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May 1, 2009
A look at Salome's creator
Impact of Richard Strauss and his music is still being felt.
DANA SCHLANGER
As the Vancouver Opera is mounting Salome next week, perhaps it would be helpful to know more about the fascinating history surrounding its creator, German composer Richard Strauss, and the biblical subject of this opera.
Despite being one of the most important composers of the 20th century, the general public knows little about Strauss. First: he is no relation whatsoever to the Viennese waltz dynasty of Johann Strauss.
Richard Strauss was always at the centre of controversy and many can't forgive him the connection to the Nazi regime – the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra did not play his music until 1994. He was highly successful, yet his "immortality" status remains ambiguous. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, yet apparently a huge ego. He once said: "I am not a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer!"
Born in Munich in 1864, the son of the leading horn player in the Royal Bavarian Orchestra and his wife, who came from of a wealthy family, Strauss grew up in a very solid, bourgeois, yet enlightened environment. Great emphasis was placed on music and an even greater one on money. Strauss loved them both: he loved music as the undisputed essence of his life and he loved the advantages money brought – and he never made a secret of that.
Strauss achieved incredible success and status in a country steeped in classical music. He was hailed as Germany's foremost composer. His earlier tone poems ("Don Juan," "Death and Transfiguration," "A Hero's Life," "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," etc.), with their lush, opulent sound, naturalistic effects and huge orchestral forces, placed him in the eye of the storm, between adulation and outrage from critics who claimed his music was too pompous, beautiful only on the surface, never touching the essence. He aroused extreme reactions: his great contemporary, Gustav Mahler, respected and admired his work, the French writer Romain Rolland thought its "power and brilliancy commands the attention of everyone, even those who don't like it." On the other hand, Debussy called Strauss' early works "an hour of music in the lunatic asylum" and music critic Hanslick thought Strauss was "a routined chemist who well understands how to mix all the elements of musical-sensual stimulation."
Strauss' career was always riding a high wave, be it as a composer or as a conductor. However, his relevance as an avant-garde composer began to fade after the First World War. He was completely immersed in music. He had always been a "court composer," officially recognized and acclaimed, a star to whom politicians would bow, a representative of his country, accustomed to ignoring politics that were not musical. As well, he had always been a pragmatic opportunist who looked well after his own interests. It is in this light that we should read his history as it unfolded.
The Nazis realized that Strauss' eminence was very valuable and, in 1933, he played into their hands by saving the Bayreuth Festival (the annual Wagner festival) and conducting Parsifal instead of Toscanini, who had withdrawn in protest of the anti-Jewish racial laws. That branded Strauss as a supporter of the regime and brought along the very doubtful position of president of the Third Reich Music Chamber. However, Strauss soon clashed with his Nazi superiors for obstinately collaborating with Jewish writer Stefan Zweig (as well as having a Jewish daughter-in-law). After a letter was intercepted, wherein Strauss wrote to Zweig, "for me, 'das volk' [the people] does not exist until it becomes 'the public,'" he was removed from his official position. For a while, he continued to appear at Nazi public events, even conducting at the opening of the Berlin Olympics in 1936, but, basically, he retired to his Bavarian home and kept a low profile. In 1948, a denazification court cleared Strauss of all charges of collaboration and restored him to the graces of world opinion.
It was the burning dilemma of any artist in those times (and later, under Communist regimes): stand up and leave, or stay and carry on? Strauss was a famous German composer and conductor, well in his 70s, with a partly Jewish family and a taste for the good life. In his view, he made the only choice available, and his music endures.
Such was the interest in Strauss' work that a performance of Salome in Graz in 1906 is described by historian Alex Ross as the ultimate artistic event of the season: "word had got out that Strauss had created something beyond the pale: an ultra-dissonant biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name was not mentioned in polite company, a work that the censors had banned from the Court Opera in Vienna." Since this was a scandal, the cream of the musical and political world was there to take in the new, already notorious work.
Obsession is the key in understanding Salome and everything it touched. Oscar Wilde (the "Irish degenerate") wrote the play based on the biblical story and confessed to dreaming endlessly about her. Strauss composed the opera as if in one single creative breath.
Salome is a Judean princess, step-daughter of King Herod. John the Baptist is the prophet imprisoned for denouncing Herod's depravity. Salome becomes obsessed with John and, when Herod, himself fixated on Salome, asks her to dance for him, she demands John's head as her price. After witnessing Salome's monologue around John's head on a silver platter, Herod, disturbed and terrified, orders Salome's death.
By matching the lascivious and neurotic traits of Wilde's play with extremely vivid music, fraught with fashionably decadent harmonic and orchestral colors, Strauss produced a work that constantly arouses moral indignation. However, its triumph was so complete that he could laugh off the indignation part. Kaiser Wilhelm II reportedly said, "I am sorry that Strauss composed this Salome. I like him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage." Strauss apparently retorted: "The damage enabled me to build my villa in Garmisch!"
A century later, while the shock and outrage have subsided, the remarkable qualities of the opera remain: powerful psychological conflicts mirrored in complex, opulent music that grips you and never lets go.
Dana Schlanger is a Vancouver freelance writer and director of the Dena Wosk School of Performing Arts at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver.
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