Music: Ein Heldenleben

At one time, visitors who rang the bell at the door of Zöppritzstrasse No. 46 in the little Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen heard a recorded voice boom through a speaking tube: “Dr. Strauss is not at home . . . Dr. Strauss is not at home.” After awhile, when even tall (6 ft. 3 in.), ruddy-faced Dr. Strauss had tired of his crusty prank, visitors were merely asked by a servant to state their business. In most cases they were turned away. Last week, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a visitor called who would not be denied. Death came to Richard Strauss, 85, one of the great composers of his age.

For Strauss it had been a lifetime of music. His first compositions were written when he was six; he kept working right up to his final illness. But for music lovers, nothing he wrote after 47 came near what he had done before. He never again reached the heights of his great opera, Der Rosenkavalier (1911).

In his early youth, precocious, Munich-born Richard Strauss had written under the influence of Mozart and Brahms. But after about 1885, Strauss’s contemporaries called his work “psychopathic music.” They railed against the brazen dissonances in his huge, Wagnerian tone poems (Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, etc.), the savage horrors of his operas Salome and Elektra, his general lack of taste in composition. But no one could overlook his genius: his unique gifts as an orchestrator, his penetrating power for illuminating character and for describing anything from the zany antics of Don Quixote to the bestiality of Salome.

A Touching Image. In some ways, Strauss the man mirrored the strengths and weaknesses of his music. Even to the late admiring critic, Lawrence Gilman, he was a composer who could “mold a beautiful or touching or heroic tonal image, and then distort it by scrawling a bad joke somewhere on its surface.” He was a man who composed a great symphonic poem about his own sometimes mean and usually money-grabbing life and called it Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life).

He loved art, collected El Grecos, Tintorettos and Rubenses. A genial man, he liked to play cards (skat) and drink beer, but usually had to sneak away from his strong-willed wife Pauline to do it. His favorite opera, he always said, was one he finished in 1923 called Intermezzo, the story of a musician and his termagant spouse.

Even more, he loved to make money—and hang on to it. According to one story, he once invited Parisian celebrities to a post-premiere feast at Larue’s, ordered the finest food and wines. When the assemblage had cheered him, he had the waiter bring each guest a separate check.

A Final Clearance. He was a man who stubbornly insisted he could never take politics seriously (“Ich bin Künstler”—I am an artist), but he let the Nazis make him head of their Reichsmusikkammer (State Chamber of Music) in 1933. He resigned when the Nazis irritated him by criticizing his “non-Aryan” librettists, Hugo von Hofmannsthal (who had died in 1929) and Stefan Zweig. Last year, Strauss was finally cleared by a denazification court.

Since the war, although his works have been performed as widely as ever, Allied alien-property custodians have held most of the profits (estimated, in British and U.S. royalties alone, at more than $460,000). Two years ago, pink and erect, Richard Strauss journeyed to London to earn some money conducting (he never had to yield to any man as a Mozart conductor). In London he told inquiring friends: “The last time I conduct.” What were his plans? Said Strauss: “To die.”