The Rest is Noise - Alex Ross

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Guntram. He wrote the libretto himself, as any proper young Wagnerian was expected to do. The scenario resembled that of Die Meistersinger: a medieval troubadour rebels against a brotherhood of singers whose rules are too strict for his wayward spirit. In this case, the hero’s error is not musical but moral: Guntram kills a tyrannical prince and falls in love with the tyrant’s wife. At the end, as Strauss originally conceived it, Guntram realizes that he has betrayed the spirit of his order, even though his act was justifiable, and therefore makes a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

      In the middle of the writing process, however, Strauss invented a different denouement. Instead of submitting to the judgment of the order, Guntram would now walk away from it, walk away from his beloved, walk away from the Christian God. Ritter was deeply alarmed by his protégé’s revised plan, saying that the opera had become “immoral” and disloyal to Wagner: no true hero would disavow his community. Strauss did not repent. Guntram’s order, he told Ritter in reply, had unwisely sought to launch an ethical crusade through art, to unify religion and art. This was Wagner’s mission, too, but for Strauss it was a utopian scheme that contained “the seeds of death in itself.”

      Seeking an alternative to Wagnerism, Strauss read the early-nineteenth-century anarchist thinker Max Stirner, whose book The Ego and Its Own argued that all forms of organized religion, as well as all organized societies, imprison individuals within illusions of morality, duty, and law. For Strauss, anarchist individualism was a way of removing himself from the stylistic squabbles of the time. Near-quotations from The Ego and Its Own dot the Guntram libretto. Stirner criticizes the “beautiful dream” of the liberal idea of humanity; Guntram employs that same phrase and contemptuously adds, “Dream on, good people, about the salvation of humanity.”

      Guntram was a flop at its 1894 premiere, mainly because the orchestration drowned out the singers, although the amoral ending may also have caused trouble. Strauss responded by striking an antagonistic pose, declaring “war against all the apostles of moderation,” as the critic and Nietzsche enthusiast Arthur Seidl wrote approvingly in 1896. A second opera was to have celebrated the happy knave Till Eulenspiegel, “scourge of the Philistines, the slave of liberty, reviler of folly, adorer of nature,” who annoys the burghers of the town of Schilda. That project never got off the ground, but its spirit carried over into the 1895 tone poem Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, which is full of deliciously insolent sounds—violins warbling like fiddlers in cafés; brass instruments trilling, snarling, and sliding rudely from one note to another; clarinets squawking high notes like players in wedding bands.

      In his songs, Strauss made a point of setting poets of questionable reputation—among them Richard Dehmel, infamous for his advocacy of free love; Karl Henckell, banned in Germany for outspoken socialism; Oskar Panizza, jailed for “crimes against religion, committed through the press” (he had called Parsifal “spiritual fodder for pederasts”); and John Henry Mackay, the biographer of Max Stirner and the author of The Anarchists, who, under the pen name “Sagitta,” later wrote books and poems celebrating man-boy love.

      Through the remainder of the 1890s and into the early years of the new century, Strauss specialized in writing symphonic poems, which were appreciated on a superficial level for their vibrant tone painting: the first gleam of sunrise in Thus Spake Zarathustra, the bleating sheep in Don Quixote, the hectic battle scene in Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). Debussy commented presciently that Ein Heldenleben was like a “book of images, even cinematography.” All the while, Strauss continued to pursue the underlying theme of Guntram, the struggle of the individual against the collective. The struggle always seems doomed to end in defeat, resignation, or withdrawal. Most of these works begin with heroic statements and end with a fade into silence. Latter-day Strauss scholars such as Bryan Gilliam, Walter Werbeck, and Charles Youmans assert that the composer approached the transcendent ideals of the Romantic era with a philosophical skepticism that he got from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Wagnerism implodes, becoming a black hole of irony.

