his

body of work was one “bridged by contrasts,” and, indeed, there are
hardly two adjacent works that continue in the same mode: tragic or
comic. Ein Heldenleben is preceded by the anti-heroic Don Quixote, and
the hyper-symbolic Frau ohne Schatten is followed by the light sex-
comedy, Intermezzo. But in exploring these contrasts one finds intri-
guing connections: the two tone poems probe and critique heroism in
its various guises, while the two operas explore domestic relation-
ships on both mundane and metaphysical levels. Indeed, if there is a
significant consistency in Strauss’s compositional output, it is in his
desire to suggest the profundities and ambiguities to be found in
everyday life, even in the apparently banal. The sublime final trio of
Der Rosenkavalier is based, after all, on a trivial waltz tune heard earlier
in the opera.
But beyond all the contrasts, paradoxes, and incongruities there is
indeed a coherent shape to be found in Strauss’s compositions. His
output begins with a focus on lieder and purely instrumental compo-
sition: solo piano and chamber music at first, then orchestral music
by the 1880s. Toward the end of the decade, he becomes preoccupied
with the narrative potential of symphonic music and by the turn of the
century, after an intense exploration of the tone poem, Strauss moves
on to the stage, and opera remains his principal preoccupation over
the remaining decades. Yet after Capriccio (1941), the elderly Strauss
bade farewell to the theater and returned to those instrumental musi-
cal genres of his youth. And there were, of course, the lieder that wove
their way throughout Strauss’s career at various critical junctures,
from the naive youthful pieces to the exalted orchestral songs at the
very end of his life.
The ideal likeness of Strauss would not be a painting, drawing, or
sculpture; rather, it would be a mosaic: coherent from afar, but upon
closer view made of contrasting fragments. Those who shared this
closer perspective have, in fact, o¬ered conflicting images of the man:
generous, petty, folksy, snobbish, visionary, provincial, tasteless,
refined. His was a complex personality that seemed to o¬er itself to
6 The life of Richard Strauss

the world without a filtering mechanism. Yet this may well have been
the ultimate filter: the pretense of being unpretentious. In Ariadne auf
Naxos Strauss set compelling music to the words, “music is a sacred
art,” but he was the same composer who simultaneously insisted that,
in capitalism, music is also a commodity, knowing full well the shock
value of such a statement.
Strauss would ultimately argue that it was not his job to create a
unified picture of himself. When Stefan Zweig, his one-time librettist,
suggested that the composer might write an autobiography, Strauss
declined stating that he preferred simply to “provide some signposts
and then leave it to the scholars to fill in.” The composer, thus, invites
us to discover whatever there is to learn about him through his music:
the cheap and the precious, the commonplace and the sublime. The
key may not be to reconcile or resolve such contradictions, but rather
to look at them in a dialectical way. What follows are six chapters that
cover his early musical development, his emergence as a tone poet
in the 1880s and 90s, his turn to the stage at the beginning of the
twentieth century, the successes and misfires of the post-World War I
era, the turbulent 1930s (a time of artistic and political crisis), and, of
course, the period during the Second World War and its aftermath.