Strauss at 70

Twenty-nine years have passed since Richard Strauss's Salome first shed her veils for Herod, shrieked her demands for the head of John the Baptist, groveled before it, kissed its cold lips. Scene was the Dresden Opera House where four years later Elektra scuttled crazily about the stage, screaming her lust for vengeance. Dresden heard the first Rosenkavalier, the first Egyptian Helen, the first Arabella, Strauss's latest opera (TIME, July 10). It was a right and fitting act of gratitude, therefore, for Dresden to stage a seven-day festival last week in honor of the greatest living composer's 70th birthday.

Strauss was present to conduct two of the performances, brusquely acknowledge the hochs which dinned through the house at every curtain call. Fourth night Salome was given but the 1934 Dresden audience got little shock from the horrid story. What amazed them was the fact that Strauss's music still sounded fresh and vital, that his orchestration held its record for richness and might. Salome was Strauss's first important opera but it by no means marked the beginning of his fame. Milncheners knew some 35 years before that Franz Strauss, first hornplayer at the Munich Opera, had a son who could write musical notes before he knew the letters of the alphabet. Nineteenth Century conservatives said that Strauss wrote crazy, individual music because the classical forms were beyond him. Such critics were ignorant of the rigid training that Father Franz gave his son and of the abhorrence with which the proud old hornplayer regarded even the innovations of Wagner. Son Richard wrote conventional, unexciting music at first. When he was 22 he spent a spring in Italy where the sun seemed to thaw his academic training. During the next ten years while he was making his name as a conductor he turned out his six greatest tone-poems --Don Juan, Tod und Verkldrung, Till Enlenspie gel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben. Soon the ranting began. Laymen inveighed against what seemed the ultimate in dissonance. Critics clamored that a composer was hard put to it for ideas when he would make a mouthpiece of the charlatan Till or the crack-brained Quixote. But in his shrewd power to delineate personalities, describe the craziest antic or the most intimate emotion, Strauss had surpassed all his predecessors, done for programmatic music what Beethoven did for symphony and Wagner for opera. Critics pronounced him cheap when he used ponderous brasses to suggest the windmill adventures of poor Don Quixote. For long they overlooked the sorrowing strings which poignantly expressed the foolish knight's defeat, the tranquil death which the cellos softly sang. Strauss made himself the hero of Ein Heldenleben. And again the critics said he was cheap when he blatantly rehashed his old themes and satirized his adversaries with snarling, grotesque piccolos and woodwinds. In a measure the critics were right. All Strauss's music is a curious blend of loud sensationalism and lasting beauty. In the frenetic Salome listeners have been first impressed by the awful, shuddering way the double-basses tell that John the Baptist's head is off. But they have returned to the opera time & again to hear the tender apostrophe which Salome sings in the great finale. In Der Rosenkavalier Fat Baron Ochs, with his clumsy curtseying, his drunken waltz-singing, his penchant for tweeking the first pretty girl, belongs in opera bouffe. But after he has left the stage in the first act comes the aria in which the Marschallin realizes sadly, philosophically, that her youth is gone. And the trio at the end of the opera has a place with the world's greatest music. Since Rosenkavalier (1911), Composer Strauss has been more deserving of criticism. He has orchestrated with his prodigious oldtime skill but many of his ideas have been barren, repetitious. Strauss's skill as a conductor has, however, kept pace with the times. Only Arturo Toscanini surpasses his Mozart. His beat is forthright and fresh if his latest music is not. Strauss's enemies feed on his personal shortcomings. His conceit, they say, is enormous. To keep him in Vienna for four months a year, Austria gave him the Belvedere Palace, once occupied by the ill-fated Archduke Francis Ferdinand.* Visitors complain that to enter and see the composer they must first clean the soles of their shoes. Mercenary Strauss undoubtedly is. He lives carefully in his home in Garmisch near Munich. Where royalties are concerned he is a notoriously hard bargainer. At the beginning of his career he planned to be rich. His mother was an important brewer's daughter and he has never known TIME, June 25, 1934 poverty. His domineering wife, an old-time singer, supports him when he says that there is no great glory in going to a pauper's grave like Schubert. Only at skat, his favorite recreation, will he risk a gamble. Strauss's 70th birthday brought forth countless praises. But the tall, ruddy-cheeked old composer remained as detached and matter-of-fact as when he said years ago: "If my compositions are good, or mark a new phase in musical progress, they will be honorably mentioned in histories of music--which nobody will read! But if they are of no value the most enthusiastic eulogists will not be able to keep them alive. The paper mills may grind them into pulp. ... I shall not shed tears over them."

*Vienna also celebrated the Strauss birthday last week, but Strauss preferred to be in Dresden.

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