Richard Strauss, A Classic of Our Time
Regnery, Henry
The Alternative: An American Spectator • May 1976 • Volume 9, Number 8 Henry Regnery Richard Strauss, A Classic of Our Time • When Richard Strauss appeared in London in 1947 at a special concert...
...The second, Don Juan, is the earliest work of Strauss to have become part of the regular symphonic repertoire...
...It was in Weimar, after long and careful preparation, that he conducted Tristan for the first time—"The most beautiful experience of my life," he wrote to Cosima Wagner...
...But one may equally ask, Why Strauss...
...One of the responsibilities of the tower warden was to play the horn for festive occasions, and Franz, who came to Munich as a young man, made himself the leadinghorn player of his time...
...Strauss himself must have thought he had gone as far as he could with program music, but he had yet to write a successful opera...
...The first performance in Dresden on January 26, 1911, was a great international event...
...I saw it all as through a mist...
...Romain Rolland, with whom Strauss maintained a friendly and doubtless mutually stimulating relationship for many years, objected to the "programmatic division" of the Domestic Symphony...
...There were several smaller works, including Intermezzo, for which Strauss wrote the text himself, which was based on a rather ridiculous incident from his own life...
...Frau Strauss, while her husband was on a concert tour, opened a note addressed to him which was signed "Your ever loving Mitzi...
...The corresponence that followed between poet and usician, both intent on producing a ork of art and each submerging his peronality in the task at hand, is of the reatest interest...
...In the grim world of 1947, when most of the great opera houses of Europe were bombed-out shells, when Dresden, that jewel of the old Europe where many of the Strauss operas had first been performed, was a wasteland of rubble and under Soviet Russian occupation, Richard Strauss must have appeared to be a revenant for a long-since vanished past...
...Zweig was Jewish, and when Strauss discovered that Zweig's name was not to appear on the program, he let it be known that in this case he would not come to the first performance...
...But what I know how to do is to turn such a theme around, paraphrase it, get everything out of it that is in it, and in this no one can come close to me any more.' " Die Schweigsame Frau had its first performance in Dresden in 1935 under Karl Boehm...
...He gave me complete freedom...
...As a conductor he brought new life to the great masterworks of the past, as a composer he gave new color and powers of expression rto the orchestra, and in his tone-poems, his songs, and such operas as Salome, Rosenkavalier, and Capriccio, he enriched our lives...
...that nds the opera, but nowhere, it seems to e, does Strauss's sense for the relation-hip between music and text show itself ore clearly than in the setting of the ords of the Marschallin, "Jedes Ding at seine Zeit," which marks the transion in the first act from the amorous ex-change between Octavian and the Marschallin, with which the opera opens, to the development...
...and he soon completed another tone-poem, the immense Heldenleben, which was first performed in 1899...
...His mother came from the Pschorr family, who were well-to-do and respected Munich brewers...
...In 1898 Strauss became First Conductor of the Royal Opera in Berlin...
...The portrait of himself in Heldenleben—and she takes it for granted that it is a portrait of himself—was a reflection of the "national mood," he was unable to keep his "technical facilities and command over ideas in bounds," and if, she said, German home-life is as Strauss pictured it in the Sin fonia Domestica, "German history be, comes understandable...
...years later he wrote: "...it was clear to me that the mediocrity of his melodic sense scarcely exceeded that of a Mendelssohn, but the harmonic-rhythmic invention, the brilliance of the instrumentation, the dramatic intelligence, the will, were gigantic...
...Without Strauss," asks Mr...
...Romain Rolland heard it soon after in Cologne, and was overwhelmed...
...Some were horrified, es pecially by the idea of basing an opera or this gruesome story of degeneracy, bu Gustav Mahler welcomed it as "a work o genius...
...When the smoke had finally cleared, it turned out that Mitzi had confused Strauss with another musician, and was only trying to get two free tickets for the opera...
...Was Mozart a hero, did Beethoven rush off to enlist to fight against the Hitler of his time...
...Miss Tuchman' omniscience and readiness to sit in jud ment on nations, composers, composer wives, music, or whatever it may be, a truly staggering...
...If Strauss had emigrated, it is doubtful that we would have Capriccio, the beautiful orchestral piece Metamorphosen, or the haunting, almost mystical last songs, composed a few months before his death...
...It was a wonderful evening, how happy I would have been if you had been there...
...Strauss has been accused of glorifying himself in Heldenleben...
