The Proud Tower (58 page)

“You thief!” she screamed. “You have the nerve to show yourself? I’m not going with you. You’re rotten.” Hurriedly pushed into Mahler’s office, she continued her berating behind closed doors until Strauss stumbled out followed by his mate who announced in awful tones that she was returning to the hotel and “I sleep alone tonight.”

“Can’t I walk with you at least?” Strauss begged humbly.

“All right—ten steps behind me!” and she stalked off followed by the hero of the evening at a respectful distance. Later, looking subdued and exhausted, he rejoined the Mahlers for a late supper and spent the remainder of the evening with pencil and paper figuring out the royalties in the event of a major or minor success. Making money interested him as much as any aspect of his profession.

Strauss composed
Ein
Hėldenleben
in the summer of 1898, describing it as “a largish tone poem … with lots of horns, always expressive of the heroic.” When finished it played for forty minutes, longer than any of his previous works. Artists had often portrayed themselves before, but Strauss, reflecting the national mood, was probably the first to name his self-portrait a Hero. He conducted the premiere himself on March 3, 1899, which, considering the provocative title, the nature of the music and the program notes, displayed considerable bravado.
Heldenleben
was divided into six sections, dealing with “The Hero,” his “Adversaries,” his “Consort,” his “Battle,” his “Works of Peace” and finally his “Escape from the World and Fulfillment of Life.” In form it was an expanded sonata on a vast scale with recognizable statements of theme, development and recapitulation. After the Hero is proclaimed by the horns in a proud theme rising to fortissimo, the woodwinds introduce the Adversaries in busy, sniggering music that as plainly says “critics” as the bleating brasses in
Don Quixote
said “sheep.” The Consort is played by solo violin in a series of cadenzas, alternately seductive and shrewish, with outspoken not to say painfully frank marks of expression on the score, among them, “
Heuchlerisch schmachtend
” (Hypocritically gushing), plus “frivolously,” “haughtily,” “affectionately,” and at the last, in a passionate and moving love duet, “tenderly and lovingly.” Meanwhile three trumpeters have tiptoed off stage and suddenly from a distance sound the call to arms. With fiercely scurrying strings, rattling kettledrums, fanfares of brasses and thunder of bass drums, the battle rages in a confused crescendo of noise that, not unlike real war, sounds as if all the generals had blundered. To the ears of 1899 it sounded “hideous.” Through the turmoil the Hero’s theme returns triumphantly. His Works of Peace, making the autobiographical point unmistakable, are themes from the composer’s earlier works. The Hero’s final apotheosis is accomplished to muted solemn music which in later program notes Strauss designated as “funeral rites with flags and laurel wreaths lowered on a hero’s grave.”

Listening to the second performance at Cologne a few weeks later, Romain Rolland, fresh from his own exhilarating battle at the opening of
Les Loups
, was transported with excitement. Although some auditors hissed and some members of the orchestra even laughed at the music, “I clenched my teeth and trembled and my heart saluted the young Siegfried resurrected.” In the “tremendous din and uproar” of the battle music, Rolland heard “the storming of towns, the terrible charge of cavalry which makes the earth tremble and our hearts beat.” He thought it “the most splendid battle that has ever been painted in music.” There were gulfs in which the musical idea disappeared for a time but emerged again, sometimes mediocre in melodic sentiment but grand in “harmonic and rhythmic invention and orchestral brilliance.” Strauss seemed to Rolland to express a will “heroic, dominating, eager and powerful to a sublime degree.” Touched too by the Nietzschean spirit, Rolland found this the reason why Strauss is noble and at the present quite unique. One feels in him the force that has dominion over men.” In the midst of admiration, however, Rolland also felt French and could not resist drawing political lessons. Now that Strauss, he decided, like Germany, had “proved his power by victory, his pride knows no limit.” In him as a man “of vital energy, morbidly overexcited, unbalanced but controlled by an effort of will power,” the Frenchman saw reflected the face of Germany. Nevertheless Rolland became his friend and celebrator.

He had met Strauss for the first time eight years before in Bayreuth and again in January, 1899, when Strauss conducted
Zarathustra
in Paris. It was the Dionysus of Nietzsche let loose. “Aha!” Rolland wrote then, “Germany as the All-Powerful will not keep her balance for long. Nietzsche, Strauss, the Kaiser—giddiness blows through her brain. Neroism is in the air!” Rolland thought he could detect in the reiterated theme of Disgust in the tone poems and in the deaths that concluded them, a German “sickness hidden beneath the strength and military tautness.” He heard it again in
Heldenleben.

