Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [190]
Refusing to be diverted from the path he had chosen, Strauss next produced an orchestral work on the theme of Macbeth, as Berlioz had done on King Lear and Liszt on Hamlet. Not the drama’s events but the conflict within Macbeth’s soul was his subject, expressed in the rich polyphony and fertility of musical idea which were to create his renown. Meanwhile on Billow’s resignation he had succeeded as conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra and in 1889 moved to Weimar as conductor in the post Liszt had held thirty years before. Combining classics with “madly modern” works, including Liszt’s as yet unappreciated tone poems, he presented fresh and exciting programs which drew large audiences. In a discussion with a friend who declared his preference for Schumann and Brahms, Strauss replied, “Oh, they are only imitators and will not survive. Apart from Wagner there is really only one great master and that is Liszt.”
At Weimar on November 11, 1889, he conducted the premiere of his own Don Juan. Its theme, as stated by Nicholas Lenau, author of the poem on which it was based, was not that of a “hot-blooded man eternally pursuing women,” but of a man’s “longing to find a woman who is to him incarnate womanhood and to enjoy in one all the women on earth, whom he cannot, as individuals, possess. Because he does not find her, although he reels from one to another, disgust at last seizes hold of him and this disgust is the Devil that fetches him.”
In adopting this theme Strauss committed himself fully to the business of making music perform a non-musical function: making it describe characters, emotions, events and philosophies, which is essentially the function of literature. He was forcing instrumental music by itself, without singers or words, to do the work of opera or what Wagner called “music drama.” Given the task, no one was better equipped to accomplish it. With his knowledge, gained from conducting, of the capacities of every instrument, his bursting talent and overflow of ideas, his mastery of the techniques of composition, Strauss, like a circus trainer, could make music, like a trained seal, perform dazzling miracles against nature. Don Juan proved an enthralling seventeen minutes of music with its snatches of amorous melody, its headlong passion, its marvelous song of melancholy by the oboe, its frenzied climax and strange end on a dissonant trumpet note of disenchantment. Its undeveloped themes, however, were disconcerting and its episodic form sacrificed musical to narrative sequence. Bülow nevertheless pronounced it an “unheard of success.” Eduard Hanslick, the grand panjandrum of musical criticism who wrote for the Neue Freie Presse and other papers of Vienna and detested everything that was not Brahms or Schumann, denounced it as “ugly” with only shreds of melody and no development of musical idea.
The feuds of music were personified by Hanslick, who had worn out the world “ugly” on Wagner through a thousand repetitions until Wagner conferred immortality on him as the unpleasant Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger. Hanslick pursued Bruckner, a symphonic follower of Wagner, with such virulence that when the Emperor Franz Joseph granted Bruckner an audience and asked if there was anything he could do for him, Bruckner could only mutter, “Stop Hanslick.” Strauss now emerged as another of the new breed to be scotched, and as each new work of his appeared, Hanslick and his school warmed to new degrees of invective.
But Strauss was on his way. Bülow dubbed him “Richard II” and the next