...As for Strauss's music, Elektn is "two hours of demonic intensity,' Rosenkavalier "a silver rose, beautiful glittering and tarnished," the violin sol in Heldenleben "alternatively seductiv and shrewish," and in the work as whole there is "evidence of a deep-seate flaw in the composer...
...Such symphonic works as Till Eulenspiegel and Death and Transfiguration would no longer be possible for him, since pure music required the highest degree of creative spirit, but the word still inspired him...
...Modern...
...In 1904 he made an American tour, which became a great triumph, and included 21 concerts in four weeks with 20 different orchestras, recitals of his own songs with his wife Pauline as soloist, and the world premiere of a new work, the Sinfonia Domestica on March 21, 1904 in Carnegie Hall in New York...
...She suspected the worst, and by the time Strauss returned, had consulted a lawyer about a divorce, etc...
...Meiningen was followed by engagements first in Munich The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 5 as third conductor of the opera, then in Weimar for four years as second conductor, and then again in Munich, where he was given the title koniglicher Kapellmeister (royal conductor) of the opera...
...As for his own work, he said, "I know well that my symphonic work cannot approach the immense genius of Beethoven, and I am equally well aware of the distance of my operas (in the magnitude of conception, primary melodic invention, cultural wisdom) from the eternal works of Richard Wagner, but the facts of the development of the art of the theatre justify me in the modest but beautiful feeling that my operas, in the many-sidedness of their dramatic ma-terial and in the forms of their treatment will take an honorable place at the end of the rainbow in their relationship to all earlier works of the theatre—leaving the works of Richard Wagner out of account...
...Although Strauss urged Zweig to continue to work with him, Zweig felt that it would be better if he did the Alternative: An American Spectator May 1976 7 not...
...One wonders how such a society was able to function at all, and could produce such music as that of Wagner, Brahms, and Richard Strauss...
...Would it be possible for you to give e 12 to 16 verses in the following rhym...
...The first of these, Macbeth, was performed in Berlin, under Billow's direction...
...He came at the end, and may well represent the last gift to the world, of a great musical tradition...
...Strauss's mind was not strong enough to wing above the times...
...Decay, mental and moral, attacked him," Mr...
...Franz had an infallible sense of time as well as a violent temper, so that to make music with him, as Richard put it, could be a "somewhat unpredictable pleasure, but I learned how music should be played from the innumerable times I had to accompany him in the beautiful Mozart horn concertos and the Beethoven horn sonatas...
...everything sounded fine, and comes out superbly, even if it is horribly difficult...
...Before leaving Mr...
...In a letter to his friend Ottonie Degenfeld (dated 5:00 a.m., January 27, 1911), Hofmannsthal left an impression of that memorable evening: "I can write only very hurriedly, so many people everywhere, in the hotel, on the stairs, constantly knocking at the door, incredibly exciting, and very nice...
...Strauss once said, "What does it mean to be modern...
...These were followed by instruction in violin, theory, and composition, all from friends or colleagues of Franz, but Richard's greatest musical education probably came from his father himself...
...in spite of having been written during World War II, it is a work that radiates the serenity of a great artist nearing the close of a full and creative life...
...Hofmannshal made several suggestions, none of which seemed satisfactory, until, after 1. long, fruitful conversation in Weimar with his friend Count Harry Kessler, -lofmannsthal brought Strauss the bare outline of what was to become Roseniavalier...
...From this beginning we have at beautiful, magical duet, "Ist ein raum, kann nicht wirklich sein...
...After receiving the first ages, Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal: 'The scene is charming, and will cornose itself like oil and butter, I am aleady hatching it out...
...not in ferior to that of the late Field Marshal voi Moltke...
...Strauss did indeed continue to write music during the two world wars, as Beethoven did during the Napoleonic wars...
...For me, the poetical program is nothing more than the means by which the expression and purely musical development of my feelings are given form...
...Had Strauss left Germany after the difficulties he experienced because his librettist was Jewish, and then presented himself in New York as a victim of Nazi persecution, he would have been received with open arms...
...Through Strauss's efforts, the opera became successful and Humperdinck famous almost overnight...
...a second opera, Feuersnot, was in preparation...
...A conservatory would have had nothing to offer to Strauss...
...I have met many great artists in my life, but never one who knew how to maintain such abstract and unerring objectivity toward himself...
...One has the impression that he had carried "program music" to the extreme limits of its possibilities...
...his last great orchestral work, the Alpensymphonie, which, for all its complexity and variety of instruments—including a wind and thunder machine and glockenspiel—is a work of great majesty and classic dignity...
