• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1039 0

and our hearts beat.” He thought it “the most splendid battle that has ever been painted in music.” There were gulfs in which the musical idea disappeared for a time but emerged again, sometimes mediocre in melodic sentiment but grand in “harmonic and rhythmic invention and orchestral brilliance.” Strauss seemed to Rolland to express a will “heroic, dominating, eager and powerful to a sublime degree.” Touched too by the Nietzschean spirit, Rolland found this the reason why Strauss is noble and at the present quite unique. One feels in him the force that has dominion over men.” In the midst of admiration, however, Rolland also felt French and could not resist drawing political lessons. Now that Strauss, he decided, like Germany, had “proved his power by victory, his pride knows no limit.” In him as a man “of vital energy, morbidly overexcited, unbalanced but controlled by an effort of will power,” the Frenchman saw reflected the face of Germany. Nevertheless Rolland became his friend and celebrator.

He had met Strauss for the first time eight years before in Bayreuth and again in January, 1899, when Strauss conducted Zarathustra in Paris. It was the Dionysus of Nietzsche let loose. “Aha!” Rolland wrote then, “Germany as the All-Powerful will not keep her balance for long. Nietzsche, Strauss, the Kaiser—giddiness blows through her brain. Neroism is in the air!” Rolland thought he could detect in the reiterated theme of Disgust in the tone poems and in the deaths that concluded them, a German “sickness hidden beneath the strength and military tautness.” He heard it again in Heldenleben.

When on this occasion he called on Strauss at his apartment in Charlottenburg, Berlin’s fashionable suburb, he found him more Bavarian than Nietzschean, with “a certain humorous buffoonery, paradoxical and satirical like that of Till Eulenspiegel.” Like Till he delighted to scandalize the philistines. He alternated between energy and bouts of “laziness, softness and ironic indifference.” Though cordial and well-behaved toward Rolland, he could be short with others, scarcely listening to what was said to him and occasionally muttering, “Was? Ach, so so.” He behaved badly at table, sitting with his legs crossed at the side, holding his plate under his chin to eat and stuffing himself with sweets. In the drawing room he might lie down on a sofa, punching the cushions with his fists, and “insolently indifferent to those around him,” fall asleep with his eyes open.

It was difficult to decide whether he was Till or Superman. In an article for the Revue de Paris Rolland presented him as “the artist-type of this new Germany, the reflection of a heroic pride close to delirium, of a Nietzschean egoism which preaches the cult of force and disdain for weakness.” But he had to admit the picture was overdrawn. Rolland suffered from the same difficulty as Matthew Arnold’s niece in Max Beerbohm’s cartoon who was forced to ask, “Why, Uncle Matthew, oh why, will you not be always wholly serious?” Strauss would not live up to his image either and was quite prepared to admit it. “You’re right,” he wrote to Rolland. “I’m no hero; I haven’t got the necessary strength; I’m not made for battle.… I don’t want to make the effort. At the moment all I want is to make sweet and happy music. No more heroics.” The fact was that in the surrounding Nietzschean ethos, Heldenleben had seemed like the thing to do; it reflected the national mood more than his own.

Strauss was a string plucked by the Zeitgeist. Although he had never known any but the most comfortable bourgeois circumstances, he sensed and expressed the revolutionary rumble of the working class in two of his finest songs so effectively that one, “Der Arbeitsmann” (The Workingman) became an anthem of the Socialist party. Another, “Das Lied des Steinklopfers” (Song of the Stonecutter), was his own favorite among his songs. When these were sung by Germany’s leading concert baritone, Ludwig Wüllner, with the composer at the piano, they had such dramatic power that “hearing these grim defiant sounds,” wrote a critic,