The German Genius

Frau Strauss’s fan one evening with a few notes of the “Blue Danube,” adding the words: “Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.” Richard Strauss called him “the laughing genius of Vienna.” 23
    W AGNER’S N ATURAL S UCCESSOR
     
    Some people in Vienna referred to Richard Strauss (1864–1949) as “the third Strauss” but for others—modernists—he was without question the first, the only Strauss, “the most-discussed man of European music” between Don Juan , which had its premiere in 1886, and 1911, when Der Rosenkavalier was staged. His symphonic poems were considered “the last word in shocking modernism” while Salome and Elektra (1905 and 1909) provoked riots.
    In his early years, an aura of nervous energy and scandalous sensation surrounded the tall, slim Strauss. It was not just the size of his orchestras that attracted and repelled people—often at the same time—but the fact that his music was, for many, painfully dissonant and, moreover, immoral. Salome set music to a text by Oscar Wilde, who had been sent to prison for his homosexuality.
    Paradoxically, Strauss was himself a solid bourgeois, with a sober—even staid—private life. Alma Mahler was at the rehearsal of Feuersnot in 1901 and confided to her diary: “Strauss thought of nothing but money. The whole time he had a pencil in his hand and was calculating the profits to the last penny.” 24 His wife, Pauline, was a grasping woman, once a singer, who would scream at her husband, when he was relaxing at cards, “Richard, go compose!” Their house at Garmisch had three separate door-mats, on each of which Pauline insisted that the composer wipe his feet.
    Until Der Rosenkavalier each of Strauss’s works was different, one from another, exciting and electric. “Then he seems to have hit a wall.” There is no shortage of critics and historians who dismiss all of Strauss’s post- Rosenkavalier oeuvre as a regression, mechanically repetitive and lacking in innovation. 25 Ernest Newman was one of those: “A composer of talent who was once a genius,” is how he summed up the predicament. After Elektra , Newman said, “the premiere of a Strauss opera was no longer an international event.”
    Strauss’s father was a peppery, outspoken man—Franz was “the most celebrated horn player in Germany,” who considered Wagner “subversive.” Richard, born in Munich, was a prodigy, playing the piano at four and a half, the violin shortly afterward, composing at six. Richard’s father, however, had no wish to form him into a second Mozart: it was accepted in the family that the boy would be a musician “but all in good time.” In 1882 he attended the University of Munich though he never took a degree, then spent time in Berlin, playing at musical soirees and in due course met Hans von Bülow. He showed the celebrated conductor his Serenade for Winds in E-flat, op. 7, which was snapped up for the Meiningen Orchestra. In fact, Bülow so loved the Serenade that he commissioned another piece there and then—what became the Suite for Winds in B-flat, op. 4. This, too, impressed Bülow so much so that he appointed Strauss his assistant at Meiningen (it was by then 1885). It was a heady time for the young composer and might have led Strauss in a very different direction, except that in Meiningen he met Alexander Ritter, a violinist with the orchestra. Ritter had married Wagner’s niece and introduced Strauss to Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner himself, and it was the latter who encouraged Strauss to explore new forms of music. Until this point, his compositions had been along largely traditional, familiar lines. The break came in 1889, with Don Juan , his first tone poem. Premiered in Weimar on November 11, it was immediately obvious that a new voice had emerged. 26
    With Don Juan , Strauss staked his claim as Liszt’s—and Wagner’s—natural successor. The score stipulated a vast orchestra and was unprecedented in its difficulty. Its bold leaps and twists of sinuous melody were also new. 27 His standing as a conductor grew in parallel. In 1898 he was appointed conductor at the Royal Opera in Berlin, where he remained until 1918, at which time he took up the post as codirector of the Vienna Opera. Even Pauline was impressed.
    He had his failures. “It is incredible what enemies Guntram [1894] has made for me,” he complained in a letter. “I shall shortly be tried as a dangerous criminal.” 28 In 1905, however, with Salome , he at last