Rounding Wagner's Mountain - Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera

ROUNDING WAGNER’S MOUNTAIN
Richard Strauss’s fifteen operas, which span the years 1893–1941, make up the largest German
operatic legacy since Wagner’s operas of the nineteenth century. Many of Strauss’s works
were based on texts by Europe’s finest writers: Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
and Stefan Zweig, among others, and they also overlap some of the most important and
tumultuous stretches of German history, such as the founding and demise of a German
empire, the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, the period of National Socialism, and the
postwar years, which saw a divided East and West Germany. In this first musicological book
to discuss all Strauss’s operas, Bryan Gilliam sets each work in its historical, aesthetic,
philosophical, and literary context to reveal what made the composer’s legacy unique.
Addressing Wagner’s cultural influence upon this legacy, Gilliam also offers new insights
into the thematic and harmonic features that recur in Strauss’s compositions.
bryan gilliam is Bass Professor in Humanities at Duke University, North Carolina. He is

the author of Richard Strauss’s Elektra (1996) and The Life of Richard Strauss (Cambridge, 1999)
and editor of a number of books, including Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic
(Cambridge, 1994) and Music, Image, Gesture (2005). His numerous book chapters and articles
include the biographical entry on Richard Strauss in The Revised New Grove Dictionary of Music.
He serves on the Strauss editorial board in Munich and has given lectures in the United States,
Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN OPERA
Series editor: Arthur Groos, Cornell University
Volumes for Cambridge Studies in Opera explore the cultural, political and social influences
of the genre. As a cultural art form, opera is not produced in a vacuum. Rather, it is influenced,
whether directly or in more subtle ways, by its social and political environment. In turn, opera
leaves its mark on society and contributes to shaping the cultural climate. Studies to be
included in the series will look at these various relationships including the politics and
economics of opera, the operatic representation of women or the singers who portrayed
them, the history of opera as theatre, and the evolution of the opera house.
Published titles
Opera Buffa in Mozart’s Vienna
Edited by Mary Hunter and James Webster
German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner
John Warrack
Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture
Camille Crittenden
Opera and Drama in Eighteenth-Century London: The King’s Theatre, Garrick
and the Business of Performance
Ian Woodfield
Opera, Liberalism, and Antisemitism in Nineteenth-Century France: The Politics
of Halévy’s La Juive
Diana R. Hallman
Three Modes of Perception in Mozart: The Philosophical, Pastoral, and
Comic in Così fan tutte
Edmund J. Goehring
Landscape and Gender in Italian Opera: The Alpine Virgin from Bellini to Puccini
Emanuele Senici
Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647–1785
Downing A. Thomas
The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity
Alexandra Wilson
The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815–1930
Susan Rutherford
Opera and Society in Italy and France from Monteverdi to Bourdieu
Edited by Victoria Johnson, Jane F. Fulcher, and Thomas Ertman
Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks
Daniel H. Foster
When Opera Meets Film
Marcia J. Citron
Situating Opera: Period, Genre, Reception
Herbert Lindenberger
Rossini in Restoration Paris: The Sound of Modern Life
Benjamin Walton
Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution
Pierpaolo Polzonetti
Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust
Cormac Newark
Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism
David Charlton
The Sounds of Paris in Verdi’s La traviata
Emilio Sala
The Rival Sirens: Performance and Identity on Handel’s Operatic Stage
Suzanne Aspden
Sentimental Opera: Questions of Genre in the Age of Bourgeois Drama
Stefano Castelvecchi
Verdi, Opera, Women
Susan Rutherford
Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera
Bryan Gilliam
Rounding Wagner’s Mountain
Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera
Bryan Gilliam
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© Bryan Gilliam 2014
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First published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Gilliam, Bryan Randolph, author.
Rounding Wagner’s mountain : Richard Strauss and modern German opera / Bryan Gilliam.
pages cm. – (Cambridge studies in opera)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-521-45659-3
1. Strauss, Richard, 1864–1949. Operas. 2. Strauss, Richard, 1864–1949 – Criticism and interpretation.
3. Wagner, Richard, 1813–1883 – Influence. 4. Operas – Analysis, appreciation. 5. Opera – Germany –
19th century. 6. Opera – Germany – 20th century. I. Title.
ml410.s93g55 2014
782.1092–dc23
2014014062
isbn 978-0-521-45659-3 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication,
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
For Grace and Stephanie
in memory of their Nana
CONTENTS
List of figures page x

Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1 Guntram and the crisis of German musical metaphysics 10
2 Élan vital: Feuersnot, Salome, and radical individualism 39
3 The way to the social: Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier 85
4 Intermezzo: Ariadne and her transformations 127

5 The marriage operas: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo,
and Die ägyptische Helena 152
6 Composing without Hofmannsthal: Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau 195
7 The politics of peace: Friedenstag and Daphne 238

8 Opera in time of war: Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio 272
Epilogue 313
Bibliography 316
Index 333
ix
FIGURES
1.1 Hans von Bülow with Johannes Brahms. Reproduced by kind permission
of the Richard Strauss Institute, Garmisch. page 16
1.2 Pauline de Ahna Strauss as Freihild. Reproduced by kind permission of the
Richard Strauss Institute, Garmisch. 21
1.3 Alexander Ritter. Reproduced by kind permission of the Richard Strauss
Institute, Garmisch. 26
2.1 Ernst von Wolzogen. Reproduced by kind permission of the Richard Strauss
3.1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Reproduced by kind permission of the Richard
Strauss Institute, Garmisch. 86
3.2 Gertud Eysoldt. Reproduced by kind permission of the Richard Strauss
3.3 Strauss at the time of Elektra. Reproduced by kind permission of the Richard
Strauss Institute, Garmisch. 107
4.1 Max Reinhardt. Reproduced by kind permission of the Richard Strauss
6.1 Strauss at the time of Arabella. Reproduced by kind permission
of the Richard Strauss Institute, Garmisch. 210
7.1 Strauss with Joseph Gregor. Reproduced by kind permission
7.2 Strauss with Joseph Goebbels in 1934. Reproduced by kind permission
8.1 Strauss with Clemens Krauss rehearsing Capriccio. Reproduced by kind
permission of the Richard Strauss Institute, Garmisch. 302
E.1 Strauss a year before his death in 1949. Reproduced by kind permission
x
PREFACE
In his memoir The World of Yesterday (Die Welt von Gestern), Stefan Zweig reports his
first meeting with Richard Strauss. It was on 20 November 1931 in Munich’s Four Seasons
Hotel, where they were exploring possibilities for a new opera project. Zweig relates how
Strauss admitted that Wagner was the last master of the genre, so high a peak that no one
could get above it. “‘But,’ he added, with a broad Bavarian grin. ‘I solved the problem by
making a detour [Umweg].’”1 Strauss’s Bavarian grin was a fundamental part of his persona,
and the composer toiled daily to make his creative life look easy, even effortless. What,
indeed, had Strauss been doing on this detour of nearly fifty years?
The simple answer is that – with his fifteen operas – he had been creating the greatest
German operatic legacy since Richard Wagner. After Wagner’s final music drama,
Parsifal (1882), German opera entered a period of serious artistic decline. Wagner’s
impact on German opera was as powerful as it was unique, and those who continued to
compose stage works based on such themes as redemption, idealized love, and musical
salvation were destined to fail. As I will detail later, the more weighty and serious the
material, the closer such operas came to unintentional Wagnerian farce. What had
begun with Wagner as aesthetic conviction had deteriorated, in lesser hands, to hollow
aesthetic posturing. Wagner’s shadow loomed large; he had reached Olympian heights.
The mountain-loving Strauss was not afraid of high altitudes; he simply saw no reason to
climb Wagner’s metaphysical mountain and knew the potential pitfalls that lay along the
path of such a perilous and fruitless journey, one that Hans Pfitzner, among others, had
undertaken in vain.
Among the major composers of his day, Strauss stood alone in his conviction that,
after Parsifal, music could no longer serve as a substitute for religion; in fact, it could
not even serve an ethical purpose. Strauss, the only successful German opera composer
of his generation, developed a different artistic voice, one that spoke of the irrelevance
of mountainous metaphysics to the modern world. Wagner was the “preacher,” but
Strauss preached against preaching. Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Max Stirner’s
godless, life-affirming individualism, Strauss believed that the only religion for a
new century was the act of artistic creation. Strauss the nonbeliever, the practitioner
1
See Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 437. Die Welt
von Gestern was first published in 1942; it was first published in English in 1943.
xi
xii Preface
of Bergsonian élan vital, was indifferent to post-Wagnerian notions of redemption

