And Another Thing

28 March 2009

Richard Strauss: the Bavarian Joker in the Pack

No one ever made more musical jokes than Strauss, and good ones too, from bleating sheep to the use of a wind-machine in Ein Heldenleben. Musicians can be divided, broadly, into two classes: those who think Beethoven the greatest composer, highly serious people, often humourless and apocalyptic, and those who take things more lightly and prefer Mozart. Strauss was emphatically a Mozartian. That was all very well in the joyous, dancing and frivolous years before the first world war spoiled everything in Europe, for ever. At that time Strauss was the most successful composer in the world, beating even Puccini, and many regarded him as the best. But after the horrors of the war he fell from favour and never really recovered. The north German intellectuals, in Hamburg and Berlin, and the trend-setting Saxon nobs in snooty Dresden, thought him unserious. Why didn’t he write symphonies like Brahms or go modern like Hindemith or Webern? The jokes were in deplorable taste, and was it true that in the United States he had conducted a concert in a department store, just to make money? It was Strauss’s fate to be subjected to vicious attacks all his life for one reason or another. After the second world war, Bruno Walter and others accused him of kowtowing to Hitler. It is true he was terrified that his son, who was married to a Jewess, would be packed off to a camp with his wife.

He was also accused, always, of being ‘a lazy Bavarian’. This charge, at least, can be refuted by the evidence of his work, great in quantity and still more in quality. He was a modest man: ‘I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.’ (This recalls Verdi’s famous saying, ‘I am not a great composer but I am certainly a very experienced one.’) Lazy, Strauss was not. He regularly worked a 12-hour day. Close examination of his autograph manuscripts tell a revealing tale of fluent intensity and energy, reminding one of Dickens’s frenzied holographs, or the magical drawings and oil-sketches of Ingres. All three were men of genius who never relaxed for a second when at work. Strauss was a master of the cantilena, the long, sustained vocal line, and this reached its epitome in his ‘Four Last Songs’, his astonishing octogenarian masterpiece, which delights the experts and is loved by millions, especially in the celebrated recording by Lisa della Casa. So, good for the old Joker, say I.