When on this occasion he called on Strauss at his apartment in Charlottenburg, Berlin’s fashionable suburb, he found him more Bavarian than Nietzschean, with “a certain humorous buffoonery, paradoxical and satirical like that of Till Eulenspiegel.” Like Till he delighted to scandalize the philistines. He alternated between energy and bouts of “laziness, softness and ironic indifference.” Though cordial and well-behaved toward Rolland, he could be short with others, scarcely listening to what was said to him and occasionally muttering, “
Was? Ach, so so.
” He behaved badly at table, sitting with his legs crossed at the side, holding his plate under his chin to eat and stuffing himself with sweets. In the drawing room he might lie down on a sofa, punching the cushions with his fists, and “insolently indifferent to those around him,” fall asleep with his eyes open.

It was difficult to decide whether he was Till or Superman. In an article for the
Revue de Paris
Rolland presented him as “the artist-type of this new Germany, the reflection of a heroic pride close to delirium, of a Nietzschean egoism which preaches the cult of force and disdain for weakness.” But he had to admit the picture was overdrawn. Rolland suffered from the same difficulty as Matthew Arnold’s niece in Max Beerbohm’s cartoon who was forced to ask, “Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why, will you not be always wholly serious?” Strauss would not live up to his image either and was quite prepared to admit it. “You’re right,” he wrote to Rolland. “I’m no hero; I haven’t got the necessary strength; I’m not made for battle.… I don’t want to make the effort. At the moment all I want is to make sweet and happy music. No more heroics.” The fact was that in the surrounding Nietzschean ethos,
Heldenleben
had seemed like the thing to do; it reflected the national mood more than his own.

Strauss was a string plucked by the
Zeitgeist.
Although he had never known any but the most comfortable bourgeois circumstances, he sensed and expressed the revolutionary rumble of the working class in two of his finest songs so effectively that one, “Der Arbeitsmann” (The Workingman) became an anthem of the Socialist party. Another, “Das Lied des Steinklopfers” (Song of the Stonecutter), was his own favorite among his songs. When these were sung by Germany’s leading concert baritone, Ludwig Wüllner, with the composer at the piano, they had such dramatic power that “hearing these grim defiant sounds,” wrote a critic, “was like hearing the Marseillaise of tomorrow.” Of another of his songs for the male voice, the “Nächtlicher Gesang” (Night Song), it was said that it could “make one shudder in broad daylight.”

In
Heldenleben
, however, convinced admirers began to detect evidence of a deep-seated flaw in the composer. Ernest Newman believed Strauss had enriched music with more new ideas than anyone since Wagner and had “put into music a greater energy, a greater stress of feeling and a greater weight of thinking than any other composer of the day.” Yet he did not seem able to restrain an unworthy desire to “stagger humanity.” His technical facility and command over ideas was such that he could do anything he wanted and there was no limit to his inventiveness, but he could not keep it within bounds. Newman would willingly have left the hall during the “sniggering, snarling and grunting” of the Adversaries in
Heldenleben
, which he considered “freak” music like the sheep in
Don Quixote.
He felt a failure of taste, a streak of vulgarity in a man willing to spoil “two of the finest scores of the Nineteenth Century” with such “monstrosities” as these. Such reactions merely stimulated Strauss to further freaks as a sign of his contempt for what were claimed to be the “eternal” laws of beauty in music. The fact that he insisted on making the critics pay for their seats, causing “screams of agony” all over the Continent, did not help matters.

To the younger critics Strauss’s discords and dissonances were not as distressing as his freaks. Lawrence Gilman, an American, thought the dissonance of the Battle music, like that depicting the mental confusion of Don Quixote, was “eloquent and meaningful” and quite different from that other kind achieved, as Whistler said, “by the simple expedient of sitting on the keyboard.” Apart from the freaks there were enough marvels of music in Strauss’s work to have put him above the sneers and carping; it was the non-musical aspect of his work—that is, the didactic realism of his program notes—which kept him in the center of critical furor. In the same spirit in which Philip Ernst, having omitted the tree from his picture, decided it must be cut down, Strauss insisted on painting the tree and then hanging a sign on it saying, “This is a tree.” As a result critics leaped to take issue, as when Newman said of a trombone passage in
Zarathustra
labeled “Disgust,” which followed “Delights and Passions,” that “it no more suggests disgust than it does the toothache.” It was no defence by his friends to insist that Strauss wanted his music to be listened to as music and that he added the program notes only under the urgent pressure of colleagues and publishers. An artist certain of his standards would not have made the concession and in any case the literary labels were in his mind and scribbled on his scores when he composed.