...Among those in the audience as Strauss made his debut with the Meiningen orchestra—first as soloist in the Mozart C-minor piano concerto and then conducting his own F-minor symphony—was no less a figure than Johannes Brahms...
...There would have been special performances of his music, especially of Heldenleben, editorials in the New York Times and the Saturday Review, invitations and honorary degrees from Harvard and Yale, and so on...
...Everything so festive, especially so in this small city...
...Ernst Krause, in his book on Strauss, sums it all up as follows: "In `Elektra' Strauss plunged into the abyss on the dark side of existence with all the vehemence of his vital musical nature, although he later asserted that he had approached the subject 'very coolly and at a listance.' Disease here is not restricted o Klytemnestra's liver...
...Marek's mind, with his cliches, his assumption, appropriate to the age of Camelot and Playboy, that if a man is loyal to his wife it can only be because he is not "highly sexed...
...Oscar Wilde's Salome, which had been translated into German and very successfully presented in his Berlin theatre by Max Reinhardt, seemed tc offer Strauss exactly the dramatic material he was looking for...
...Besides his heavy schedule as conductor of the Berlin Opera, his creative work, and appearances as guest conductor in cities from London to Moscow, Strauss found time to set up his own orchestra for the performance of works by contemporary composers...
...Strauss wrote to a friend that "the piece cried out foi music...
...It takes place in a country house outside Paris, about 1775, when, in Strauss's description, "Gluck was beginning his work on the reform of the opera...
...but it is my intention that the work be taken seriously...
...Many years later, Strauss remarked that he had "no particular liking" for Heldenleben, but he chose to conduct the Domestic Symphony, particularly lovingly, we are told, for the celebration of his eightieth birthday in 1944 in Vienna...
...and then the three-act opera Frau Ohne Schatten, which had its first performance in Vienna in 1919...
...He was now at the height of his immense vitality and creative powers—three further tone-poems, Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, and Don Quixote were behind him, as well as a number of songs and smaller works...
...While the hero's "help-mate" isclearly a picture of Strauss's own wife Pauline—as he told Romain Rolland—and the depiction of the hero's enemies a portrayal of his own critics, it is hardly plausible that Strauss thought of himself as a hero, or intended the piece as a representation of himself in a heroic cast...
...There was the one-act ballet, Josephslegende, which was first performed in Paris in 1914 by the Diaghileff company...
...After the first rehearsal for the first performance, which took place in Weimar in November 1889, Strauss wrote to his father: "I am happy to see that I have again made progress in instrumentation...
...Richard's first compositions were performed at such affairs, by an amateur orchestra, the "Wilde Gung'1," which was conducted by his father and in which he played violin...
...Marek, "who can this hero be...
...Strauss was delighted, and rged his friend to go home at once and et to work...
...one of the greatest masterpiece of our time...
...Shocking as it may sound, for Strauss to have stayed in Germany during the Hitler period may well have been the more honorable and courageous course than to emigrate...
...Every principal paper in Europe and the United States sent correspondents...
...spent only one winter in Nfeiningen, but the opportunity to work under such a man as Billow with an excellent orchestra and before a discerning audience, gave him superb training and invaluable experience...
...Zweig's name did finally appear and Strauss attended the performance, but Hitler stayed away...
...It opens with the presentation of the hero in a wonderfully clear, strong theme played by the horns and strings, in E flat, the key of Beethoven's Eroica, but in spite of many beautiful passages, the work, to my mind, lacks coherence—perhaps Strauss tried to do too much...
...His father, Franz, came from a family which for generations had occupied the office of tower warden in a small- town in northern Bavaria...
...You may be right," he wrote to Rolland, "in what you say about the program of the Domestica, and in this you agree with Gustav Mahler, who completely damns the whole business of a program...
...The next year his father let him go to Berlin, where, among others, he met Hans von Billow, the great conductor of the day...
...rnd the receptive ability of modern ears...
...In the meantime, Strauss had met the Austrian poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who became his close friend and collaborator, and remained so until Hofmannsthal's death in 1929...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator • May 1976 • Volume 9, Number 8 Henry Regnery Richard Strauss, A Classic of Our Time • When Richard Strauss appeared in London in 1947 at a special concert arranged in his honor by Sir Thomas Beecham, many people found it difficult to believe that the composer of Salome and Rosenkavali er was still alive...
...When, two years later, i was performed in New York at the Metro politan, the house was sold out at doubly prices and extra policemen had to b called to handle the crowds...