through music.
What set Strauss apart from his German contemporaries was a unique musical atheism.
Read in this context, the metaphysical Ernst Bloch’s remarks – that we hear a “brilliant
hollowness” in Strauss’s work, and that he possessed a “profound superficiality” – are not
much of an indictment. Like many others, Bloch, a Wagnerian and the most romantic of
the twentieth-century Marxist philosophers, saw a utopian function in music. Strauss, to
the contrary, saw no need to fill those purported lacunae where God once reigned.2
Musically, Strauss was undoubtedly a post-Wagnerian. He extended the musical side of
what Wagner had begun – the ability to translate images and gestures into the purely sonic
realm, the chromatically enriched diatonic harmonic language, the remarkable orchestra-
tions. This is the musical standpoint from which we should approach Strauss’s operatic
works. What was new about his operas, however, was not the obvious post-Wagnerian
musical techniques, but the anti-German humanism and cinematic pictorialism of his
music, his delight in shocking his listeners, his irony, and his detachment from his material.
Strauss uniquely embraced the triangular relationship of philosophy, humor (as protest
against tradition), and the erotic, sometimes in a single opera. No other German composer
of the time embraced all three, least of all in one work.
Strauss’s first success, Salome, exemplifies these very traits, and they continued to
manifest themselves, in different ways, in all the more modern – less Nietzschean, less
ego-assertive – operas that follow. The protean Strauss sensed and savored the disunities
of modern life and did not believe in masking them with a unified style. His first major
step in this new direction was Der Rosenkavalier (1910), with its incongruous stylistic
layers and anachronisms. The traditionalist Arnold Schoenberg, in 1923, disparagingly
called Strauss the “only revolutionary in our time.”3 Strauss’s laws of contrast (as
opposed to Adorno’s laws of history or his Tendenz des Materials, the laws or necessities
of musical materials) and unflagging lifelong desire to communicate the visual into
music separated Strauss from his less successful contemporaries.
Among other things, this book seeks to gainsay three common tropes on Strauss
as an opera composer that persist to this day. The first is that after a brief but intense
engagement with Johannes Brahms, Strauss “converted” to Wagnerism in the
2
Bloch’s use of the word Spuren refers to just the kind of emptiness, the lacunae, he hears in Strauss. See
Bloch, Spuren (1930), translated into English by Anthony A. Nassar as Traces (Stanford University Press,
2006). Adorno also dismissed such Blochean notions, but for different philosophical reasons. See
Adorno’s “Bloch’s ‘Traces’: The Philosophy of Kitsch,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, New Left Review 1,
121 (May–June 1980), http://newleftreview.org.
3
Arnold Schoenberg, “New Music,” in Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1975), p. 137. In this context Schoenberg thinks of himself as an evolutionary, as part of
a continuum of a great Austro-German musical heritage, where “the laws of earlier art can be applied to
the new” in this evolutionary process.
Preface xiii
mid-1880s; the second is that Der Rosenkavalier was a conscious retreat toward popular
taste; and the third is that Strauss was an unreflective, card-playing Bürger who para-
doxically wrote remarkable music. A careful reading of Strauss’s childhood letters to
Ludwig Thuille shows that the composer was fascinated with Wagner far earlier than
has been thought. And his interest in Brahms, brief though it was, formed an important
component of Strauss’s musical maturation in the early 1880s.
As for popular taste, we should keep in mind that Salome was more in tune with
fashionable European sensibilities than any opera of its time. Strauss proudly bragged that
the royalties from this opera, written for a young bourgeoisie hungry for scandal and
titillation, paid for his villa in Garmisch. Salome was far less Deathridge’s “fatal conclusion”
to Wagnerian opera than a new beginning.4 Audiences and critics failed to understand
Strauss’s subtle critiques of Wagner in Guntram and Feuersnot; but Salome, ironically subtitled
Music Drama, was the first clear debunking of Wagnerism, more specifically Parsifal: in
Strauss’s sarcastic response, the ascetic redeemer is not redeemed, but beheaded.
In researching his pathbreaking book, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the
German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism,5 the
American Charles Youmans did what few Germans bothered to do: he went through
Strauss’s vast library of thoroughly read volumes by Goethe, Wagner, Arthur
Schopenhauer, Eduard Hanslick, and Siegmund von Hausegger (all containing numer-
ous marginal annotations by the composer) to reveal a side of the composer that he
wished to hide behind his phlegmatic mask. In part, this book extends Youmans’s
arguments concerning Strauss’s orchestral music to his music for the stage.
One anecdote will suffice to illustrate Strauss’s quiet Socratic delight in appearing
nonreflective, choosing instead to let others do the talking. Bloch, who had remarked on
Strauss’s “profound superficiality,” confessed in old age to having been duped by Strauss
when he was a young man of twenty-six. In a conversation with the literary critic Marcel
Reich-Ranicki, Bloch, then in his seventies, described an evening with Strauss in
November 1911. The composer had conducted Elektra on the eighth of that month
in Berlin. He told Reich-Ranicki that the two
spoke about Elektra, but Bloch did most of the talking while Strauss, who ate dumplings and
drank beer, remained silent. Only once in a while did he mumble something in agreement.
Bloch said it became a “horrible” evening. He was suddenly struck by terrible thoughts: this
Strauss, this Bavarian beer drinker, he did not at all understand the subtle, exquisite, wonderful
music of Elektra. As [Bloch] thought about it, he laughed cheerfully – surely at himself.6
4
John Deathridge, Wagner: Beyond Good and Evil (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2008), p. 225.
5
Charles Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2005).
6
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mein Leben (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1999), p. 342. My italics.
xiv Preface
Since the change of the millennium we have seen fresh discourse on nineteenth- and
twentieth-century German musical culture and identity, and Strauss’s role as an opera
composer is vital to that conversation. His operas, with libretti by Oscar Wilde, Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, and Stefan Zweig, mirrored the social, political, and aesthetic
concerns of their age. But even beyond these issues, Strauss’s operas were remarkably
successful. Like his beloved Mozart, Strauss believed in the harmony of contrasts, both
within a work and between adjacent works: successive operas should contrast with one
another. Therefore, my study situates them chronologically and, for the most part, in
dialectical pairs. (An exception is Chapter 5, in which I discuss a triptych of marriage
operas wherein Strauss examines the subject through the lens of the metaphysical, the
comic, and the mythological, respectively.) By considering the contrasts, we learn of the
similarities and, ultimately, better understand the whole corpus of his stage works.
My study examines these works as a life’s project with important recurring themes,
beginning with the primary one, the very “detour” he mentioned to Zweig: Strauss’s
Umweg (or Sonderweg) as an opera composer, his initial engagement with the various
Wagnerisms of his day, and his ultimate rejection of all of them beyond musical
technique. Other recurrent themes include Strauss’s late-industrial materialism, egoism,
and humanism; the composer as pictorialist, his cinematic explicitness, debunking
Wagner with the latter’s own tools; Strauss’s historical skepticism, his law of contrast
versus the Adornean stylistic demands of history; and the centrality of marital relation-
ships, reflecting Strauss’s fondness for finding profundity in the everyday.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should like first of all to acknowledge the initial support of the American Council
of Learned Societies, which offered me the initial grant that enabled me to start this
project, and also to thank James A. Hepokoski and Lewis Lockwood, who offered
the ACLS generous letters of support. I am as always indebted to the Strauss family and
the Richard Strauss Institute (Garmisch-Partenkirchen) for their generosity in making
available to me all their materials, including those used for the illustrations in this book.
Christian Wolf and Jürgen May are ideal helpers who went well out of their way to help
me at every stage of the process. Much of my material draws on years of my own writing
on Elektra, Ariadne auf Naxos, Intermezzo, and Daphne. Their published manifestations
may be found in the bibliography.
I would be most remiss if I did not acknowledge my readers Thomas Hansen, and
Charles Youmans, who read every word and made numerous suggestions along the
way. My colleague Matthew Werley not only thoroughly read the manuscript but
created a careful and detailed index for which I am most grateful. Then there were those
who read parts of the manuscript: Wilbur Bonnell, Joy Calico, James A. Hepokoski,
Fredric Jameson, David Lubin, Phillip Rupprecht, and especially Stephen Hinton, who
offered much insightful advice, especially as it related to Strauss and music in the 1920s,
1930s, and 1940s. And still others responded to various queries, both by letter and in
conversation, such as Leon Botstein, Katherina Hottmann, Fredric Jameson, Michael
Kater, David Lubin, Pamela Potter, and Walter Werbeck. I received excellent linguistic
advice from James Rolleston and Walter Niedermann, who pointed out that the Nurse
(Amme) in Die Frau ohne Schatten is a wet nurse, with all that figure’s intended irony. I
had so many supporters along the way and wish to thank them now: Bill Hampton;
Brian Kileff; Scott Lindroth; Pei-Fen Liu; Pandora Shaw; my two lovely daughters,
Grace and Stephanie; and, of course, my dear wife, Vivian.
This book took way too much time. Tennis is supposed to be a solace to someone
working on a book, not the source of serious injury, which laid me up on various
occasions. But the series editor, Arthur Groos, wisely assured me he preferred to wait
for something good and complete rather than abridged and compromised. Barbara
Norton, my “triage copy editor,” helped pull together over six years of material into a
coherent whole. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my good-hearted mother. She warned
me toward the end that I might be writing a work with a posthumous dedication to her,
and she was – as always – right. I dedicate this book to her memory.
xv
Introduction
Chapter 1 suggests that, despite its obscurity, Guntram (1893) remains the central source
for understanding the emergence of Strauss as a mature artist. The work, whose text
was written by the composer, documents his early philosophical struggles with the issue
of music and metaphysics. Earlier scholars of Strauss’s operatic oeuvre have explained
its failure in terms of its miscarried Wagnerism, demonstrating that they themselves
have failed to understand that Guntram ultimately rejects Wagnerian metaphysics. In
1949, at the end of his life, Strauss regretted that his biographers tended to downplay
Guntram’s rejection of a Wagnerian Erlösung, thereby ignoring the breach between
individual (subject) and the world (object), as the Minnesänger breaks his lyre and walks
away from his brotherhood and his beloved Freihild.1 In this single gesture, Strauss, who
served as his own librettist on this work, suggests that if one systematically follows
Schopenhauer to the end of his four-book World as Will and Representation, the final denial
of the will must include a rejection of music.
Feuersnot (1901), the co-subject, along with Salome, of Chapter 2, marked the end of a
seven-year operatic hiatus in the wake of Guntram’s failure. During those years Strauss
composed his mature tone poems, all of which exemplify a shift toward ego assertion
foreshadowed by that breach between individual and collective treated in Guntram.
Informed by Nietzsche and Stirner, these orchestral works feature an individual
(whether the visionary hero of Ein Heldenleben or the delusional antihero of Don
Quixote) at odds with a complacent society. The Till Eulenspiegel-like main character
of Feuersnot, Kunrad, is such a one. This lampoon of Wagnerian metaphysics and a world
of indolence celebrates Erlösung not through a woman’s love but through purely
physical, sexual passion, thereby mocking the whole concept altogether. Feuersnot
fared only slightly better than Guntram: the intricacy of the libretto’s satire and fragile
puns obscured the narrative, and Strauss’s score lacked the thematic precision that he
had attained in the tone poems.
That all changed with the sudden success of Salome, which Strauss intended as a
pendant to the one-act Feuersnot. The cinematic exactitude of the orchestra, the motivic
clarity, the taut pacing of events, and the themes of lust, incest, and necrophilia created
as much fascination as revulsion. Once again Strauss exploits graphic sexuality as a sharp
response to loftier Wagnerism. This is Straussian “musical atheism” in high profile – it
1
In no way can Guntram be understood as an autobiographical extension of Strauss.
1
2 Introduction
mocks both Christianity and Judaism.2 It also marked the end of his relationship with
the Wagner family, which had been strained since the mid-1890s. Strauss had found his
voice as an opera composer, and that genre would remain his chief preoccupation for
the rest of his life.
Chapter 3 shows that, despite Strauss’s initial desire to compose a contrasting comedy
to Salome, he followed it with the tragic Elektra (1908). He recognized in Hofmannsthal’s
play the ingredients that had served him well in Salome: a strong female protagonist,
a rapid chain of events, and a focus on physical gesture. Elektra, another narcissistic
heroine, shares Salome’s contempt for the world around her and is ultimately undone
by her neurotic fixations. Ego assertion had reached a disturbing level of pathology, and
at this stage in his career, Strauss, drained by solipsistic tragedy, pulled away from the
defiantly Dionysian and began moving toward the realm of the social.
Curiously, as Chapter 3 asserts, even though Hofmannsthal was not a collaborator on
Strauss’s libretto, it was he who showed Strauss the way out of his predicament, a way to
the modern, to the social, and to “one’s higher self.” Hofmannsthal had simultaneously
grown weary of such social inwardness, and he and Strauss could not have found one
another at a better time, both achieving renewal and rejuvenation in social comedy. Der
Rosenkavalier (1910) is about the transitory nature of living, and the chapter challenges
the outdated notion of Rosenkavalier as some sort of regression. If it is a volte-face, it
is a rejection of Nietzschean (as Strauss perceived it) fin-de-siècle decadence. Prefiguring
the neoclassicists of a decade later, Strauss offers a critical layering of seemingly
incompatible styles with remarkable ease. Through the lens of Der Rosenkavalier, with
its ahistorical anachronisms, we see a composer who keenly recognized and even
embraced the incongruities of modern life.
Both Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, as originally written by Hofmannsthal, are plays,
the first for the spoken stage and the second for an operatic one.3 Rosenkavalier was
intended to be the Meistersinger of the twentieth century: the former centered on Vienna
and the spirit of Maria Theresa, the latter on Nuremberg and the spirit of Hans Sachs.
Many of the most famous lyrical moments were added by Hofmannsthal at the compos-
er’s urging. Hofmannsthal was keenly aware that he had not yet become a real operatic
2
Strauss once recalled: “In Salome I tried to compose the good old Jochanaan more or less as a clown. A
preacher in the desert, especially one who feeds on locusts, seems infinitely ridiculous to me. Only
because I had already caricatured the five Jews and also poked fun at Father Herod did I feel that I had
to follow the law of contrast and write a pedantic-Philistine motif for four horns to characterize
Jochanaan.” See Strauss to Zweig (5 May 1935), in A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and
Stefan Zweig, 1931–1935, ed. Roland Tenschert, trans. Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977), p. 90.
3
Indeed, Hofmannsthal published his play separately, with his own publisher, without the additions and
changes suggested by Strauss. See “Der Rosenkavalier”: Komödie für Musik von Hugo von Hofmannsthal
(Berlin: Fischer Verlag, 1911).
Introduction 3
librettist and decided that he would need to undertake an experimental work in which
musical numbers, along with dance, would serve as the backbone of the text. In creating a
work that combined so many aspects of the other arts, all of which retained their integrity
and were not synthesized but treated severally, Strauss and especially Hofmannsthal
offered a twentieth-century response to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk.
Ariadne was that pivotal moment in Hofmannsthal’s career, for thereafter, in such
works as Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die ägyptische Helena, and Arabella, Hofmannsthal creates
compelling musical moments in the libretto itself, whether solos, duets, ensembles,
choruses, symphonic interludes, or dance. Ariadne was also the first opera to feature a
theme to be found in the rest of the Hofmannsthal operas (as well as Joseph Gregor’s
Daphne libretto), namely the concept of transformation (Verwandlung). According to
Hofmannsthal, the way to one’s higher self, from preexistence to existence, is through
transformation, from becoming to being, from werden to sein. The title character makes
this journey in both operas (1912/16 and 1919, Ariadne and Die Frau, respectively), yet in
different ways. Ariadne, resigned to solipsistic grieving, takes a risk: by offering herself
to a stranger (the disguised Bacchus), she is transformed and attains a life of meaning.
Chapter 4 explores Verwandlung in detail, a theme that concerned Strauss as early as
Death and Transfiguration (1890) and as late as the Metamorphosen (1945). What separates
Ariadne from the preceding operas is Hofmannsthal’s conscious desire to create a real
musical text. Strauss had already set the plays Salome and Elektra to music and thus had
no trouble with Rosenkavalier’s playlike text, save for the ending, where he required
more text to round out the musical ensembles. But Hofmannsthal was dissatisfied
and desired more from their artistic relationship, wanting to learn how to craft lyrical
phrases and shape texts meant for music. Their Ariadne “experiment,” which encom-
passed several years and two versions, served them well for the operas that followed.
Chapter 5 covers the three “marriage operas,” Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, and
Die ägyptische Helena. The shadowless, immortal empress lives in constant bliss, but
without human desire. In order for her to feel the fire of passion, she must accept life’s
shadow, born of light. By sacrificing her chance to attain humanity ( by refusing to
take another’s), she is thus transformed and gains it. Ariadne and the empress learn
something Elektra could never know: in order to become human, one must realize a
responsibility to one’s past, present, and future. The quest for humanity, especially the
centrality of modern marriage in the human experience, formed a vital theme in Strauss
and Hofmannsthal’s postwar collaborations. The autobiographical Intermezzo (1924),
Strauss’s opera domestica, presents issues of marital fidelity and trust as comedy, and
although Hofmannsthal was sympathetic to the overall idea, he had no interest in
writing such a libretto. This intentionally cinematic opera, with its quickly shifting
scenes and blackouts, was a compelling response to the new Weimar era, a work that
served as a model for the Zeitopern (the topical operas of Paul Hindemith, Ernst
Krenek, and Kurt Weill) that soon followed. Die ägyptische Helena (1928) presents the
4 Introduction
other aspect of the issue of marriage and a return to the composer’s collaboration with
Hofmannsthal.
Not only did Strauss and Hofmannsthal share a passion for Greek drama, but they
also both interpreted it in an idiosyncratic, modern way. They rejected the Teutonic
mythology of Wagner, who believed that the Greek myths had become corrupted
beyond repair. To the contrary, Strauss and Hofmannsthal saw in the twentieth century
the opportunity to modernize classical themes. Beneath the surface of myth, Greek
drama was a way for them to explore purely human qualities, the nature of human
relationships, and the union of marriage – a union that seems always to be presented
by Wagner as one of bad faith. By the end of Helena, the themes of memory, marital
fidelity, and the restoration of trust are brought into sharp focus in what Hofmannsthal
considered his finest libretto. On a broader level, the libretto, whose context is the
Trojan War, is very much a conscious reflection of post-First World War society and
economics, as Hofmannsthal made clear when he suggested that his modern mythology
was unthinkable without “the events since 1914.”4 Marriage symbolized a return to
equilibrium and the continuity of civilization. A discussion of these marriage operas
offers the opportunity to get beyond the old binary discourse – expressionism
(Expressionismus, as exemplified by, for instance, Schoenberg and Alban Berg) versus
the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit, represented by Weill and Hindemith, among
others) – as it relates to modern opera in Weimar Germany.
The events surrounding the two operas discussed in Chapter 6 were devastating,
though for different reasons, and in each instance Strauss believed his operatic career to
be over. The first blow was the sudden death, in June 1929, of Hofmannsthal during their
work on Arabella (1932). Just when Strauss came out of his depression with the discovery
of Stefan Zweig, who wrote the libretto for Strauss’s only opera buffa, Die schweigsame
Frau (1934), the National Socialists assumed control of the government. Any further
official work with the Jewish Zweig would be out of the question. This chapter
examines two works of revival. The first marked a revisit to Vienna, not in the time
of Maria Theresa but during the 1860s. The second marked a return to opera buffa (his
favorite aspect of Ariadne auf Naxos, though it was upstaged by opera seria in the end).
One might argue that Arabella was a pursuit of the operetta Strauss never got in Helena,
which was conceived, in part, as a work referencing the lighter world of la belle Hélène.
Arabella certainly has an aura of Viennese operetta: a mysterious Croatian count,
a lavish ball, coloratura, and sexual intrigue. The gains of the 1860s, with the rise of
an Austrian liberal bourgeoisie and an Ausgleich with Hungary, had their dark side:
increasing financial speculation and ultimate economic breakdown in 1873, which is
mirrored in the opera and was repeating itself when Hofmannsthal began writing the
4
The work immediately preceding Helena, the Ruins of Athens project, is likewise a view of Greece as a
model for renewal at a time when Germany lay in postwar ruins.
Introduction 5
libretto in late 1928. As Strauss struggled with the Nazi government over the premiere
of Arabella, he was also in the midst of composing with Zweig the comic work Die
schweigsame Frau – one that echoed, among other operas, Don Pasquale, complete with
textual and musical-historical allusions, among other things, to Italian opera. Strauss’s
delusion that he could continue working with Zweig, thinking his shameful service to
the Nazi government could earn him special privileges, displays the narcissism and
opportunism that were an undeniable part of his personality. In 1935 it all collapsed;
Zweig was gone, Strauss was fired from his governmental post, and the Nazi shadow
loomed large over all his operas to follow.
But, as Chapter 7 shows, before he left the collaboration Zweig provided Strauss with
a plan for an opera about the 1648 Peace of Westphalia – just as the Nazis were preparing
for war. Joseph Gregor, a brilliant theater historian, though less brilliant a poet, wrote
the libretto for his friend Zweig. Titled Friedenstag, it contains some of Strauss’s finest
choral music, yet by the time this one-act “scenic cantata” premiered in July 1938, Austria
had already been annexed. With the outbreak of war the next year, performances of this
opera of reconciliation ended.
Daphne was conceived as a companion piece for Friedenstag, but it soon went its
own way and became, in Strauss’s final years, his favorite opera. As with Ariadne and Die
Frau ohne Schatten, transformation (the path to the human community) is a key element.
But now, without Hofmannsthal – and with Strauss, having recently reread The Birth
of Tragedy, acting on his Nietzschean roots – transformation is expressed in Daphne’s
inward act of leaving a corrupt social environment and joining nature. As Germany was
gearing up for war, the social took on a disturbing outlook, and musical sketches reflect
Strauss’s state of mind at this time. Not unlike Guntram, Daphne, in the end, abandons
her community; indeed, her transformation music (F♯ major) recalls enharmonically the
music of Guntram (G♭ major) as he abandons his collective.
The eighth and final chapter addresses, among other issues, that of art during a time
of war. Personal and political worries had taken their toll on a composer determined to
compose a three-act “light mythology.” Strauss’s diaries show that, with the invasion of
Poland in September 1939, he foresaw the end of the cultural institutions he had known
so intimately all his life. He recognized Die Liebe der Danae (1940), based on a sketch by
Hofmannsthal and realized by Gregor, as the culmination of his life’s work. Danae’s ties
to Hofmannsthal’s Helena are tightly intertwined, and for a time after the First World
War Strauss was conceptualizing them simultaneously. Thus, Danae was conceived in
the very wake of a war that created the next one, during which Strauss finally got round
to composing it. It became a casualty of the Second World War with the closing of
all German theaters in August 1944 and the cancellation of the premiere, which did not
take place until eight years later. Although fleshed out by Gregor, the fundamental
themes – particularly Danae’s attainment of humanity through marriage – bear the
imprint of Hofmannsthal. Yet there are strong elements of Wagner as well, especially
6 Introduction
the relationship between love and the corruptive power of gold. Strauss was quite open
about Jupiter as a Wotan-like character, and it is safe to say that the composer saw a bit
of himself in this role.
Strauss originally requested that this complex opera be performed two years after an
armistice. Curiously, Strauss put no such stipulation on Capriccio (1941), his final opera,
for he simply did not put it in the same category as Danae. Capriccio is a conversational
work (Strauss subtitled it A Conversation Piece for Music in One Act) of nuance, stylization,
and restraint, one that literally creates a discussion about the fragile balance between
words and music. Strauss never meant it to equal the full-throttled complexities of the
Danae score, which officially premiered three years after the composer’s death. Like
Danae, Capriccio is a summation, but of a different type, more personal and without
the philosophical weight. Strauss, who was sensitive about being his own librettist
since the days of Guntram, overly credited Clemens Krauss as “co-librettist.” Indeed, one
should recall that a year before Capriccio, Strauss revised Guntram, cutting the score and
thinning out his thick, youthful orchestral score in order better to balance words and
music. He hoped that it might finally find a place on the German operatic stage. But
there are two other obvious references in this “conversation piece”: Intermezzo, the
comic “play-opera” (Spieloper), and Ariadne auf Naxos, his only other opera about opera.
Capriccio’s premiere took place in the same year as the infamous Wannsee
Conference, which created the blueprint for Hitler’s final solution. Is there a moral
issue to be raised about an old composer preoccupied with the eighteenth-century War
of the Bouffons at the same time that his country was launching a military campaign
against Russia? Or was Edward Said correct when he observed that, without approach-
ing the issue of politics and art on a more contextual level, we are left with little more
than “hortatory testimonials to the horror of German fascism, raised eyebrows and
finger-pointing”?5 Throughout his life, Strauss believed his music to be separate from
politics, despite the fact that art had been so politicized by the Nazis and the fact that,
paradoxically, he had chosen to work with them early on in the regime. But this regime,
where Gleichschaltung was the new rule, was like no other he had ever seen. For the first
time in his life, Strauss, who had Jewish colleagues, friends, and family, was simply
unable to keep these two worlds apart, as I discuss in Chapters 7 and 8.
This complex of Jupiter–Wotan–Strauss is not to be taken lightly. One detects in
Strauss’s old age a certain “metaphysical longing” in Danae,6 which is a story of love,
gold, redemption, and renunciation, specifically a renunciation by Jupiter, the king of
the gods. In a passage that Strauss likened to “Wotan’s Farewell,” Jupiter returns to
Olympus, high above mortal earth. Strauss, no longer in an ironic, circumventing
5
Edward W. Said, “Gay and Pepusch: The Beggar’s Opera,” The Nation 256, 3 (25 January 1993), p. 101.
6
Youmans discusses this concept in terms of the character Zarathustra, but I believe it applies to Strauss
as well, especially toward the end of his life. See Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, p. 101.
Introduction 7
mode of thought, admitted that “the lofty spirits of Olympus” should have called him
up as well.7
For an atheist whose religion was German humanism and whose gods were Mozart
(for drama), Wagner (for music), and Goethe (for literature), the perceived demise of
German culture at the time of Danae’s 1944 premiere in Salzburg placed much at stake.
Strauss’s solution was the solution he employed for every crisis in his life: daily creative
work. Hence the various postwar concerti for woodwinds, the so-called wrist exercises,
and the more weighty Metamorphosen (1945) and Four Last Songs (1948). At the end of
Faust ii, the angels sing, “Through our deeds we are redeemed.” I am fully convinced
that for Strauss the act of creation approached the divine, and for him that meant pure
happiness. Despite the undeniable, dominant musical influence of Wagner, his spiritual
guide was Goethe.
In a late memoir, Strauss wrote down, from memory, a quote from one of Goethe’s
conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann, a passage that he surely believed summed
up his own life:
In the life of a person, a turning point often occurs. Where in his youth everything favored
him and brought him happiness, now one misfortune piles upon another. I believe a person
must be ruined again. Each person has a particular mission that he is called to carry out. When
he has accomplished it he is no longer needed on the face of the earth in his present form
[Gestalt], and Providence turns him again toward another purpose. But, since everything here
on earth happens according to the natural course of things, the spirits force him to go on, one
foot after the other, until, at last, he succumbs.8
With little ahead of him, Strauss went on, one foot after the other, creating music,
whether wrist exercises or more lofty works, until the very end.
A MUSICAL-ANALYTICAL POSTSCRIPT
This book takes into account two others, readily available, that serve as musical guides
to the operas of Strauss: Norman Del Mar’s three-volume Richard Strauss: A Critical
Commentary on His Life and Works (London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1962–72) and William
Mann’s Richard Strauss: A Critical Study of the Operas (London: Cassell, 1964). I cannot
overstate their importance to me when I was a young Strauss scholar. Del Mar’s
achievement is more far-reaching in that he includes all genres of Strauss’s music, but
the highlights are his discussions of the operas. Their chapters acquaint the reader with
the basic plot and provide a short background, a musical-motivic outline of the plot in
chronological order, and some paragraphs on reception.
7
Personal communication with Gertrud Wagner (Munich, 2 September 1995).
8
Strauss’s memory was remarkably accurate. The passage is quoted in Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss
persönlich: Eine Bildbiographie (Munich: Kindler, 1984), p. 409.
8 Introduction
For the Strauss neophyte, the main benefit of Mann’s opera discussions is the
unlocking and explication of the associative themes or leitmotives that make up the
linear fabric of the work. What frustrated me as a student was that they never delved
into Strauss’s larger tonal structures, especially the harmonic constructions, which are
central to his expressive aims. The composer’s tonal symbolism and the way tonalities
interrelated were fairly consistent throughout his life: they could be banal, even humor-
ous, such as in the autobiographical Symphonia domestica, where he separates his wife
from himself by a tritone (B and F, respectively, with a D – the son – in between); or, in a
more serious setting, in Also sprach Zarathustra, where the irreconcilable clash between
world and humanity (immortality and mortality) is symbolized by the half-step relation-
ship between C and B. The first author to present in-depth discussions of the tonal
relationships in the operas was Reinhard Gerlach in his Don Juan und Rosenkavalier:
Studien zu Idee und Gestalt einer tonalen Evolution im Werk Richard Strauss (Bern: Verlag
Paul Haupt, 1966). In the chapter on Rosenkavalier, he analyzes in great detail the
structural ramifications of Strauss’s musical journey from the libidinal E major,
Octavian-dominated opening of the opera to the serene close in E♭, which is controlled
by the Marschallin.
Many decades ago, Edmund Wachten proposed an ambitious typology of Straussian
tonalities and their meanings in “Das Formproblem in den sinfonischen Dichtungen von
Richard Strauss (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Bühnenwerke)” (Ph.D. diss.,
University of Berlin, 1933). Although his system is fraught with omissions and incon-
sistencies and betrays the dangers of a mechanistic application of programmatic tags to
particular keys, he was not altogether incorrect in his assumptions. Kenneth Birkin, in
Friedenstag and Daphne: An Interpretive Study of the Literary and Dramatic Sources of Two
Operas by Richard Strauss (New York: Garland, 1989), updated and improved Wachten’s
table (p. 258), and more recently a host of articles and monographs (including some by
this author) have discussed this important musical phenomenon. Strauss’s tonal fields
of expression – which Christopher Wintle, in “Elektra and the ‘Electra-Complex,’” in
Salome/Elektra, ed. Paul Banks, English National Opera Guides (London: J. Calder,
1988), calls “motivic tonality” (p. 77) – serve various purposes.
Most important, these tonal areas serve as the structural building blocks for his stage
works: certain keys generate specific types of themes, textures, and orchestrations. But
even more, they help the analyst understand psychological strata and motivations in
the operas. By now it should be clear that Strauss could never operate outside the tonal
system, be it in tone poem, opera, lied, or ballet. The tonal ambiguity in the central
scene of Elektra (the confrontation between Elektra and Klytämnestra) only confirms
the tonal clarity of the work, as we shall see in Chapter 3. Strauss had perfect pitch, and
tonalities held a central place in his creative mind. Whether or not the audience was
aware of these relationships is immaterial; what is germane is that expressive tonalities
were central to Strauss’s musical-dramaturgical strategies. (One might add that it is
Introduction 9
equally doubtful that audiences could perceive the often fast-paced, motivically thick
passages in such works as Die Frau ohne Schatten.)
No book-length survey of Strauss’s operas thus far has taken the composer’s tonal
strategies into account. This study makes no attempt to lay out a systematic analysis of
the motives, which would have doubled the size of the book. Rather, it takes into
account the thorough analysis of Del Mar and Mann as its companion works.
1 Guntram and the crisis of German musical metaphysics
Not many reading this book will ever see a production of Strauss’s Guntram (1893).
Despite its moments of great musical beauty, few who know the work would hesitate
to point out the opera’s inherent unstageworthiness, slow pace, and paucity of action
in a sometimes laborious libretto written by the composer. That said, if we wish to
comprehend how Strauss understood himself as a creative artist, his complex relationship
with Wagner’s legacy, and the reasons that Strauss would become the most successful
modern German opera composer of the twentieth century, we must first come to terms
with this misunderstood, problematical work, its magnificent failure, and the deep
philosophical and aesthetic foundation upon which the opera was built.
Strauss’s fifteen operas remain the greatest German operatic legacy since Wagner,
after whose final Parsifal (1882) German opera entered a state of serious decline. Guntram,
understood or not, was one of many casualties during this period of operatic compo-
sition following Wagner’s death.
The post-Wagnerian slump – indeed, an operatic collapse – between Parsifal and
Salome (1904) was surely not one of quantity. Paul Bekker writes of “a genuine creative
fever,” listing, among others, operatic works by Hugo Wolf, Engelbert Humperdinck,
Eugen d’Albert, Hans Pfiztner, and Ferruccio Busoni;1 one could add Karl Goldmark,
Felix Weingartner, and Alexander Ritter to his list. Though some of these composers
may still have their advocates, the fact remains that, beyond Humperdinck’s Hänsel und
Gretel (championed and premiered by Strauss in 1893), none of these composers’ works
remains in any standard operatic repertoire. Indeed, what had begun with Wagner as
compelling aesthetic conviction had deteriorated, in lesser hands, to aesthetic pretense.
Hänsel und Gretel demonstrates that not all post-Wagnerian composers were writing
only redemption operas (Erlösungsopern); some turned to the fairy-tale opera (Märchenoper),
with its antecedents in the Zauberoper tradition of the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth centuries. The problem here is the incongruity between the Wagnerian musical
language and the childlike subject matter. Humperdinck was the best-known exponent
of this tradition, but there were others, such as Ludwig Thuille, Ritter, Wilhelm Kienzl,
Siegfried Wagner, Leo Blech, and Friedrich Klose. D’Albert’s Tiefland (1903) brought to
the stage a short-lived German-style work in the verismo style popularized by Pietro
Mascagni and Ruggero Leoncavallo, but its fame was relatively brief.
1
Paul Bekker, The Changing Opera, trans. Arthur Mendel (New York: Norton, 1935), p. 256.
10
Guntram and the crisis of German musical metaphysics 11
Wagner, unlike his contemporaries and those who shortly followed, brought German
opera to Olympian stature through the force of a colossal creative personality, and
Strauss well understood the hazards of continuing such an unparalleled, even idiosyn-
cratic, project. Few have understood how Guntram, with its overt Wagnerian allusions, in
fact marked the first, albeit awkward, step in that new direction.
Among the major composers of his day, Strauss was alone in his conviction that
music could neither serve as a substitute for religion nor serve a higher – or even an
ethical – purpose. For him, art and religion could never coexist, because “in an artist
whose works have this strong ethical or religious tendency, the religious emotion
always outweighs the artistic emotion.”2 The metaphysical Parsifal was unique and
should (indeed, could) never be repeated. Those artistic projects grounded in ethics
or religion were doomed to fail as art; they contained “the seeds of [artistic] death in
itself.”3
Strauss developed a different, independent artistic voice, one that spoke of the
irrelevancy of metaphysics in the modern world. Guntram was the first leg of his
unique journey as an opera composer, and despite its failure, it remained Strauss’s
lifelong obsession. The opera was broadcast from Berlin (significantly cut) in celebra-
tion of his seventieth birthday, and a fully revised version was staged six years later in
Weimar, the city that had seen the work’s premiere in 1894. Indeed, Strauss was
preoccupied with Guntram as late as three months before his death, as his “Final
Chronicle” (“Letzte Aufzeichnung”) of June 1949 reveals. At the end of his life, in an
era of Darmstadt modernism, the eighty-five-year-old Strauss believed he had come to
be misunderstood as a composer, expressing regret that none of the more recent
biographies had the right slant (Einstellung) on him: “Why don’t they [the biographers]
see what is new in my works, how, as only in Beethoven, the individual plays a visible
role in them – this [phenomenon] begins already in the 3rd act of Guntram (the
rejection of the collective).”4
To understand Strauss is to recognize an opera composer for whom the individual’s
rejection of a collective (whether they be Mastersingers of Nuremberg, Knights of a
Holy Grail, or Guntram’s Brotherhood) served as a central basis of his response to
Wagner. This chapter will show that Guntram was far from the unreflective Wagner
pastiche that most contemporary critics believed it to be; rather, it was an insightful
critique in both theory and practice. In studying the genesis of this work, we also track
the genesis of Strauss’s emerging worldview as a mature, independent artist.
2
Willi Schuh, Richard Strauss: A Chronicle of the Early Years, trans. Mary Whittall (Cambridge University
Press, 1982), p. 285.
3
Ibid.
4
Richard Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich: Atlantis, 1981), p. 182. All
translations from German sources are mine unless otherwise noted.
But in order to appreciate the significance of this alternative worldview, one must
first dispense with two commonly held notions about the composer, persistent
clichés that continue to obscure an accurate perception of Strauss the opera com-
poser. The first appears to be true on the surface: a composer who devotes himself to
instrumental music, culminating in the grand tone poems of the 1890s, then moves on
to a career in opera. The second is the account of Strauss’s upbringing in a con-
servative musical household under the tight reins of a brilliant, curmudgeonly horn
player who banished any discussion or performance of Wagner from the house. This
account goes on to say that, upon leaving this household in 1885 for a musical post
under Hans von Bülow in Meiningen, Strauss – under the tutelage of the avuncular
and charismatic Alexander Ritter – was “converted” to the music and teachings of
Wagner.
One searches in vain for any contemporary source, primary or secondary, that even
mentions the word “conversion,” though this narrative has persisted uncontested for
decades. The two fallacies are curiously interwoven, for Strauss’s introduction to
Wagner was simultaneous with his youthful infatuation with the theater (both of
which well predated his move to Meiningen), and it was a fascination encouraged by
his parents. By 1882 young Strauss had seen every major Wagner opera (even parts of
Rienzi), and that year his father, Franz, took his son to Bayreuth to hear Parsifal – during
the very summer of its premiere. Franz Strauss, the great horn player who performed
in a number of Wagner premieres, may not have liked many of the music dramas (their
lack of melodic clarity, their nervous modulations and intricate horn parts), but he
recognized great music and, despite his personal distaste, knew that his son should be
exposed to it. Franz realized that cultural and musical exposure was key for this genial
young boy, who was poised, like a dry sponge, to absorb all that a major music capital
had to offer.
MUSIC AND THEATER: YOUNG STRAUSS AND WAGNER
The Munich into which Strauss was born in 1864 numbered some 150,000 inhabitants; it
expanded to a half million by the end of the century. The young composer grew up in the
very center of the Bavarian capital and eagerly exploited its many cultural opportunities –
theaters, concert halls, museums – and through his father made early contacts with
Munich’s most important musicians. At the age of seven he attended his first public
musical event, Der Freischütz, at the Nationaltheater, and The Magic Flute shortly there-
after, both times sitting with his mother as his father played first horn in the pit. Over
the next several years, Strauss’s passion for opera and spoken theater increased by
leaps and bounds, and at age twelve he tried his hand at composing some musical
drama with Scenes for a Singspiel, for voice and piano; later that year he composed another
Music and theater: young Strauss and Wagner 13
fragmentary voice-and-piano Singspiel entitled Battle with the Dragon, based on a text by
Karl Theodor Körner.5
In 1878 the fourteen-year-old Strauss, having become infatuated with the plays of
Goethe and Schiller, planned his first major work for the stage. Based on Goethe’s Lila,
it was to be set as a Singspiel with orchestra and choruses. Although he never got
any further with the work than three numbers, the play had made a serious enough
impression on him that he returned to it nearly twenty years later, now no longer a
schoolboy but rather a famous tone poet who, with the failure of Guntram, had yet to
make an impact as an opera composer. However, Strauss was simultaneously absorbed
by a new tone poem while he was sketching the libretto to the later Lila, and it may well
be that some of Lila’s themes of doubt and despair found their way into his Also sprach
Zarathustra, a project that pushed aside all practical plans for ever seeing the earlier effort
come to fruition.
Young Strauss saw his first Siegfried in April 1878, then Die Walküre six months later.
We can gauge his reaction from his letters to his childhood friend Ludwig Thuille, who
was living in Innsbruck with his oldest half sister. The orphaned Thuille was three years
older than Richard, also a passionate young composer, and was treated as a family
member when he lived in Munich. Thuille and Strauss’s father were at one in their
conservative anti-Wagnerism, and their prejudice strongly influenced young Richard
as well. His letters to Thuille from the late 1870s are the closest things we have to a
childhood diary from Strauss. Beneath the obligatory overwrought negative surface of
these Wagner “reviews,” we see glimpses of a perceptive young musician – brighter
than Thuille – who was at some level bowled over by Siegfried and Walküre. Strauss’s
adolescent review-letter of the spring of 1878 is an amazing contradiction of condemna-
tion and amazement; and perhaps these two opposing states were not that far apart in
the formative musical intellect of a brilliant adolescent:
So recently I was in Siegfried, and I can tell you, I was bored stiff. I was quite frightfully bored,
so horribly that I cannot even tell. But it was beautiful, incredibly beautiful, this wealth of
melodies, this dramatic intensity, this fine instrumentation, and clever it was, eminently
beautiful! You will think I have lost it, well I know how to make it right again and tell you it
was dreadful.6
The awkwardness of Strauss’s sarcasm and the fact that he was able to notate many of
these “boring passages” from memory, note for note, in his letter suggest the impres-
sionable young musician’s mixed feelings. He returned to this same type of adolescent
5
As a boy Strauss enjoyed reading Theodor Körner, a young playwright, poet, and soldier whose
untimely death during the Napoleonic Wars made a strong heroic impression on generations of
Germans to come. In 1878 the composer set one of Körner’s poems, “Spielmann und Zither,” to music.
6
Strauss to Thuille (May 1878), translated in Bryan Gilliam, ed., Richard Strauss and His World (Princeton
University Press, 1992), p. 207.
mockery in a “review” of his first Walküre in October. Using Wagnerian Stabreim, dutifully
underlined by its proud author, Strauss reproves Thuille for a lapse in correspondence:
Nach langem und sehnlichen, sauren Warten / hielt in Händen ich endlich die neidliche Post; /
ich warte weiland auf Walhalls Zinnen / vor Sehnsucht verzehrte mich beinahe der Rost.
(Long I listed, in painful delay; / here I hold your mail at last in my fist / woeful
I waited on Valhalla’s walls, / yearning I was almost devoured by rust.)
In the main body of the “review” Strauss declares: “I have become a Wagnerian; I was in
Die Walküre, I am enraptured; I don’t even comprehend people who can claim a Mozart
might be as beautiful, who can go as far as to do harm to their tongue and their gullet by
expressing such a thing.”7 Although it was not reported in any letter to Thuille, Strauss
also saw a performance of Tristan und Isolde that year, and it made enough of an
impression that he got hold of a score and studied it over a significant period of time.
Whether or not the anecdote is true that his annoyed father heard Richard playing parts
of it on the piano during his regular evening horn practice in the adjacent room, the son
continued to study Tristan, which inspired him to attend another, later performance.8
Strauss recalled:
At any rate, it was not until, against my father’s orders, I studied the score of Tristan, that
I entered into this magic work, and later into the Ring des Nibelungen and can well remember
how, at the age of seventeen, I positively [devoured] the score of Tristan as if in a trance,
and how intoxicated I was with enthusiasm, which was only cooled when I attempted once
again to find in the live performance a heightening of the impressions which I had gained
through eye and spiritual ear in reading the score. New disappointments and new doubts,
new recourse to the score – until I realized at last that it was the discrepancy between a
mediocre performance and the intentions of the great master, which I divined from the score,
which prevented the work from sounding in performance as I had already heard it with the ear
of the mind.9
He continued that, having fully realized this discrepancy, he became a “full-fledged

Wagnerian.” All this took place before he met Alexander Ritter in Meiningen. Here
we see, in a nutshell, Strauss’s view of Wagnerism, one that never changed. It was a
decidedly narrow, purely musical worldview that, despite Ritter’s later urgings,
eschewed any ideology beyond the score. The mind that created Tristan, he maintained,
“was as cool as marble.”10
7
Strauss to Thuille (28 October 1878), translated in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, pp. 212–13.
8
Whether this was the documented Berlin performance in January 1884 or an earlier one cannot be
determined.
9
Richard Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. L. J. Lawrence (London: Boosey &
Hawkes, 1953), p. 132.
10
Richard Strauss, “Arbeitsmethode (1914),” in Richard Strauss: Dokumente, ed. Ernst Krause (Leipzig:
Reclam, 1980), p. 65.
Music and theater: young Strauss and Wagner 15
Strauss gave Ritter’s ideology lengthy and serious study (Guntram being an anchor
to this process) but ultimately concluded that he could never be a part of what he later
called the “redemption ballyhoo.” Indeed, Strauss was by instinct a lifelong loner, a self-
described Selberaner, refusing to be stereotyped into any group and needing no encour-
agement from friends or entourage.
Yet, one should not minimize the role Ritter played in Strauss’s life. After all, he
named his son Franz Alexander Strauss, for his father and his friend, and there is no
doubt that Ritter was responsible for catalyzing Strauss’s decision to compose opera,
specifically Guntram. But what, indeed, was that role? Strauss’s misleading explana-
tion, upon which the “Wagner conversion” trope was based, must be read carefully
and with constant attention to context. To begin with, the assertion that Ritter
introduced Strauss to the work of Schopenhauer is patently false. It remains unclear
why Strauss would have made the claim, since at the University of Munich he not only
studied philosophy, aesthetics, cultural history, and Shakespeare but, more specifi-
cally, a course on Schopenhauer taught by Friedrich Jodl, who attained later fame in
Vienna for his work in ethics and positivism. While a student in Munich, Strauss also
made the acquaintance of Arthur Seidl, who later wrote a doctoral dissertation on
musical aesthetics in Leipzig. Seidl became a major intellectual influence on Strauss,
introducing him to Nietzsche, after Strauss moved to Weimar in 1889, when Seidl was
also in residence there. His memoirs of Strauss’s artistic development are among the
earliest and contain some of the most insightful observations on Strauss as an artistic
thinker.11
The Schopenhauer that Strauss learned from the antimetaphysical Jodl (and his
notions on “ethical culture”) would have been poles apart from Ritter’s lofty religious
interpretation, and it may well be the apparent memory slip was actually his implica-
tion that Ritter introduced him to an entirely different type of Schopenhauer, one
closely connected with Wagnerian metaphysics. Whatever the case, Ritter’s impor-
tance for the twenty-one-year-old Strauss was twofold: he provided the young com-
poser with a philosophical basis for Wagner via Schopenhauer, and he introduced
him to Franz Liszt’s symphonic poems. The former had important long-term implica-
tions for Strauss, ultimately resulting in Guntram; the latter bore shorter-term results,
namely the creation of a musical alternative to the symphonies of Brahms. Convinced
that “new ideas must seek new forms,” a galvanized Strauss turned swiftly and
energetically to the tone poem.
11
Arthur Seidl, “Richard Strauss – eine Charakter-Skizze (1896),” in Straußiana: Aufsätze zur Richard
Strauß-Frage aus drei Jahrzehnten (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, [1913]), pp. 11–66. This important source
remained almost unnoticed until the 1990s, especially among English-speaking scholars on Strauss and
early German modernism in general.
MEININGEN
Given Strauss’s short tenure in Meiningen (October 1885–April 1886), far too much
weight has been placed on that period as the point when Strauss turned to the aesthetics
of Wagner and Liszt. Strauss himself must share some of the blame, for in his sentimental
reminiscence of the Meiningen period he collapsed years of evolving thought into a single
event.12 Those six months no doubt entailed some of the most concentrated activity of
his whole life. With no previous experience as a conductor, Strauss became Bülow’s
apprentice; then, a month later, on 28 November, the hot-tempered Bülow resigned,13
leaving Strauss to run one of Germany’s best orchestras (many members spent summers
playing at Bayreuth), not to mention directing choral and chamber concerts. Strauss and
Bülow nonetheless remained friends and kept in close touch during the remaining
months.
Figure 1.1 Hans von Bülow with Johannes Brahms
12
Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, pp. 138–9.
13
Biographies of Strauss have never made clear the reason for Bülow’s resignation. It seems that Bülow’s
wife, an actress in the Meiningen Court Theater, was dismissed for disciplinary reasons, and “soon
afterwards von Bülow asked to be released from his post.” John Osborne, The Meiningen Court Theater,
1866–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 142.
Meiningen 17
Indeed, the disproportional emphasis placed on Ritter in Meiningen has unfairly

overshadowed Bülow, a brilliant conductor who rehearsed without a score, a piano
virtuoso, and a sarcastic wit. During this time he had far more influence over Strauss
than Ritter did, and under him the young composer-conductor learned conducting,
repertoire, and the futility of adhering to any one dogma. Bülow himself was living
proof of such a view, for he was the only major musician in Germany to have been a
champion of both Wagner – with two premieres to his credit – and Brahms. In Strauss’s
view there was no greater interpreter of the orchestral repertoire from Beethoven
through Wagner; he believed Bülow’s Tristan Prelude to be the ideal model. More
importantly, he learned from his mentor that a great artist must never accept another
artist wholly and unquestioningly. This lesson soon became instinctual for Strauss, who
had an uncanny ability to extract the best from a variety of sources.
One major yet often overlooked creative source in Meiningen was, of course, its
great theater – one of the finest in Germany at that time, owing in large part to Duke
Georg II, himself a graphic artist, who spent much time and money to create a theater
troupe and repertoire of world renown. Although the company toured extensively, it
remained in residence during the winter and spring of 1886, and we know from Strauss’s
memoirs and letters that he attended their performances – and even rehearsals – as often
as possible:
My stay in Meiningen was all the more important to me because the theater did not go on
tour that winter and I had an opportunity of admiring the wonderful performances of the
classics, arranged by Duke George [II], which excelled particularly in the careful handling
of crowd scenes . . . On New Year’s Eve the rehearsal went on until nine o’clock, ten
o’clock, and at last the clock struck midnight; the Duke rose, and everyone heaved a sigh
of relief. Thereupon the Duke: “I wish you all a happy New Year. The rehearsal will now
continue.”14
The repertoire was extensive, reaching beyond “the classics” – historical plays and the
like – to the works of such naturalist playwrights as Henrik Ibsen, for whom Strauss had
a particular liking. In January 1886 he mentioned seeing A Doll’s House, and in April of
that same year the Court Theater mounted the German premiere of Ghosts in Augsburg;
Strauss would easily have been in a position to attend rehearsals.15 This antibourgeois,
socially engaged naturalism, which found an enthusiastic audience in Munich around
this time, informed much of Strauss’s thought for many years to come, including that
which led to Guntram, with its background of medieval social unrest.
14
Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, p. 138.
15
Bülow was well aware of Strauss’s love of Ibsen and in March 1888 suggested the playwright’s recently
translated Das Fest auf Solhaug as an operatic subject (“I thought repeatedly of you”). See Hans von
Bülow and Richard Strauss: Correspondence, ed. Willi Schuh and Franz Trenner, trans. Anthony Gishford
(London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1955), p. 68.
MUNICH, WEIMAR, AND THE GENESIS OF GUNTRAM
As a musician, Strauss grew exponentially in Meiningen. He met Brahms as well as

