The German Genius

had an opera that galvanized the public as much as his symphonic poems had done, though the scandal it provoked had as much to do with its plot as his score. Who but the most puritanical would not want to see Salome make love to the severed head of Jochanaan, or be there as she took off her seven veils one by one? 29
    The opera was based on Oscar Wilde’s play, which had been banned in London, but Strauss’s score “added fuel to the fire.” To highlight the psychological contrast between Herod and Jochanaan, Strauss employed the unusual device of writing in two keys simultaneously. The continuous dissonance of the score reaches its culmination with Salome’s moan as she awaits execution. This, rendered as a B-flat on a solo double bass, registers the painful drama of Salome’s plight: she is butchered by guards crushing the life out of her with their shields.
    After the first night, opinions varied. Cosima Wagner was convinced the new opera was “Madness!…wedded to indecency.” The Kaiser would only allow Salome to be performed in Berlin after the manager of the opera house shrewdly modified the ending, so that a Star of Bethlehem rose at the end, a simple trick that changed everything, and the opera was performed fifty times in that one season. Ten of Germany’s sixty opera houses chose to follow Berlin’s lead so that within a few months Strauss could afford to build his villa at Garmisch in the art nouveau style. Despite its success in Germany, it was banned outright in New York and Chicago (in the former city after one night). Vienna also banned the opera, but in Graz the opening night was attended by Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Mahler, and a band of young music lovers who traveled down from Vienna, including an out-of-work would-be artist named Adolf Hitler, who later told Strauss’s relatives he had borrowed money to make the trip.
    Despite the offense Salome caused in some quarters, its eventual success contributed to Strauss’s appointment as musical director of the Hofoper in Berlin. He began work there with a one-year leave of absence to complete his next opera, Elektra . This was his first major collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929), whose play of the same name, realized by that magician of the German theater, Max Reinhardt, Strauss had seen in Berlin. What appealed to him was its theme, so very different from the noble, elegant, calm image of Greece traditionally set out in the writing of Winckelmann and Goethe.
    Elektra uses a larger orchestra even than Salome , 111 players, to produce a much more dissonant, “even painful experience.” The original Clytemnestra was Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who described the early performances as “frightful…We were a set of mad women…There is nothing beyond Elektra …We have come to a full stop.” 30
    Strauss and Hofmannsthal were trying to do two things. At the most obvious level, they were doing in musical theater what the Expressionist painters of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter (see Chapter 27) were doing in their art, using unexpected and “unnatural” colors, disturbing distortion and jarring juxtapositions to change people’s perceptions of the world. Most scholars had inherited an idealized picture of antiquity from Winckelmann and Goethe, but Nietzsche had changed all that, stressing the instinctive, savage, irrational, and darker aspects of pre-Homeric ancient Greece (fairly obvious, for example, if one reads the Iliad and the Odyssey without preconceptions). But Elektra wasn’t only about the past. 31 There can be little doubt that Hofmannsthal had read Studies in Hysteria and The Interpretation of Dreams . The presence of Freud’s, and Nietzsche’s, ideas on stage, undermining traditional understanding of ancient myth and the exploration of the unconscious world beneath the surface, did not make people content, but it made them think.
    Elektra made Strauss think too, and he abandoned the discordant line he had followed from Salome to Elektra . In doing so he left the way open for others, of whom the most innovative would be Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951).
    Elektra had achieved one other thing. It had brought Strauss and Hofmannsthal together. For nigh on a quarter of a century, Strauss and Hofmannsthal collaborated— Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Arabella (1933). Their most fruitful collaboration after Elektra was Der Rosenkavalier . After the dark depths of