Bad Boy

(See front cover)

In the winter of 1907, Manhattan had its most celebrated operatic scandal. Critics scolded, pulpits seethed. The solemn, stiff-collared directors of the Metropolitan Opera House went into a huddle, sent a word of warning to harried Director Heinrich Conried. The grounds for this protest were moral. Its cause was a new opera which had just been given its Metropolitan premiere. In the opera a necrophilic heroine disrobed before her gloating, drunken stepfather, demanding as the price of her strip tease the head of an imprisoned prophet. To the severed head, duly served up on a platter, she made more or less violent love. The plot was Oscar Wilde's, but the opera's composer had italicized its gruesomeness with uncanny naturalism. For sheer horror nothing like it had ever been witnessed on the austere Metropolitan's stage. When the performance was over, pale, gibbering bluenoses fumed with indignation. After a dress rehearsal and one public showing, Salome was withdrawn from the Metropolitan's repertoire, remained unperformed there for 27 years.*

Author of this melodramatic opera was, and remained, the most talked-about composer of his time, Germany's great bad boy of music, Richard Strauss. Composer Strauss, who had had somewhat similar results with his hair-raising opus in several of the world's important operatic centres, might have been chastened by this experience. But he was not. Before two years were out, he and his librettist, the late Hugo von Hofmannsthal, had turned out another grisly melodrama, a Freudian version of the Greek tragedy Elektra. In this second blood-curdler, the hag-ridden heroine danced gleefully while the dying screeches of her father's murderers floated from behind the backdrop.

Meanwhile, Composer Strauss continued to startle and scandalize staid concert audiences in more subtle ways. He flouted time-honored symphonic proprieties by writing naturalistic musical descriptions of mundane scenes and events. In his symphonic poem, Don Quixote, he made the brass instruments of the orchestra bleat like sheep. In his later Symphonia Domestica, an enormous orchestra of 108 players was set to work imitating the sound of a baby in a bathtub. He boasted that he could depict anything in music recognizably, even a glass of water. Critics deplored his vulgarity, but they had to admit that Composer Strauss was one of the most gifted orchestrators in the history of orchestral music.

Five years ago when Nazis came to power in Germany, 69-year-old Composer Strauss had left most of his musical scandals behind him and settled into a highly respected position as musical Germany's No. 1 composer. Friendly at first to the new regime, he accepted an official post as head of the German Reichsmusikkammer (State Chamber of Music). But independent-minded Strauss soon found himself in conflict with Nazi ideas of musical propriety. Nazi authorities regretted that his favorite librettist, von Hofmannsthal, had been a Jew, but agreed to let bygones be bygones if he would abjure Jewish librettists in the future. Promptly Composer Strauss got himself another Jewish librettist, Austrian-born Dramatist Stefan Zweig, and started work on a new opera called Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman).

It is told that while the opera was being written, Librettist Zweig, worried by Nazi growls, suggested that they call the whole thing off, that Strauss get himself another librettist acceptable to the German authorities. In reply to Librettist Zweig's suggestion, white-haired Strauss wrote a long letter. In it he expressed his contempt for the Nazis, and his hunch that by the time the opera was completed they would be out of power anyhow. The letter was addressed to Zweig in Vienna, but Zweig did not receive it. At the Austrian border, Nazi officials opened the letter and read it. While Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and other prominent Nazi disciplinarians boiled with rage, Composer Strauss went quietly on with his work. But when Die Schweigsame Frau was finally performed in Dresden, Librettist Zweig's name was absent from the programs, and Nazi critics were hostile. It was immediately dropped from the repertory. Months later, Strauss resigned as head of the Musikkammer.

Nazi rage was mollified somewhat when, later the same year, Strauss humbly announced that he had found a new 100% Aryan librettist and was planning an opera on a German historical subject. The librettist: Dr. Joseph Gregor, 50-year-old director of the Theatrical Collection in Vienna's famed National Library. Arrangements were soon made to have Strauss's forthcoming opus premiered at the opening of Munich's world-famed summer opera season. But last week, as the rehearsals were well under way, and the score of the opera was released to the public, war-loving Nazis got another unpleasant surprise. Obstinate Bavarian Strauss and his guaranteed Aryan librettist had concocted an impassioned plea against war. Its title: Friedenstag (The Day of Peace).

At this particular time, an opera extolling peace by any other contemporary composer would probably have been quickly verboten by zealous Nazi censors. But Herr Doktor Richard Strauss is not only Germany's No. 1 composer. As one of the two most eminent composers in the world today (the other is Finland's Jean Sibelius), he is Naziland's No. 1 cultural exhibit. Even though he is a bad boy the Third Reich is loath to spank him.