...Franz was a demanding father, and saw to it that his son was given an exacting and thorough musical education, beginning with piano lessons at the age of four...
...Strauss was now the acknowledged great figure of contemporary music, the successor, one might say, of Wagner and Brahms...
...it is not, as you believe, merely a musical description of certain events of life...
...he eventually left Austria, and, finally, a homeless and tragic figure, took his own life in Brazil...
...Ludwig II of Bavaria, whom the world considered mad, but whose first act as king was to send his chancellor to find Richard Wagner and bring him to Munich, was in the first year of his reign when Strauss was born in his capital on the Isar in 1864, and it was in the Royal Opera of Munich, a few months later, where Tristan had its first performance...
...Marek unhesitatingly informs us that because Strauss did not indulge in extramarital affairs and was happily married, "He was not highly sexed," and that Strauss himself was the subject of his tone-poem Heldenleben...
...Strauss, of course, was most anxious to have Brahms' opinion of his symphony, and reports the conversation as follows: "In his laconic way, he said only, 'Quite nice,' but then added an encouraging piece of-advice, 'Young man, study the Schubert dances and try your hand in the invention of eight-bar melodies.' " "I am grateful," Strauss added, "chiefly to Johannes Brahms, that since then I have never been ashamed to use a popular melody (as little as they are regarded by the school-wisdom of contemporary criticism, they come to one rarely, and then only at a fortunate moment...
...In his book Richard Strauss, George R. Marek speaks highly, and with understanding, of some of the music of Strauss, especially of his earlier period, but as the subtitle of his book indicates, "The Life of a Non-Hero," deprecates him as a man...
...in them I went to the extreme limts of harmony, psychical polyphony...
...Finally, for all the horrors our century has been guilty of, it is worth reminding ourselves that he was also a man of our time...
...He could take something that was formed and ready and illustrate it dramatically, because musical themes developed spontaneously from situations and words, which is why, in his last years, he had turned exclusively to opera...
...I think still today that the vital arrow of Strauss has never risen higher than it did then...
...the whole main floor turned around and began to applaud, people called out from all the boxes, it was a very pleasant moment, and more gratifying than the stupid, conventional appearance on the stage...
...I don't invent long melodies like Mozart...
...instead, he spent two years at the University of Munich, where he studied philosophy and the history of art...
...Guntram, his first opera, was given a friendly reception in Weimar, where it premiered, but in Munich it was a dismal failure...
...The sound was wonderful, of enormous intensity and voluptuousness...
...At that moment, the people saw me from below...
...During the first ten years of his association with the Berlin Opera, he appeared as conductor 700 times, and directed 69 different works, the first, characteristically, being Tristan, which was followed, in less than two weeks, by Carmen, Hansel and Gretel, The Merry Wives of Windsor, La Muette de Portici, and Fidelio...
...Reinhardt had come down from Berlin, at Strauss's suggestion, to supervise the staging, and as before, Ernst von Schuch, whom Strauss greatly respected, was the conductor...
...One has the impressio that she learned how to write history fror Time magazine...
...I knew of no creative musician of our time I would have been more willing to serve than Richard Strauss, the last of the great race of full-blooded German musicians, which extends from Handel and Bach through Beethoven and Brahms into our own day...
...His first loyalty was to music...
...Have inspiration like Beethoven, write counterpoint like Bach and be able to orchestrate like Mozart and be genuine and true children of your own time, then you will be modern...
...I had not expected...
...Marek makes much of Frau Strauss's habit of insisting that guests wipe their shoes before coming into her house, and resents the fact that during both world wars Strauss continued to compose music, even under Hitler, instead of emigrating or getting himself thrown into a concentration camp...
...In - Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower, Strauss is presented as the embodiment of all that was wrong, in Miss Tuchman's opinion, with the Germany of Wilhelm II...
...Heldenleben, as its critics say, may reflect the bombast of its age (which was not, by the way, confined to Wilhelm II), but in its lovely violin passages which describe the hero's "helpmate" and in the "Works of Peace" it does much more, and expresses another aspect of heroism...
...It wa an enormous success, however, in Eu 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 1971 rope, and with the proceeds—Strauss knew the value of his work—the composer built his country house in Garmisch, which became his home for the rest of his life, and where he died...
...On Sunday afternoons the Strausses and their friends would gather in the garden of an uncle, and play music...
...Within a year Don Juan was followed by an equally impressive tone-poem, Death and Transfiguration...
...I felt sorry for the poor horn and trumpet players...
