Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [198]
What Speyer observed, Mommsen attempted to explain. “Bismarck has broken the nation’s backbone,” he wrote in 1886. “The injury done by the Bismarck era is infinitely greater than its benefits.… The subjugation of the German personality, of the German mind, was a misfortune that cannot be undone.” What Mommsen failed to say was that Bismarck could not have succeeded against the German grain.
In the nineties, as a convinced believer in Übermensch, Strauss shared the general admiration for the Kaiser. Personal experience as conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera modified it. After conducting a performance of Weber’s tuneful Der Freischütz, one of the Kaiser’s favorites, he was summoned to the Imperial presence. “So, you are another of these modern composers,” stated the Kaiser. Strauss bowed. Mentioning a contemporary, Schillings, whose work he had heard, the Kaiser said, “It was detestable; there isn’t an ounce of melody.” Strauss bowed and suggested there was melody but often hidden behind the polyphony. The Kaiser frowned and pronounced, “You are one of the worst.” Strauss this time merely bowed. “All modern music is worthless,” repeated the royal critic, “there isn’t an ounce of melody in it.” Strauss bowed. “I prefer Freischütz,” stated the Kaiser firmly. Strauss deferred. “Your Majesty, I also prefer Freischütz,” he replied.
If the Kaiser was not the hero he had supposed, Strauss was not long in finding a better one—himself. This seemed a natural subject for his next major work, unbashfully entitled Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). Since Aus Italien his subjects had never been moods or pictures, sunken cathedrals or pastoral scenes, but always Man: Man in struggle and search, seeking the meaning of existence, contending against his enemies and against his own passions, engaged in the three great adventures: battle, love and death. Macbeth, Don Juan, the nameless hero of Tod und Verklärung. Till, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, were all voyagers on the soul’s journey. A portrait of the artist now joined their company.
Strauss’s personal experience of the two first of the three great adventures had been adequate if not epic. He had had battles with critics which left wounds, and in 1894 he had married. Pauline de Ahna, whom he met when he was twenty-three, was the daughter of a retired General and amateur baritone who gave local recitals of Wagnerian excerpts. Following his lead, the daughter had studied singing at the Munich Academy but had made little progress professionally until Strauss fell in love with her and combined instruction with courtship so effectively that in two years he introduced her to the Weimar Opera in leading soprano roles. She sang Elsa in Lohengrin, Pamina in The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Fidelio and the heroine of Strauss’s own opera Guntram. Once, when rehearsing Elisabeth in Tannhäuser, she fell into an argument with him over tempo, and shrieking “frightful insults,” threw the score at his head and rushed off to her dressing room. Strauss followed and members of the orchestra listened in awe to sounds of feminine rage audible through the closed door, followed by prolonged silence. Wondering which of the two, conductor or prima donna, might have killed the other, a delegation of trembling players knocked on the door and when Strauss opened it the spokesman stammered that he and his colleagues, shocked by the soprano’s behavior, felt they owed it to the honored Herr Kapellmeister to refuse in future to play in any opera in which she had a role. “That distresses me,” Strauss replied, smiling, “as I have just become engaged to Fräulein de Anna.”
The pattern of this occasion was retained in marriage. The wife shrieked, the husband smiled and evidently enjoyed being bullied. At parties Frau Strauss did not permit him to dance with other ladies. At home she practiced housewifery with “ruthless fanaticism,” requiring her husband to wipe his feet on three different doormats before entering his own house. Every guest of no matter what age or rank was greeted