In France Claude Debussy, too, was writing descriptive music. Rather than literal and narrative, like that of Strauss, it was elusive and shimmering, after the manner of the Impressionists in painting and the Symbolists in poetry. The Symbolist credo was to suggest, not to name, an object. Where Strauss stated, Debussy suggested. “If people insist on wanting to understand what happens in a symphonic poem, we may as well give up writing them,” he said. Literal meaning was a matter of equal unconcern to Sibelius. When asked by a friend alter listening to a recording of his Fourth Symphony what it really meant, he said after a short pause, “Play the record again.”

Debussy, however, admired Strauss, who was two years his junior, and acknowledged that the
Verklärung
(Transfiguration) in
Tod und Verklärung
“takes place before our very eyes.” When he heard
Till Eulenspiegel
in 1903 he thought its flouting of musical laws amounted almost “to an hour of music in a lunatic asylum.… You do not know whether to roar with laughter or groan with pain and you are filled with wonder when you find anything in its customary place.” Nevertheless he thought it a work of “genius” and was awed by its “amazing orchestral assurance” and the “mad rhythm that sweeps us along from beginning to end and forces us to share in the hero’s pranks.” What impressed him most about
Heldenleben
, which he also heard in 1903, was its “cyclonic energy.” The listener is no longer master of his emotions: “I say again that it is impossible to withstand his irresistible domination.” Debussy’s own orchestral prelude,
L’Après-midi d’un Faune
, based on Mallarmé’s poem, and his
Nocturnes
for orchestra, which appeared in the nineties, led Strauss to return the compliment. Debussy was “a remarkable and altogether unique genius,” he said, “within his own limited domain.”

Strauss was always rather surprised when someone else produced work of high quality. “I had no idea that anyone except myself was capable of writing such good music as this,” he remarked “charmingly and characteristically” to Beecham on hearing a work of Delius. He never listened to Puccini and did not know
Manon
from
Tosca
, or
Butterfly
from
Bohème
, although Puccini’s works were exactly contemporary with his own. Italian opera was not highly regarded in Germany. He was generous, however, in performing the works of other contemporaries. Unable to conduct modern music at the Berlin Royal Opera while the Kaiser’s taste held sway, he founded an orchestra of his own, the Tonkünstler, to encourage “progressive principles” in music. Subsidized by private patrons, the Tonkünstler played all Liszt’s tone poems in chronological order as well as Strauss’s own works and introduced to Berlin performances of Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, Elgar and, if not Debussy, at least his predecessors, Charpentier and d’Indy. Once in London on a visit to the National Gallery in company with Edgar Speyer and Edward Elgar, the group stopped in front of Tintoretto’s “St. George and the Dragon” while Speyer remarked, “Here we have a revolutionary who broke ground at the very end of the glorious Venetian period. Shall we say that Tintoretto was to painting what our friend Richard Strauss is today to music?” Much struck by this remark, Strauss returned to the painting on their way back through the rooms, studied it again and exclaimed, “Speyer is right. I am the Tintoretto of music!”

From this height he could afford, and did not stint, encouragement of less renowned colleagues. On hearing a performance in Düsseldorf in 1902 of Elgar’s
Dream of Gerontius
, based on a poem by Cardinal Newman, Strauss proposed a toast “to the welfare and success of the first English Progressive, Meister Edward Elgar, and of the young progressive school of English composers.” Such tribute from Strauss startled the musical world and aroused the usual critics’ uproar which it amused him to provoke. Though disliking the terms of the compliment all England was impressed and flattered. Strauss was no less appreciative of the ultramodern Schönberg, whose experiments in atonality so impressed him that he arranged for the young composer to be given the Liszt Fellowship and appointment as Professor of Composition in the Stern Academy in Berlin. On the occasion of the premiere of Mahler’s
Third Symphony
in Cologne in 1902, Strauss decided its success by going up to the platform and applauding ostentatiously. From 1900 on, as president of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, founded by Liszt, he invited foreign composers to conduct their new works at the Society’s festivals. Sibelius, whom he invited to present his
Swan of Tuonela
in 1900, found him “extraordinarily amiable.” When Strauss himself took the podium at these concerts he was greeted by the orchestra with a threefold fanfare and by the audience rising to its feet.