...The book contains all the conventional, stupid generalizations about pre-World War I Germany—Munich a city of beer and sausages, Berlin of bombast and militarism, the universal subservience to petty officials and the military, the music "foursquare and heavy as German furniture," the school system "grey and intolerant" where the usual teacher "was a dreary official whose small salary was compensated for by his own sense of importance," the family dominated by a tyrannical father, etc...
...The oboe passage in g-major with the basses divided into four parts was especially beautiful...
...That would be utterly contrary to the spirit of music...
...The first result of this meeting was Elektra, which was first performed under Ernst von Schuch in Dresden on January 25, 1909...
...Do we criticize Shostakovich because he stayed in Russia, Solzhenitsyn because he would not leave until he was forced to...
...In 1885, Billow arranged for Strauss to come as his assistant to Meiningen, a small principality, which had one of the best orchestras and theatres in Germany, and where Billow was music director...
...Strauss's first compositions, not surprisingly, were in the traditional forms: besides a gavotte, a "Festmarsch," an early symphony, the violin concerto already mentioned, there was a horn concerto, a quartet, a cello sonata, and so on...
...Rosenkavalier, perhaps, marked the high point of Strauss's collaboration with Hofmannsthal and of his own creative achievement, but much of great substance was to follow...
...After setting the opening lines, "Wie sch5n ist die Prinzes sin Salome heute Nacht...
...Besides occupying the chair of first horn in the Munich opera, he was also professor in the conservatory...
...These few bars have the unmistakable touch of genius...
...Before their meeting, Billow had arranged to have his orchestra play Strauss's serenade for winds, and on the occasion of their meet-ing asked him to compose a suite for winds...
...At our very first meeting Strauss let me know quite frankly that a composer of 70 no longer possessed the original power of musical inspiration...
...This is one reason why his music is not merely a period piece, but has something to say to us still, and, like all true art, can raise our eyes to a higher view of life...
...I know that some people believe the work to be a humorous representation of domestic happiness...
...They blew themselves blue, it is so difficult—it is fortunate that the piece is so short...
...This was completed the following summer, and in the winter of 1884, when Strauss was 18, Billow had his orchestra play the piece at a public performance in Munich with Strauss as conductor, his formal debut...
...The last, Capriccio, for which Clemens Krauss wrote the text, was completed during the war, in 1941, when Strauss was 77, and first performed in Munich in 1942, not long before the stately old Munich opera house was destroyed...
...Although Strauss, particularly as a younger man, was regarded as a revolutionary and a destructive influence, there can be ri() doubt that Stefan Zweig was right when he said that with Strauss the great tradition that goes back to Handel and Bach was continued into our own day...
...He would be grateful, however, if I could construct a few complicated forms which would give him the possibility of particularly colorful development...
...Why, because Marek needed to make the point to justify the theme of his book, Strauss as a "non-hero...
...While one was explaining the material to him he would be putting it into dramatic form, and, what was even more astonishing, adjusting it to the limits of his own capacity, which he grasped with almost unbelievable clarity...
...After Elektra Strauss made up his mind 'to write a Mozart opera...
...Richard Strauss, in contrast to most of the great composers, enjoyed not only a long life, but a life, one can believe, that came about as close to complete success and fulfillment as is permitted to man, flawed and imperfect creature that he is...
...The Munich tenor, after the first performance, declared he would sing it again only if guaranteed a higher pension, and the orchestra threatened to strike...
...Afterward there was a dinner, for, I think, four hundred...
...Strauss himself wrote that Saloml and Flektra "stand alone among all my works...
...Whatever flaws there may be in t music of Richard Strauss or were in hi as a person—and who among us is wit out flaws?—he continued a great traditi into our own century and left us wor (continued on page 27) 8 The Alternative: An American Spectator May 197 (continued from page 8) which will remain a part of our cultural heritage...
...It was first performed Decem ber 9, 1905 in Dresden, and caused great sensation...
...I went to the loge of Frau Strauss to offer my congratulations...
...In his choice of the tone-poem instead of the traditional symphony, Strauss was seeking his own means of expression, but, as the following from a letter to Billow written at the time of the composition of Macbeth makes clear, he was well aware of the paramount importance of form: "If one wishes to create a work of art that is coherent in tone and structure, and if it is to have such an effect on the listener, then what the composer wishes to say must have taken form in his mind...
...the hundreds of vehicles, the crowds of curious people in the streets, then the beginning, the tension, then, after the second act, the sense of success...
...In his memoirs (published in Stockholm in 1944), Zweig has the following to say About Strauss: "I was well aware of the honor of such an offer...
