Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [189]
Strauss’s parents began his musical education at the piano when he was four and he began composing at six. He could read and write musical notation before he knew the alphabet. While at school he studied violin, piano, harmony and counterpoint with the conductor of the Court Orchestra. With the “superfluous vitality” that was to remain one of his most notable characteristics, he produced at the same time a flow of songs, instrumental solos and sonatas. When he was twelve his Festival March (Op. 1) was performed by his school and later published. Performance of his compositions at public concerts began with three of his songs when he was sixteen, a String Quartet in A (Op. 2) when he was seventeen and a Symphony in D minor (Op. 3) played by the Munich Music Academy to an enthusiastic audience in the same year. At eighteen, he wrote a suite for winds which received the accolade of a commission for another work of the kind from Hans von Bülow, leader of the ducal Orchestra of Meiningen and the outstanding conductor of the day. Trained by Bülow, the Meiningen was the jewel of German orchestras, whose members learned their parts by heart and played standing up like soloists. Strauss wrote a Serenade for Thirteen Winds which Bülow invited him to conduct at a matinee concert without a rehearsal. The twenty-year-old composer led the performance “in a state of slight coma,” having never conducted in public before. Becoming Bülow’s protégé, he appeared with him as solo pianist in a Mozart concerto and at the age of twenty-one was appointed music director of the Meiningen, where he studied conducting under its recognized master. In composition his adored model at the time was Mozart, and Strauss’s early quartets and orchestral pieces composed before he was twenty-one were works of great charm and style in the classical tradition.
The musical world of the eighties was immersed in the party politics of classical versus romantic. New works were heard less for themselves than as upholders of the one or followers of the other. Composers, critics and public revolved in a perpetual war dance around the rival totem poles of Brahms and Wagner. To his partisans Brahms, who died in 1897, was the last of the great classicists, Wagner was anti-Christ and Liszt a secondary Satan. Lisztisch was their last word of contempt. Wagnerians on the other hand considered Brahms stuffy and tradition-ridden and their own man a combined prophet, Messiah and Napoleon of music. Strauss, as his father’s son and a disciple of Mozart, was anti-Wagner, but under Bülow became converted. Even Wagner’s seduction of his wife could not dim Bülow’s admiration for the seducer’s operas. Strauss was affected also by the preaching of Alexander Ritter, first violinist of the Meiningen, who enjoyed extra prestige as husband of Wagner’s niece and convinced Strauss that Zukunftsmusik (Music of the Future) belonged to the successors of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. “We must study Brahms,” he asserted, “long enough to discover that there is nothing in him.”
Strauss felt Ritter’s influence “like a storm wind.” It combined with the experience of a trip to Italy, whose sun and warmth acted on him as it had on Ibsen and other northerners, to inspire Aus Italien, his first work in a new form. It was called a “Symphonic Fantasia” of four movements which bore descriptive titles: “In the Campagna”; “Among the Ruins of Rome”; “By Sorrento’s Strand”; “Scenes of Popular Life in Naples.” The second movement was subtitled “Fantastic pictures of vanished splendor; feelings of melancholy and splendor in the midst of the sunny present”: and was marked allegro molto con brio, an odd way to express melancholy but molto con brio was to be characteristic of Strauss.
Aus Italien picked up where Liszt and Berlioz left off. They also had experimented in narrative and descriptive music, though within traditional patterns of theme and development.