Brahms’s antipode Ritter, and he learned well from the brilliant Bülow, who supported
the views of the two rivals with equal insight and understanding. As a composer,
however, the busy Strauss produced little during this time, save for a work that exem-
plifies the paradoxical situation in Meiningen: a Burleske for piano and orchestra that
parodies not only Brahms’s D Minor Piano Concerto but also Wagner’s Walküre and
Tristan. Characteristically, Strauss resolves the tensions in this scherzo by happily not
resolving them.
Against Bülow’s advice, Strauss took a job as a conductor at the Munich Court Opera.
On paper the Munich post, as third conductor, looked better than the one in Meiningen,
and Munich was certainly a richer cultural center. But in Meiningen he had operated
with remarkable autonomy, while Munich required him to fit into a more rigid,
bureaucratic hierarchy that often seemed to reward seniority over talent. Worse yet,
Hermann Levi, first conductor at the Court Opera, was often ill, which left the orchestra
at the mercy of the second conductor, Franz Fischer – “a criminal at the rostrum,”
according to Strauss. Still worse, the intendant, Karl von Perfall, himself a conductor and
composer of sorts, was hostile both to Strauss’s music and to his “Bülowian” style of
conducting. Strauss readily admitted that because he insisted on his own tempi, taking
the baton at short notice made it difficult for singers and musicians, who included his
father on first horn. Strauss was unhappy and made many of those around him equally
so, including Levi himself. Franz Strauss counseled his hotheaded son to patience and
moderation.
There was, as we have seen, no “Wagner conversion” in Meiningen, but there was
certainly a deepening of the relationship between Strauss and Ritter, who moved to
Munich in 1886 because of Strauss. Their complex relationship resists easy analysis
for a variety of reasons, most obvious among them the host of undocumentable
conversations and the lost correspondence. Strauss’s retrospective on this association,
as important as it is, should not be taken at face value. But that is precisely what early
biographers did, giving rise to the Meiningen conversion trope. Thus, if we are to follow
the road to Guntram, our focus should be on the three years in Munich, not the short stay
in Meiningen.
Through his acquaintance with Bülow and Ritter, Strauss soon learned that being a
Wagnerian could mean different things, and as he matured artistically in Munich, as he
was introduced to Cosima Wagner and the Bayreuth circle through Ritter, he came to
realize just how many complexities attached to the label. Cosima’s Wagnerianism
centered on the practicalities of preserving her late husband’s performing tradition
as she understood it. Ritter’s Wagnerianism, the worldview that he ultimately wanted
realized in a work such as Guntram, was an idiosyncratic blend of Wagner, Schopenhauer,
Munich, Weimar, and the genesis of Guntram 19
and mystical Catholicism. Although Strauss was well aware, before he met Ritter, of
the epistemological foundation of Schopenhauer’s philosophy and of the mechanics of
the Wagnerian musical apparatus, he had not made a connection between the two, and
it was from Ritter that Strauss learned the “historical meaning of the Wagner–Liszt
musical direction.”16 Despite his youthful secular leanings, he felt compelled to explore
this connection in greater depth. In many ways the genesis of the Guntram libretto is
simultaneously the genesis of Strauss’s earliest sustained philosophical thought.
If Strauss took any solace from his new arrangement in Munich, which presented the
third conductor with so few musical challenges, it was in the fact that he had now more
time to devote to composition, philosophy, and musical aesthetics. His relationship
with Ritter deepened considerably: they remained friends throughout the 1880s, the
elder Ritter continuing to stimulate Strauss’s thoughts on music and philosophy (mostly
Schopenhauer), which, in 1887, while Strauss was visiting Bayreuth in August, found
their way into the beginning stages of the Guntram libretto. That summer Ritter may
have brought to Strauss’s attention an article in the Vienna Neue freie Presse on medieval
artistic-religious orders.17 Strauss had been in Bayreuth a year earlier when the two men
visited Liszt’s grave, five days after his death, and also attended performances of Tristan
and Parsifal.
Old friends and classmates, such as Thuille and Friedrich Rösch, were in town as well,
and they gathered each evening at the Weinstube Leibenfrost, with Ritter at the head
of the table. These meetings were critical to Strauss’s development, for Wagner was
far more than mere style and technique. According to Ritter, his musical language was
the vehicle for realizing the central tenet of Schopenhauerian metaphysics: the denial of
the will. Accordingly, music – above all other arts – was a sacred, transcendent space, a
refuge from the all-too-human will to life. Thus, music must serve a higher, even ethical,
purpose, and its greatest manifestation was in the genre of music drama – which, after
Parsifal, was in a state of crisis.
The crisis was twofold: first, Ritter saw danger, after the death of Wagner, in the rising
popularity of Brahms’s classic romanticism and the embrace of older structural and
generic paradigms such as sonata form and symphony;18 and second, serious music
drama itself was in a bad state. For all his idiosyncrasies, Ritter was no fool; he recognized
not only the musical shortcomings of the current generation of music dramatists but also
16
Seidl, “Richard Strauss – eine Charakter-Skizze,” p. 18.
17
There is no direct evidence to support this widely published statement. The earliest credible source,
Strauss’s friend Seidl, nonetheless does not mention Ritter in conjunction with the newspaper article.
Ibid., p. 37.
18
Strauss clearly echoed this point of view when he declared that toward the end of the nineteenth
century, form – once vital and dynamic – had deteriorated to mere formula. He believed it was his task
“to create a correspondingly new form for every new subject.” Strauss to Bülow (24 August [1888]), in
Schuh and Trenner, Bülow–Strauss Correspondence, p. 82.
his own inadequacies as an opera composer. “Ritter had made frustration and failure a
way of life,” Charles Youmans observes. “As a violinist, conductor, composer, and writer
he had set high goals for himself and fallen short of every one.”19 In Strauss, Ritter saw a
potential opera composer, one who could stand head and shoulders above any of his
generation, and he was pragmatic in his belief that Strauss could become his mouthpiece,
his messenger, and ultimately his salvation. The message took the form of Guntram,
though Ritter was dismayed by the opera’s final outcome. In this state of profound
disappointment, he confided his innermost wish to Strauss: “For many years I searched
for someone [like you], yearning, but in vain . . . finally I recognized in you, dear friend, a
talent of which I believed it possible to assume, that it would allow you to build upon
Wagner’s work in his sense.”20 As we shall see, Strauss, too, firmly believed he was
building on Wagner’s achievement, but he simply could not tread the metaphysical path
Ritter had laid out for him. Even as a young man, Strauss possessed a strong artistic
personality that instinctively exploited in others what it needed. Ritter never had the
philosophical control over Strauss that he believed he had.
It took Strauss nearly five years to write his libretto, from August 1887 to March 1892,
with many starts and stops and much revision and rewriting. Although it may be
tempting to ascribe the delay of this characteristically fast worker to the distractions
of composing three tone poems (Macbeth, Don Juan, and Death and Transfiguration) in
quick succession (1888–90), the blame lay elsewhere. Strauss faced two obstacles: his
lack of experience as a dramatist and the uncertainty of his evolving philosophical
grounding.21 To complicate matters, Strauss met his wife-to-be, Pauline de Ahna, just
a month after his visit to Bayreuth in 1887. He first became her vocal coach in Munich,
and after their move to Weimar she took the leading soprano role, Freihild, in Guntram.
They were married in September 1894, four months after the Guntram premiere.
But most important, the five-year span of libretto writing refutes the oft-repeated
fallacy that Strauss developed from a tone poet in the late 1880s into an opera composer
in the early 1890s. To the contrary, tone poem and music drama were simultaneous
preoccupations for this composer at a major artistic turning point. We see that Strauss’s
remark in November 1890 – that “I am turning my back on absolute music altogether,
to seek my salvation in drama” – now takes on a different meaning.22 As Youmans
observes, Strauss’s tone poems were less Liszt than Wagner: they were “operatic (or
‘music dramatic’) rather than orchestral.”23
19
Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, p. 40.
20
Ritter to Strauss (17 January 1893), in Charles Youmans, “Ten Letters from Alexander Ritter to Richard
Strauss, 1887–1894,” Richard-Strauss Blätter 35 (1996): 15.
21
Indeed, in a letter to his father dated 20 February 1892, he writes, “I’m curious to find out how I shall
take to composing again after the two-year break.” Schuh, Richard Strauss: Chronicle, p. 275.
22
Ibid., p. 273. 23 Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, p. 148.
Munich, Weimar, and the genesis of Guntram 21
Figure 1.2 Pauline de Ahna Strauss as Freihild
Strauss, bored with Munich’s steady diet of Daniel Auber, Peter Cornelius, and Otto
Nicolai, greeted early confidential offers from Weimar with open eagerness. By March
1889 a formal offer had been made, and Strauss accepted an appointment to the post
of Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The Weimar intendant,
Hans von Bronsart, had great respect for Bülow and had taken his enthusiastic recom-
mendation to heart; the music director, Eduard Lassen, had likewise heard great things
about Strauss. The wisdom of their decision was affirmed when, shortly after his arrival,
Cosima Wagner asked Strauss to work as a music assistant that summer in Bayreuth.
There he developed and maintained a close relationship with Wagner’s widow, giving
Strauss visibility and assuring Cosima of an ardent Wagner advocate in Weimar. The
opera at Weimar, with its modest means, could never threaten Bayreuth, but led by
an enthusiastic “neo-Bayreuthian” such as Strauss it could diminish the reputation of
Bayreuth’s rival, Munich, and serve as a kind of regular-season promotional for the
summer festival.
In the spring of 1889 Strauss began versifying a prose draft, which he had finished
several months earlier. Preoccupied in the fall with his new conducting duties, he was
unable to devote himself fully to the libretto until the late spring and summer of 1890.
The first version was completed in October of that year. Strauss, who rarely submitted
his work to outsiders for their opinion, turned to friends and family for their comments
on his text, which in turn went through more revisions until March 1892. By February
Ritter had even suggested that Strauss might begin composing, which he did, reporting
to his sister in March that he had completed “the end and the beginning.”24 That he
composed first “the end and the beginning” – in that order – sheds light on the intended
shape of the work: the archlike effect, derived from Tristan and Parsifal, where the
prelude returns and is resolved at the end of the final scene.
Once the Weimar season was over, Strauss was able to concentrate on Guntram, but
the season had taken its toll on him, for he suffered from pleurisy and bronchitis. On his
doctor’s orders he spent the next winter in a warm Mediterranean climate, and, as we
shall see, it was as much of a Bildungsreise for Guntram as it was for Strauss. After
completing the short scores to Acts i and ii, in October he set sail for Egypt via Italy and
Greece. Ritter might have approved of some of Strauss’s literary “companions” –
Goethe and Schopenhauer – but he was dismayed to learn (at second hand) that
Strauss’s readings also included Stirner, Nietzsche, and even Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment.25
Although Strauss made a number of visits and new acquaintances along the way, this
period of self-imposed isolation marked the most significant turning point in the life of
Germany’s greatest opera composer after Wagner. This time of separation and inde-
pendence not only altered the fundamental concept of Guntram; it also marked the end,
for Strauss, of any hope that metaphysical Wagnerism could prevail in German culture
on the threshold of a new century.
THE MEANINGS OF GUNTRAM
On one level Guntram can be read, as many commentators have done, as one of many
Wagner-like Erlösungsopern of the 1890s. At the level of narrative, it appears to be a
conflation of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and even Parsifal, with its Brotherhood of the Grail.
The language is decidedly Wagnerian, complete with alliteration and the archaic-
sounding grammatical syntax of the post-Opera and Drama style:
My Savior, my Lord
I recognize your hand
That has led your servant
To this unhappy land!
[Heiland, mein Herr

Ich erkenn’ deine Hand
Die geführt deinen Knecht
In dies unsel’ge Land!]
24
Schuh, Richard Strauss: Chronicle, p. 275.
25
Strauss briefly considered using the title of Dostoyevsky’s novel for his Guntram.
The meanings of Guntram 23
In the case of Guntram, was he slavishly imitating the words of the master, or was there
still that youthful element of irony latent in the libretto? There are obvious musical-
stylistic ramifications, which will be discussed below.
Unlike any Wagner opera – or any later Strauss opera – this work focuses on one
central male character: Guntram, a Minnesinger in the mold of Wolfram who, like
Lohengrin, comes from afar to save an innocent woman (Freihild) and, like Tannhäuser,
transgresses and needs redemption. In earlier versions, that redemption would come
from either the Ewig-Weibliche (eternal feminine) archetype Freihild and a pilgrimage
to Rome or the judgment of his peers (the brotherhood of Minnesingers known as
the Contenders of Love). But by the time Strauss began composing Act iii, during his
Mediterranean autumn, he had evolved philosophically to such a degree that he could
not set his libretto as it stood.
Freihild’s malevolent husband, Duke Robert, may have brandished his sword in
Act ii, but Guntram, the advocate of peace and social justice, struck first. The triangular
tensions among crime, punishment, and redemption all take place within Guntram
himself, and, indeed, the work ends not with his redemption but with only the promise
of it. He needs no eternal feminine, no ethical brotherhood, no judge or jury. His crime,
as he articulates it, was not the act of murder – for he acted in self-defense – but rather
the deeper motivation for that action: an unspoken love for another man’s wife.
Strauss’s intense Mediterranean rereading of Schopenhauer, specifically The World as
Will and Representation, Book 4, Section 60, is central: Guntram was hopelessly guided by
the self-destructive force of the will.26
Even Guntram’s music, such as the Act ii Peace Narration that so enraged Duke
Robert, could not quiet the will for long, and Guntram ultimately realizes that redemp-
tion must come from within (“My God only speaks to me through myself” [Mein Gott
spricht durch mich selbst nur zu mir]) and through a rejection of art, love, and the world
in ascetic solitude. His epiphany mirrors precisely what Schopenhauer observed at the
very end of Book 3 as he makes the transition to the more sober Book 4:
[Art] is not the way out of life, but only an occasional consolation in it, until his power,
enhanced by [artistic] contemplation, finally becomes tired of the spectacle, and seizes
the serious [i.e., saintly] side of things. The St. Cecilia of Raphael can be regarded as a
26
According to Schuh (Richard Strauss: Chronicle, p. 131), Strauss received a copy of the Schopenhauer
edition for Christmas in 1889. That began an extended off-and-on period of rereading over the next few
years, especially of Book 4, which had not been integral to the Munich Leibenfrost discussions. In
Book 4 Schopenhauer had declared, “The Will is often inflamed to a degree far exceeding the
affirmation of the body. This degree is then revealed by violent emotions and powerful passions in
which the individual not merely affirms his own existence, but denies and seeks to suppress that of
others, when it stands in its way.” Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans.
E. F. J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), fourth book, p. 328.
symbol of this transition. Therefore we will now in the following book turn to the
serious side.27
Strauss openly declared that he was not Guntram, that he himself was no saint, and
that he could never abandon the art of music. Indeed, Strauss’s annotations in his copy of
Book 4 bear out his lack of sympathy with a philosophy that squarely placed religious
asceticism or saintliness ahead of music as the only hope for permanent release from
the will and the endless striving that it causes. The typically self-deprecating Strauss
made light of his rejection of saintliness in a letter to Cosima: “I can’t help it, I’ll never
be granted the halo.”28 The philosophical distance between the composer and his
main character (and thus the potential for irony and sarcasm) was sharply defined in a
letter to Thuille in which he referred to Guntram as a “gasbag.” For Strauss, it was not
for music to preach, and neither was it for “musical priests” to create sonorous sermons.
Music may well be able to represent metaphysics, but it could never be metaphysics,
Strauss asserted to Thuille: one should follow Wagner’s example and “not preach a
moral sermon.”29
Thus, on his Mediterranean Bildungsreise, Strauss experienced two changes of
climate: the literal one, and the new environment of splendid isolation – away from
friends, colleagues, and, notably, Ritter. It was a time of intense reading and reflection,
and his diaries indicate how much he relished his solitude. In Greece, where he finished
the libretto of Guntram’s Act iii on 24 November 1892, he found amid the ruins a
dialectical counterpart to Bayreuth, one that pointed to the split between society (or
“race,” as he called it) and the artistic individual: “from the [Hellenic] outward to the
[German] inward human existence, from Olympia to Bayreuth.” “The definition of ‘race’,”
he continues, “as those who share a common need applies, in my view, only to the
Greeks; now there is no longer a ‘race,’ now there are only lonely geniuses.”30
This remark seems redolent of Nietzsche, and well it should, for that philosopher
and another, Stirner, were fueling Strauss’s view of art and ego during this period of
epistemological turmoil: “[Nietzsche’s] polemic against the Christian religion spoke
deeply to my heart; it strengthened and corroborated an unconscious antipathy,
which I had felt since my fifteenth year, for this religion which frees its believers of
responsibility for their own deeds and actions (through confession).”31 Strauss confessed
that his attraction to Stirner’s Ego and His Own (1844) was born of his opposition to the
27
Ibid., third book, p. 267.
28
Strauss to Cosima Wagner (1 March 1893), in Cosima Wagner–Richard Strauss: Ein Briefwechsel, ed.
Franz Trenner (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1978), p. 148.
29
30
Strauss to Cosima Wagner (9 December 1892), in Trenner, Cosima Wagner–Strauss: Briefwechsel,
pp. 141–2. Italics in original.
31
Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, p. 211. This essay is not included in Recollections and Reflections.
The meanings of Guntram 25
three enemies of art: hypocrisy, the impudence of dilettantes, and philistinism. Thus, for
Strauss, the highest form of existence “is to be alone with the great spirits . . . to be alone
with oneself . . . the more I am alone, the better I amuse myself; I only get bored when
I’m in incompatible company.”32
Shortly before Seidl left Weimar in the autumn of 1893 he visited Strauss, who spoke
at length about Nietzsche and read aloud extensively from his major works. Seidl
returned to Weimar for the world premiere of Guntram and spent the afternoon before
with Strauss. Acting as if nothing important would happen that evening, Strauss limited
his discussion to John Henry Mackay, Stirner’s biographer and author of The Anarchists
as well as two poems (“Morgen” and “Heimliche Aufforderung”) set by Strauss. The
composer was deeply impressed by Mackay’s new novel, and he played and sang for
Seidl the two newly composed songs. This conversation about a Mackay–Stirner-inspired
ego assertion may well have crystallized Seidl’s own thoughts about the meaning of
Guntram’s Act iii, which he described as a “breakthrough,” beginning a new “modern-
philosophical direction” by overcoming Schopenhauer, who, as interpreted by Wagner,
was a “blind alley” and a “dead end.”
In getting beyond Schopenhauer, Seidl declared that Strauss had established a “radical
(even revolutionary) left wing” within the Wagner movement as he shifted from
“world denial to self-affirmation,” from a “democratic concept” to radical individualism.
Probably from firsthand discussion with the composer, he summarized the message of
Guntram: “Christ redeemed the world for once and all. We weaker mortals, however,
cannot redeem the world, rather we can only overcome it.” Such a state can only be
achieved by “overcoming ourselves” as the result of introspection and self-confession.
Ritter was devastated by the news that Act iii had been changed, and he accused
Strauss of ruining his own work, robbing it of tragedy, destroying its artistic unity,
negating Guntram’s heroic qualities, and creating an immoral opera that “mocks ethical
principle.” Strauss was convinced that he could bring Ritter around after playing Act iii
for him; Ritter was unmoved, however, declaring that Strauss was not building upon
Wagner’s legacy but undermining it. A shattered Ritter suggested that the composer
throw “each and every page” of Act iii into the fire. “What is the only thing of Wagner
that has survived in you? The mechanics of his art.”33 Ritter was, of course, absolutely
right, for that was precisely what Strauss had in mind – to undermine a metaphysical
Wagnerian worldview using Wagner’s own technical and musical apparatus of a
massive orchestra, chromatic harmonies, a system of leitmotives, and the like. It was
this modern Weltanschauung, one unlike that of any of his German contemporaries, that
informed his operas for decades to come.
32
33
Ritter to Strauss (17 January 1893), in Youmans, “Ten Letters,” p. 16.
Figure 1.3 Alexander Ritter
THE MUSIC OF GUNTRAM
Exploring the score of an obscure, rarely staged opera would hardly seem worth the
trouble, were it not that Guntram informs Strauss’s later stage works both philosoph-
ically and musically. Music commentators from the time of its premiere up to the more
current literature have dwelt on its musical dependence on Wagner. Strauss did not help
matters when he once described Guntram as “hyper-Tristan-ish.” Only as recently as the
1990s have Strauss scholars begun to reconsider the many Wagnerisms in the score,
no longer seeing them as slavish, apprenticelike imitations but rather as intentional
criticism, perhaps even irony.34
The opening bars of Guntram suggest the Prelude to Lohengrin in an effort to create
the atmosphere of “once upon a time” – but with a difference. The phantasmagoria of
the former is generated in part by the avoidance of any tonic root as it floats for quite
some time in Strauss’s characteristic six-four voicing. Charles Youmans suggests that
Strauss creates not a simple, unreflective appropriation of Wagner, but rather “a
knowing superficial reminiscence that systematically deprives its source of all those
34
See Charles Youmans, “Richard Strauss’s Guntram and the Dismantling of Wagnerian Musical
Metaphysics,” Ph.D. diss., Duke University (1996), ch. 5.
The music of Guntram 27
features that would support a claim to metaphysical power . . . leaving only the husk of
Wagner’s original” (compare Exx. 1.1a and 1.1b):
Gone [in the Guntram prelude] are the carefully controlled dynamic shapings [of Lohengrin];
the contrast between solo violins and the full violin section; the shimmer of the violins’
stratosphere; the particular timbre of a root position triad played by two oboes surrounding a
flute, with another flute doubling the first oboe an octave above; and the subtle use of dotted
notes, ties, and triplets in the melody. By comparison, Guntram seems oddly static and not
only because of the second-inversion harmony; the violins play the same chord at the same
dynamic level for fourteen bars, and no other musical events accompany the flute melody
until the violas enter in measure 12.35
One might well describe this as special pleading, making orchestrational inexperience
a virtue, had Strauss not already composed two tone poems of sonic brilliance and
complexity, namely Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration.
There are other, seemingly awkward allusions to Wagner: the thematic connection
between Guntram’s Brotherhood and Wagner’s Grail theme (Exx. 1.2a and 1.2b) and, of
course, Strauss’s self-described Tristan-isms (Exx. 1.3a and 1.3b and 1.4a and 1.4b). What
is missing, in Strauss’s translation, is the Wagnerian sophistication and nuance, the
phenomenon of Wagner’s “husk,” which is well illustrated by a dangling Tristan chord
(untransposed, though enharmonically respelled) toward the end of Act iii (Ex. 1.4a).
Strauss had already burlesqued this very chord seven years earlier (Ex. 1.5). But parody
need not be seen as an attempt to tear down its referent: Strauss clearly wanted to
continue the Wagnerian musical discourse, but on his own terms.
Guntram requires musical consideration also for purely Straussian reasons. In this
piece, Strauss establishes harmonic strategies that he exploits in all the operas to follow,
tonal plans where the musical-structural and dramaturgical layout are effectively a single
entity. Since about the 1980s a rich literature has evolved on the centrality of associative
keys for Strauss, associations that remain consistent throughout his stage works.36 One
aspect of this approach is Strauss’s strategy of exploiting half-step relationships to
suggest distant worlds. In Ariadne auf Naxos, a prosaic prologue begins in the banal
white-key world of C major. After the mutual transformation of Bacchus and Ariadne at
the end of the opera, we go a half step higher, to D♭ major, the sublime key of, among
other things, the final trio of Rosenkavalier.
But there is another, later opera that is specifically foreshadowed (musically and
dramaturgically) in Guntram, namely Daphne (1937). Both operas follow the tonal trajec-
tory of G major to G♭ major (enharmonically respelled in Daphne as F♯), and in both cases
the title character takes leave of his or her surrounding world – Strauss’s Absage an den
35 36
Ibid., p. 283. See Introduction this volume, p. 8.
1.1a Guntram, opening
Collektivismus (Rejection of the Collective), cited above from his “Final Chronicle.”37 In the
case of Guntram, it is his Brotherhood and Freihild; for Daphne, it is the mortal world
37
In 1893 the community was a philistine German bourgeoisie; in 1937 that German community had
turned to malevolent National Socialism.
1.1b Lohengrin, opening

1.2a Brotherhood theme
1.2b Parsifal, Grail theme
1.3a Tristan quotation
when she is transformed into a laurel tree. Consciously or not, Strauss creates a thematic
connection as well (Exx. 1.6a and 1.6b).
There is a further half-step relationship in Strauss’s G/G♭ double-tonic complex
in Guntram: the semitone above G. It too is removed from the G major world of
the collective (the Brotherhood and the like). This relationship is played out in
the Prelude (see again Ex. 1.1a), where the motif representing the faith of the
Brotherhood is presented in a harmonically static, thematically fragmentary way.
All of this is presented in a cool, austere timbre with emphasis on the upper winds,
especially the flutes.
1.3b Tristan, prelude
1.4a Tristan chord
1.4b Tristan, prelude
Fifty-four bars later in the score, all that was inchoate and tentative coalesces into
something warm and luminescent, with Strauss using every musical device at his
disposal. What was static now has harmonic shape, what was fragmentary becomes
melodic, what was focused on the winds attains great warmth in the strings. Strauss,
who heard harmonies timbrally, also creates a warmer sound in his move from the key
signature of one sharp to four flats (Ex. 1.7). A♭ major, which serves as a signifier for
Guntram’s personal vision of love and peace, serves as an important part of the opera’s
1.5 Burleske
1.6a Guntram, love theme

1.6b Daphne transformed
journey from G to G♭ major. In the realm of G, it is an ethereal Neapolitan; in the

removed world of G♭, it is an effective secondary dominant.
The broad tonal layout of Guntram is as follows:
Act i Act ii Act iii

G–F D–A♭–C–E F–(E)–C–A♭–D♭–G♭
As this suggests, the visionary A♭, hinted at in the Act i Prelude, attains full form as the
key of Guntram’s central “Peace Narrative” in Act ii, and in Act iii it begins the clear,
functional progression to G♭. This final tonality thus rejects tonally – and dramatically –
the essential aspects of Act i. In its semitonal and tritonal oppositions, Strauss under-
scores Guntram’s rejection of the Brotherhood and its ideals. If we were to look at this
work as a Bildungsoper about Guntram, his journey might be plotted in the following
harmonic pattern:
G → A♭ → D♭ → G♭
The above scheme leaves out E major, a vital key that ends the central second
act and is reached by major thirds, beginning with A♭. Unlike the other Strauss
operas (from Salome onward), there is no integral narrative role for the female
character in Guntram. In this opera the passive Freihild serves as little more than
the source of Guntram’s passion, which causes him to give himself over to the
destructive forces of the will. E major consistently characterizes this Dionysian
force, exploited first as the tonic of the erotic tone poem Don Juan and later in many
subsequent operas.38
38
For a discussion of Strauss’s use of E major to suggest the Dionysian, passionate, or even erotic
sensations in music, see Bryan Gilliam, Richard Strauss’s “Elektra” (Oxford University Press, 1991),
pp. 68–9.
1.7 Prelude
Freihild’s reaction to the killing of her husband is neither horror nor sorrow, but
rather erotic passion, in which she wages sonic battle with a full orchestra ablaze in
E major. Looking at her husband’s corpse, she sings:
Your icy glance
Does not chill the ardor
That fills my burning senses . . .
1.7 (cont.)
Withdraw Death
Before Freihild’s jubilation,
The victorious celebration
Of joyous life.
[Dein eisiger Blick

erstarrt nicht die Glut
die alle Sinne mir lodernd erfüllt . . .
Entweiche Tod.
Vor Freihilde’s Jubel,
dem siegenden Jauchzen
wonnigen Lebens.]
Strauss, whose fiery fiancée premiered the role, thought it one of the best
moments in the opera, later observing that it really lit things up (zündete).39 The
violins, often in parallel thirds, are pushed to their upper registers, while the
winds and brass hammer away with libidinous, driving triplet rhythms. Where
most tragic three-act operas end Act ii in a complication, this one finishes in a
Dionysian exuberance not to be equaled until Elektra’s final maenadic dance,
where she likewise contrasts fire and ice.
Guntram gave in to the will and Freihild eagerly followed – a linking of killing with
sexual passion (eros and thanatos) that would be a crucial part of Strauss’s next three
operas (Feuersnot, Salome, and Elektra). By now Strauss’s intellectual development had
gone over to the Nietzschean side, affirming the will; but the composer knew that he
had to bring his Schopenhauerian project to its own proper conclusion. E major makes a
brief return at the beginning of Act iii as Freihild plans to free him from prison and flee
with him (“Burning love guided your sword . . . in speedy escape to eternal, wonderful
happiness” [Glühende Minne führte dein Schwert . . . in rasender Flucht . . . zu ew’ger
herrlicher Wonne]). The shift to C major is as abrupt as Guntram’s sudden realization
that Freihild cannot follow; the stage directions indicate that at this moment Guntram
“gently pushes Freihild away.” “Do not follow me,” he declares; “Farewell!” This
conflict between libidinal E major and the more socially responsible C major was the
major harmonic tension in Don Juan; Strauss will return to it in the final scene in
Elektra.40
Although Stirner and Nietzsche might have prompted Strauss to change his ending,
Strauss concludes his first opera with pure Schopenhauer, using the philosopher against
himself by countering the common wisdom of Schopenhauerian composers of his day.
Simply put, The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung)
ultimately moves from “the aesthetic [Book 3] to the ascetic [Book 4],” and art, more
specifically music, cannot play a role in that world.41 None of Strauss’s friends and
colleagues understood Strauss’s Mediterranean epiphany; they believed that he had
turned toward Nietzsche, which is partly true – but that worldview did not play out in
Guntram.
Guntram was Strauss’s first and last ascetic hero. The main character of his next
opera, Feuersnot, confirms the composer’s contention that the “consciousness of the
affirmation of the will is our ultimate goal.”42 The ramifications of Strauss’s decision
39
Strauss to Joseph Gregor (4 February 1945), in Richard Strauss – Joseph Gregor Briefwechsel, 1934–1949, ed.
Roland Tenschert (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1955), p. 273.
40
See James Hepokoski. “Fiery-Pulsed Libertine or Domestic Hero: Strauss’s Don Juan Reinvestigated,”
in Richard Strauss: New Perspectives on the Composer and His Work, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997), pp. 135–75; and Gilliam, “The Final Scene,” in Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,”
pp. 206–35.
41
Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Works, p. 78. 42 Schuh, Richard Strauss: Chronicle, p. 312.
to change Act iii were large. In the short term, it severed his friendship with Ritter
and caused permanent frictions with the Wagner family; but in the longer term, this
idea of an individual (or an ego) removed from society and in constant conflict with it
informed the remainder of his tone poems as well as the three one-act operas that
followed.
Guntram premiered in Weimar on 10 May 1894 to moderate success. Earlier in the
day Strauss and Pauline announced their engagement. (Indeed, that year saw several
events that profoundly affected Strauss’s life: not only was his friendship with Ritter,
his third and last father figure, irreparably damaged, but also he lost his second as
well, Hans von Bülow, who had died on 12 February.) Life seemed to be going
Strauss’s way: in addition to being happily engaged, he was finally able to conduct in
Bayreuth that summer and – after complex negotiations – was appointed Kapellmeister
at the Munich Court Opera, with the agreement that Munich would mount perform-
ances of Guntram.
But what was moderately successful in Weimar was an outright failure in the city of
Strauss’s birth. After the Munich premiere on 16 November 1895, future performances of
Guntram were canceled, despite promises to the contrary, and for the first time Strauss
had to deal head-on with strong conservative elements in Munich. The failure of
Guntram was the most bitter, yet most important setback of his life, coming as it did
at a time when Strauss was riding so high. As we have seen, he never forgot it, not
even in the final weeks of his life. But the composer himself, in a typically honest self-
appraisal, assumed much of the blame for Guntram’s failure. Indeed, he put up a grave
marker in his back yard reading:
Here lies the venerable, virtuous young Guntram –
Minnesinger, who was gruesomely slain by the symphony orchestra of his own father
May he rest in peace!43
[Hier ruht her- u. tugendsame Jüngling Guntram –

