Strauss at Home

Captain, or colonel, or knight in arms,

Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize

If deed of honor did thee ever please,

Guard them, and him within protect from harms. . . .

Lift not thy spear against the Muse's bower. . . .

In 1642, Poet (and Roundhead) John Milton nailed this sonnet on his London door when the King's Cavaliers threatened to take the city. Last week, Richard Strauss, 80, composer of some of the most opulent and colorful dramatic music ever written (Salome, Rosenkavalier), found a sign nailed on his door: Clear out by morning. U.S. forces had arrived to take over the picturesque Bavarian resort, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where Strauss lives.

Always a good German, Strauss has been an on-again-off-again friend of the Nazis. Last June, he publicly snapped his fingers at Hitler's threat to cancel his birthday celebration, said: "It was not I who started the war" (TIME, July 17). Even then, the Kultur-conscious Nazis, considering his prestige valuable to Germany, let him be. As the war approached his doorstep, the aged composer continued to cultivate his musical garden.

A.M.G. officials, overruling the sign-nailing G.I.s to whom Richard Strauss was just "another kraut," took down the sign. The composer stayed at home unmolested, continued to work on his new one-act opera called Capriccio.

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