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By Root 1244 0

had acquired an oppressive atmosphere of obligatory reverence. The cab taking a visitor to the Festspielhaus displayed a card pinned over the seat labeled “Historical!” indicating that the Master had sat there. Performances opened with a blast of trumpets as if commanding the audience to prepare for devotions. At intermission sausages and beer were consumed, followed by another trumpet blast; after the second act more sausages and beer and more trumpets and the same procedure after the third act. The faithful absorbed the Master’s works “as if they were receiving Holy Communion,” reported the young Sibelius, who came in 1894 eager for a great experience and could not leave soon enough. By 1899 when Thomas Beecham, aged twenty, arrived, he found there was a rift in the cult. Malcontents were proclaiming the decadence of the Festival, criticizing the reign of the widow, Frau Cosima, and clamoring for the removal of the son, Siegfried, as director. They said his management was feeble and uninspired, singers were poor and performances shoddy, while the group loyal to “Wahnfried,” the Wagners’ house, countered with charges of intrigue and jealousy.

By now Strauss was the new Hero, so acknowledged in his self-portrait in music, A Hero’s Life. Reared in and accustomed to comfort, clad in the correct clothes of a diplomat, slender and six foot three inches tall, with broad shoulders and well-cared-for hands, a soft unlined face, a mouth shaped like a child’s under a flaxen moustache and a cap of curly flaxen hair already receding from a high forehead, Strauss looked neither Promethean like Beethoven, nor poetic like Schumann, but simply like what he was: a successful prosperous artist. His works had been performed since he was twelve; as a conductor he was engaged by all the leading orchestras. He was self-possessed, conscious of superiority and comfortably rather than offensively arrogant, a consequence of being Bavarian rather than Prussian.

Bavaria’s last King, Ludwig II, who adored Wagner and died mad, had sided with Austria against Prussia in 1866, and Munich’s culture was oriented more toward Vienna than Berlin. Munich fostered the arts and considered itself the modern Athens, as opposed to the Sparta of Prussia, whose Junkers, like their ancient prototypes, despised culture as well as comfort. Bavarians, as Germany’s southerners—and largely Catholic—enjoyed the pleasures of life, physical as well as aesthetic. In Munich, Stefan George was high priest of a cult of l’art pour l’art and beginning in 1892 edited for his worshipful disciples the literary review Blätter für die Kunst, which sought the German answer to questions of art, soul and style. Humor found a corner in Munich, where the satiric journal Simplicissimus, founded in 1896, and the comic journal Lustige Blätter were published. In Munich the Überbrettl, a form of satiric café entertainment, flourished and mocked Berlin.

As a native of Munich, Strauss belonged to a culture antipathetic to Prussia, but as a German aged seven in 1871, he grew up parallel with the new nationalism of the German Empire. Born in 1864, five years younger than the Kaiser, Dreyfus and Theodore Roosevelt, he came of a family which combined beer and music, his native city’s leading occupations, in that order. His grandfather was a wealthy brewer whose musically inclined daughter married Franz Strauss, first horn of the Munich Court Orchestra and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He was said to be the only man of whom Wagner was afraid. Although he played Wagner’s music “lusciously,” he hated it and his emphatic objections to its demands on his instrument accomplished on one occasion the unique feat of rendering the Master speechless. Before a rehearsal of Die Meistersinger Wagner begged the conductor, Hans Richter, to play over the horn solo himself for fear Franz Strauss would declare it unplayable. Although Franz Strauss never became reconciled to his son’s dissonances and departures from classical form, Richard Strauss used no instrument to more marvelous capacity than the horn,