Minnesänger der vom symphonischen Orchesters seines eigenen
Vaters grausam erschlagen wurde
Er ruhe in Frieden.]
Although Strauss never entirely forgave Munich, he also knew that he had more to learn
about composing opera; he recognized his shortcomings as a librettist and saw the
dangers of stepping too near Wagner’s shadow, even though by the end of the project he
had rejected Wagnerian metaphysics.
Guntram was now dead and buried, and it was time for the ego, the body, to assert
itself, and for the radical individualism of Don Juan and the roguish mischief of Till
43
It remains for all to see in the garden.
Eulenspiegel. After considering a number of possible opera projects, including a staged

Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel, he settled on Feuersnot. With the help of the librettist
Ernst von Wolzogen – the estranged half brother of the Bayreuthian Hans von
Wolzogen – he created an opera that critiqued Bavarian indolence, as well as the
“redemption ballyhoo,” not with opaque Guntram-like dialectics, but with wit, sarcasm,
and spite.
2 Élan vital: Feuersnot, Salome, and radical individualism
Affirmation of the Will must properly beNarratives of Strauss’s operatic oeuvre have tradi-
called Affirmation of the Body. tionally paired Salome (1905) and Elektra (1908), his
– From Strauss’s diary entry of third and fourth operas, respectively. On one level
4 February 1893, Luxor, Egypt
they have certainly much in common: both are
one-act operas, both center on neurotically obsessive women who dance, and both
end in their deaths. But these superficial connections should not draw our attention
away from Salome’s central theme of carnal obsession – a far cry from Elektra’s myopic
fixation on revenge. Salome’s dance is offered to her voyeuristic stepfather at a steep
price, while Elektra dances (“like a Maenad”) for no one but herself: awkward, strange,
and decidedly unerotic. The young princess of Judea is overwhelmed by Jochanaan’s
physical presence; she affirms and then rejects his body and hair before she fixates on his
mouth, “like a pomegranate cut with a knife of silver,” the final bloody object of desire.
After the death of Elektra’s father at her mother’s hands, Elektra neither exudes nor
craves sex; she confesses to her sister, Chrysothemis, that her only sexual partner is
“hollow-eyed hatred.”
In retrospect, these two operas seem a natural pair, and the literature on Strauss
opera and early German modernism more generally has sustained the relationship,
though often without much reflection. Yet the intended companion for Salome was not
the later Elektra, but the previous Feuersnot – an intention Strauss made clear in a letter to
his parents five months after Feuersnot’s premiere in November 1901. In April 1902 he
informed them that he soon planned to work on a “companion piece”1 for Feuersnot to
be set to a text by Anton Lindner, who proposed a Salome libretto based on Oscar
Wilde’s play.2 Yet we need no letter to realize, in the context of Strauss’s worldview
around the turn of the century, that Salome has deeper commonalities with its prede-
cessor than with Elektra. Although Feuersnot never attained the status of Salome and
remains mostly unknown beyond Strauss specialists, it has been unduly ignored by
many music historians seeking to reexamine Austro-German modernism at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century. Feuersnot and Salome share the fundamental desire of the
1
Strauss used the word Pendant, the same term he used when describing Heldenleben’s relationship
with the antiheroic Don Quixote.
2
In Richard Strauss: Briefe an die Eltern, ed. Willi Schuh (Zurich: Atlantis, 1964), p. 257. Strauss
ultimately rejected Lindner’s unfinished text.
39
40 Élan vital: Feuersnot, Salome, radical individualism
composer, now estranged from the city of his birth, to reject Schopenhauer’s meta-
physics through what Strauss called “the affirmation of the body.”
In the spirit of the revised Act iii of Guntram, the composer played with Schopenhauer’s
own words in this rejection, specifically those from Book 4 of The World as Will and
Representation: “The body of man is already the objectivity of the will . . . instead of
affirmation of the will, we can also say affirmation of the body.”3 Thus, the sexual act is
the purest expression of the will to life; it is the “strongest affirmation of life.” But that
very life – the direct product of carnal assertion – is one of suffering and inevitable death.
Strauss, who by the time of Guntram had rejected the notion of redemption through
music, now embraced Nietzsche, who transformed Schopenhauer’s fatalistic “will to life”
into a celebratory “will to power,” affirming the life-generating force that the latter sought
to deny.
In Feuersnot and Salome, Strauss abandoned the pious hero, celebrating the sexual
fire that consumes Freihild in Act ii of Guntram. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who decried
the “despisers of the body” as being unable to create beyond themselves, ignited an
antiphilistine, antibourgeois flame within Strauss.4 Now away from conservative
Munich, the composer was determined to shock his audience with outrageously graphic
sexuality. For Nietzsche, as for Strauss, the modern artist is an optimist who “affirms all
that is questionable and terrible in existence.”5 His dazzling orchestra – at once lush and
seductive, and sometimes strangely comforting – may distract our attention from
intentional obscenity, but the sexual pathology is there for all who care to see it. After
more than a century, the edginess of these two Nervenopern has not dulled.
In Feuersnot humor, satire, and spite combine with themes of sexual violation, shame,
and deflowering in a strange mixture of bizarre ingredients. Salome switches from
comedy to serious “music drama” (Strauss’s sole use of the term) as it explores topics
of incest, sexual obsession, dismemberment, and necrophilia. What was obscured by the
veil of farce in Feuersnot is made explicit in Salome. Such frankness played a role in
Strauss’s first operatic success, which secured his reputation as Germany’s leading opera
composer.
The unveiled visibility of Salome’s sexualized body may bring the issue of eroticism
closer to the discursive surface, but this phenomenon should in no way diminish
Feuersnot’s unprecedented and unequaled lewdness. The literature on this work is
significantly smaller than that on its sister opera, and what scholarship exists avoids
significant discussion of Feuersnot’s (and its source’s) even stranger sexual themes.
Indeed, it may well be that writers have avoided it because of its unusual sexuality,
3
Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, pp. 326–7.
4
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Of the Despisers of the Body,” in Also sprach Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(London: Penguin, 1978), p. 35.
5
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 49.
Élan vital: Feuersnot, Salome, radical individualism 41
most of which remains unseen – though not unheard. Wolzogen articulated the central
theme from the very beginning: “all creative power springs from sexual desire.” Thus,
the fire of creative inspiration comes not from above, but from within:
Art, at least for cultured people, offers life primarily light, color, warmth, deeper meaning.
Every true artist is a Prometheus who creates humans in the image of God. But he does not
need to steal the distant heavenly light for his creatures; he can take the fire from earth,
because:
All warmth springs from woman,

All light stems from love . . .
For that is the very moral of this little [libretto].6
Behind the colorful foreground of children’s choruses, Bavarian folk music, magic
incantations, and obscure local dialects (both real and made-up), Feuersnot is an opera
about artistic inspiration derived not from lofty notions of the eternal feminine or the
like, but rather from sensual urges, which include libido, genitalia, erotic secretion, and
sexual fire.
What Paul Bekker once observed with regard to Strauss’s tone poems applies just
as well to most of his operatic works – in them, one perceives three distinct directions
(Linien): the philosophical, the humorous (as protest against tradition), and the erotic.
He was convinced that no composer at the turn of the century embraced all three –
especially in one given piece. All three Linien work together in Feuersnot and Salome,
though some of these elements are overshadowed for various reasons. Of the three sides
of this triangular relationship, the philosophical has traditionally come up short in the
Straussian discourse, and for that the composer is partly to blame.
Those in Strauss’s small circle of friends were not only aware of Strauss’s deep
immersion in nineteenth-century German philosophy but were also active participants
in an ongoing discussion of music and metaphysics during that critical decade of the
1890s, when the composer’s worldview began to grow and change. The earliest record
we have was written by one of the composer’s most influential intellectual friends,
Arthur Seidl, who was born in Munich a year before Strauss. Seidl was Strauss’s
schoolmate, attended philosophy lectures at the university with Strauss during the
winter semester of 1882–3, and was in Weimar during Strauss’s tenure there. He was
among the first to note Strauss’s Socratic method of appearing as a blank slate, an
unreflective Bavarian, so that “in this disguise” he could ultimately show his opponents
even deeper wisdoms.7 Strauss managed to fool many well into the twentieth century
and beyond.8
6
Ernst von Wolzogen, Wie ich mich ums Leben brachte (Berlin: G. Westermann, 1922), p. 147.
7
8
See the Bloch anecdote in the Preface to this volume, p. xiii.
The central point of Feuersnot, according to Strauss, was the protagonist Kunrad’s
final narrative against the Wagnerian philistines of Munich, but contemporary accounts
of the work’s reception show that humor and playful erotics obscured this vital message.
In Salome the erotic element was less playful – indeed, the overt sexuality overshadowed
Strauss’s intent to lampoon both Judaism (for example, the ensemble scene with the
five Jews) and Christianity ( John the Baptist, whom Strauss intended to portray as a
fool; see Introduction, n. 2). Its sarcastic take on all religion remains misunderstood
among audiences even today. Both operas – one obscure, the other infamous – have
been equally misconstrued by many for decades.
FAILURE IN MUNICH: THE PATH TO STRAUSS’S FIRST

OPERATIC MANIFESTO
Understanding Feuersnot is unfathomable without the context of Munich, on two levels:

more immediately, the medieval Bavarian setting for the opera; and more complexly,
the work as a reflection of an ongoing love–hate relationship with the city of Strauss’s
birth, the “wasteland” of philistines, the dreary “beer bog” (Biersumpf ) to which he later
graciously gave the autograph score as an honored citizen in 1928.
Strauss’s move in 1894 from Weimar to Munich matched his earlier move from
Meiningen to the Bavarian capital in 1886; in both cases he went from a situation of
autonomy to one where a more complex musical hierarchy prevailed. But this time, in
the fall of 1894, the thirty-year-old Strauss had far greater clout, and though he had to
deal constantly with the aging Levi, the detested Perfall and Ernst von Possart (intendant
of the Court Theater), he usually got his way and likely made life difficult for his older
colleagues. Strauss and his wife settled into their new quarters in the Hildegardstrasse,
and the regular nights out with the old Leibenfrost cohorts of the late 1880s diminished
considerably.
As mentioned earlier, Strauss’s second tenure in Munich was poisoned from the start.
After Guntram’s November failure, an event intended to crown Strauss’s new appoint-
ment at the Munich Court Opera, promises for future performances were broken, and
though he behaved as diplomatically as a young egotist could manage over the next
four years,9 he trusted no one in the hierarchy of Munich’s musical institutions. Beneath
the surface he was seething over what he believed to be a narrow, indolent, self-satisfied
Bavarian bourgeoisie, and he was determined to compose his second opera as a vehicle
with which to pour scorn on the beer-guzzling, wurst-gobbling dilettantes who had
failed to appreciate his first work for the stage. In what would become a typically
Straussian modus operandi, he would achieve his project with humor, but by no means
9
Strauss wrote his melodrama Enoch Arden for Possart, who recited Tennyson’s poem with Strauss
at the piano.
Failure in Munich: Strauss’s first operatic manifesto 43
of a kind or innocent type. Rather, his was a Nietzschean one, which James Hepokoski
has called “the dismissive laughter of incoming power . . . to overcome religious, scien-
tific, and artistic institutions,”10 the brash, iconoclastic laughter (lachender Tod) of Siegfried
on Brünnhilde’s mountaintop at the end of Siegfried’s Act iii.
Such joviality was no doubt informed by Zarathustra’s mountainous laughter in “Of
Reading and Writing”:
You look up when you feel the need for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated.
Who among you can laugh and be elevated at the same time? Whoever climbs the highest
mountains laughs at all tragic plays and tragic seriousness. Brave, unconcerned, mocking,
violent – thus wisdom wants us . . . I believe only in a god who could dance . . . Not by wrath
does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!11
The dance, especially the waltz – drunken, brash, and overwrought – became a frequent
and important topos for Strauss beginning with Also sprach Zarathustra. It first appeared
onstage in Feuersnot in unabashed vulgarity, then resurfaced with self-destructive mae-
nadic movements in Elektra and, of course, with costumed irony in Der Rosenkavalier.
Thus it was without a trace of sentimentality that Strauss called Johann Strauss Jr. the
“laughing genius of Vienna.”12 In Nietzsche contra Wagner the philosopher reminds us
that Wagner swims and floats, but does not dance, and Strauss, eager to rid himself of
Wagner’s “drained goblet,”13 used the bodily gesture of dance throughout his life as a
response to Wagner, as the signifier of an artist free of metaphysics. Dionysian dance and
iconoclastic laughter are to be found in the overquoted, often misinterpreted line from
Also sprach Zarathustra: “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced
at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least
one laugh.”14
Even before Guntram’s failure in Munich, Strauss, now converted to Nietzsche and
Stirner through Seidl and others, sought to make manifest his rejection of Schopenhauer,
something he had not yet done in a musical work. His first instinct was to compose
another opera, one that pitted a “laughing philosopher” against a narrow-minded, back-
ward village. The idealist was named Till Eulenspiegel, and the backwater village (a
thinly disguised Munich) was the town of Schilda. In the opera scenario, the hapless,
empty-headed townspeople at first sentence Till to death, then ultimately make him their
10
James Hepokoski, “Framing Till Eulenspiegel,” 19th-Century Music 30, 1 (2006): 18.
11
Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 41. 12 Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, p. 77.
13
Although this famous line, where Wagner is described as drawing his best resources “out of
the drained goblet” of human happiness, is indeed to be found in his 1895 Nietzsche contra Wagner,
it originated in his 1882 The Gay Science, trans. Thomas Commons (New York: Barnes & Noble,
2008), p. 75.
14
Nietzsche, Also sprach Zarathustra, p. 41.
mayor.15 Strauss never explained why he abandoned the opera, opting for a tone poem
instead, but Seidl (to whom the tone poem was dedicated) had a hypothesis.
Seidl proposed that the action planned for the stage was so lively and fast-paced
that the operatic genre would have constrained its iconoclastic energy. Yet in 1896 he
maintained that he would still have preferred that Strauss compose it as an opera, because
in doing so he would have taken the genre in an entirely new direction and “explored
unusual ground,” namely the “expressive realm of musical irony.” In a footnote to a later
edition of his essay, Seidl declares that with Feuersnot Strauss achieved that goal.16 Thus,
the objective of the two operas, despite the fact that one was never completed, was the
same: the opposition of a radical individual (whether Till Eulenspiegel or Kunrad) to a
complacent, ignorant collective. To understand fully the philosophical basis of Feuersnot,
we must first address the symphonic Till Eulenspiegel, his first artistic manifesto after
Guntram.
If this tone poem “acted as a kind of artistic manifesto,” according to Youmans, “it did
so partly because Strauss for the first time used a method of ironic disguise that he would
retain even after he moved on to opera.”17 As Walter Werbeck and James Hepokoski
have shown, the central conflict of Till Eulenspiegel is the protagonist’s encounter with
narrow, pedantic, self-satisfied philistines:
It was only gradually that Strauss moved away from his first plan, surely, setting the
material of the opera-to-be [Opernstoff ] symphonically, and only then would the Till–Philistine
conflict be enriched with further adventures. (That that conflict nevertheless formed the
core of the program all the way up to the end can hardly be disputed.)18
The boisterous humor of Till misled contemporary commentators and critics, who were
taken in by its charm, wit, “naturalistic” tone painting, and technical brilliance. Munich
critics and audiences alike, who had ridiculed Guntram’s premiere, stood up and cheered
Till Eulenspiegel’s premiere just two weeks later – in both instances with the composer at
the podium.
Till Eulenspiegel’s dedicatee, Seidl, pointed out that the critics could not get beneath
the “exoteric” meaning and penetrate to the “esoteric” one, of irony and “the new spirit
of an establishment-debunking modernism.”19 This work was less a harmless piece of
music comedy than contemptuous mockery: debunking old-guard Wagnerism, the
musical academy, the concert hall, and Munich musical society in a work of under
twenty minutes’ duration. Hepokoski points out the obvious paradox: “it affirms the
15
Given the fragmentary nature of Strauss’s scenario, discovered after the composer’s death, it is not
clear whether the work was to be one act or two; Seidl, “Richard Strauss – eine Charakter-Skizze,”
p. 51, suggested that it was intended to be a two-act work.
16
Ibid., p. 53. 17 Youmans, Richard Strauss’s Orchestral Music, p. 184.
18
Hepokoski, “Framing Till Eulenspiegel,” p. 10.
19
Failure in Munich: Strauss’s first operatic manifesto 45
[musical] institution that is the precondition of its existence . . . [yet] its pointedly
mocking, transgressive stance – the socially destructive power of its laughter – defies
the criteria for aesthetic legitimacy that had founded and sustained that institution in the
first place.”20
That same iconoclastic worldview pertained to Feuersnot and Salome, though it was
not until the latter work that Strauss, the bourgeois revolutionary, learned how to
titillate and offend an opera audience without alienating it. Adorno warned those who
might be duped by Strauss’s Socratic naïveté: if Strauss’s humor was so harmless, how
was it that the hero of the comic Feuersnot (Kunrad, alias Strauss) could “fall head over
heels in love with Salome”?21 What the early modernist critic Oscar Bie lauded as “cool
objectivity” and a “wondrous lack of principles” in 1906 was ridiculed in hindsight
by Adorno for that very lack of conviction: “But unlike his mentor Nietzsche, Strauss,
the antimetaphysician, does not challenge metaphysics as ideology, nor does his tone
include the slightest trace of sorrow at its futility . . . His antitraditional impulse thumbs
its nose at its own class but never really means it.”22 The comment echoes Adorno’s
Wagner critique, namely that the composer “violates the taboos of the bourgeois work
ethic, but his blessing redounds to the glory of his benefactors.”23 This perceived lack of
“sorrow” might well have been a significant impulse behind Schoenberg’s negative
remark that Strauss was the “only revolutionary in our time.”24
Till Eulenspiegel began a series of post-Guntram tone poems, each one becoming
increasingly graphic in the presentation of its program, whether a literary source or the
invention of its composer. But the pattern became clear: a humorous iconoclast would
precede a serious one. Thus, Till was followed by his alter ego, Zarathustra, and the
antiheroic Don Quixote was followed by the hero of Ein Heldenleben. Till was the manifesto,
but what Strauss still wanted was a major statement for the operatic stage – for he saw
opera, above all other genres, as his ultimate artistic goal. He searched for various options,
even revisiting the possibility of another Eulenspiegel libretto, but that all changed when
the composer came across an outlandish tale entitled The Extinguished Flames of Audenaerde
in a collection of Flemish sagas published in German translation in 1843.
The original story was absurd and obscene:
A young man in the town of Audenaerde was in love with a young woman in his
neighborhood, but his love was not returned. The more he tried to woo her, the more her
20
Hepokoski, “Framing Till Eulenspiegel,” p. 14.
21
Theodor W. Adorno, “Richard Strauss at Sixty,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and
His World, p. 413.
22
Theodor W. Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born, June 11, 1864,” trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber,
Perspectives of New Music 3 (Fall/Winter 1965): 22–4.
23
Theodor W. Adorno, “Social Character,” in In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London:
Verso, 1985), p. 17.
24
Schoenberg, “New Music,” p. 137.
indifference turned into spite, until it reached a point when she decided to play a trick on him.
He was to meet her beneath her window, where he would get into a basket that she would
pull up to her balcony. Instead, she lifted him up only halfway, leaving him dangling,
impotently, the entire night and well into the next day, when townspeople gathered and
mocked him with great delight.
After finally being released, he fled to the surrounding woods, where he met a wise old
hermit who listened sympathetically to the young man’s tale. The hermit, who was in fact a
magician, promised to turn things aright and made his way to the town square, where he
extinguished all the fires in the village: no light, no fuel, no energy, and no warmth. The old
man explained to the panicked crowd who had gathered in the street that fire could be
restored on only one condition: that the offending woman come and stand in the middle of the
square and take off her clothes. Each citizen was given a candle, which was ignited from a
flame that came from her backside.25
It is difficult to imagine a scenario more difficult to stage even by today’s standards, but
that is precisely the challenge that Strauss deliberately set for himself and his librettist
(yet to be decided upon). What Till Eulenspiegel lacked was Bekker’s third element of
the Straussian triangle: the erotic. Feuersnot’s scenario provided ample material for it.
No longer was the credo a Wagnerian “redemption through love”; rather, it was an
unabashed “redemption through sex,” a potent symbol for the affirmation of the will.
Thus love and sexual passion are consciously, even conspicuously, separated from any
context of idealism – a separation reinforced through humor and graphic orchestration,
often working together. As early as 1893 Strauss described the look of postcoital bliss on a
woman’s face: “That smile – I have never seen such [an] expression of the true sensation
of happiness! Is not the way to redemption of the Will to be sought here (in the
condition of the receiving woman)! . . . Affirmation of the Will must properly be called
the affirmation of the body.”26 Thus, with Till Eulenspiegel and Feuersnot, Strauss created
a double-pronged artistic manifesto: one symphonic, one operatic, and both carefully
manipulated beneath a bright, energetic sonic surface of ironic wit.
ERNST VON WOLZOGEN: STRAUSS’S FIRST LIBRETTIST
Strauss could hardly have had a more sympathetic artistic colleague at the time than
Ernst von Wolzogen. The two men had first met in Leipzig in March 1892, when Strauss
25
The above is my translated abridgement of the original story published in Niederländische Sagen,
ed. Johann Wilhelm Wolf (Leipzig, 1843), No. 407. It appears in Morten Kristiansen, “Richard
Strauss’s Feuersnot in Its Aesthetic and Cultural Context: A Modernist Critique of Musical Idealism,”
Ph.D. diss., Yale University (2000), pp. 464–6.
26
From Strauss’s diary entry of 4 February 1893 (Luxor, Egypt). See Schuh, Richard Strauss: Chronicle,
pp. 312–13.
Ernst von Wolzogen: Strauss’s first librettist 47
was there in conjunction with a Liszt-Verein concert that included his Death and
Transfiguration. Wolzogen, who was living in Munich at the same time Strauss was
there at the Court Opera, was remarkably in tune with Strauss’s frame of mind at this
critical time. This cofounder of the literary cabaret Überbrettl – a satiric conflation of the
German slang for the stage (Brettl) and Nietzsche’s Übermensch – was likewise inspired by
Nietzsche around the same time as was Strauss, and he shared the composer’s strong
anti-Christian beliefs.27
Strauss and Wolzogen experienced frustration with the way in which Munich
reacted to their plans to rejuvenate and even reform opera and theater, respectively.
Wolzogen’s first effort was to organize the Freie literarische Gesellschaft; he also took
over stage direction of the Akademisch-dramatischen Vereins. By 1899 – within a year
of Strauss’s move – Wolzogen had left Munich for Berlin, and it was in the German
capital that the two first collaborated on the one-act Feuersnot. Like Strauss, he had
embraced Wagner but soon begun to distance himself from the Wahnfried circle,
which included his half brother, Hans, with whom he had a troubled relationship.
Echoing Strauss, Wolzogen believed that Wagner had become ossified and that the
theatergoing elite had devolved into “envious dilettantes,” “arrogant know-it-alls,” and
thin-skinned “unrecognized nobodies.”28 In such a sad climate, should anyone be
surprised by all the Wagner imitations written for the stage? Given Wagner’s enor-
mous personality, was it any wonder that a younger generation of composers, indulg-
ing in unreflective “Tristan polyphony” and “Parsifal orchestration,” had been forced
into a dead end? Wolzogen maintained firmly, if not self-servingly, that only Strauss,
“with his graphic tone painting and amazing orchestral effects,” had succeeded in
finding an original voice, one informed by humor, the vital “third way” between music
drama and operetta.
On 17 March 1899, Wolzogen heard a performance of Also sprach Zarathustra while in
Munich. He wrote to Strauss the very next day that he had been overwhelmed by the
work, so much so that he received the energetic impulse (energischer Anstoß) to trans-
form a bawdy Flemish saga into an opera libretto:
I have the following idea: Feuersnot – one act – setting, old Munich in legendary
Renaissance period. The young love hero [Kunrad] is himself the magician, [and] the great
old man, his mentor, whom the good Münchnern had once driven out of town, does not
appear [on the stage]. At the urging of the town officials and citizens, the naughty girl
[Diemut] offers her virginity to the young magician in order to restore light [i.e., fire] to
27
The Überbrettl’s clever credo, “The transvaluation of old, worn-out values” (Die Umwertung alter
verbrauchte Werte), also parodied Nietzsche in the way it challenged the norms of bourgeois morality
derived from the philosopher’s notion of the “transvaluation of all values.”
28
Ernst von Wolzogen, “Theatralische Probleme” (1906), in Ansichten und Aussichten: Ein Erntebuch
(Berlin: Fontane, 1908), pp. 332–3.
the city. When love unites itself with the magic of genius, even the most annoying
philistine sees the light!29
Because composer and librettist both lived in Berlin during the compositional genesis of
the work (hence the paucity of letters), we can establish only the broad contours of this
collaboration. On 7 September 1900, Strauss wrote to Wolzogen from Marquartstein
(where he spent his summers composing until he built his summer villa in Garmisch
eight years later) that his libretto was excellent ( famos).30 Despite a busy conducting
season in Berlin, Strauss worked diligently on the short score (Particell), which he
finished on 30 December 1900; scoring began on New Year’s Day. On 22 May 1901,
Wagner’s birthday, Strauss finished the final page, on which he wrote: “Completed on
the birthday and greater glory of the ‘Almighty’! Charlottenburg, 22 May 1901.”
Figure 2.1 Ernst von Wolzogen
29
Franz Grasberger, ed., Richard Strauss: Eine Welt in Briefe (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1969), pp. 120–1.
The setting was changed to legendary timelessness (though a historical setting, much like
Meistersinger, is clearly stated in the stage directions).
30
Franz Trenner, ed., Richard Strauss: Chronik zu Leben und Werk (Vienna: Richard Strauss Verlag, 2003),
p. 201.
Wagner the almighty 49
WAGNER THE ALMIGHTY
The tribute to Wagner seems a curious one for an opera bent on spoofing the elder
composer. Was it naïveté or ironic spite that was responsible for Strauss’s inviting
Cosima Wagner to a performance of Feuersnot in Frankfurt less than a fortnight after the
21 November premiere in Dresden? “I would be delighted if you could hear my modest
little work: I imagine it would give you a naughty pleasure given the especially acute
jabs at the Wagner-city [of] Munich. Oh, pardon, I forgot: Laughing spite is a virtue
among us brothers of Nietzsche.”31 There is no record that she ever saw “the modest
little work,” but it is clear that Strauss wanted it both ways. On the one hand, he wished
to express his contempt for the Munich that rode Cosima’s husband out of town; on the
other, he wished to excoriate a bourgeois populace that embraced him thirty years
too late and for all the wrong reasons. Strauss knew at some level that Cosima was part
of the problem, and as we shall see, he would goad her again, playing for her an excerpt
from Salome on his piano a few years later in Berlin.32
Guntram and Feuersnot are unthinkable without Wagner, but Strauss is now engaged
in the Eulenspiegel-like world of satire as he mocks the citizens of medieval Munich, a
setting owing much to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The opera takes place on St. John’s
Eve (Johannestag), the summer solstice festival, which involves ceremonial fires.33 But
whereas Guntram slinks off in Schopenhauerian resignation, the malicious Kunrad
pokes his finger in the eye of the collective. In the first opera Strauss is the apprentice;
in the second he becomes the master. One might well think of Kunrad as a Walther
von Stolzing-like apprentice, but the differences are even more illuminating in this anti-
Wagner Wagnerian work.
Both Walther and Kunrad are artist-heroes living as unknowns in their surroundings
and ridiculed by the populace. Walther, however, learns the ways of the masters,
combining innovation and tradition through his mentor, Hans Sachs; he wins the hand
of Veit Pogner’s daughter and is hailed by sixteenth-century Nuremberg. Kunrad is the
unbridled Walther of Meistersinger’s Act i, not reined in by a Sachs but encouraged
by the spirit of Stirner and Nietzsche. Kunrad wins the mayor’s daughter and the
accolades of old Munich, but through entirely different means: he has no living
31
Strauss to Cosima Wagner (30 October 1901), in Trenner, Cosima Wagner–Strauss: Briefwechsel, p. 243.
32
This repartee between Strauss and Cosima began benignly, but over the years it developed to the point
that they were no longer on speaking terms – starting with Also sprach Zarathustra and ending with
Salome. In a congratulatory telegram to Strauss on the birth of his son on 17 April 1897, Cosima wrote,
“Hail to the [Strauss] family / please, no Zarathustra as teacher / I offer my own services as
governess.” See Trenner, Cosima Wagner–Strauss: Briefwechsel, p. 227.
33
Stephan Kohler goes into great detail comparing the language of Meistersinger and Feuersnot and
showing many direct satirical citations. See Kohler, “Ein Operntext ist kein Kinderfiebel: Zur
Geschichte des Feuersnots-Libretto,” in special program book for the Bavarian State Opera, ed. Klaus
Schulz (11 July 1980), especially pp. 30–5.
mentor, though he lives in his master’s old house; he cares nothing for tradition; he
gains the approval of the populace after excoriating it; and, unlike the operatic Till, he
may not be made mayor but wins the mayor’s daughter only after taking her virginity
at the very urging of the clueless townspeople.34
What Kunrad does for a living is a mystery. He is called a leveler (Ebener), which
suggests some sort of carpentry, though in the operatic context we know that his
abilities at leveling, or getting even (eben), go far beyond woodworking. Indeed, in a
symbolic gesture, when asked by the children for wood for the solstice fire, he answers
that they should take an axe and tear down as much wood as they need from the
Hexenhaus of Meister Reichart (alias Richard Wagner). In a phrase that echoes Beyond
Good and Evil, Kunrad describes himself as “too good for virtue,” and, indeed, with his
fire magic, he appears to have Zoroastrian powers. Along these lines, Meister Reichart
was a Bavarian Zarathustra, and Kunrad, his protégé, an early Übermensch.
There are other Wagnerian allusions in the text as well – the most obvious, beyond
Meistersinger, being Die Walküre and its Act iii circle of magic fire atop Brünnhilde’s
mountain, to be penetrated later by the intrepid Siegfried, wielding his magic sword.
Peter Pachl sees references to Act i as well and is the first commentator to explain,
convincingly, Feuersnot’s enigmatic references to mead: “All maidens like mead” (Alle
Mädel mögen Meth).35 This bookendlike phrase first appears in Diemut’s opening lines
and closes the opera as well, there sung by the full ensemble. In Die Walküre Sieglinde
offers the stranger-hero, Siegmund, a drinking horn of “creamy, sweet mead,” who asks
her to try it first. After Siegmund takes “a long swallow” he looks at her “with growing
warmth.” According to Pachl, what might be interpreted in this context as feminine
erotic secretion (weibliche Lustsaft) becomes masculine (männliches Sperma) in the context
of Feuersnot;36 that is what Kunrad offers the mayor’s daughter behind closed doors in
order for the flames of passion, art, and life to rekindle.
Pachl’s observation sheds light on Adorno’s comments on Feuersnot and Salome, where
Strauss consummates what was relatively latent in Siegfried, Tristan, and Walther von
Stolzing:
[T]he ego-ideal is now fully identified with the Freudian genital-character, who is
uninhibitedly out for his own pleasure and is kindly disposed to pleasure as such, tolerant
towards extravagance and occasionally toward perversion as well. In Feuersnot, the
deflowering of the young girl, Diemut, is officially celebrated by the town; in Salome, the
34
“Da hilft nun kein Psallieren / noch auch die Klerisei: / das Mädel muss verlieren sein Lirumlarumei!”
This nearly untranslatable passage suggests that singing hymns won’t help, nor will the worthless
clergy: “The maiden must offer her Lirumlarumlei!” Lirum larum is a children’s-rhyme nonsense word
that, in this context, means something like “you know what.”
35
Peter P. Pachl, “Die Märchenoper der Wagnernachfolge,” in Oper und Operntext, ed. Jens Malte Fischer
(Heidelberg: Winter, 1985), p. 136.
36
Ibid.
Word, tone, and musical-dramatic structure 51
music openly takes the side of the pretty princess who revels in the severed head of
the ascetic. “Live and let live” is the motto, even at the cost of death; “head or tail,” as in
the popular English wager.37
Less obvious but no less important is the allusion to Tristan und Isolde. Diemut, like Isolde in
Act ii, lights a lamp for the unwitting, libidinous Kunrad; but in the end, after the hoax is
exposed, he creates an “eternal night” far from anything envisioned by Wagner. This
antilove duet, where Diemut feigns her love and Kunrad overstates his passion, is full of
textual and syntactical references to Act ii of Tristan (including a matching A♭ major setting):
diemut: If you have chosen me
All my defiance would be lost.
kunrad: Your defiance is indeed lost,
For I have chosen you.
[diemut: Habt Ihr mich denn erkoren,
Ging all mein Trotz verloren –
kunrad: Nun ging dein Trotz verloren,
Denn ich hab’ dich erkoren – ]38
Indeed, the entire “Poem for Singing,” or “Song Poem” (Singgedicht), as it was subtitled
by Wolzogen, consists mostly of witty couplets in a style informed by Wagner’s
Meistersinger and Tristan libretti – or, in a spoof on the German romantic folk idiom,
Hänsel und Gretel, with a libretto by Engelbert Humperdinck’s sister. Indeed, many of its
textual folk idioms baffle non-Germans and non-Bavarians alike, which is why one
contemporary critic described the work as the first “dialect opera.”39
A SURFEIT OF STYLES: WORD, TONE, AND MUSICAL-DRAMATIC