Friedenstag, which will receive its Nazi-endorsed premiere this week, will probably not take rank with Strauss's earlier operas. It is a short work requiring about 75 minutes for performance, and its music is simpler, less daring, than the brilliant path-breaking music of Composer Strauss's youth. But it contains spots (notably a central love scene) of noble and eloquent music. Its plot, laid in a besieged town at the close of the Thirty Years War, rings fervently with the spirit of pacifism. It depicts the conflict between a do-or-die army commander who has chosen to defend his citadel to the last man, and the humbler, more human beings of the town (including his beautiful wife Maria) who prefer life and love to death with honor. Death does not arrive, however. Instead the enemy marches in with white flags raised, the commander gives in, embraces the enemy leader as a brother. The final curtain closes on a jubilant hymn to love, peace and the rule of reason. Richard II, Composer Strauss has been composing steadily since the age of six, when his Schneiderpolka (Tailor's Polka) was first played for admiring friends in the Strauss home in Munich. His very early work was severely classical, patterned after the work of 18th-Century Mozart. At 25, however, he began to hit his stride as a composer of orchestral tone poems and operas, developed a brilliant style strongly influenced by the late great Richard Wagner, and a virtuoso technique of orchestration that has been equaled by few other composers. Soon he was popularly known as Richard II. And to a certain extent this popular title was justified. For though Strauss never came within gunshot of the great Composer-Philosopher Wagner's eminence, he became the most discussed and most revolutionary composer of the post-Wagnerian period. And the fact that Strauss's lusty music skips in lusty, plodding, Nationalist Wagner's technical footsteps rather than in those of the cerebral modernists, has undoubtedly saved him a lot of trouble in Naziland in the past five years.

To U. S. concert audiences Strauss has long been the most consistently popular of contemporary symphonic composers. Though recent seasons have given Sibelius a slight lead in public favor, Strauss has held his place steadily for nearly 30 years. This U. S. popularity rests mainly on a half-dozen lusty, brilliantly-orchestrated tone poems, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel, Ein Helden-leben (Life of a Hero), Don Quixote and Thus Spake Zarathustra, which are played by the major U. S. symphony orchestras almost as often as Beethoven symphonies. Connoisseurs rate him also as the greatest living operatic composer, consider the light, glistening Viennese comedy-opera Der Rosenkavalier to be his masterpiece.* Last season Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, scene of Salome's early snubbing, presented a Strauss Cycle including Salome, Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, played them all to packed houses.

What bothers politicians most about Strauss is the fact that the old man consistently refuses to take politics seriously. Questioned recently about his political opinions, he replied with an expressive shrug, "Ich bin kuenstler" ("I am an artist"). For an artist, genial, beer-drinking Strauss is an unusually shrewd business man. Famed as a hard bargainer, he is one of the few men in history to make the art of highbrow musical composition a sound and dividend-paying proposition.

When he is not guest-conducting at one of Germany's numerous opera-houses and concert-halls (he is also one of Germany's top-notch orchestra leaders), Strauss lives quietly and well with his wife and seven servants at his home in the little Bavarian mountain resort town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Originally the Villa Strauss at Zoeppritzstrasse No. 46, was a simple, comfortable country establishment. But Garmisch-Partenkirchen, scene of the 1936 winter Olympics, has recently become a tourist and winter sport centre, and the white-haired composer has had to fortify himself against snoopers. Today, the Strauss home and adjoining five acres of formal gardens are surrounded by a five-foot wall topped by an 18-inch barbed wire fence. Only entrance to the grounds is a thick iron door equipped with a large bell-push and a speaking tube. The speaking tube runs through the grounds a good 50 yards to the servants' quarters. At one time the good Dr. Strauss had this speaking tube connected with a phonograph mechanism. When unwanted visitors rang the bell, a record would repeat monotonously, "Dr. Strauss is not at home. . . . Dr. Strauss is not at home." A second push of the bell would stop the record and open the door. But only Strauss's intimate friends knew enough to ring twice. Nowadays, when a visitor has been duly interrogated through the speaking tube, an electric control opens the door. But accredited visitors to the Villa Strauss are few & far between.

A genial, hospitable host, Strauss looks more like a conservative country squire than a world-renowned composer and conductor. Ruddy-complexioned, with clear, pale-blue childlike eyes, he carries his full six foot three with an easy natural dignity. Bent slightly with the weight of his 74 years, his tall figure is still spare and vigorous. There is no trace of pose or affectation about him.

Though he follows international affairs with a lively interest, Composer Strauss is fundamentally a man of old-world tastes. A connoisseur of painting, he prefers, and owns, pictures by El Greco, Rubens, Tintoretto. His favorite reading is history and biography, and he will spend many hours at a stretch poring over formidable, many-volumed records of the past.

