Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [191]
He continued to conduct, to encourage and perform the works of contemporaries and to compose his first opera, Guntram, which was rejected as imitation Wagner by a public already saturated with the real thing. No rigid partisan, Strauss conducted Hänsel und Gretel with as much enthusiasm as Tristan und Isolde. When Humperdinck, then an obscure teacher at the Frankfurt Academy, sent him the score, Strauss was delighted with it and wrote the composer, “My dear friend, you are a great master who has bestowed on our dear Germans a work which they can hardly deserve.” His introduction of the opera at Weimar made Humperdinck famous overnight and rich soon afterwards.
In 1894 Strauss moved on to Munich as conductor of the Court Opera and following the death of Bülow led the Berlin Philharmonic concerts for the winter season of 1894–95. In the same year he was guest conductor at Bayreuth. “So young, so modern, yet how well he conducts Tannhaüser,” sighed Cosima Wagner. The summers Strauss devoted to his own compositions, working best, as he said, when the sun shone. During the concert season he appeared as guest conductor in different German cities and toured with the Berlin Philharmonic throughout Europe. In the years 1895–99 he conducted in Madrid and Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Zurich, Budapest, Brussels and Liège, Amsterdam, London and Moscow. Limitless in energy, he once conducted thirty-one concerts in thirty-one days. On the podium, making no show of extravagant gesture or muscular contortions, he used a firm, decided simple beat, a few hard angular movements and signaled for crescendo with a hasty bend of the knee joints. “He conducts with his knees,” said Grieg. Tyrannical in his demands on the players, he was generous in praise of a well-performed solo no matter how short, and would step down from the podium to shake hands with the player when the piece was over. He was no longer the “shy young man with a large head of hair” whom Sibelius, then a young music student in Berlin, had seen rise from a seat in the audience to acknowledge the applause at one of the early performances of Don Juan. His hair was already receding and it is doubtful if he had ever been shy. Now in his early thirties and with Bülow gone he was the most renowned conductor and exciting composer in Germany.
Between 1895 and 1898 he brought out three more new works which carried the symphonic poem to more daring feats of description and more boldly original subject matter than had so far been attempted in music. The marvels of polyphonic complexity were more stunning, the unresolved discords more disturbing and the uses of music in some places seemed deliberately provocative.
Nothing so clever, so comic, so flashing and surprising as Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks had ever been heard. The brisk twinkling motif of the horn carries the medieval folk hero, Germany’s Peer Gynt, on his picaresque progress, with every kind of instrumental device portraying his adventures as he gallops through the marketplace scattering pots and pans, disguises himself as a priest, makes love, and comes to a bad end in court with a long drum roll announcing the death sentence. An impudent twitter of the clarinet voices his final defiance on the gallows and a faint trill carries off his last breath as his feet swing in air. Strauss’s program notes this time were more specific: “That was an awful hobgoblin,” he noted