STRUCTURE
A recurring journalistic buzzword at the turn of the century was “nervousness” (Nervösität),
a concept embraced by such progressive commentators as Seidl, Bie, and Hermann Bahr.
Conservatives saw their world, now in a late-industrial age, becoming increasingly hectic
and fragmented with the advent of mass urbanization. They worried about an erosion of
German humanist ideals and saw rushed, nervous concert audiences corrupted by the noise
of urban transportation and the distractions of electric lighting. Music was no longer an
intimate, inward experience; thanks to mass transit, audiences were coming in from the
suburbs in numbers greater than ever, a numb, anonymous collective. Music venues “with
37
Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864,” p. 24.
38
This is an obvious reference to Act i of Tristan, when Isolde, “darkly staring” at Tristan, sings, “Mir
erkoren / mir verloren” (Destined to me / lost to me).
39
Clipping of Paul Riesenfeld, “Feuersnot,” Allgemeine deutsche Musikzeitung (1901).
electric lights and a one-hundred-piece orchestra with kettledrums and percussion” were no
longer a solace for a needful humanity; rather, they were a showplace for an audience
seeking ever greater noisy shock effects from a composer such as Strauss.40
Strauss was the first major composer to recognize and embrace a new culture
industry that put him in constant demand: the first modern-age touring conductor
who was simultaneously the artist who created a product and the performer who sold it.
Feuersnot is the first operatic example of Strauss’s ahistorical treatment of musical style,
prefiguring what Fredric Jameson much later called the “collapse of the high-modernist
ideology of style.”41 Strauss delighted in the fast pace and the fragmentation of modern
life and saw no reason that music should not be part of it. For him, Schopenhauer was
“romanticism on a respirator,” and the only way out was a nervous stylistic pluralism.42
If anything adequately describes Feuersnot’s shocking modernity, it is just this stylistic
pluralism, unprecedented in any previous work and not outdone by any subsequent
one. For this reason Adorno believed the opera to be the most characteristically
Straussian, and that “never again did Strauss write music as spontaneous.”43 Reinhold
Schlötterer described Feuersnot as an “overflowing surfeit” of musical styles;44 a better
metaphor might be a stylistic traffic jam, with all its accelerations, brakings, sudden
changes of direction, and inevitable collisions. In this one-act score we hear children’s
rhymes (à la Hänsel und Gretel), folk dances, folk songs,45 waltzes, magical incantations
(also in the Hänsel style), a parody of a Wagnerian love duet, and a symphonic sex scene.
If Strauss’s friend Seidl described modernism as Nervenkultur, its musical manifestation
would be stylistic multiplicity. In 1906 Strauss declared to Bie: “[The fact] that one
cannot be one person today and another tomorrow, but must always be the one the dear
Lord created, is too profound a thought to find a place in the brain of an aesthetician.
And that the rainbow, even if it shimmers in seven different colors, is just one rainbow.”46
There is little evidence to suggest that Strauss altered much of Wolzogen’s text, which
was written quickly over the summer of 1900. The text’s strengths are its weaknesses,
40
Werner Sombart, “Technik und Kultur,” Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik 33 (1911): 345.
Cited in Richard Wattenbarger, “Richard Strauss, Modernism, and the University: A Study of German-
Language and American Academic Reception of Richard Strauss from 1900 to 1990,” Ph.D. diss.,
University of Minnesota (2000), p. 34.
41
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1991), p. 18.
42
Morten Kristiansen, “Richard Strauss, Die Moderne, and the Concept of Stilkunst,” Musical Quarterly 86,
4 (2002): 690.
43
Adorno, “Richard Strauss, Born June 11, 1864,” p. 123.
44
Reinhold Schlötterer, “Adornos Sympathie für Feuersnot,” in Gemurmel unterhalb des Rauschens: Theodor
W. Adorno und Richard Strauss, ed. Andreas Dorschel, Studien zur Wertungsvorschung 45 (Vienna:
Universal Edition, 2004), p. 93.
45
Strauss cites three folk songs, two of which are directly related to Munich: “So lang der alte Peter” and
“Mir san net von Pasing.” The other one is “Guten morgen Herr Fischer.”
46
Kristiansen, “Stilkunst,” p. 700.
2.1 Feuersnot, Diemut’s entrance
for the desired stylistic diversity dilutes the dramaturgical shape and strength that we
associate with Salome, a text unilaterally shaped by Strauss from Oscar Wilde’s play.
Feuersnot, which is not divided into scenes, unravels in real time, as do Salome and Elektra.
But there are important points of dramaturgical demarcation:
1. Introduction (children’s choruses, townspeople, etc.)
2. Kunrad’s appearance, culminating with his audacious kissing of Diemut
3. Kunrad and Diemut’s ironic love duet
4. Kunrad’s humiliation and his magic incantation (to the town’s horror)
5. Kunrad’s “sermon”
6. Demands of the citizens, culminating in the symphonic sex scene
7. Final duet and jubilant chorus.
Although these sections are not of equal length, the dramaturgical symmetries are clear:
the bookend effect of the opening and closing choruses, the initiation of Kunrad’s
passionate advance and its culmination in Sections 2 and 7, and, of course, midway
through the opera, the extinguishing of Munich’s fire.
Strauss’s original tonal plan, as evidenced by the key areas he annotated in the
margins of the libretto, was fairly straightforward: begin the opera in a bright D
major, switch to D minor when the fires are extinguished, and return to D major at
the end, instead of the ultimate B♭ major. The reason he changed his original plan
remains unexplained, but in the end Strauss opted for something more complex and
interesting, creating a greater sense of harmonic adventure. As spontaneous as much of
the nervous chromatic sidestepping may seem on its colorful surface, it is all well
executed in Strauss’s able, classically trained hands. Indeed, the composer’s musical
plan is far more coherent than the poetic plan of Wolzogen, whose dramaturgical
abilities fall short of Strauss’s sure-footed stage instincts. If we are to take seriously
Strauss’s idea that there is redemption, albeit through libidinal assertion, then the work
could not end in the bright, simple-minded, two-sharp manifestation of its beginning;
rather, it had to make a journey to the flat side, to the key associated with Diemut from
2.2 Opening
2.3
her very first entrance (Ex. 2.1). After all, it is through her sacrifice that the philistines of
Munich are redeemed.
This journey to B♭ is prepared within the very opening bars (Ex. 2.2), as the
orchestra intones the “theme” (more precisely, a series of jarring harmonic juxtapo-
sitions) of the summer solstice; this gesture is concretized with text 114 bars later
(Ex. 2.3) and appears several times throughout the opera. Strauss achieves his goal of
disorientation with great clarity, making the tonic a misleading dominant seventh
going to a tonicized subdominant; after repeating the process, he makes a nervous
shift to the real tonic’s Neapolitan (E♭). This harmony then cadences on B♭ (the opera’s
final tonic), only to slip into an F♯7 and finally to a crudely prolonged A7. This gives way
to D major, but not before he first inserts a whimsical, pregnant pause. What ensues is
Strauss at his most stylishly unsophisticated: a peasant dance, homely in melodic cut,
2.4 “Peasant dance”
harmonic simplicity, and vulgar orchestration (Ex. 2.4). No doubt Strauss drew upon
the theme for the simple peasant girl whom Don Quixote mistakes for his beloved
Dulcinea (Ex. 2.5).
According to Strauss, “Kunrad’s speech was clearly the main thing and the rest of the
story an amusing addition.”47 All the written evidence by either collaborator suggests
that this summation is quite true. Thus, we can construct a hierarchy that blends well
with Strauss’s harmonic-dramaturgical plan:
Kunrad’s “sermon” (centered on A major)
The ego-assertive sexual relationship (sensually circumscribing A major in various ways)
The philistines as local color (mostly in the realm of D major or D minor)
After Kunrad literally and figuratively shows the hapless Münchners the light, they can
never go back to their old ways and therefore can never simply return to D major, as if
turning on a light switch, for “when love unites itself with the magic of genius even the
most annoying philistine sees the light!”
47
Strauss to Joseph Gregor (4 February [1945]), in Tenschert, Richard Strauss – Joseph Gregor Briefwechsel:
1934–1949, p. 274.
2.5 Don Quixote, Dulcinea theme
The sermon and the sex symphony48 that follow are set up by Kunrad’s initial
provocation, when he invites young Diemut to jump through the solstice flames with
him, sealing their relationship. First he bursts off the steps of his house as he sees
Diemut, then springs toward her, stealing a kiss in public – in both instances in A
major, centered on the libidinous upward dotted gesture, the same erotic rhythmic
topos opening Der Rosenkavalier, representing the sexually aroused Oktavian
(Exx. 2.6a and 2.6b).
Kunrad’s speech is loosely organized as a kind of recitative and aria, the former
section allowing for the timely insertions of earlier motives as well as ones by
Wagner, notably the Dutchman theme and the Valhalla motive from the Ring (Ex.
2.7). The lyrical section (at first the dominant of A) takes the dotted figure and
transforms it into two of the drinking songs mentioned above (Ex. 2.8). Then, in a
state of libidinal intoxication, it takes on the guise of a Bacchic waltz that could easily
been danced by Rosenkavalier’s drunken Baron Ochs. Again, we are not drawn in to
float in the Wagnerian tide, but rather are invited to dance in a wonderfully vulgar
fashion (Ex. 2.9). Toward the end Kunrad teases citizens and listeners alike with
promises of restoring light through various harmonic excursions before settling on a
final cadence in F major, the dotted figure rendered innocuous by folksy parallel
sixths and thirds.
What seemed peripheral in bar 7 of the opera (see again Ex. 2.2) emerges as
something central to the musical-dramaturgical structure, for F♯ is the entire piece’s
48
“Now comes the ‘symphony,’ Strauss once exclaimed to [the] Stuttgart [r]egisseur . . . Emil
Gerhäuser in 1912.” See Kenneth Birkin, “‘Die Regenbogenbrücke Hinüber’: Feuersnot 1912 in
Stuttgart,” Richard Strauss-Blätter 49 (June 2003): 84.
2.6a Kunrad springs toward Diemut
2.6b Der Rosenkavalier, opening
2.7 Valhalla quotation
Janus-faced pivot chord: it can work its way back toward D major, as in Ex. 2.2, or take
on the guise of G♭ major, serving as the Neapolitan of V in B♭ major, just as E♭ served
as the Neapolitan to D major in Ex. 2.3. Thus, the progression of F♯7–A7–D is
transformed (redeemed) to G♭–(A7)–F–B♭ (Exx. 2.10a and 2.10b). But before we get
there, Strauss creates a heated Steigerung (as Diemut offers Kunrad her Lierumlarum)
with a fierce, masculine pounding of F♯ on the strong beats and sinuous, sensual
parallel thirds hovering above, capped off by the springing, erotic dotted gesture.
Such force was unprecedented in any Straussian work, and the passage seems nearly
2.8 Drinking song
2.9 Waltz
2.10a “Redemption” to B♭ major
to spin out of control. This kind of feigned excess was precisely what Strauss had
in mind when he instructed the conductor, during the heated moment of sexual
Steigerung that begins Der Rosenkavalier, to realize it as being “thoroughly parodistic”
(ganz parodistisch). This moment in Feuersnot should be executed in the same manner
(Ex. 2.11).
2.10b Reduction
2.11
Feuersnot’s companion piece: a “religious” turn 61
RECEPTION
Did Strauss really believe that Feuersnot, the first operatic manifesto of his “new way,”
could become a mainstay of the operatic repertoire in the way Till Eulenspiegel did in the
symphony hall? Feuersnot, not Salome, is his first Literaturoper (Wolzogen’s Singgedicht),
but the Überbrettl literary cabaret qualities of the text worked against the clarity of the
dramaturgy. Many of the clever puns and plays on words went over the heads of an
audience it was admittedly trying to insult. If the attack was on German-(especially
Munich-)based Wagner philistinism, what could be its expected fate outside the German
realm? In England it was almost entirely misunderstood, for much of the pun-ridden
text is untranslatable, and in fact there is still no modern English version of the libretto.
The English premiere, under Thomas Beecham in 1910, utterly failed to convince.
One London critic lamented that Wolzogen had “spoiled his drama by dragging in
Wagner” – which was, of course, the very point of the opera.49 Many comparisons,
however, were made with Till Eulenspiegel in terms of its busyness, scrappiness, and
restlessness. A critic for The Times cogently pointed out that Kunrad might well have
been stricken with the very “madness” (Wahn) of which Hans Sachs speaks in his famous
Act iii Meistersinger monologue.50
If its intent was to affront its own Munich audience, they were not in on the joke,
no more than they were with Till Eulenspiegel – though, without words and with its short
duration, clever musical themes, and vivid orchestration, such incomprehension did
not seem to matter. Those in Strauss’s small circle of friends understood his satirical
strategies, as did the more learned German critics, but the public never fully got the
message of Strauss’s attack on reactionary Wagnerism. In retrospect, Strauss referred to
his “little non-opera” (Nichtoper) as an “upbeat” (Auftakt), implying that his “downbeat”
was Salome, a work designed to make his message clearer, even to the point that he gave
the opera the ironic subtitle of “music drama.” Strauss’s statement that it was a “com-
panion piece” to Feuersnot now takes on sharper meaning. Even if those critics beyond
Strauss’s circle failed to understand that meaning in Salome, House Wahnfried certainly
did not, and from that opera onward Strauss and the Wagner family remained estranged
until the deaths of Siegfried and Cosima in 1930.
FEUERSNOT’S COMPANION PIECE: A “RELIGIOUS” TURN
With the composition of Salome, Strauss created a compelling symmetry: if Zarathustra

was Till’s serious alter ego, then Salome bore that same relationship to the strangely
comic Kunrad. But with a difference: from Salome onward, Strauss chiefly chose women
as central characters – not only Salome, but also Elektra, the Marschallin, Ariadne, the
49 50
E. A. Baugham, The Daily News, 9 July 1910. The Times, 11 July 1910.
empress, Arabella, Danae, and others. He sensed, as did other artists and intellectuals
at the time, that the new century would be one with an intense, sometimes perverse
focus on women (an early manifestation of this new direction was the European femme
fatale, a stylized male nightmare in a patriarchal society).51 Now firmly established as an
artist in Berlin, Strauss made the acquaintance of such important poets and dramatists
as Richard Dehmel, Detlev von Liliencron, and Frank Wedekind. Strauss set texts by
Dehmel and Liliencron and greatly admired Wedekind’s Erdgeist (Earth Spirit), the
Berlin premiere of which he attended in 1902.
Strauss’s move toward central female roles was catalyzed by numerous factors, chief
among them a personal and artistic attraction to the female voice. He met his future wife
as her vocal coach and later composed the role of Freihild for her; in the early days of
their marriage, she toured with him as a much-beloved song recitalist; and after her
retirement from the stage as a young mother, Strauss continued to compose songs for
her. Of course, with the new century’s sea change toward the femme nouvelle, Strauss was
hardly oblivious to the huge marketing potential of writing for women.52 But there were
also important psychological implications, rich literary allusions, and another opportu-
nity for an open artistic response to Wagner, whose worldview focused more on male
heroes, with the woman serving as a redeeming force. Composing a work such as Salome
and labeling it a “music drama,” thereby inverting Wagner (the “eternal feminine”
seduces the redeemer, then has him executed), was a calculated affront.
That affront was personalized when, on Good Friday of 1905, Strauss played and
sang the final scene of the still-unorchestrated Salome on the piano for Cosima Wagner,
who was visiting Berlin. Cosima was aghast. “This is madness!” she exclaimed. “You are
for the exotic. [My son] Siegfried is for the popular.”53 The split between Strauss and
Wahnfried had now reached the point of no return, though, as has been noted, the
process of separation had been gradual, beginning fifteen years earlier when Strauss,
as Kapellmeister in Weimar, played his recently composed Don Juan for Cosima. At that
time Strauss was on friendly terms with Wagner’s widow, who was visiting Strauss’s
new uncut production of Lohengrin, one that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its
51
The conservative, patriarchal Julius Korngold often took Strauss to task – as did others – for having an
“eye out for anything that was contemporary. A musician who is modern through and through,
including keeping up with literary modernity, with all its moods and fantasies, and heeding the
currents of the times.” See his “Richard Strauss’s Salome: A Conversation,” in Gilliam, Richard Strauss
and His World, p. 343.
52
Debora L. Silverman offers a compelling discussion of the femme nouvelle in France, though most of
these major themes pertain to the rest of Europe as well. See the chapter on the femme nouvelle in her
Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1989), pp. 63–74. For a study of Salome reception in late nineteenth-century France,
see Davinia Caddy, “Variations on the Dance of the Seven Veils,” Cambridge Opera Journal 17 (2005):
37–58.
53
Cosima Wagner to Strauss, cited in Trenner, Cosima Wagner–Strauss: Briefwechsel, p. 255 n. 5.
Nerves and maybugs 63
world premiere in Weimar (under the baton of Cosima’s father, Franz Liszt). The young
Strauss played Don Juan on the piano from start to finish, and Cosima, despite her
maternal sympathies toward this new talent, could not hide her disappointment. She
was horrified not only by its flagrant eroticism but also by the quasi-cinematic con-
creteness of his musical narrative and materials. In short, the work was devoid of any
transcendent qualities, and she strongly urged him to follow his heart and not his brain.
Strauss paid no heed, and the Hotel Bellevue incident was the last straw – they saw
each other only one more time, in passing. The friction extended to Cosima’s son,
Siegfried, and it was not too long after Salome that his friendship with Strauss came to an
end. Siegfried had written an open letter bemoaning Strauss’s modernist direction,
declaring that, after Salome, his father had “already turned in his grave.” He accused
Strauss of playing the role of musical speculator, of “tailoring” his operas for money, for
momentary “sensationalism and success,” playing to the lowest appetites of the modern
audience.54 Strauss was understandably angered, especially because he judged Siegfried
Wagner to be no more than a modest talent who had achieved distinction and fortune
by exploiting his last name. Their friendly camaraderie had been strained since 1896,
the year of the Nietzschean Also sprach Zarathustra. Around this time Siegfried ran
into Strauss at the lobby of the luxurious Adlon Hotel in Berlin. An awkward Siegfried
needled the more famous composer about the expensive hotel: “Is your business
making such good profits, then?” “Oh yes,” replied Strauss, “and it’s my own business,
not my father’s.”55
NERVES AND MAYBUGS
After he retired from the Munich Court Orchestra, Franz Strauss’s business had been to
offer his son constant advice; whether or not Richard took it is another matter.56 “My
God, what nervous music!” was Franz’s response to Salome. “It is as if one had maybugs
crawling around in one’s pants.”57 The son was, of course, delighted; his first operatic
manifesto may not have hit the bull’s-eye, but its companion piece had. Strauss was by
this time losing the support of such Wagnerians as Ernest Newman, who had begun to
question the seriousness of Strauss’s artistry. Disappointed with Symphonia domestica’s
54
Siegfried Wagner, “Siegfried Wagner gegen Richard Strauss,” Der Turm 1, 4 (1911).
55
Kurt Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, trans. Mary Whittall (New York: Rizolli, 1989),
p. 215.
56
In a recent essay, Roswitha Schlötterer-Traminer examines symmetrical relationships between
Mozart, Strauss, and their respective fathers. Schlötterer-Traminer “Väter und Söhne im Briefwechsel:
Leopold und Wolgang Amadeus Mozart–Franz und Richard Strauss,” Richard Strauss-Blätter, 56 (2006):
5–24.
57
Strauss, Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, p. 152.
banality and Salome’s solipsistic pathology, Newman worried whether Strauss’s next
opera would “realize our best hopes or our worst fears.”58
Indeed, what is one to make of a composer of these two adjacent works – Symphonia
domestica, with its scenes from blissful bourgeois family life, and Salome, where family
life gives new meaning to the term “dysfunctional,” with its themes of incest, bisex-
uality, dismemberment, and necrophilia? The juxtaposition surely startled Robert
Hirschfeld:
The art of Richard Strauss bears, like Salome, deep traces of decay: from Zarathustra it drags
itself lasciviously to the children’s room [Symphonia domestica]; from the Domestica it
staggers to the excesses of impure blood and demands the head of John the Baptist. The
public stares hypnotically, like the slaves of the tetrarch [Herod], at the bloodthirsty music,
then throws the shield of indignation over it and, laughing sarcastically, leaves the house that
has incited its curiosity.59
Salome’s reception paralleled that of its predecessor: Strauss had composed another
“nerve opera,” another extension of the bustling, noisy world of modern Germany, with
its trains, trams, and electric lights. A look at Strauss’s busy engagement calendar reveals
a conductor who spent as much time on the road as he did at home. What kind of
music could come from an artist who seemed to have so little time for artistic reflection?
“Materialist music” is the answer, music derived from the technical potential of the
orchestra and not from the spirit. “[Salome] ceaselessly electrifies and discharges the
spirit; it rattles and bangs until the emotions are worn out; it no longer wants anything
but explosions, and the dynamic of these has no effect but that of dynamite.”60
Strauss was accused of being a Jew in music, curiously, by Jewish critics. Hirschfeld,
the son of a distinguished Viennese cantor, decried Salome’s “eternally excited Straussian
orchestra,” which, “with distorted harmonic images, in its restless, grotesque gestural
language, play[s] precisely the role of that group of voluble Jews in Wilde’s drama.”61
Julius Korngold suggested that “[with] the quintet of quarreling Jews . . . Strauss is in his
element . . . Doesn’t the whole vocal score of Salome sound somewhat Jewish?”62 One
might well imagine that upon hearing Strauss play the score on that Good Friday,
Cosima Wagner might have gone beyond judging Salome to be insanity and made a few
choice anti-Semitic statements of her own against Strauss. It even seems that Strauss’s
outspoken wife, Pauline, may have got into the fray, for in a sarcastic follow-up letter to
58
Ernest Newman, Richard Strauss (London: The Bodley Head, 1908), p. 137.
59
“Strauss and the Viennese Critics (1896–1924): Reviews by Gustav Schoenaich, Robert Hirschfeld,
Guido Adler, Max Kalbeck, Julius Korngold, and Karl Kraus,” selected and ed. Leon Botstein, trans.
Susan Gillespie, in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, p. 334.
60
Ibid., p. 335. 61 Ibid.
62
Ibid., p. 348. Before the two world wars, the composer of Salome was accused of philo-Semitism;
postwar Salome reception, specifically with regard to the quintet of Jews, has seen it as anti-Semitism.
Strauss’s Salome 65
Cosima’s infamous Berlin visit, he wrote: “I hope that, after making the acquaintance of
my crazy Jewish girl, you did not have a bad night in the train and that you had a pleasant
trip home. Best wishes from me and my not always un-crazy wife.”63
We have no commentary from Strauss concerning his being labeled a “Jewish
composer” at this time – indeed, the same was said about his conducting (the fast
tempi, etc.); but the fact that the composer saw himself as a practitioner of Nervenkunst is
beyond dispute. His friend Hermann Bahr had already seen the end of the century as the
dawn of nervous modernism: “when romanticism says human being, it means passions
and desires; and [when] modernism says human being, it means nerves.”64 Arthur Seidl,
Strauss’s friend from his student days, defined modernism at the turn of the century as
“nerve culture.”
STRAUSS’S SALOME
One would hardly call Wilde’s play a “nerve play”; rather, it is a work steeped in a
Symbolist decadence that in France was already past, the author dead, by the time
Strauss read the German translation. Treatments of the Salome story abound from the
biblical accounts through the end of the nineteenth century, but what most influenced
Wilde’s play, written in French, was Gustave Flaubert, Stéphane Mallarmé, and espe-
cially Huysmans. In his novel À rebours (Against Nature) he describes Gustave Moreau’s
painting Salome Dancing before Herod (c.1875) in great detail, giving her a power she never
had in previous treatments.
Huysmans himself observes that in the Bible she did not even have a name.65
Admittedly, the oft-quoted description of Moreau’s Salome (“[her] nipples hardening
under the friction of her whirling necklaces; the diamonds adhering to the moist skin
glitter; her bracelets, her belts, her rings flash and sparkle”) fascinated, even preoccupied
Wilde. But Huysmans goes on to say that, more important, this Salome was like no
other, either in print or on canvas:
[She was] that superhuman, strange Salome of whom [the protagonist] dreamt. No longer
was she just the dancer who by a shameless gyration of her hips wrests a lustful, ruttish cry
from an old man, who destroys the resoluteness and breaks the will of the king with thrusts of
her breasts, undulations of her belly, and quiverings of her thighs.66
63
Strauss to Cosima Wagner (20 April 1905), in Trenner, Cosima Wagner–Strauss: Briefwechsel, p. 255.
64
Hermann Bahr, “Die Überwindung des Naturalismus,” in Zur Uberwindung des Naturalismus:
Theoretische Schriften 1887–1904, ed. Gotthart Wunberg (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1968), p. 87.
65
Salome’s name is first mentioned by Abbot Isidor von Pelusium at the beginning of the fifth
century ce.
66
Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature [À rebours], trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford University Press,
1998), p. 45.
In Wilde’s play there is surely a nervous fascination with various forms of decay and
with the confusion between art and life, even a “profound surface” that recalls Bloch’s
pejorative against Strauss. Yet, ultimately, Strauss is not at one with Wilde’s worldview,
a fact that has obscured Salome’s opera reception to the present day. Despite all his
internalized antagonisms between Irish Anglicanism and the Roman Catholic church
and his inconsistencies with regard to organized religion as a whole, Wilde was, in the
end, a believer. From his De Profundis we know that the playwright ultimately found
solace in Christ the “artist,” who performed great miracles
as exquisite as the coming of spring, and quite as natural. I see no difficulty at all in believing
that such was the charm of his personality that his mere presence could bring peace to souls
in anguish, and that those who touched his garments or his hands forgot their pain; or that as
he passed by on the highway of life people who had seen nothing of life’s mystery, saw it
clearly, and others who had been deaf to every voice but that of pleasure heard for the first
time the voice of love and found it as “musical as Apollo’s lute” [sic].67
In Salome, this cauldron of mixed pre-Christian elements ( Judaism, paganism, and the
like), Wilde believed that Christ would, in some form, finally show the way. Strauss was
deaf to the Apollonian lyre and had no interest in religious miracles; he cut almost all
references to Christ’s miracles.
Strauss, who had spent several months in Greece and Egypt while working on Act iii
of Guntram, had long wanted to compose an opera with a Middle Eastern setting, and he
was critical of existing stage works that failed to evoke “true oriental color and scorching
sun.”68 Salome’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” was, in fact, his second, and less evocative,
attempt at Middle Eastern dance: in 1893 he had composed an Arabian Dance for piano
quartet dedicated to his uncle Georg Pschorr, who had helped fund his trip. This first
dance, free of the motivic obligations of the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” shows a
composer with a keen ear for local color, some of which may be detected in the later
piece.69
More important, what most strongly attracted Strauss was a play with a central
female character, an almost operatic text (with its heightened speech and overwrought
imagery), a contrast of characters, and rhythmic repetitions – Strauss referred to Salome’s
repeated line “I want the head of Jochanaan” as an ostinato. With the confidence of a
seasoned opera composer, Strauss cut nearly half of the dialogue, accentuating the play’s
contrasting images as well as its symmetries. He also deleted characters extraneous to his
mission of composing an opera about three equally off-putting, pathologically narcissistic
67
Oscar Wilde, De Profundis (1909), in The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 2005), p. 318.
68
69
We recall that Strauss had composed the “Dance of the Seven Veils” after completing the rest of the
opera, and it mostly integrates and derives from previously composed material.
characters: the ascetic, pedantic Jochanaan; the sensual and erotic yet virginal Salome; and
the conflicted, haunted, incestuous Herod, who orders their deaths in a desire to purge
both extremes. Most mercilessly cut were the first and final scenes: the former to allow
the work to move more efficiently to the conflict between Salome and Jochanaan, and
the latter to create a perverse and fatal “Liebestod” for Salome, the “Isolde who becomes
a Jewish prostitute,” as Romain Rolland described the character.70
Creating a workable version of Wilde’s play was not what Strauss had in mind at first.
In fact, his original plan was to write and compose another comedy, Ekke und Schnittlein;
after that failed to get past the text-draft stage, he entertained the idea of another
Wolzogen opera (a flim-flam comedy à la Till Eulenspiegel).71 But in January 1902 Anton
Lindner, editor of the Wiener Rundschau and author of the poem “Hochzeitlich Lied,” set
by Strauss in 1898, sent the composer a copy of Wilde’s Salome, an edition translated by
Hedwig Lachmann. Hoping for another collaboration with Strauss, Lindner promised
that a libretto would soon follow.
Two months later all Strauss had received was an apology from Lindner, who decided
that the whole thing would have to be redone and sent a sample of some verse treatments
of the play, which failed to impress the composer. Everything changed after the Berlin
premiere of Salome on 15 November 1902.72 Directed by the young, innovative Max
Reinhardt with the stunning Gertrud Eysoldt in the title role, Salome mesmerized Strauss,
who returned to see it again two months later. By then he had resolved to reject Lindner’s
awkward verse and set the play itself to music. Strauss’s cuts and annotations in his
copy of the play, as well as the word-level reworking of the syntax (eliminating
subordinate clauses and the past perfect tense) and a streamlining that created an
overwhelming sense of escalation culminating in Salome’s final monologue, show a
composer who knew precisely what he wanted.
The ostinati of Wilde’s textual repetitions provided Strauss with, as he put it,
“wonderful musical points of attack.” Indeed, the composer delineates some of them
in the margins of his copy of the play:
(I) Salome: I am not thirsty, Tetrarch. [Ich bin nicht durstig, Tetrarch.]
(II) Salome: I am not hungry, Tetrarch. [Ich bin nicht hungrig, Tetrarch.]
(III) Salome: I am not tired, Tetrarch. [Ich bin nicht müde, Tetrarch.]
70
From Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe (1904–12), quoted in Ernst Krause, Richard Strauss: The Man and
His Work, trans. John Coombs (Boston: Crescendo Press, 1969), p. 304.
71
Coabbradibosimpur oder Die bösen Buben von Sevilla (Coabbradibosimpur or The Bad Boys of Seville); the
libretto was completed and contains some musical marginalia by Strauss. It is in the Richard Strauss
Archive in Garmisch.
72
Because of censorship restrictions that had yet to be ironed out, this first performance was a private
showing for invited guests.
These are, of course, replies to Herod’s incestuous entreaties to have her share the
same drinking vessel, the same piece of fruit, and even to sit next him on the throne.
Throughout the play, repetitions are typically in threes, a rhythm set into motion by
Salome’s three entreaties to Narraboth to bring up Jochanaan from the cistern (“You
will do this for me” [Du wirst das für mich tun]). Once Jochanaan arrives onstage she
attempts another trio of seductive pleas, each one rebuked. In both cases Strauss
intensifies each repetition, but in the second case Jochanaan, unlike Narraboth, refuses
even the third appeal:
salome: I want to kiss your mouth, Jochanaan!
jochanaan: I will not look at you. You are accursed, Salome, you are accursed.
[salome: Ich will deinen Mund küssen, Jochanaan!

