“I may not be a first-rate composer,” declared Richard Strauss with characteristic self-deprecation, “but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” He was speaking in 1947, aged 83, during a golden Indian summer which yielded such works as Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs.
Strauss was most definitely a first-rate composer, particularly in the realm of opera, from the succès de scandale of Salome (1905) to the wistful “conversation piece”, Capriccio (1942). He also excelled at writing tone poems, where he harnessed the dramatic power of the Wagnerian opera orchestra and unleashed it into the concert hall with flair and opulence.
Strauss was born into a musical family in Munich, 11th June 1864. His father, Franz Strauss, was Principal Horn of the Munich Court Orchestra, and had an important influence on his son’s musical education. A prodigy in composition, by the time he left school in 1882, he had 140 works under his belt. Through Franz’s connections, Hans von Bülow commissioned the Suite in B flat major for 13 wind instruments for the Meiningen Orchestra and invited the young Strauss to conduct its November 1884 premiere. This led to von Bülow offering Strauss the post of assistant conductor at Meiningen, launching a parallel career that continued through his long life, including key posts in Munich, Berlin, Vienna and at the Bayreuth Festival.
In Meiningen, Strauss was encouraged to adopt the symphonic poem as a genre and the triumph of Don Juan (1889) led to him being acclaimed as Wagner’s heir. In 1894 came the premiere of his first opera, Guntram, where the lead soprano role was taken by Pauline de Ahna, a few months before they married. Pauline was ill-tempered and outspoken – quite the opposite to Richard – yet theirs was a happy marriage and she was depicted musically as the hero’s companion in Ein Heldenleben and in the Symphonia domestica. Strauss’ opera Intermezzo is a thinly veiled portrait of their happy marriage.
As well as Pauline, Strauss was generally in love with the soprano voice itself and his greatest roles – Salome, Elektra, the Marschallin, Ariadne, Arabella, Daphne – were written for sopranos, as well as the vast majority of his nearly 200 Lieder.
Salome was Strauss’ big operatic breakthrough. With his next opera, Elektra, a study in bloody revenge, Strauss went to the very edge of the atonal abyss… only to swiftly withdraw. Elektra was Strauss’ first collaboration with Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The would produce five more operas together, including Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten. In 1920, they were among the co-founders of the Salzburg Festival.
Strauss’ reputation was later tainted by association with the Third Reich. In 1933, he was appointed President of Germany’s Reichsmusikkammer (Chamber of State Music) as well as Principal Conductor at Bayreuth, replacing Arturo Toscanini who had resigned in protest against the Nazis. Toscanini was not impressed: “To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.”
But Strauss was no Nazi. His daughter-in-law, Alice, was Jewish and he did much to protect her and his grandchildren. When he insisted on using Stefan Zweig, a Jewish librettist, for his opera Die schweigsame Frau, the Nazis fired Strauss from his official posts.
Postwar, Strauss’ name was cleared at the Allied denazification tribunals, after which he returned to live out his final years in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the villa he had built on the royalties earned from Salome. He died on 8th September 1949. From his death-bed, he remarked to Alice that “dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung”.
1Salome
Based on Oscar Wilde’s notorious play, Strauss turned Salome into an equally notorious opera: bloody, biblical and erotic. The Judean princess, fascinated by the imprisoned John the Baptist but rejected by him, performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for her stepfather, Herod, who has promised her anything she requests. When she asks for the head of the prophet as her reward, he is revulsed, but yields to her demand. The opera is lushly scored, really a tone poem with singing. Strauss himself described Salome as “a scherzo with a fatal conclusion”.
2An Alpine Symphony
Eine Alpensinfonie was the last of Strauss’ tone poems (1915), taking its inspiration from Nietzsche. The struggle between man and his natural surroundings is depicted in the form of a dawn-to-dusk trek, the ascent and descent from an alpine mountain serving as a metaphor for the exaltation of nature. It was written for a huge orchestra – around 125 players – its instrumentation including a wind machine, cowbells, organ and a massive brass section. At the final rehearsal, Strauss quipped, “You see, I have finally learned how to orchestrate.”