Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [199]
When to her husband’s accompaniment Frau Strauss sang his songs, which usually ended with a long coda on the piano, she flourished a large chiffon handkerchief which she would fling down with a gesture at the end to keep the audience’s eyes on her instead of on the pianist. To guests she would explain in detail, while Strauss listened with an indulgent smile, how and why her marriage was a shocking mésalliance. She should have married that dashing young Hussar; now she was tied to a man whose music was not even comparable to Massenet’s. During a visit to London when Strauss conducted Heldenleben and a toast was proposed in his honor at a dinner at the Speyers’, his wife excitedly interrupted, “No, no!”—pointing to herself—“no, no! to Strauss de Ahna.” Strauss merely laughed and seemed to an observer to enjoy his wife’s claim of precedence.
She was responsible for his orderly habits. His worktable was a model of neatness, with sketches and notebooks arranged, filed and indexed as scrupulously as the records of a law firm. His handwriting was exquisitely clear and his scores “miracles of calligraphy,” with hardly an erasure or correction. His songs might be dashed off at odd moments, sometimes during the intervals of concerts or operas when he was conducting, but his longer pieces were composed only at his summer home, first at Marquardstein in Upper Bavaria, later at his second home near Garmisch. Here in his studio he worked regularly from breakfast to lunch and often, or so he told an interviewer, through the afternoon and evening until one or two o’clock in the morning. He enjoyed writing his incredibly intricate scores, often so complicated in their excessive subdivision of groups and interweaving of melodies that the theme was beyond the reach of the listener’s ear. Discernible to the eye of an expert score-reader who would marvel at the mathematical ingenuity of the scheme, such music was called Augenmusik (eye music) by the Germans. When complimented on his skill Strauss said it was nothing compared to that of a new young man in Vienna, Arnold Schönberg, who required sixty-five staves for his scores and had to have his music paper specially printed. Strauss’s own facility was such that he said to a visitor, “Go right on and talk for I can write this score and talk at the same time.” A symphonic poem took him three or four months, with scoring usually completed in Berlin between rehearsals and conducting engagements.
Visitors at the summer home were met by arrangements which exhibited a talent for organization on the part of Frau Strauss not inferior to that of the late Field Marshal von Moltke. A speaking tube was fixed to the gate under a sign telling the visitor to ring a bell and then put his ear to the tube. A voice over the tube demanded his name and if found acceptable, informed him the gate was now unlocked. Another sign instructed him how to open it and to be sure to close it behind him.
Frau Strauss did not permit dawdling. If her husband should be found on occasion wandering aimlessly around the house, she would command, “Richard, jetzt gehst componieren!” (Go ahead and compose!), and he would obey. If he worked too hard she would say, “Richard, put down that pencil!” and he would put it down. When he conducted the first performance in Vienna of his second opera, Feuersnot, Frau Strauss attended in the box of the Austrian conductor-composer Gustav Mahler and