The German Genius

Elektra , Strauss thought a comedy was needed (he was not wrong) and Hofmannsthal provided the idea. Although there had been no widely acclaimed German comic opera since Die Meistersinger in 1868, Der Rosenkavalier had a difficult birth. Hofmannsthal was trying to lead Strauss to a different aesthetic, lighter, more sophisticated, with no burdensome psychological archetypes. “People do not die for love in Hofmannsthal’s world.” 32 Is this why, for many, Strauss appeared to stop after this opera?
     
     
    In their day, three other German composers were overshadowed by Richard Strauss. Gustav Mahler was well known in his lifetime but chiefly as a conductor, as the main figure in what are remembered as the “golden years” of the Vienna Opera, the decade between 1897 and 1907. His symphonies were heard but not often. Anton Bruckner’s following was even smaller. Max Reger had his followers and there was at least a vogue for his music after he died. But not until the 1960s did Bruckner and Mahler find any kind of general popularity. 33
    Bruckner, born in Ansfelden, Upper Austria, in 1824, studied at the monastery of St. Florian, known for its magnificent Altdorfer altarpiece. He became choirmaster and organist there, playing for its community of Augustine monks. He was close to being a peasant. Photographs show that his head was shaven, and accounts record that his clothes were homemade. Despite this and his rural accent, he was appointed teacher of organ and theory at the Vienna Conservatory in 1868 and made full professor not long afterward; he was also given parallel appointments at the University of Vienna. These were serious positions, such that leading conductors, Mahler among them, started to pay attention to his music. But Bruckner’s problem was with the critics, not the conductors, in particular with Eduard Hanslick, Brahms’s champion in the press. Bruckner always suspected that Brahms was the dark shadow behind Hanslick. 34
    Bruckner never lost his air of provincial awkwardness and, in the middle of his lectures, delivered in his peasant garb, he would stop everything and kneel to pray when the Angelus sounded. But he was sophisticated enough in music, and people were forced to acknowledge it. He loved slow, solemn, deliberate music, and became known in Vienna as the “Adagio-Komponist.” 35 Critics said he composed the same symphony nine times, but the unhurried serenity of his music has helped it endure.
    Mahler was the opposite. For many of his critics, his music is much too neurotic, though Mahler afficionados are, if anything, even more fanatical than those of Bruckner. Mahler, a patient of Freud’s, was typical of one kind of Viennese, who took life seriously, anxious to make sense out of their circumstances. 36 The difference between Beethoven’s struggles and Mahler’s has been well put: Beethoven was a titan and a heroic figure, Mahler was a “psychic weakling,” a sentimentalist, a “manic-depressive with a sadistic streak,” who took four-hour walks with Freud as a form of therapy. His orchestras respected him but rarely enjoyed the experience. His music has been attacked as “monotonous.” 37
    Born in Kalist, Bohemia, in 1860, Mahler was master of all he surveyed for ten years in Vienna. To his credit, his approach—unpopular though it was—worked; under him the opera was revitalized and cleared of debt. Avant-garde productions proliferated and so did the furors. Mahler was pointed out in the street to visitors by cabdrivers who referred to him simply as “Der Mahler!” He was essentially a Romantic composer (especially in the Third and Eighth Symphonies), less harsh than Wagner and less progressive than Strauss. 38
    T HE E MANCIPATION OF THE D ISSONANCE AND THE M USICAL E QUIVALENT OF E= MC 2
     
    Richard Strauss was ambivalent about Arnold Schoenberg. He thought he would be better off “shovelling snow” than composing, yet recommended him for a Liszt scholarship (the revenue of the Liszt Foundation was used to help composers or pianists). Born in 1874 into a poor family, Arnold Schoenberg—like Brahms and Bruckner—always had a serious disposition and was largely self-taught. A small, wiry man, “easily unimpressed,” who went bald early on, Schoenberg was strikingly inventive—he carved his own chessmen, bound his own books, painted (Wassily Kandinsky was a fan), and built a typewriter for music. 39 In Vienna he frequented the cafés Landtmann and Griensteidl,