      There are, however, consoling voices in Strauss’s universe, and more often than not they are the voices of women. Listeners have never ceased to wonder how a taciturn male composer could create such forceful, richly sympathetic female characters; the answer may lie in the degree to which Strauss submitted to his domineering, difficult, yet devoted wife, Pauline. His operatic women are forthright in their ideas and desires. His men, by contrast, often appear not as protagonists but as love interests, even as sexual trophies. Men in positions of power tend to be inconstant, vicious, obtuse. In Salome, Herod is nothing more than a male hysteric who hypocritically surrounds himself with Jewish and Christian theologians and pauses in his lust for his teenage stepdaughter only to comment on the loveliness of a male corpse. John the Baptist may speak in righteously robust tones, but, Strauss later explained, the prophet was really meant to be a ridiculous figure, “an imbecile.” (The musicologist Chris Walton has made the intriguing suggestion that Salome contains a clandestine parody of the court of Kaiser Wilhelm, which was prone both to homosexual scandal and to censorious prudishness.) In a way, Salome is the sanest member of the family; like Lulu, the heroine of a later opera, she does not pretend to be other than what she is.

      Strauss delivered one more onslaught of dissonance and neurosis: Elektra, premiered in Dresden in January 1909, based on a play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in which the downfall of the house of Agamemnon is retold in language suggestive of the dream narratives of Sigmund Freud. The music repeatedly trembles on the edge of what would come to be called atonality; the far-flung chords that merely brush against each other in Salome now clash in sustained skirmishes.

      But this was as far as Strauss would go. Even before he began composing Elektra, he indicated to Hofmannsthal, the poet-playwright who was becoming his literary guide, that he needed new material. Hofmannsthal persuaded him to go ahead with Elektra, but their subsequent collaboration, Der Rosenkavalier, was an entirely different thing—a comedy of eighteenth-century Vienna, steeped in super-refined, self-aware melancholy, modeled on Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Così fan tutte. The same complex spirit of nostalgia and satire animated Ariadne auf Naxos, the first version of which appeared in 1912; in that work, an overserious composer tries to write grand opera while commedia dell’arte players wreak havoc all around him.

      “I was never revolutionary,” Arnold Schoenberg once said. “The only revolutionary in our time was Strauss!” In the end, the composer of Salome fit the profile neither of the revolutionary nor of the reactionary. There was constant anxiety about his de facto status as a “great German composer.” He seemed too flighty, even too feminine, for the role. “The music of Herr Richard Strauss is a woman who seeks to compensate for her natural deficiencies by mastering Sanskrit,” the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus wrote. Strauss was also too fond of money, or, more precisely, he made his fondness for money too obvious. “More of a stock company than a genius,” Kraus later said.

      And was there something a little Jewish about Strauss? So said the anti-Semitic French journal La Libre Parole. It did not go unnoticed that Strauss enjoyed the company of Jewish millionaires. Arthur Schnitzler once said to Alma Mahler, with ambiguous intent: “If one of the two, Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss, is a Jew, then surely it is … Richard Strauss!”

      Der Mahler

      Berlin, where Strauss lived in the first years of the new century, was the noisiest, busiest metropolis in Europe, its neoclassical edifices encircled by shopping districts, industrial infrastructure, working-class neighborhoods, transportation networks, and power grids. Mahler’s Vienna was a slower, smaller-scale place, an idyll of imperial style. It was aestheticized down to its pores; everything was forced to glitter. A gilt sphere capped Joseph Olbrich’s Secession building, a shrine to Art Nouveau. Gold-leaf textures framed Gustav Klimt’s portraits of high-society women. At the top of Otto Wagner’s severe, semi-modernistic Post Office Savings Bank, goddess statues held aloft Grecian rings. Mahler provided the supreme musical expression of this luxurious, ambiguous moment. He knew of the fissures that were opening in the city’s facade—younger artists such as Schoenberg were eager to expose Vienna’s filigree as rot—but he still believed in art’s ability to transfigure society.

      The epic life of Mahler is told in Henry-Louis de La Grange’s equally epic four-volume biography. Like many self-styled aristocrats, the future ruler of musical

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