Background
Richard Strauss was born in Munich on 2 June 1864, the son of one of the finest French-horn virtuosos of the age.
Richard Strauss was born in Munich on 2 June 1864, the son of one of the finest French-horn virtuosos of the age.
A musical child prodigy, Strauss was engaged in 1885 as assistant to the great conductor, Hans von Bülow, at Meiningen. A year later he was appointed junior conductor at the Munich Opera and within three more years he had already performed at Bayreuth and become a protégé of Cosima Wagner’s.
Before he was thirty, Strauss had won international fame with symphonic poems. In 1898 he was made Royal Prussian Court Conductor in Berlin. By the turn of the century he had not only performed successfully in most West European capitals but was widely recognized as the greatest German composer since Wagner and Brahms. For all his phenomenal success, the young Strauss was a revolutionary innovator and iconoclast who shocked contemporaries with the harsh dissonances of some of his early orchestral works, the deliberate ugliness and macabre eroticism of operas like Salome (1905), drawn from the text of Oscar Wilde.
With Elektra (1909), Strauss began his twenty-year collaboration with the famous Viennese poet and librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Their greatest success, Der Rosenkavalier (1911), a gay, melodious, sensual baroque comedy, brought Strauss to the pinnacle of his fame and popularity. In 1919 Strauss followed in Mahler's wake as Director of the Vienna Opera (a post he held until 1924), but though as productive as ever, his music increasingly lacked the daring, energy and vitality of his youth. Nevertheless, the premières of all his later operaswere major events and, under the Weimar Republic, Strauss enjoyed an Olympian status, comparable only to that of Gerhart Hauptmann in the held of drama.
When the Nazis seized power in Germany, Strauss, although no National Socialist, showed little awareness of the implications, lending his name, prestige and fame to the régime and accepting in 1933 the position of head of the Reich Chamber of Music. He agreed to take the place of the exiled Bruno Walter as guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and deputized for Toscanini at Bayreuth. He even sent a telegram of support to Goebbels for the measures that the régime was taking against the composer Hindemith and his supporter, Furtwängler. Nor did Strauss come out with any public protest against the dismissal of talented Jewish musicians who were often personal friends, though he privately disapproved of Nazi policies in this respect. On the other hand, when Strauss discovered that the name of his Jewish librettist, the renowned writer Stefan Zweig, was to be removed from the opening performance of Die Schweigsame Frau ( The Silent Woman), he threatened to leave Dresden unless it were included.
Strauss’s compositions were in fact played, sung and trumpeted through all the opera houses and concert halls of Nazi Germany, inspiring much imitation by younger and lesser colleagues. He continued to compose throughout the years of the Third Reich, working away in his study at Garmisch, cherishing his family- he protected his Jewish daughter-in-law to whom he was strongly attached - and ignoring the cataclysmic political events in the outside world. Capriccio (1942), an extensive one-act disquisition on the nature of opera, was his nostalgic and evocative farewell to the medium he had served with such distinction for so long. Only at the end of the war with the destruction of the great theatres in Dresden, Berlin, Vienna and Munich, did he appear to grasp the magnitude of the disaster which had befallen Germany and western civilization. In the autumn of 1945 he took refuge in Switzerland, after writing one impassioned last lament for the Germany that had disappeared forever. On 8 June 1948 Richard Strauss was cleared by a de-Nazification court in Munich of all charges that he had participated in the Nazi movement or benefited from the régime.
The eighty-five-year-old composer, one of the giants of German musical history, died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen on 8 September 1949.
Die Frau ohne Schatten
1919Intermezzo
1924Die Ägyptische Helena
1928Arabella
1933Salome
1905Elektra
1909He angrily rejected Zweig’s suggestion that a nom de plume be used to get round the difficulties with the Nazi régime and wrote an exasperated, teasing letter on 17 June 1935 in answer to his librettist’s refusal to write a second libretto for him: This Jewish stubbornness is enough to turn one into an anti-semite! This pride of race, this feeling of solidarity - even I note a difference here! . . . For me there exist only two categories of people: those who have talent and those who have none.’ Strauss claimed to Zweig that he had often told the Nazi leadership ‘that I regard the Streicher-Goebbels [q.v.] anti-Jewish campaign as a shame for German honour, as the lowest kind of warfare of talentless, lazy mediocrity against higher genius. I confess openly that I have received from Jews so much help, sacrifice, friendship and inspiration that it would be a crime not to acknowledge this in greatest gratitude. . . . My worst and most malicious adversaries and foes were “Aryans”.’ The letter was intercepted by the Gestapo and led to Strauss’s dismissal from the Presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer and Chairmanship of the Federation of German Composers. Unfortunately, Strauss then wrote a terrified, cringing letter to Hitler, trying to dispel any notions that he did not take his anti-semitism seriously. However craven this behaviour, much of it stemmed from naivety and the illusion that he was ‘above politics’, as well as the opportunistic desire to promote his own work through the organizational power of the State.