Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [200]
“You thief!” she screamed. “You have the nerve to show yourself? I’m not going with you. You’re rotten.” Hurriedly pushed into Mahler’s office, she continued her berating behind closed doors until Strauss stumbled out followed by his mate who announced in awful tones that she was returning to the hotel and “I sleep alone tonight.”
“Can’t I walk with you at least?” Strauss begged humbly.
“All right—ten steps behind me!” and she stalked off followed by the hero of the evening at a respectful distance. Later, looking subdued and exhausted, he rejoined the Mahlers for a late supper and spent the remainder of the evening with pencil and paper figuring out the royalties in the event of a major or minor success. Making money interested him as much as any aspect of his profession.
Strauss composed Ein Hėldenleben in the summer of 1898, describing it as “a largish tone poem … with lots of horns, always expressive of the heroic.” When finished it played for forty minutes, longer than any of his previous works. Artists had often portrayed themselves before, but Strauss, reflecting the national mood, was probably the first to name his self-portrait a Hero. He conducted the premiere himself on March 3, 1899, which, considering the provocative title, the nature of the music and the program notes, displayed considerable bravado. Heldenleben was divided into six sections, dealing with “The Hero,” his “Adversaries,” his “Consort,” his “Battle,” his “Works of Peace” and finally his “Escape from the World and Fulfillment of Life.” In form it was an expanded sonata on a vast scale with recognizable statements of theme, development and recapitulation. After the Hero is proclaimed by the horns in a proud theme rising to fortissimo, the woodwinds introduce the Adversaries in busy, sniggering music that as plainly says “critics” as the bleating brasses in Don Quixote said “sheep.” The Consort is played by solo violin in a series of cadenzas, alternately seductive and shrewish, with outspoken not to say painfully frank marks of expression on the score, among them, “Heuchlerisch schmachtend” (Hypocritically gushing), plus “frivolously,” “haughtily,” “affectionately,” and at the last, in a passionate and moving love duet, “tenderly and lovingly.” Meanwhile three trumpeters have tiptoed off stage and suddenly from a distance sound the call to arms. With fiercely scurrying strings, rattling kettledrums, fanfares of brasses and thunder of bass drums, the battle rages in a confused crescendo of noise that, not unlike real war, sounds as if all the generals had blundered. To the ears of 1899 it sounded “hideous.” Through the turmoil the Hero’s theme returns triumphantly. His Works of Peace, making the autobiographical point unmistakable, are themes from the composer’s earlier works. The Hero’s final apotheosis is accomplished to muted solemn music which in later program notes Strauss designated as “funeral rites with flags and laurel wreaths lowered on a hero’s grave.”
Listening to the second performance at Cologne a few weeks later, Romain Rolland, fresh from his own exhilarating battle at the opening of Les Loups, was transported with excitement. Although some auditors hissed and some members of the orchestra even laughed at the music, “I clenched my teeth and trembled and my heart saluted the young Siegfried resurrected.” In the “tremendous din and uproar” of the battle music, Rolland heard “the storming of towns, the terrible charge of cavalry which makes the earth tremble