jochanaan: Ich will dich nicht ansehen. Du bist verflucht, Salome, du bist verflucht.]73
This refusal sets in motion an escalating cascade of events ending when she kisses the
mouth of his severed head in her final monologue.
But while the mouth fetish is so obvious on the visual surface, the obsession with
looking, of voyeuristic gazing, is just as important, if not more so. As Lawrence
Kramer observed: “For nineteenth-century men, the pleasure of looking can plausibly
be said to have rivaled that of physical penetration as the chief means of satisfying
sexual desire.”74 Each stolen glance is rebuked by either its victim or a jealous
companion,75 and thus the eye becomes more an object of obsession than the
mouth. At her first sight of Jochanaan, Salome exclaims: “He is terrible . . . It is his
eyes, above all, that are terrible.” As she gets close enough for Jochanaan to see her, he
asks: “Who is that woman who looks at me? I will not have her eyes upon me. Why
does she look at me with her golden eyes and glistening eyelids?” Although Salome
kisses his mouth in the end, Jochanaan trumps her; the man she first heard but could
not see will give her neither his voice nor his eyes:
73
All German originals and English translations of Salome are taken from Deutsche Gramophone 2707
052 (1970) [Karl Böhm and Hamburg State Opera Orchestra with Gwyneth Jones and Dietrich Fischer-
Dieskau] with certain changes made by the author.
74
Lawrence Kramer, “Modernity’s Cutting Edge: The Salome Complex,” in Opera and Modern Culture
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), p. 131.
75
In her opening line Salome asks why Herod (with his “mole’s eyes”) keeps looking at her.
Herodias constantly reprimands her husband, telling him to stop looking at her daughter, and of
course the page urges Narraboth, with whom he is in love, to stop staring at Salome. Narraboth’s
infatuation with the princess ends in his suicide, but neither Salome nor Jochanaan, the two
self-absorbed narcissists, looks upon his bleeding corpse. In a wonderful example of dramatic
economy, Strauss cuts the page’s revealing, loving reaction to Narraboth’s suicide but retains
the aura of homosexuality by casting the page as a mezzo, the first of many Straussian trouser roles
to come.
Ah! Why do you not look at me, Jochanaan? Over your eyes you put a blindfold over one
who wanted to see his God. Well, you have seen your God, Jochanaan, but you never saw me.
If you had seen me, you would have loved me.
[Ah! Warum hast du mich nicht angesehen, Jochanaan? Du legtest über deinen Augen die
Binde eines, der seinen Gott schauen wollte. Wohl! Du hast deinen Gott gesehen, Jochanaan,
aber mich hast du nie gsehen. Hättest du mich gesehen, du hättest mich geliebt!]
The greater mystery might well be: what, in essence, was Strauss’s Salome? The power
of her sexuality and desire is made so palpable through the music that it is difficult to
believe Strauss was not at all invested in this brilliant demonstration of carnal passion, of
the dark side of sexual attraction latent in all humans. Yet could one argue that if one
reads Guntram and Kunrad as male ego extensions of the composer, then must one
so interpret the role of Herod? Clearly not. Strauss was drawn to the beauty of Wilde’s
title role and images of a Middle East that Strauss himself had visited just a decade
earlier. Moreover, and more disturbingly, he might well have been drawn, in this first
blatant nonredemption opera, to the idea of the death of a redeemer.
It is no coincidence that Strauss’s first operatic hit was one that finally mastered the
technique of clearly delineated musical and psychological characterization through
motive, harmony, and timbre. Rudolf Louis, a contemporary critic and theorist, recog-
nized in Strauss’s tone poems steady technical progress in terms of instrumentation
and evocative thematic writing. He viewed it as a negative phenomenon, but there was
no doubting that Strauss was without equal in “the art of letting the listener see, as it
were, with his ears.” Louis maintained that Strauss creates “a gestural language of great
specificity that undertakes quite seriously not only to interpret events of an external plot
in tone (by revealing the music that is latent in them) but to draw them until they are
recognizable to the inner eye.”76 Technically the high point, and for some the artistic
low point, was the Symphonia domestica, Salome’s immediate predecessor. Strauss came
upon Wilde’s text at an ideal stage in his creative life, for it was only because of such
clearly profiled, evocative psychological motives that he was able to have them collide,
to be superimposed and juxtaposed with such élan. Had he done the same with his
Guntram, the listener would have been left with motivic mush.
Salome is a fascinating parallel to Don Juan. Both were overnight successes. Their
evocative orchestrations, sharply etched melodies, and compelling pacing and energy
seemed to come out of nowhere, given that their predecessors, Feuersnot and Macbeth,
were such misfires. Perhaps, then, it was no coincidence that the only two works known
to have been played by Strauss for an astonished Cosima Wagner were Don Juan in
February 1890 and Salome fifteen years later, both of them exuding a coarse sexuality.
76
Rudolf Louis, “On the Tone Poems of Richard Strauss,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Gilliam, Richard
Strauss and His World, p. 309.
Strauss had given up on philosophizing and sermonizing in opera, and the result
was magnificent. The composer, captivated by Wilde’s threefold repetitions, took that
symmetry to the musicodramaturgical level, cutting as much of the playwright’s Herodias
as he could. What remained was a triangle that fascinated and delighted him. But his
interest in those three characters was purely artistic: Herod, who gawked at Salome, who
in turn gazed upon Jochanaan. (The last looked only to God.) Strauss treated them with
an irony and dark humor still misunderstood by many, who maintain that the composer
was insincere when he summarized Salome as a “scherzo with a fatal dénouement.”77
Contrasting characters made for divergent musical styles: the inflexible and pedantic for
Jochanaan, the deliberately cheesy for Herod, and the sensuously chromatic for Salome.
“A PREACHER IN THE DESERT”: JOCHANAAN
The figure of Jochanaan was the least sympathetic for Strauss, who, as late as the 1930s,
still felt he needed to explain his antipathy:
In Salome I tried to compose [poor] old Jochanaan more or less as a clown. A preacher in
the desert, especially one who feeds on locusts, seems infinitely ridiculous to me. Only
because I had already caricatured the five Jews and also poked fun at Father Herod did
I feel that I had to follow the law of contrast and write a pedantic-Philistine motif for four
horns to characterize Jochanaan.78
That very motive was criticized by contemporary critics, unaware of its irony, for being
precisely what it was supposed to be. Once such critic was Paul Bekker, who charac-
terized Jochanaan’s music as that of a soapbox orator and as overwrought Mendelssohn.79
Alfred Heuss, reviewing the Leipzig premiere in 1906, criticized the music’s sentimen-
tality: “Who would believe that the sentimental chords of the horns, which are
unimaginatively repeated, actually characterize the crude prophet? Who stands as a
rock in the middle of a sea of depravity? Aren’t we navigating in Liedertafel style, bouncing
towards a four-three chord as in the times of Mendelssohn?”80 Predictably, the East
German critic Ernst Krause, in his brilliant post-Second World War study of Strauss and
his work, classified Salome as late-capitalist bourgeois decadence, but even he missed the
composer’s intentional, ironic sentimentality. Lauding the score as Strauss’s first master-
work for the stage, with its polished, “crystal clear” leitmotivic style, its highly artistic
“nervous counterpoint,” and an ecstatic “espressivo style” that reached its summit in
77
Gustave Samazeuilh, “Richard Strauss as I Knew Him,” Tempo (1964): 15. Samazeuilh, who had
translated some of Strauss’s texts and libretti into French, was a close personal acquaintance of Strauss
in the 1930s and 1940s.
78
Strauss to Zweig (5 May 1935), in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 90.
79
Paul Bekker, “Richard Strauss,” Westermanns Monatshefte 52 (1907): 126.
80
Alfred Heuss, “Musikberichte,” Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 7 [1906]: 427–8.
“A preacher in the desert”: Jochanaan 71
2.12a Salome, Jochanaan theme
Salome’s final monologue, Krause lamented that the opera “descends to sentimentality
only on occasion during Jochanaan’s calls to repentance.”81
The stiff, pedantic, “Mendelssohnian” horn theme, never specifically cited in the
score, is no doubt that shown in Example 2.12a; it is reminiscent of a similar horn call
(never mentioned) from Mendelssohn’s incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(Ex. 2.12b).
The leaden pedantry of the overblown, overrepeated Jochanaan music is not difficult
to observe, though the more devious irony of his, and later the Nazarene’s, references to
Christ (though never by name) has proved to be more difficult to grasp (Ex. 2.13) and is
never discussed in detail.
In Example 2.13 Strauss ridicules Christ himself, in the same mocking key of A♭
that he used to characterize the “Afterworldly” in Also sprach Zarathustra, the weak who
seek an afterlife of “heavenly nothing” (Ex. 2.14). In both instances Strauss infuses these
passages with sugary thirds and sixths; as if that were not enough, the “Man from
Galilee” is offered a syrupy solo violin obbligato as well.
In “Salome as Music Drama,” Derrick Puffet warns against motivic “literalism” in
analyses of this and other music dramas. Indeed, especially in Strauss, any attempt to
explain the work by picking apart such a tightly knit, complex motivic network risks
81
Krause, Richard Strauss: The Man and His Work, p. 301.
2.12b Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream
falling into the quicksand of motive description. Puffet writes of a continuum of words,
motives, and meaning, to which I would add timbre, rhythm, vocal registers, and the
like.82 The pious, ascetic Jochanaan is profiled by his simple, sustained, or at times
declamatory baritonal vocal lines – homophonic, set in a clear, slow-paced harmonic
rhythm, and utilizing mostly triadic themes83 (although, in the case of Jochanaan’s
“prophecy theme,” it is a matter of sustained falling fourths; see Ex. 2.15).
Such musical treatment stands in stark contrast to the sputtering lines of the loqua-
cious Herod, the sensual music of Salome, and the nervous counterpoint of the quintet
of the Jews in Scene 4.
WITH “FEET OF WHITE DOVES” AND THE VOICE

OF ISOLDE: SALOME
There is no doubt that Salome captured the composer’s imagination more completely
than any other person in the opera. He lavished more themes upon her than any other
character by far: as a virgin, a spoiled princess, a seductress, a sexually hungry being,
and a seething victim of incest. In this music drama Strauss believed there was ample
excitement and turmoil in the orchestra, necessitating that the singers, especially Salome
and Herod, tone down their physical gestures:
82
Derrick Puffet, ed., Richard Strauss: Salome (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 63.
83
In a strange way, Strauss seems to be borrowing from the basso buffo tradition of his beloved Mozart,
such as Leporello’s “Nott’ e giorno faticar,” of Don Giovanni, but in augmentation.
With “feet of white doves” and the voice of Isolde 73
2.13 Jochanaan’s reference to Christ
Whoever has been in the East [as was Strauss in 1893] and has observed the decorum [Dezenz]
with which women there behave, will appreciate that Salome, being a chaste virgin and an
oriental princess, must be played with the simplest and most restrained gestures, unless her
downfall by the wonder of a great world is to excite only disgust and terror instead of
sympathy.84
To be sure, this comment was made nearly four decades after the opera was written;
yet the cuts Strauss made in the text show clearly that he wanted to create a character of
greater purity than Wilde’s. Strauss reduced little of Salome’s part, making those rare
84
Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, p. 151 (with some changes by this author).
2.14 Also sprach Zarathustra
2.15 Jochanaan’s prophecy
cuts all the more revealing as to his intentions. In her opening lines, Salome asks: “Why
does the Tetrarch look at me constantly with his mole’s eyes beneath his shaking
eyelids? It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me so. I don’t know what
it should mean. In truth – I know it all too well.” Strauss cut the last two (italicized) lines,
which suggest lost virginity, as well as similar references in her final monologue: “I was a
virgin, and you took from me my chastity. I was pure and chaste, and you poured fire in my
veins.”
Strauss himself stated that he began composing the opera upon reading the opening
line, “How beautiful is Princess Salome tonight!,” and, indeed, in the margins of his copy
2.16 Opening
2.17a Salome as pure princess
2.17b Salome’s charm
of Wilde’s text one sees the sinuous, slippery melodic line played by the clarinet, a
musical gesture that opens and sets the tone for the entire work (Ex. 2.16).
But Salome is not onstage, and the way in which Strauss manipulates the theme
suggests that this theme has more to do with Narraboth’s infatuation with her beauty.
One rarely hears it while she is singing, and when it does coincide, she is enticing
Narraboth into breaking Herod’s orders against releasing Jochanaan from the cistern.
There is, however, a multiplicity of themes that directly relate to the many facets of her
personality. As different as they are in musical qualities, all share the same fundamental
rhythm of three short notes and a long one. This type of motivic derivation, where
rhythm is as important a signifier as pitch, is integral to Strauss’s operatic style and had
already been exploited in his symphonic works. Sometimes that fundamental, motive-
generating rhythm can come from a word or name, such as the cry “Agamemnon” in
Elektra or “Keikobad” in Die Frau ohne Schatten.
Example 2.17 shows this rhythmic family of Salome motives, expressing the pure
princess (Ex. 2.17a), her charm (Ex. 2.17b), her sexual passion (Ex. 2.17c), her desire to kiss
Jochanaan (Ex. 2.17d), and her stubborn demand for his head (Ex. 2.17e).
The motivic complexity of this opera far exceeds that of Strauss’s first two, and
picking apart leitmotives and assigning meanings to them can make for tedious business.
One might indeed see prototypes of the “three shorts and a long” rhythm in the page’s
“Du siehst sie immer an” (You always look at her) or in the Jochanaan theme (see again
2.17c Salome’s sexual passion
2.17d Salome’s desire to kiss Jochanaan
2.17e Salome’s demand for Jochanaan’s head

Ex. 2.12a), where the rhythmic association is matched by the same intervals, just
rearranged. In the latter case, the match is intentional, exploited to help set up the
most powerful orchestral interlude in the opera: Jochanaan’s emergence from the
cistern. If it is breathtaking in its spontaneity, in the busyness of motivic interplay that
foreshadows some of the great symphonic interludes of Die Frau ohne Schatten, it is
certainly not unreflective. It is no longer the relatively unpolished thematic traffic jam of
Feuersnot; rather, this is an artfully jam-packed interlude that staggers its listener with a
gargantuan orchestra operating at full throttle, yet where all the essential thematic parts
remain remarkably clear – if one is not distracted, indeed overwhelmed, by the sheer
sonic force.
Strauss knows full well that neither Salome nor the audience has yet made a physical
match to Jochanaan’s dismembered voice in the opening scene, and he heightens our
anticipation with a dizzying mixture of Salome and Jochanaan motives that morph into
one another with remarkable ease. This miniature tone poem, a psychological combi-
nation of suspense and Salome’s sexual projection, juxtaposes, then combines the
Salome-as-princess figure (see again Ex. 2.17a) with Jochanaan’s main theme (see again
Ex. 2.12a) – now in even rhythms – in the first wave of musical build-up. The second and
final wave begins with a rhythmically proper Example 2.12a, followed by his prophecy
motive. When her motive of sexual passion arrives at rehearsal number 63, the orchestra
erupts in carefully crafted motivic chaos, where all the aforementioned motives seem to
vie for attention (Ex. 2.18).
Closer analysis of this scene would go entirely against the grain of Strauss’s intent,
which is to create a sonic tidal wave that crashes over its audience with a surfeit of
material. He does not wish “to grant [us] time for its examination,” as one critic observed;
“there isn’t time to stop and reflect . . . the protagonists’ motives [are] juxtaposed or
superimposed any-old-how, jacked up and down in sequences . . . ice and fire at the turn
of a knob.”85 That is certainly one of the great enigmas of Strauss: his carefully calculated
spontaneity has fooled many critics and commentators, yet the abundance of relevant
motivic material that rushes by is never wasted. With the wisdom foreshadowing that of
a good film composer such as Max Steiner – Strauss’s godson, who attended the premiere
as his guest – Strauss knows that the sonic memory retains those traces, which are
reawakened time and again, most importantly in the final scene, after Salome’s dance.
Salome is at once powerful and brash, vulnerable and terrified, and these two contra-
dictory emotions make for a puzzling dance. In this Totentanz she submits to her step-
father. She sells her body, but at great cost, and yet there is also an element of physical,
sexual catharsis as she moves about the stage; eros and thanatos are close partners in this
fatal game. We may never know why Strauss could not bring himself to compose the
dance until after he had completed the remainder of the opera, scoring and all. Memories
85
Robin Holloway, “Salome: Art or Kitsch?,” in Puffet, Richard Strauss: Salome, p. 150.
2.18 Jochanaan’s emergence from the cistern
of his ballet Kythere (c.1900), which he was unable to finish, may have resurfaced. His
impasse is also a reminder that this opera was based on words and not, as in the case of
Elektra, gestures. Two performances of Wilde’s play, with Eysoldt as the dancing Salome,
failed to inspire him. In a memorandum from the 1920s, Strauss outlines Salome’s dance,
though it omits the fourth, sixth, and seventh veil. Some illustrations in the book, which
Strauss links to specific rehearsal letters in the score, served as a visual guide as he
composed the dance. One of the illustrations is the very Moreau painting described by
Huysmans in his novel.
HEROD AND THE REST
Wilde’s play is part of a long list of treatments of the biblical story of John the Baptist’s
beheading. The scriptural account makes for short reading: an unnamed daughter of
Herod and the rest 79
Herodias dances, Herod promises her anything, and the mother claims the head of John
the Baptist. If Wilde pushes Herodias to the margins in his literary version, Strauss, as
librettist, further marginalizes her to mere operatic asides in caricature.
Herod himself represents the court, the social as an entity that is as corrupt and
decadent as it is possible to be. If the collective in Feuersnot’s medieval Munich is
backward and philistine, Herod’s court is outright mad. Herod is hated by his step-
daughter and by his wife, whose male page is in love with the Syrian Narraboth, captain
of the guard. Herod, defensive about his possible impotence,86 has no sexual interest
in his wife; rather, his desire is directed toward his stepdaughter and perhaps even
members of her guard. Other than the homosexual page, no one shows any sympathy
for Narraboth save Herod (“[His death] seems strange to me. The young Syrian, he was
very beautiful”).
In a one-act opera such as this one, crammed with leitmotives that are narrative,
psychological, and purely coloristic, there is simply no new narrative motivic space left
for Herod as a real player. He is a kind of blank canvas upon which Strauss can paint his
sonic images: the wind, the beating wings of death, the moon, the precious jewels, the
fruits and wines. Curiously, this nonmotivic player is the sole survivor of this triangle
after sensual longing (Salome) and asceticism (Jochanaan) have been purged by play’s
end. The haunted, conflicted, superstitious Herod must kill his beloved stepdaughter
and a man he believes to be a prophet of God. As an old man, Strauss suggested that
Herod, “oriental parvenu though he is,” must be played with a sense of dignity and
composure, “notwithstanding the momentary erotic misdemeanor.”87
But these proposals may well be special pleading by a composer at the end of his life,
who himself seeks to preserve a sense of dignity regarding his operatic legacy of nearly
fifty years. The Strauss of 1905 gave Herod few opportunities in music to be the dignified
tetrarch of Judea. Herod is the first in a line of roles for comic tenors in many operas
to come. Strauss pushes his tessitura to levels of real nasal ugliness and annoyance,88
offering him the sleaziest melodies and harmonies of any character in the opera, as when
he asks Salome to eat, drink, and sit with him (Ex. 2.19).
Few German opera composers of this time were willing to debase their art to comply
with the demands of the text. One thinks back to Strauss’s beloved Mozart, who could
write both a Papageno and a Queen of the Night for the same opera; but that was before
the advent of romanticism, the sublime, and the composer as a remote artistic individual.
Beyond the main contrasts between the rigidly diatonic Jochanaan, the sensuously
chromatic Salome, and the kitsch of Herod is the contrast between the nervous counter-
point of the five Jews and the bland, static piety of the two Nazarenes (repeating material
86
Strauss cut this portion from the play. 87 Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, p. 151.
88
His model was no doubt Siegfried’s Mime. Indeed, such character tenors as Gerhard Stolze and Heinz
Zednik made major careers singing Mime, Herod, Aegisth, Valzacchi, and the like.
2.19 Herod invites Salome to eat
from Ex. 2.10). With most of Christ’s miracles cut from the text, the two Nazarenes
offer only token obligatory Christian contrast to the Jewish quintet, which on a musical-
technical level was far more interesting and longer than the insipid duet.
STRAUSS’S MUSICAL-DRAMATIC STRUCTURE:

A BRIEF OVERVIEW
Wilde offers no scenic breakdown in his one-act play; the scene changes articulated in
the score and the published libretto were constructed by Strauss himself. He divided the
work into four unequal parts, as noted in his copy of Wilde’s translated play:
Scene 1: Narraboth, page, soldiers, Cappadocian

Scene 2: Salome’s entrance
Scene 3: Jochanaan’s entrance
Scene 4: Entrance of Herod and Herodias
Each scene change is articulated by an orchestral interlude, and Scene 4 is nearly the
length of Scenes 1–3 combined; in fact, Scene 4 contains three subdivisions not articu-
lated in Strauss’s copy of the translation. Thus, Scene 4 should look like:
Scene 4/1: Entrance of Herod and Herodias; dialogue between Herod and Salome;
ensemble of the Jews; Herod asks Salome to dance
Scene 4/2: Salome’s dance
Scene 4/3: Salome demands the head of Jochanaan; her fatal soliloquy to the severed
head
Strauss’s musical-dramatic structure 81
In contrast to the plan for Feuersnot – originally to begin and end in D major, but then
changed to end in B♭ early in the preliminary sketches – Strauss’s jottings in the margins
of Wilde’s play show that the composer intended from the very beginning to base the
opera on the double tonic of C♯ and C. He had composed a double-tonic work before
(Also sprach Zarathustra, with its opposition of B and C), but never one on such a large
scale. He learned much from his collaboration with Wolzogen, who, like Wilde, did
not divide his Singgedicht into scenes. Knowing the musicodramatic strengths and
weaknesses of Feuersnot, Strauss began his companion piece with his eyes wide
open. Strauss’s Guntram showed his good theatrical instincts, but also his shortcomings
as a writer. In Salome Strauss had the best of both worlds. Without Wilde, without
having to worry about offending a collaborator, Strauss whittled away with abandon,
creating precisely the dramatic structure he wanted – one that was unified with the tonal
structure as well.
For a work that has been singled out for its timbral, contrapuntal, and tonal slipperi-
ness, his strategy at its most basic level is remarkably clear-cut: just as Strauss presented
the listener with the tension between Mensch (B) and Welt (C) in Zarathustra,89 he offers
an antagonism between the sensual (C♯) and the ascetic (C).90 In both pieces, as in all of
Strauss’s mature works, these keys (B, C, and C♯) serve in both major and minor
colorations. Both pieces likewise operate in tonal areas that are extensions of these
two realms separated by a semitone. The main tendency is for the secondary tonal area
to be a major third below the given tonic: thus, A♭ and A pertain to Jochanaan and
Salome, respectively. Less frequent is the upward extension to the upper minor third (E♭
and E). E♭ is usually heard in its minor coloration, and it usually refers to the dark cistern
(see four bars after rehearsal number 45, for example); E is less often articulated, though
Strauss assigns it more or less consistently to Herodias. In sum, if we were to organize
these essential harmonic fields into triads, we would get the following:
A–C♯–E
A♭–C–E♭
The scenic breakdown would approximate the following scheme:
Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3 Scene 4/1 Scene 4/2 Scene 4/3