About his contemporaries, and contemporary music in general, Composer Strauss is reticent. The music of his great contemporary, Sibelius, he knows only slightly. That which he does know, he likes. Russia's boisterous, chameleonesque Igor Stravinsky leaves him somewhat nonplussed, but impressed. Germany's Paul Hindemith, whose music is now banned in the Third Reich, he will not discuss. The mere mention of famed, exiled Atonalist Arnold Schonberg brings a pained grimace to Strauss's usually serene face, a shrug to his vigorous shoulders. For jazz he has only one word "scheusslich" ("abominable"). Specially admired by him is the work of his friend the late Sir Edward Elgar, composer-laureate of England. Asked what he thinks about modern music in general, he answers with a good-natured grin "Meine Musik ist die Moderniste," ("My music is the most modern"). To old-world-minded Strauss, the greatest composer who ever lived was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. But he follows this estimate with great praise of Beethoven.

As a composer, Strauss is methodical and diligent. He thinks his works out during long walks in the neighboring mountains. His favorite walk for composing purposes is along the glacier-green waters of the river Loisach which runs through the town. Having completed his mental conception of a work, he writes it out in pencil in one of the hundreds of music notebooks he keeps handy for the purpose. Seldom does he consult the piano or the violin (he plays both) while composing. His preliminary pencil sketch is elaborated in ink in a second notebook. Other elaborations follow, each in a separate notebook. When the perfect version has been obtained, he writes out the full orchestra score. When completed, this is photographed, and a corrected copy sent to his Berlin publishers.

When Composer Strauss is not composing, or reading history and biography, he is usually to be found playing cards (skat) with a local lawyer named Hirschberger. The 74-year-old musician is, privately, even more jealous of his prowess as a skat-player than of his reputation as a composer. Of his skat-playing, and the beer-drinking that inevitably goes with it, his sharp-tongued wife Pauline strongly disapproves, however. And often the good Doktor Strauss is forced to wait until his wife goes visiting, before he and Lawyer Hirschberger can sneak away for a game at a neighboring inn. It is darkly hinted by the townspeople of Garmisch-Partenkirchen that Strauss sometimes returns as late as three a. m. from these nights of conviviality.

Strauss's fondness for skat, Wife Pauline's dislike of it, and a few other tensions of the Strauss household, once furnished Composer Strauss with a subject for an opera. The opera, Intermezzo (1924), has as its principal characters a musician and a scolding wife. The first scene in Act II depicts a skat party.

Asked which is his favorite work, Skat-player Strauss replies without a second's hesitation "Intermezzo." Asked which he considers his finest work, his reply is equally unhesitating: "Intermezzo." The reasons for this preference are, he quaintly says, "personal."

To the average U. S. man in the street the name Strauss is connected with Viennese waltzes and comic operas. But neither Vienna's Johann Strauss who wrote the Blue Danube, nor his father, Johann Strauss the Elder, nor yet Oscar Straus, who wrote the Chocolate Soldier, are any relation whatever to Bavaria's Richard. Richard came of a stolid family of South German musicians and brewers. His father, white-mustached Franz Strauss, was the most famous horn player of his time, played the horn often under Richard Wagner's baton. His mother's family owned one of Munich's most famous breweries, that of the foaming Pschorr Braeu which is still drunk, and spoken of with reverence, by good Munchners. It was, in fact, in the ancient Pschorr brewery building, seventy-four years ago, that beer-drinking, skat-playing, close-to-immortal Composer Strauss first saw the light.

* Two years after its U. S. premiere at the Metropolitan, however, Impresario Oscar Hammerstein presented it to packed houses at the Manhattan Opera House. His strip teaser was famed Soprano Mary Garden.

* Strauss's six best-known tone poems are all available for the phonograph. Victor has issued Don Juan (Fritz Busch and the London Philharmonic); Till Eulenspiegel (Fritz Busch and the B.B.C. Symphony); Death and Transfiguration (Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra); Don Quixote (Sir Thomas Beecham and the N. Y. Philharmonic-Symphony); Ein Heldenleben (Willem Mengelberg and the N. Y Philharmonic-Symphony); Thus Spake Zarathustra (Sergei Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony). Victor has also issued an abridged performance of the complete opera Rosenkavalier (Robert Heger and the Vienna Philharmonic, with Lotte Lehmann, Elisabeth Schumann, Richard Mayr and other famous singers). Strauss's own interpretations of his Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel and Don Quixote (all with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra) have been issued by Brunswick. Excerpts are also currently available from the operas Salome, Arabella, and Die Aegyptische Helena (Decca), the ballet-pantomime Schlagobers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.