...In the Sinfonia Domestica, Strauss, as he said, undertook "to give a musical picture of married life...
...if he made compromises to the powers of the world, he remained true to his art...
...As a reward for his graduation from the classical Gymnasium, where he did well, Franz took Richard to Bayreuth, and the following winter, with proper introductions, sent him to Vienna, where he played the piano part for a public performance of his violin concerto, and received the only favorable comment from the redoubtable critic Eduard Hanslick he was ever to have...
...everything in :his snake pit is rotten, putrid, decaying, while the music, in its unprecedented de--nands on the orchestra, a truly gigantic apparatus even larger than that of Salome,' glitters, shines, seduces, inderlines every word and gesture...
...It was also in Weimar that he conducted the first performance of Engelbert Humperdinck's Hansel and Gretel, which the composer, then entirely unknown, had sent to Strauss...
...But for music not to lose itself in complete arbitrariness, to dissolve in emptiness, it needs the limits of form, and such a boundary is formed by a program...
...Marek, it is rather revealing that his own photograph on the jacket of his book is larger than that of Richard Strauss...
...Strauss's first great success would be with his tone-poems...
...The word should be emphasized differently...
...In such music as Heldenleben and Zarathustra he doubtless expressed the spirit and inadequacies of his time, but because he never cut himself off from a great tradition, he was also able to rise above them...
...Heldenleben is written for a very large orchestra, which Strauss uses with the complete mastery now at his command...
...In his letter of reply, Strauss explained his reasons for using a program...
...The subtitle of the work is "A Conversation Piece for Music," which is exactly what it is...
...particularly remember a performance of Elektra many years ago in Cologne, the iramatic effect of which was heightened, f possible, by the Elektra collapsing at he climax of her great, incredibly demanding aria at the beginning of the optra...
...This is only possible in consequence of the inspiration of a poetical idea, whether this accompanies the work as program or not...
...I declared myself ready, and at the first meeting proposed the theme of 'The Silent Woman' of Ben Jonson as a motive for an opera, and was pleasantly surprised at how quickly and clearly Strauss accepted all my suggestions...
...Rosenkavalier was an immediate success, and is still one of the most popular operas, not only in Germany and Austria, but wherever opera is given...
...I must say that I fail to see much winging above the times by Mr...
...The two tone-poems written during the first years of Strauss's engagement as conductor in Berlin, Heldenleben and the Sinfonia Domestica, are his last works in this form...
...Marek tells us, "as it attacked his people...
...There were several other collaborators after Hofmannsthal's sudden death in 1929, the first, Stefan Zweig, whose literary gifts Strauss greatly admired...
...He was now ready to begin his musical career...
...In the opinion of the excellent English musician and critic Norman Del Mar, "Strauss had too much of a sense of humor pompously to proclaim himself a hero to all the world...
...There were other operas...
...Billow wrote to a friend that it sounded "overpowering," and was enough to make him into an optimist...
...such astonishing dramatic understanding...
...Mine are always short themes...
...Not long before his death, in a conversation with a friend in Zurich, Strauss is reported to have said that his affirmation of faith included "the Mozart melody as the purest expression of the human soul, and the Wagner opera, in which he saw the peak of the cultural development of the West...
...the divided violas and cellos, all with mutes, the horns also all muted, had a perfectly magical sound...
...In Capriccio it is not the composer's intention to overwhelm us, at it was, perhaps, in Heldenleben, nor to plumb the depths of human emotion and desire, as in Salome, but to express his love for the opera and his conception of the true purpose of art...
...One can almost see the nished opera taking form in their exhange of letters: "For the end of the ird act, the concluding duet of Sophie nd Octavian, I have a very pretty meldy...
...Whateve Mahler may have thought, the New Yor critics were utterly appalled, and afte one performance it was withdrawn...
...Two fairly recent, widely-heralded books, I should perhaps mention, take a rather different view of Richard Strauss and his achievement than is indicated in the foregoing...
...Strauss's wife Pauline, who was a fine singer—the bes interpreter of his songs, he said—at the hands of Barbara Tuchman becomes teutonic fury: she "practiced house wifery," we are told, "with ruthless fa naticism," shrieked at the maids if the linen closets were not arranged in "math ematically perfect rows," and treate( visitors with "arrangements which ex hibited a talent for organization...
...Strauss's life, from his birth in the placid Munich of Ludwig II to his death in 1949 in a shattered, divided Europe, spanned a period of violent change...
Vol. 9 • May 1976 • No. 8