C♯–C–C♯ A–(C/A♭)–A C–A–C♯ C–(d/A♭)–C A C♯–C
The above is only a schematic; some scenes are tonally more stable than others. Less
tonally stable are Scenes 1 and 4/1, which serve, respectively, as introductions to the first
89
The original title of Ein Heldenleben, composed just a few years later, was Held und Welt (Hero and
World).
90
Only one other one-act opera, Daphne (1937), would end a semitone apart from its beginning (G/F♯).
and second halves of this one-act opera. In a way that foreshadows Scene 1 of Elektra,
Strauss suspends tonality in order to give us introductory information as efficiently as
possible, both textually and motivically. Although the scene begins and ends in C♯ with
the guards describing Salome, the only tonal stability is the pious, disembodied voice of
Jochanaan in C major. In a nutshell Strauss offers us the crux of the work, the conflict
between the volatile and the stable. This volatility, with its suggestions of C♯, results
from Strauss’s use of the time-honored recitativo secco technique, which Adorno likened
to a “centrifugal force” away from tonality, despite the composer’s tonal orientation.91
In Scene 4/1, which begins in the alternative tonic of C, Strauss likewise suspends
that tonality as the garrulous Herod, with asides from Herodias, offers us expository
information about his bisexuality, superstitions, marital discord, and lust for Salome.
Moments of tonal lyricism emerge from the accompagnato when he asks her to drink (E),
eat (F), and sit (A) with him and finally when he asks her to dance (F♯), and they dissolve
just as easily. In Scene 4/1 the tonal anchor is the quintet of Jews, specifically D minor, a
fleshing out of passing references (always in D minor) in the first introduction; the
Nazarenes respond at the tritone, A♭. (The dance of Scene 4/2, composed a month after
the rest of the opera had been scored, is a closed number in A.)
Jochanaan’s curse and Herod’s oath come together as Salome begins her most
famous moment in the opera (Scene 4/3), nearly twenty minutes of prolonged C♯ (in
minor and major colorations with incursions of C), which finally breaks through, as
C minor, when the guards put her to death. Strauss could not resist matching the visual
with the musical: the last time we saw Jochanaan alive was at the end of Scene 3 as he
returned to the cistern. Scene 3 began with his entrance in C major, the final tonal
destination of the orchestral interlude that began its journey in Salome’s A major
(Ex. 2.16). He refuses to look at her, refuses even to call her by name, and he leaves
cursing her, though, as Tethys Carpenter points out, no longer in his C♯ major, but
rather entirely in Salome’s C♯ minor.92 His curse is simultaneously his own death
sentence: his bloody head appears with a crash ( ff/sfz) in C minor (a negation of the
major mode) and quickly slips to C♯ minor as Salome says, “I will now kiss your mouth!”
As she does so, Strauss returns us to Jochanaan’s fatal Scene 3 exit music.
This finale, which some call Salome’s scena, is everything anyone could want it to be:
brilliant, kitsch, profound, hollow, sterling, and silver-plated. The challenge is manifold:
first, how to resolve an extensive work with a semitonally related double tonic, and
91
“The extreme example in music of a centrifugal phenomenon – that dissociation into individual
sounds which symbolizes the contingency, the idolic aspect of an empirical life no longer held together
by its animating conception – is the secco recitative. By fusing its chordal procedure with the
accompagnato technique, Strauss introduced the musically extraterritorial recitative far deeper into
organized composition that even Wagner had done.” Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864,”
pp. 113–14.
92
Tethys Carpenter, “Tonal and Dramatic Structure,” in Puffett, Richard Strauss: Salome, p. 95.
Strauss’s musical-dramatic structure 83
second, how to prolong the C♯ scena without diluting any sense of anticipation of the end.
The answer to both lies in Strauss’s uncanny ability to exploit semitonal voice leading and
his characteristic manipulation of the six-four chord. That solution, combined with his
predilection for composing open-ended motives defined more by rhythmic gesture than
by melodic shape (a shape based on triadic outlining, and therefore one that better
facilitates massive motivic simultaneities), finally comes together in Salome. Adorno said
that in such scenes, Strauss spurns Wagner’s “art of transition,” where motives of varying
importance “line up like pictures on an unending filmstrip, at times virtually unrecogniz-
able in the background of sound events.”93
Far outdoing either of Jochanaan’s orchestral interludes, this final “sonic tidal wave”
washes everything aside; it is calculated spontaneity at its best. In this “symphony in
the medium of drama . . . psychological like all music” (which should not be confused
with the facile notion of a “symphony with accompanying voices”), we have a
remarkable rush of recapitulatory material.94 There is a massive onslaught of motives,
both large and small in their importance, and all are relevant – from the narrative ones
(Salome’s ecstasy) to the colorful ones, such as the inane Herod motive (Ex. 2.19)
where he wishes to bite along Salome’s teeth marks in their fruit, now matching
Salome’s reference to Jochanaan’s tongue as “a poisonous scarlet viper.” Whether the
“cinematic” audience gets all of it is immaterial; it simply works, and time has shown
that it will always work.
Stripped down to its harmonic essentials, the scena is brilliantly uncomplicated and
breaks down as follows (unstable areas are shown in italics):
1. Jochanaan’s head brought up on the platter (brief measures of C minor)
2. Salome’s amazement/horror (C♯ minor)
3. Insecurity: “Why didn’t you look at me?”
4. Ecstatic: “You were beautiful” (C♯ major)
5. Insecurity: “Why didn’t you look at me?”
6. Ecstatic: “You would have loved me.” (C♯ major)
7. Insecurity: Confuses love and death (C♯ minor, C minor respectively)
8. Herod leaves the court (recitative)
9. Ecstatic: “I have kissed your mouth.” (C♯ major)
10. Herod: “Kill that woman!” (C minor)
Thus, the main trajectory is one from horror and awe to that of narcissistic ecstasy
in constant alternation with equally narcissistic insecurity, which Strauss navigates
with élan:
C minor → C♯ minor → C♯ major → C minor
93
Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864,” p. 116.
94
Krause, Richard Strauss: The Man and His Work, p. 299.
If Feuersnot was a satirical response to ossified Wagnerism à la Die Meistersinger, then

Salome was an even greater sacrilege: an ironic response to Parsifal, where the redeemer
is not redeemed, but beheaded. Scholars of twentieth-century German opera have
observed the creative crisis, the hiatus in important German opera, between Parsifal
and Salome. What has not been emphasized, however, is that the solution to the crisis
was Salome’s specific rejection of the very cause of that crisis: the religious Parsifal. If few
people understood the connection, it was not lost on Siegfried Wagner, who dreaded
the day when, after its copyright had expired, Parsifal might literally share the same
“stage floor boards” upon which the “disgusting” (ekelhafte) Salome had walked.95 We
recall from Chapter 1 that Strauss maintained that the metaphysical Parsifal was unique
and could never be repeated: music grounded in ethics or religion was doomed to fail
primarily as music, since it contained “the seeds of [artistic] death in itself.”96 Salome
was the ultimate rejection of what Seidl called right-wing Wagnerian metaphysics, the
kind that Ritter so wanted Strauss to preserve and continue. One can only wonder what
Ritter’s reaction would have been had he lived to see Salome.
Parsifal and Jochanaan both reject physical pleasure, yet the outcomes could hardly
be different. Diemut offers her virginity, thereby redeeming the philistine collective,
and light is restored. Salome retains her virginity, sublimated by ordering the execution
of her love object; she is in turn murdered beneath the dark shields of Herod’s guards,
and light is extinguished (“Put out the torches,” Herod exclaims, “hide the moon, hide
the stars!”). Herod’s court may be purged of two dangerous, narcissistic elements –
sexual pathology and extreme asceticism (an inverted hedonism) – but this collective is
in no way redeemed. Affirmation of the body succeeded in Feuersnot; the denial of the
body, through perverse chastity, proves in Salome to be quite dangerous. Strauss had
exhausted his preoccupation with bodily affirmation, redemption (Wagnerian and non-
Wagnerian), and its inversion. His artistic engagement with Hofmannsthal, another
artist who believed that Wagner’s oeuvre had become a dead end in a modern world,
could not have come at a better time. Hofmannsthal, who rejected decadence around
the time Wilde’s play was translated into German, took Strauss in the direction of a new
type of modernity, away from the solipsism of Symbolist poetry toward the social
gesture of drama.
95
Siegfried Wagner, “Siegfried Wagner gegen Richard Strauss.” The copyright stipulated that Parsifal
could only be performed in Bayreuth – curiously, a stipulation that Strauss supported all his life and
was successful in extending (at least in Germany) through persistent personal lobbying.
96
Ibid.
3 The way to the social: Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier
Elektra (1908) signaled a crucial turning point in

A pure gesture is a pure thought, in pure
gestures the true personality comes to
Strauss’s operatic career. It not only marked the
light. – Hugo von Hofmannsthal, On beginning of his artistic relationship with Hugo
Pantomime (1911)
von Hofmannsthal, one that lasted until 15 July
1929, but it also initiated an association with the
Austrian writers for all his future operatic collaborations: Hofmannsthal, Stefan
Zweig, and Joseph Gregor.1 No one could argue that Strauss intended Der
Rosenkavalier as a companion piece to Elektra in the same way he had intended Salome
to balance Feuersnot; yet the two Hofmannsthal works are connected. Guntram had
taught Strauss his own limitations as a librettist, and from Feuersnot he learned that Ernst
von Wolzogen – clever as he was – could never serve as his bridge to the international
fame he had achieved setting the Wilde’s Salome to music.2 Now Strauss was receiving
unsolicited offers from would-be librettists all over Germany, and he waved them off as
he did throughout his career. With his experience of composing Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,
Strauss had found, for the first time, a poet with whom he shared profound common
ground.
Salome had given Strauss enough prestige and capital that he was able to take an
unpaid one-year sabbatical from his Berlin duties, beginning on 30 September 1908. In
April he had been promoted to Generalmusikdirektor, and two months later Strauss
moved into his Garmisch villa, paid for by Salome royalties; Elektra was fully scored by
22 September. It was time to consider the next project, and Strauss was eager to begin a
real collaboration with Hofmannsthal; the plan, it was agreed, would be a comedy – one
based on the memoirs of Casanova. Yet Hofmannsthal was still no more a librettist in
1908 than he had been in 1903 when he wrote Elektra, which Strauss had unilaterally
shaped into a libretto, just as he had Wilde’s stage work.
Both Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier are plays set to music, tragedy and comedy
respectively. Hofmannsthal, unsure not only of his own ability to create a successful
comedy but also of Strauss’s, published Der Rosenkavalier separately as a play, with
certain divergences from the libretto, and it has occasionally been performed without
1
Strauss wrote his own libretto for the autobiographical Intermezzo (1924) as well as Capriccio (1941)
with the help of the Austrian conductor Clemens Krauss.
2
After Feuersnot, Wolzogen sent Strauss a libretto for another spiteful comedy, Coabbradibosimpur
oder Die bösen Buben von Sevilla, in July 1903 (see ch. 2, n. 71 this volume).
85
Figure 3.1 Hugo von Hofmannsthal
music.3 His insecurity as an opera librettist was obvious from the start. For their first
project after Elektra, Hofmannsthal proposed that he first write this Casanova-based
comedy, Christines Heimreise (Christine’s Homeward Journey), as a play, after which Strauss
could adapt it himself into a libretto as he had done with the previous two dramas – a
proposition that was out of the question for Strauss.4 Hofmannsthal confessed to be “so
much in awe of the difficulties of producing a really good libretto that to write one out
of the blue would seem to me almost impossible.” (As we shall see in Chapter 4,
Hofmannsthal regarded Ariadne auf Naxos [1912/16] as the two men’s first real operatic
endeavor and Hofmannsthal’s own first real libretto.)
COMMON GROUND
Strauss was attracted to Feuersnot and Salome by their poetry – the former, Wolzogen’s
Singgedicht; the latter, a play whose artificial language caused it to read more like a
3
Beyond its publication in Hofmannsthal’s complete works, it is readily available in paperback form
published by Deutsche Taschenbücher Verlag (Berlin) in 2004.
4
Hofmannsthal went ahead with Christines Heimreise as a stage comedy, which premiered in Berlin
in 1910 under Reinhardt’s direction.
Common ground 87
dramatic poem than a stage work. Strauss was mesmerized by Salome’s words, the
textual imagery – seductive, overwrought, dazzling – and he began composing after the
first reading. By the time he attended the Berlin premiere of the play on 15 November
1902, composition was well under way.5 The focus on language was no less potent in
Feuersnot, where Wolzogen, immersed in the tradition of the literary cabaret, wrote a
piece of satire with strange dialects, artificial words, ironic allusions, and puns.
The link between Strauss and Hofmannsthal was one less of language than of gesture,
an artistic aspect of the composer that did not mature artistically until the ballet Josephs-
Legende of 1914.6 The two first discussed the possibility of a ballet in Paris on 6 March
1900, and Hofmannsthal followed up with a scenario for Der Triumph der Zeit (The
Triumph of Time) eight months later. Although Strauss declined the offer – he had been
working on his own ballet, Kythere, over the summer of 1900 and had also begun
Feuersnot that autumn – they finally came together on another project, though for
theater rather than a ballet.7 The next letter in their published correspondence is
dated six years later: Hofmannsthal asks Strauss whether he is still interested in setting
his play Elektra to music. Much had transpired in Strauss’s career during this hiatus;
besides Feuersnot, he had composed lieder, Taillefer, Symphonia domestica, and Salome.
Strauss, the avid Berlin theatergoer, had not only attended two performances of
Reinhardt’s Salome production but, as we recall, the premiere of Wedekind’s Erdgeist,8
as well as productions of Maxim Gorky’s Lower Depths and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,
which he saw in October 1905.
Strauss may have wanted a comedy to follow Salome, but after seeing Elektra in
Reinhardt’s brilliant production that October evening, such thoughts were thrown
aside: “When I first saw Hofmannsthal’s wonderful play, with Gertrud Eysoldt in the
title role,” Strauss recalled, “I immediately recognized a brilliant opera text.”9 Eysoldt, as
the shocking Salome, the alluring Lulu, and the remarkable Nastja from The Lower
Depths, made a career of portraying women at the fringe of society, strong though
desperate and hysterical heroines, and she was celebrated as a master of bodily motion.
In 1904 Bahr marveled at Eysoldt’s ability “to compress a whole life into a single
gesture.”10
5
Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, p. 150. When a friend of his, the cellist Heinrich Gründfeld,
suggested that the play might make a good opera, Strauss retorted, “I am already busy composing it.”
6
A project initiated by Hofmannsthal, though completed by his friend Harry Graf Kessler.
7
Hofmannsthal’s ballet Triumph der Zeit was ultimately composed by Alexander von Zemlinsky in
1901.
8
Alban Berg’s Lulu (1935) is a conflation of Wedekind’s Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora
(Pandora’s Box).
9
10
Hermann Bahr, Prophet der Moderne: Tagebucher, 1888–1904, ed. Reinhard Farkas (Vienna: Böhlau,
1987), p. 191.
Figure 3.2 Gertud Eysoldt
The resemblances between Salome and Elektra are clear: two one-act operas with
neurotic females in the title roles, women who confuse love and hatred, sex and
violence. Indeed, there were enough similarities that Strauss momentarily considered
postponing Elektra until he had written his comedy. It has become commonplace to
dismiss as self-serving Hofmannsthal’s reply, in which he asserts their dissimilarities. To
be sure, the young dramatist was trying to launch an international career as a Strauss
librettist, but his work was at bottom a far different piece from the one by Wilde.
Indeed, there are greater continuities to be found in Der Rosenkavalier. Salome, the
decadent tour de force, ends in utter nihilism, with the corpses of a young Syrian
captain (dead by suicide), Jochanaan beheaded at the indirect order of Salome, and
finally Salome, executed at the direct order of Herod.
What Karl Kraus once criticized in the young pre-Elektra Hofmannsthal, when the
critic called the writer a “gem collector” who flees life yet embraces its beauties,11 applies
far better to the solipsistic world of Wilde and Salome, where Herod offers his step-
daughter jewels too precious even for Herodias. There is nothing vital, “pure,” or
“victorious” about Salome’s ending, but that is precisely how Hofmannsthal described
the finale of his own play, with the murders of Klytämnestra and her lover-accomplice,
11
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York: Knopf, 1980), p. 16.
Common ground 89
Aegisth, and the collapse of Elektra: “[T]he rapid rising sequence of events relating Orest
and his deed, which leads up to victory and purification [Sieg und Reinigung] . . . is not
matched by anything of a corresponding, or even of a faintly similar kind in Salome.”12
Hofmannsthal’s two plays – Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier – are linked by their ultimate
affirmation of the communal over the individual, the social (even psychological) power
of gesture (often ritualistic), and the perception of time as a societal phenomenon with
respect to the individual.
A character attains full humanity when that individual truly comprehends a sense of
past, present, and future (“was,” “am,” “become”) – hence the extraordinary medita-
tions on time and mutability in so many of Hofmannsthal’s texts. At age seventeen,
Rosenkavalier’s Cherubino-like Octavian has little interest in the future; he opens the
opera saying to his lover, the Marschallin, “The way you were, the way you are” (Wie
du warst, wie du bist), and by the end of the act he becomes more strident: “I [only]
understand the here and now, I have you, I see you, and tomorrow will be like today”
(hier und heute das versteh ich, dich hab ich, dich seh ich und morgen soll sein wie
heute).13 The Marschallin, married and nearly twice his age, knows the three tenses of
the verb “to be” all too well, though she herself is surprised how quickly her Act i
prophesy becomes reality by Act iii:
I chose to love him [Octavian] in the right way,
so that I myself would love his [future] love for another!
I truly did not think that I would have to bear it so soon!14
[Hab’ mir’s gelobt, ihn lieb zu haben in der richtigen Weis’,

daß ich selbst sein Lieb’ zu einer andern
noch lieb hab’! Hab’ mir freilich nicht gedacht,
daß es so bald mir aufgelegt sollt’ warden.]
The innocent, inexperienced Sophie – whose past was confined to the walls of a cloister
and whose perception of the future is no more penetrating than Octavian’s – is absorbed
with naïve notions of eternity and idealized love. Sophie is not yet able to distinguish
between the truly precious and the silver-plated, the eternal and the frozen shining
instant: “There is time and eternity,” she says, accepting the silver rose, “in this blissful
moment.”
12
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (27 April 1906), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 4.
13
This latter text remained unset by Strauss. See Willi Schuh, ed., Hugo von Hofmannsthal–Richard
Strauss: “Der Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen, Filmszenarium, Briefe (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag,
1971), p. 155.
14
English translations for Der Rosenkavalier are taken from the second Karajan recording with the
Vienna Philharmonic: Deutsche Grammophon 423 850–2 (Polydor International, 1984) with some
changes by this author. The German text is taken from Schuh, Hofmannsthal–Strauss: “Der
Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen, Filmszenarium, Briefe.
While there is hope for young Octavian, who attains greater insight by the opera’s end,
the same cannot be said for the traumatized Elektra, who lives only in the past and future,
with no sense of a present self. Her mother, Klytämnestra, who conspired to murder her
father, remains mired in a dysfunctional present, lacking the ability to distinguish between
self and an active world of meaning, a void that all the ritually sacrificed animal blood in
the world cannot fill. “Am I still the same who has done the deed?” she asks. “Now it was
before, and then it was past.” Chrysothemis – like the Marschallin – knows past, present,
and future; though numbed by the death of her father, she stands passively as an outsider,
longing for humanity, indeed, for a sense of womanhood.
Chrysothemis cannot participate in a world of oppressive tension and speaks as a
mere observer as she narrates the passage of time to Elektra:
With knives each passing day carves his mark on your face and mine, and, outside the sun
rises and sets, and women whom I have known slender are heavy with blessing, and toil on
their way to the well and scarcely lift the pail, and all at once they are delivered of their
weight and come to the well again and they themselves flow with sweet drink, and, suckling, a
new life clings to them, and the children grow.15
[Mit Messern gräbt Tag um Tag in dein und mein Gesicht sein Mal, und draußen geht die
Sonne auf und ab, und Frauen, die ich schlank gekannt hab’, sind schwer von Segen, mühn
sich zum Brunnen, heben kaum die Eimer, und auf einmal sind sie entbunden ihrer Last,
kommen zum Brunnen wieder, und aus ihnen selber quillt süßer Trank, und säugend hängt
ein Leben an ihnen, und die Kinder werden groß.]16
In her Act i monologue the Marschallin also considers the same phenomenon of time
and mutability, though she likens time’s passage not to knives carving their mark on
one’s face over the years, but rather to sand escaping down the hourglass: “It trickles
away in our faces, it trickles in the mirror, in my temples it flows away” (In den
Gesichten rieselt sie, im Spiegel da rieselt sie, in meien Schläfen fließt sie). If we are to
believe Hofmannsthal, Klytämnestra’s death leads to Chrysothemis’s “victory”: the
tension is resolved as she takes her rightful position in a newly cleansed society, a
society also necessarily devoid of Elektra.
FROM POETRY TO DRAMA: THE GENESIS

OF HOFMANNSTHAL’S ELEKTRA
Hofmannsthal’s Elektra was the product of various convergences in the poet’s life
around the turn of the century. The prodigy in his late teens gained fame under the
15
The English translation comes from Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Selected Plays and Libretti, ed. and
trans. Michael Hamburger, Bollingen Series 33/3 (New York: Bollingen, 1963), pp. 16–17.
16
All original German text is taken from the Fürstner 1908 edition of the libretto. The copyright was
reassigned to Boosey & Hawkes (London, 1943).
The genesis of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra 91
pseudonym “Loris,” the author of lyric poems that enticed Vienna’s leading writers. A
precocious youth fluent in many languages, with a deep sensitivity to literature and a
remarkable facility as a poet, he went beyond the normal stereotype of the prodigy. His
lyric poetry betrayed a maturity that one would think could only have been based upon
years of life experience. When Hofmannsthal was introduced to Viennese literary
society at the Café Griensteidl at age seventeen, figures such as Bahr, Richard Beer-
Hofmann, and Arthur Schnitzler accepted him not as a precocious oddity but as a
literary equal.
At the same time Hofmannsthal was also engaged in the world of Greek myth.
Inspired by Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, he embraced the idea that through myth a
society might be modernized or reinvigorated by asserting Nietzsche’s tragic
Dionysian force. Negating the idealized, neo-Socratic, mid-nineteenth-century
notions of Greek tragedy inspired the young writer to rework Euripides’ Alkestis
(1893), and although he took on other unfinished mythological projects around this
time as well, his only successful venture into Dionysian tragedy was Elektra (1903).
Through gesture, Hofmannsthal found the central expressive force in his play Elektra,
his first important work after his so-called language crisis at the turn of the century and
a work of unprecedented dynamism.
During this period of crisis, the young lyric poet rejected the insular, Symbolist
poetry of his day, and in a fictional missive from Lord Chandos (in fact, Hofmannsthal)
to Francis Bacon, the Chandos Letter (1902), the poet confesses that words alone fail to
penetrate to the core, to the inner essence of things. They fall short of explaining
human actions and motivations, remaining isolated and disconnected from objective
truth. Hofmannsthal sought a level of thought more immediate than words, observing
that “the language in which I might be able not only to write but to think is neither
Latin nor English, neither Italian nor Spanish, but a language none of whose words is
known to me.”17
In short, gesture was the solution to Hofmannsthal’s crisis; it would offer what
language lacked. Hofmannsthal believed that where words are indirect, gesture is
immediate; where language is impure, gesture is undiluted. He found the new language
he was seeking in the discourse of ancient Greek theater, which for him embodied a
fusion of the arts: acting, gesture, ritual, myth, and ultimately music. Elektra was
Hofmannsthal’s first major drama after this evolution from poet to playwright. This
dichotomy of language and gesture, this dialectic of word and deed, is a central theme in
the play. Hofmannsthal addresses the tension in the scene between Elektra and her
mother, Klytämnestra, who conspired to kill her father (Strauss cut this section for his
libretto):
17
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “A Letter,” in Selected Prose, trans. Mary Hottinger, Tania Stern, and
James Stern, Bollingen Series 11/1 (New York: Bollingen, 1952), p. 141.
klytämnestra: Deeds! We and deeds! What odd words! For am I still the same who has done
the deed? . . . Now it was before, and then it was past – in between I did nothing . . .
elektra: No, the work that lay between the axe had done alone.
klytämnestra: How you thrust in words.
elektra: Not so skilled nor so fast as you with the strokes of an axe.
[klytämnestra: Taten! Wir und Taten! Was das für Worte sind. Bin ich den noch, die es
getan? . . . Erst wars vorher, dann wars vorbei – dazwischen hab ich nichts getan.
elektra: Nein, dazwischen liegt, die Arbeit, die tat das Beil allein.
klytämnestra: Wie du die Worte hineinbringst.
elektra: Nicht so tüchtig, noch so flink wie du Axthieb auf Axthieb.]18
There was a more immediate root as well of Hofmannsthal’s turn toward Greek myth:
lectures by Alfred von Berger, Privatdozent and later professor of aesthetics and philos-
ophy at the University of Vienna (1887–96) as well as dramaturge at the city’s
Burgtheater.19 Berger consolidated for Hofmannsthal a deep understanding of the
work of Freud and Breuer as well as that of Nietzsche. In an article entitled “Surgery
of the Soul,” Berger lauded the Breuer–Freud studies in hysteria as “the herald of a new
psychology.”20 His lectures “Beauty in Art” (which focused on Nietzsche) and “The
Dramaturgy of Ancient Tragedy” in the 1890s inspired Hofmannsthal to reread
Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and devote himself to a modern approach to Greek
drama, transfusing life into “the Greek ghosts” of the past.21
After all, according to Nietzsche, Socrates had drained tragedy of its life’s blood, and
the genre was not revived until Wagner (or so he thought at the time). Hofmannsthal
made no secret that his Elektra, which notably excludes any reference to her sister
Iphigenia (who was murdered by Agamemnon), was a modern response to the neo-
classical Goethe. Strauss, too, heeded Nietzsche’s call to challenge earlier, idealized
notions of neo-Socratic, “white-marble” Greek culture, and he later remarked that a
central catalyst in the decision to compose Elektra was his desire to counter Johann
Joachim Winckelmann with Hofmannsthal’s ecstatic Hellenism.22
We might also interpret Hofmannsthal’s turn to the stage in another, more biograph-
ical way. His wish in 1900 to collaborate with the world-famous Strauss suggests that a
twenty-six-year-old writer, with a recent doctorate and on the threshold of marriage,
might very well have been eager to begin a career. Lyric poetry was hardly lucrative, and
18
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5, Dramen 5, ed. Klaus E. Bohnenkamp and
Mathias Mayer (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1997), p. 82.
19
He served as director from 1910 until his death two years later.
20
This article is discussed in “Seelenchirchurgie,” Die Neue Freie Presse (2 December 1895).
21
Philip Ward, Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth: Expression and Performance, Britische und irische
Studien zur deutschen Sprache und Literatur/British and Irish Studies in German Language and
Literature 24 (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002), pp. 63 and 94.
22
Image, word, gesture 93
he relished, even envied, the success of Reinhardt’s Berlin production of Gorky’s Lower
Depths, which he saw on tour in Vienna in May 1903. The Berlin Reinhardt–Eysoldt
collaboration had already enjoyed enormous success with Wilde’s Salome, and to
Hofmannsthal’s thinking the way to such success was in German, not Austrian, theater,
which was more conservative and took fewer chances with young writers. Shortly after
the Gorky performance, Hofmannsthal promised Reinhardt and Eysoldt an Elektra, and
the play was done by the end of that summer.23 It premiered on 30 October 1903 at the
Kleines Theater in Berlin.
IMAGE, WORD, GESTURE
Hofmannsthal once likened his Elektra to a “taut chain of heavy massive iron links,” and
indeed this stage work is remarkably concise. It was made even more compact after
Strauss’s reworking, which cut nearly 40 percent of the dialogue and eliminated
extraneous characters. His cuts led to the same result as in Salome, namely to focus on
sharply etched triangular character relationships: in the earlier opera, Salome,
Jochanaan, and Herod; in the latter, Elektra, Chrysothemis, and Klytämnestra. This
remarkably succinct play, even more condensed in its operatic form, combines concen-
trated action and structural clarity with stark imagery to produce the most potent
one-act stage work Strauss ever composed.
Tension steadily rises as each scene segues into the next with increasing momentum;
the only notable break is the arrival of Orest, a scene severely truncated by Strauss. After
that Hofmannsthal goes right to the murders – first of Klytämnestra, then of Aegisth.
Hofmannsthal thereby creates a monumental dramaturgical arch structure spanning
the introduction to the finale in a series of psychological vignettes. This symmetrical
arrangement appealed greatly to Strauss, whose reductions focused the action and
balanced the plot.
The keystone of this arch is the confrontation in Scene 4 between Elektra and
Klytämnestra – the moment of greatest psychological conflict in the opera. It is flanked
by dialogues between Elektra and Chrysothemis. The first of these (Scene 3) is largely a
vehicle for Chrysothemis, the lyrical life-affirming opposite of Elektra, the sister who
refuses to dwell in the past and wants no part of Elektra’s plan of vengeance for the
murder of their father, Agamemnon. In the second dialogue, after learning of Orest’s
apparent death (Scene 5), Elektra pleads with Chrysothemis to help her with the murder
of their father’s murderers, Klytämnestra and Aegisth.
Elektra’s opening monologue (Scene 2) and the Recognition Scene (Scene 6), where
Orest arrives and reveals his identity to his sister, are just as strongly connected. Her
23
It is true that Hofmannsthal wrote the play with great speed over three to four weeks in July and
August 1903; however, he had been contemplating Elektra as a potential project for a couple of years.
opening monologue (“Alone!”) not only recalls the murder of Agamemnon but also
prophesies the atonement for his murder (“Your day will come!”). The Recognition
Scene serves as a second monologue for Elektra, a quality enhanced by Strauss’s cuts. At
the beginning of the scene, Elektra again expresses her sense of isolation (“Well then,
alone!” [Nun den, allein!]), and by the end her prophecy is fulfilled: Orest leaves with his
tutor to commit the murders. To counterbalance the textual brevity, Hofmannsthal
relied preponderantly on image and gesture, a reliance that surpasses the libretto in its
boldness, starkness, and pervasiveness.
Recurring allusions to animals, in stage directions and in the dramatic language itself,
provide a vital metaphor for Elektra’s dehumanization.24 Lonely, ostracized, and robbed
of a chorus that would have given her social footing, she is mocked from the outset by
the servants. Every day at dusk she “howls for her father” and is likened to both a wild
cat and a dog. Elektra in turn calls them “flies,” for both metaphorically and socially she
is consigned to vermin. The third maid exclaims that Elektra once jumped at her and
“stretched her fingers like claws at us and screamed: ‘I’m nurturing a vulture in my
body!’” In Scene 4 Klytämnestra seeks to separate herself from her son by reducing him
to animal status: “They say that [Orest] lies in the yard with dogs and cannot distinguish
man from beast.” Her fantasy of permanent separation is fleetingly fulfilled by the
alleged report that Orest was killed by his own horses.
The obsessive animal imagery throughout the opera, especially in Scene 4, not only
objectifies the relationship between Elektra and her mother in their confrontation but
also confuses the distinction between hunter and quarry. Haunted by nightmares,
Klytämnestra sees long-beaked demons sucking her blood; Elektra likens herself to a
bloodhound on her mother’s traces when she finally reveals that Klytämnestra herself is
the sacrificial beast: “What must bleed? Your own neck must bleed when the hunter has
moved in for the kill. He will knife his game, but only on the run! Who’d murder a
victim25 in his sleep?”
Hofmannsthal later lamented that critics had focused excessively on such “irrelevan-
cies” as his vehement diction and the frequent images of blood (eight references in
Elektra’s opening monologue alone) and had failed to understand the essence of his
work. True enough, blood is not the substance of the play, but it remains a vital
narrative image. Graphic references to blood pervade the opera, serving a threefold
purpose: as allusions to Agamemnon’s violent death, to the sacrificial blood that will
avenge that death, and to the blood relation between Agamemnon and his children but
not their mother.
24
Rumors flew before the premiere that the stage would feature numerous wild animals. One story
maintained “that the farmyards and slaughter-houses had been ransacked for livestock to figure in the
sacrificial procession.” Strauss opted for a sonic menagerie of sorts in the opera pit. Alfred Kalisch,
“Impressions of Strauss’s Elektra,” Zeitschrift der Internationalen Musikgesellschaft 7 (1909): 198.
25
Such as Agamemnon.
Image, word, gesture 95
Again, gesture is the fundamental expressive force throughout the play. Rituals such
as Elektra’s daily “howling,” the sacrifices, the murder weapon buried like a dog’s bone,
processions, and, most important, dance are as integral to the drama as any line from the
text. Indeed, the central point of the Chandos Letter is that gesture clarifies the ambi-
guities of language. Paul Bekker, who reviewed the opera’s premiere, remarked that
one of the most powerful moments in the opera had nothing to do with words at all. He
recalled the moment when we first learn of Orest’s supposed death, a moment created
by gesture alone:
Servant girls appear. They whisper a new message in the queen’s ear. At first Klytämnestra
does not understand them; she has been numbed by Elektra’s terrible prophecy and cannot
yet gather her thoughts . . . Not until a growing number of torches lights up the dark
courtyard does Klytämnestra rouse herself and hear of the news of Orestes’ death . . . A
wordless pantomime full of significance begins. Each woman [Elektra and Klytämnestra]
believes in the defeat of the other. But Klytämnestra is not only filled with thirst for
revenge . . . she is at the same time both cowardly and cruel. She does not shout out the
news of Orestes’ death to Elektra’s face; she leaves Elektra in her deluded – as Klytämnestra
must assume – belief that Orestes will return, in order to be able to strike an even more
painful blow against her later. In the rapid reversal of her mood, she lacks words that could
express her sentiments. Only in her gestures are her thoughts revealed. In a nameless wild
joy . . . she raises her hands as to curse Elektra and then rushes back into the house followed
by all the servants.26
If any scene fully exemplifies the difference between Salome and Elektra, it is the final
one. Whereas Salome sings a lengthy monologue after the death of Jochanaan,
Hofmannsthal writes nothing of the sort for Elektra after the murders; on the contrary,
her triumph is summarized in spontaneous cathartic dance – a Dionysian celebration
that signals the dissolution of Elektra herself. From the beginning Hofmannsthal knew
that Elektra could not survive her mother’s death: “Once the blow has fallen, [Elektra’s]
life and entrails must rush from her, just as life and entrails together with the fertilizing
sting rush from the drone once it has impregnated the queen.”27
Until this moment Elektra has distanced herself from her environment, and with
the deed now executed, her personality is submerged via the social gesture of the
round dance (chorós). She now moves into the realm and destiny of mortals and entreats
all of them to join her in the dithyrambic celebration. After achieving this final goal of
her life, predicted in her opening monologue, after this ultimate cathartic ritual, she
26
“Elektra: A Study by Paul Bekker,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His
World, p. 394.
27
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Ad me ipsum,” in Steiner, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag,
1959), p. 131.
will die – an outcome Sophocles never intended. Hofmannsthal’s solution – that of the
drone bee giving up its life for the greater good, for the continuity of the species or
(in the context of Elektra) a society – ran so counter to Sophocles that it might well
explain why the stage directions never specify her death, stating only that “she lies rigid”
(sie liegt starr).
Undeniable psychological elements in Hofmannsthal’s modern treatment distinctly
separate it from Sophocles as well. From Hofmannsthal’s association with Alfred von
Berger in the 1890s, we know that he was familiar with the work of Breuer and Freud and
was readdressing these issues at the time of writing Elektra.28 Freud and Hofmannsthal
shared the view that through myth one can help explain the modern human condition and
shed light on certain psychological conditions. Memory serves as a central theme in this
work, and in fact in all of Hofmannsthal’s libretti that follow. In Elektra Hofmannsthal
drew a parallel between the resolution of guilt through retribution in Greek myth and the
resolution of repressed memory through a psychoanalytical cure. He described his play as
a mixture of “black and bright,” the darkness representing the realm of the subconscious.
The image of the well, this center for the continuity of life and vital dark symbol on the
stage, is our entrance into that subconscious.
Dark spaces abound in Hofmannsthal’s imagery: the unlit palace, closed doors,
Agamemnon’s grave, and her mother’s womb (“the dark door which I crept through
into the light of day” [das dunkle Tor, aus welchem ich an das Licht der Welt gekrochen
bin]). Eros and thanatos are entirely confused in Elektra’s mind, where the act of sex is as
repugnant as the act of giving birth. Aegisth is, we recall, the effeminate coward whose
“heroic deeds” are carried out in the bedroom, the room in which, Elektra observes,
one hears either the groan of sex or the groan of death. Indeed, Klytämnestra’s
greater transgression is less the murder than the fact that she shares Agamemnon’s bed
with her accomplice. In the end, Orest and his servant, with knives and torches, revisit the
crime scene, probing the darkness, executing Sophocles’ retribution, and achieving
Hofmannsthal’s psychoanalytical cure.
STRAUSS’S LIBRETTO
Once again Strauss created a libretto featuring a triangle of main characters, with the
title role in the middle; but this triangle consisted entirely of women. From this moment
onward the female voices – solo, duet, or trio – became his chief interest for the musical
stage. Beginning with Elektra, unprecedented in the way it is based sonically on three
sopranos, Hofmannsthal created a host of female relationships that were at the center of
Strauss’s musical thinking:
28
Lorna Martens provides an excellent context for the theme of Elektra and Freud in “The Theme of
Repressed Memory in Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,” German Quarterly 60, 1 (1987): 38–51.
Strauss’s libretto 97
Rosenkavalier: Marschallin, Octavian, Sophie

Ariadne auf Naxos: Ariadne, Zerbinetta
Die Frau ohne Schatten: Nurse, empress, dyer’s wife
Die ägyptische Helena: Aithra, Helen
Arabella: Arabella, Zdenka
Strauss’s personal copy of Hofmannsthal’s play – with its cuts and emendations –
suggests a confident composer with a remarkable instinct for the theater. Granted, he
had already gone through the experience with Salome, but the precise, neatly written – in
ink – cuts and commentary are nonetheless remarkable in the way in which they show a
composer grasping the musicodramatic shape his future opera would take.29 His editing
is specific and decisive, and with few exceptions the changes represent his final decisions.
Strauss shortens the text where he needs to condense it for musical reasons and to speed
up the action where he believes it lags.
More important, Strauss felt the need to contrast further the three female characters
in order to simplify the complex psychological strata explored by Hofmannsthal.
Klytämnestra becomes all the more horrifying and Chrysothemis a more obvious life-
affirming alter ego for the asexual Elektra. Strauss’s musical treatment intensifies these
contrasts, Elektra being reduced motivically to a mere chord, and an unstable, bitonal one
at that (Ex. 3.1a), while Strauss characterizes Chrysothemis with a sweet waltz in parallel
thirds (Ex. 3.1b) and evokes the evil mother with sinuous chromaticism (Ex. 3.1c).30
As with Salome, Strauss felt compelled to excise some of the more overt sexual
references in Hofmannsthal’s text. Thus, the composer deleted Elektra’s references to
her sister’s “cool firm breasts” as she tries to get her to help with the murders; also gone is
any mention of “groaning” behind closed doors. Furthermore, Strauss cut Elektra’s
confession that she sacrificed her virginity to hatred, her “hollow-eyed bridegroom”:
And I had to let the monster,

Who breathes like a viper, come over me
Into my sleepless bed, who forced me to know
All that goes on between man and woman . . .
I am not without my wedding night as the virgins are,
I have felt the agony of childbirth . . .
And have brought nothing into the world. [pp. 64–6]
29
Strauss’s annotated copy of Hofmannsthal’s play (S. Fischer, 1904, fifth printing) is in the Strauss
Archive in Garmisch. I am grateful to the late Alice Strauss for allowing me to photocopy it.
30
In the sketchbooks Strauss sometimes labels theme 1a as “Elektra’s Hatred.” Theme 1b, in
life-affirming E♭ major, was once referred to by a critic as Strauss’s “Bavarian Waltz.” Theme 1c is often
referred to as the “Klytämnestra as Mother” theme (there are other variants) and is cast in F♯ major,
slithering its way up to G6 before sliding back down to F♯. Richard Strauss Institute, Garmisch.
3.1a Elektra
3.1b Chrysothemis
3.1c Klytämnestra
[Da mußte ich den Gräßlichen, der atmet

wie eine Viper, über mich in mein
schlafloses Bette lassen, der mich zwang,
alles zu wissen, wie es zwischen Mann
und Weib zugeht . . .
. . . ohne Brautnacht
bin ich nicht, wie die Jungfrau’n sind, die Qualen
von einer, die gebärt, hab’ ich gespürt . . .
und habe nichts hervorgeholt aus mir.]
Strauss’s twofold plan was to contrast the main characters as economically as possible
in order to create a tight sense of momentum, with each scene seeming to build upon
the rest. Uncut (or nearly uncut) are the opening scene, Elektra’s opening monologue,
and the murders. The most truncated is the first Chrysothemis scene, shortened
Strauss’s libretto 99
by nearly half in order to make this less a dialogue between sisters than a lyrical
outpouring for Chrysothemis, whose “I want to have children” (Kinder will ich haben)
serves as a striking counterbalance to the preceding monologue, so mired in the past
and future.
Also heavily cut was Klytämnestra’s scene, the most psychologically intense
section of the drama. The scene’s steadily increasing tension appealed to Strauss,
and his cuts accentuate this momentum, now divided into three subsections:
(1) Klytämnestra’s complaint about her recurring nightmares; (2) Elektra’s offer
of help in the form of questions and riddles; and (3) Elektra’s ultimate “prescrip-
tion.” The Klytämnestra scene is tripartite: monologue (Klytämnestra), dialogue
(Klytämnestra/Elektra), monologue (Elektra). As Klytämnestra’s part diminishes,
Elektra’s role steadily increases, reaching its climax when she declares that the only
sacrifice that will end the dreams is her mother’s neck. These are some of the most
powerful words Elektra utters, and Strauss took them from text he cut in the
Chrysothemis scene. Switching from the third to the second person, Elektra goes
on the attack:
And I am like a dog on your heels.

If you seek a hole, I’ll spring at you
From the side, and so we drive you on –
Until a wall shuts off everything, and there
In the deepest darkness . . . there sits my father
He pays no heed, and yet it must be done.
We drive you to his feet . . .
. . . and the rushing axe falls!
[Ich bin wie ein Hund an deiner Ferse,

willst du in eine Höhle, spring’ ich dich
von seitwärts an, so treiben wir dich fort –
bis eine Mauer alles sperrt und dort
im tiefsten Dunkel . . .
. . . da sitzt der Vater:
er achtet’s nicht und doch muß es geschehn:
zu seinen Füßen drücken wir dich hin . . .
. . . sausend fällt das Beil.]
Strauss was surely in tune with Hofmannsthal’s retrospective thinking on Orest

when he cut the role back severely; Orest was now less a character in the libretto
than a personification of the will to avenge.31 Bekker calls Orest a “presentiment of
31
In 1904 Hofmannsthal confessed to his friend Eberhard Freiherrn von Bodenhausen-Degener that
Elektra might have been purer without Orest at all. He might well have said the same to Strauss. See
death . . . [who] in his own eyes . . . already seems like a dead man, whose physical
body is allowed to walk the earth only until such time as the deed that fate and his
own will have thrust upon him has been carried out.”32 Though Hofmannsthal
lauded the change, his original Orest scene focused on the brother’s unwillingness
to act, only to be urged on by his sister. Nonetheless, Strauss eliminated all such
dialogue.
SYMMETRICAL LINKS: MUSIC AND STRUCTURE
For all the conventional wisdom about Elektra’s dissonance and tonal ambiguity, this
opera remains Strauss’s most tonally symmetrical score. His libretto heightened
Hofmannsthal’s archlike design (the “chain of heavy massive iron links”), with the
scene between Elektra and Klytämnestra (Scene 3) serving as the keystone.
It is the tensest scene that Strauss ever composed and certainly the most daring in
its hyperchromatic language, which blurs tonal boundaries in its tonic of B (playing
against the secondary C).33 On either side of this keystone, composer and playwright
address the most fundamental gesture of the opera: Elektra’s dance. In her opening
monologue Elektra looks forward to the day when the blood of Klytämnestra
and Aegisth will flow “in a swollen stream” over Agamemnon’s grave and she will
join hands with her brother and sister: “and happy is he who has children to dance
around his grave such royal dances of triumph! Agamemnon! Agamemnon!” (und
glücklich ist, wer Kinder hat, die um sein hohes Grab so königliche Siegestänze
tanzen!) (Ex. 3.2a). The rhythm appropriates a familiar topos discussed in the previous
chapter: the libidinous, ego-assertive dotted gesture (long-short-long). It was the
rhythm of Kunrad as he sprang toward Diemut; it was Don Juan; and it becomes
young Octavian in the next opera.
Strauss follows this massive eruption in C major on the word tanzen (with its
astounding juxtapositions of ff and p) with an even louder ( fff ) aftershock in the
Dionysian E major (Ex. 3.2b). This relationship remains central to the entire opera;
every other important harmonic area stems from it, whether the V/E in Scene 3 or
Chrysothemis’s semitonal dissociation from the Bacchic in E♭ major.34 In the guise
Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Briefe II: 1900–09 (Vienna: Bermann-Fischer, 1937), p. 170. Hofmannsthal
even once suggested that Aegisth might be cut as well.
32
“Elektra: A Study by Paul Bekker,” p. 398.
33
Strauss had already explored musical ramifications of the B/C double tonic on a grander scale with
his Also sprach Zarathustra (1896).
34
Strauss once again plays the libidinal Dionysian E (Octavian) against the more social E♭
(Marschallin) in Act i of Der Rosenkavalier, where E♭ prevails.
Symmetrical links: music and structure 101
3.2a End of Elektra’s opening monologue
3.2b E major coda to opening monologue

3.3a “Death” of Orest
3.3b Elektra’s death
of E♭ minor, Strauss utterly negates life, as, for example, when Chrysothemis
announces the alleged death of Orest (Ex. 3.3a) or when Elektra dies at the end of
the opera (Ex. 3.3b).
Throughout the opera, Elektra is like a loaded cannon waiting to discharge,
and once Orest has done the deed she explodes, in a stunning, breathtaking finale,
in an ecstatic frenzy of Dionysian dancing. Alfred Kalisch, who attended the
premiere, found it difficult to describe the final scene “without seeming to
exaggerate”:
Not only is there colossal skill in the way in which all previous threads are woven into one,
not only is there great art in the way in which the climax grows and the orchestral color
gradually changes from darkness to the bright light of noonday; but the result is achieved
without sacrifice of euphony or beauty, and the whole conception of the scene betrays a
creative power which is without rival in the present day.35
35
Kalisch, “Impressions of Strauss’s Elektra,” 201.
“Be silent and dance,” Elektra cries out at the end of this final scene, “all must
approach. Here join behind me! I carry the weight of great joy, and I dance before
you. There is only one thing fitting for those as happy as we: Be silent and dance!”
(Schweig und tanze. Alle müssen herbei! Hier schließt euch an! Ich trag’ die Last des
Glückes, und ich tanze vor euch her. Wer glücklich ist wie wir, dem ziemt nur reins:
schweigen und tanzen!) With that Elektra collapses and dies, Chrysothemis calls for
Orest, and finally Strauss offers up one of the most potent C major chords in modern
music.
Neither Hofmannsthal nor Strauss specifies what type of dance Elektra actually
performs – an ambiguity that was quite intentional. The libretto suggests two funda-
mental dance types of ancient Greece: the above-mentioned chorós or round dance
(Reigen) and the rapturous maenadic ritual. The round dance was a social rite during
which the participants joined hands in a circle and in which a community took part.
The maenadic dance was a Dionysian solo dance of ecstatic release, transcending the
present world.
Although the play’s text and stage directions for the final scene vaguely suggest both
types of dance, only the opera articulates these contrasting rituals. The triumphant Reigen
symbolizes restored social order after the socially dissonant elements, Klytämnestra and
Aegisth, have been removed. The solitary Elektra now wants to join the group, to join
the family and the community. We recall her words, “Be silent and dance! All must
approach!” The moment has come to join hands with her siblings and dance on their
father’s grave. But equally vital is Elektra’s dance of transcendence in the same final
scene, the Dionysian dance a Bacchic vehicle for her catharsis. In performing this
awkward dance, she separates herself from her immediate surroundings. Moreover,
Hofmannsthal deliberately obscures these two opposing states, for despite her call for “all
[to] approach,” Elektra is never joined by the group; Agamemnon’s children never join
hands. Here the playwright once again exploits the dialectic of word and deed, for as
Elektra dances, she can only speak of the round dance, which takes place solely in the
fantasy of her mind.
Sketches for the final scene show how Strauss devised a plan to symbolize these two
different dance rituals by opposing the keys of E major and C major, the central
harmonic juxtaposition that was laid out, as we have seen, in Elektra’s opening mono-
logue.36 Table 3.1 offers a summary of the dramaturgical and tonal layout of the final
scene: (1) Chrysothemis and the chorus rush onstage with the news that Orest is in the
palace, (2) Elektra sings a brief solo that suggests her increasing detachment from the
outer world (“Do I not hear?”), (3) Elektra and Chrysothemis sing a triumphant duet
(“We are with the gods!”), (4) Elektra celebrates in dance, and (5) she ultimately
36
See my chapter on the final scene in Richard Strauss’s “Elektra,” pp. 206–35.
Table 3.1 Tonal plan of the Elektra finale
First Half
Part 1 (Chrysothemis’s Entrance)

E major Chrysothemis (+ chorus) “Our brother is inside the house!” (“Orest!”)
C major Chorus “Orest!”
E major Chrysothemis “A thousand torches have been lit!”
Part 2 (Elektra’s Entrance)
E major Elektra “Do I not hear? Can I not hear the music?”
C major Elektra “They all are waiting for me.”
E major Chrysothemis “Don’t you hear?”
Second Half
Part 3 (Duet of the Sisters)

C major Elektra “We are with the gods!”
E major Elektra “This hour I am the fire of life”
C major Elektra “Do you see my face?”
Part 4 (Elektra’s Dance)
E major [Wordless, maenadic dance]
C major Elektra “Be silent and dance!”
Part 5 (Elektra’s Death)
E♭ minor
C major
collapses lifeless. As the table suggests, this scene consists of an almost relentless
interplay of E and C major through which we better understand the polarity between
individual expression and the harmonious social gesture, for these ostensibly opposing
states operate simultaneously in Elektra’s mind. In the first half, parts 1 and 2 are in the
Dionysian E major, but Strauss draws moments of C into this sphere (note the boldface);
similarly, in the second half, parts 3–5 are in C major, though the composer inserts
reminders of E.
Thus, as Chrysothemis and the chorus ecstatically rush onstage (in E major) with the
news of Orest’s return, the brief reference to C underscores the sense of incipient
reunification, for it hints at the possibility of restoration. Likewise, in Part 2 (also in E),
Elektra becomes increasingly lost in her state of cathartic transport, and Strauss touches
upon C just as she envisions the others gathering around her (“They all are waiting for
me” [sie alle warten]). By Part 3, the exact midpoint of the scene, Strauss finally makes
his move to C major as the two sisters are indeed joined together. But the brief
incursions of E contained therein reveal that although Elektra sings with her sister, it
is she alone who is transported to a different world. Like a meteor, she burns brightly
but will soon be extinguished. Indeed, the first fleeting shift to E accompanies Elektra’s
text “and this hour I am the fire of life” (und diese Stunde bin ich das Feuer des Lebens).
Finally, in the dance itself, which moves from E to C major, we witness the ultimate
process of the dissolution of the individual, and there is nothing left but for Elektra to
die. The solitary “heroine” now wants to join the group, to be a part of the community
at large; she wants to lead everyone in a cathartic dance. “But I cannot,” she exclaims;
“The ocean, the monstrous, twenty-fold ocean weighs down every limb with its power”
(Und ich kann nicht, der Ozean, der ungeheuere, der zwanzigfache Ozean begräbt mir
jedes Glied mit seiner Wucht), as if she were drowning in a gigantic undertow.
Hofmannsthal later observed that Elektra’s end was less the death of an individual
than the dissolution of that individual:
In Elektra the individual is dissolved in the empirical way, in which the content of her life
explodes outward from inside, like water that becomes ice in an earthen jug. Elektra is no
more Elektra, because she has dedicated herself entirely to being Elektra. The individual
can only remain to endure where a compromise has been struck between the community and
the individual.37
Elektra, unable to bridge past and future, is a phenomenon at odds with Hofmannsthal’s
worldview, which ultimately endorses Chrysothemis. Indeed, the play’s values, and
those of nearly every Hofmannsthal libretto, are anchored in vitalism. During his and
Strauss’s collaboration on their next Greek myth, Ariadne auf Naxos, the classicizing
Hofmannsthal felt obligated to revisit this theme in detail in a letter to Strauss when he
feared that the composer had failed to understand Ariadne, a character who faces one of
the simplest, yet most profound problems in life, “fidelity”:
Whether to hold fast to that which is lost, to cling to it even in death – or to live, to live on,
to get over with it, to transform oneself, to sacrifice the integrity of the soul and yet in
this transmutation to preserve one’s essence, to remain a human being and not to sink to the
level of beast, which is without recollection.38
The miracle of life, according to Hofmannsthal, rests in the birth of a new love from the
ashes of an old one. In such a transformation, which requires us to forget, we still
preserve our essence: the phenomenon is one of relinquishing while still preserving our
spiritual core. But Elektra is a prisoner of her past, unable to let go, incapable of
forgetting, and she detests her sister’s desire to do so. Because of this incapability,
Elektra threatens to sever the thread that connects past and future, that connects the
individual to society and ultimately links civilizations. Unable to transcend, as the
Marschallin and Ariadne do, the disconnected and isolated Elektra must perish. Lost
37
Taken from “Zwei bisher unveröffentliche Aufzeichnungen von Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” in
Programmheft 2: “Salome” und “Elektra,” program book from the Frankfurt Opera (1974), p. 28.
38
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (mid-July 1911), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 94.
in her individual, cathartic, maenadic dance, she asks all to join in but is ultimately
left alone. The last two chords (the tragic E♭ minor and the triumphant C major,
respectively) suggest that with the death of Elektra, the individual is finally dissolved.
Elektra – like Guntram, Kunrad, and Salome before her – never makes that journey
from individual to the collective; she never finds that path to the social.
DER ROSENKAVALIER: TOWARD THE SOCIAL
When Strauss sought to postpone Elektra, confessing to Hofmannsthal that Salome had
“depleted his tragic vein,” the poet, in a moment of opportunism, chose not to admit
that he too was exhausted by tragedy. Shortly before Strauss began composing Elektra,
Hofmannsthal had embarked on reworking Sophocles’ Oedipus trilogy, beginning with
Oedipus and the Sphinx in 1905. However, at the same time that Strauss was sketching the
end of Elektra and asking Hofmannsthal for extra text for the final duet between Elektra
and Chrysothemis, the playwright was becoming increasingly estranged from Greek
tragedy; indeed, he never finished the Oedipus project.
Hofmannsthal’s exhaustion resulted from there being too many obstacles blocking
his pursuit of a rejuvenated, modern Greek tragedy.39 Most important was that ancient
Greek tragedy was conceived as a drama of words, the very words that Hofmannsthal
began to doubt around the turn of the century and compellingly critiqued in his Chandos
Letter. Hofmannsthal eventually returned to mythology (Ariadne and Die ägyptische
Helena), but never again to tragedy. As Strauss was in the final stages of composing
Elektra, Hofmannsthal finally visited Greece, a journey that capped off his changing
worldview. Greece was neither wild, dark, nor strange: “[Greece] is not a cavernous
grave,” he wrote later; “here there is so much light.”40
Thus, by the end of the Elektra project, both poet and composer were united in their
desire to compose a social comedy. Strauss planned on getting the libretto to Christines
Heimreise by the autumn of 1908 and using his 1908–9 sabbatical for composition. He
understood fully the privilege of being able to work with a man of such high literary
rank, but he also soon realized that, unlike Wolzogen, this was an extremely independ-
ent artistic figure whose first priority was not to serve an eager, equally independent,
egotistical composer. The Casanova comedy never emerged as a libretto, and the
industrious Strauss saw his sabbatical slipping away without a major project in the
pipeline.
Remarkably, however, all that changed in a few months, for on 11 February 1909
Hofmannsthal was in Weimar with his friend Harry Graf Kessler:
39
Ward, Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth, pp. 97–9.
40
Hofmannsthal, Augenblicke in Griechenland (1912), p. 1. Spiegel Online Edition (Projekt Gutenberg):
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/1008/1.
Der Rosenkavalier: toward the social 107
Figure 3.3 Strauss at the time of Elektra
I have spent three quiet afternoons here drafting the full and entirely original scenario for an
opera, full of burlesque situations and characters, with lively action, pellucid almost like a
pantomime. There are opportunities in it for lyrical passages, for fun and humor, even for a
small ballet . . . It contains two big parts, one for a baritone and another for a graceful girl
dressed up as a man, à la Farrar or Mary Garden. Period: the old Vienna under the Empress
Maria Theresa.41
Who would have thought from this little aside in a letter about the Casanova comedy
that Strauss was about to compose his most famous opera? Three days later Strauss and
Hofmannsthal met in Berlin to discuss the new scenario, and a follow-up discussion took
place in Vienna a month later, when Strauss was in town for the Vienna premiere of
Elektra. At last he had found his librettist, his “da Ponte and Scribe rolled into one,” and
in April 1909 he believed he had a text, or at least a first act, that seemed to “set itself to
music like oil and melted butter.”42 By May an ecstatic Strauss was already composing.
He told Hofmannsthal that his work was flowing “like the Loisach,” the alpine river that
runs through Garmisch.
41
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (11 February 1909), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 27.
42
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (21 April 1909), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 29.
Der Rosenkavalier was neither Strauss’s first comedy nor his first period piece –
Feuersnot, with its late medieval Munich setting, embodied both elements. But that
opera’s characters, with the exception of Kunrad, are lifeless, drained of any human
qualities. After the unexceptional response to his first comedy, Strauss was determined,
as was Hofmannsthal, to write the great German operatic comedy for the twentieth
century, as Meistersinger had been for the nineteenth century and Figaro had been for the
eighteenth. Whereas the antisocial Feuersnot had vilified its urban setting, Rosenkavalier
celebrated the world and time of Maria Theresa’s Vienna of the 1740s, with its “half
imaginary, half real totality . . . with its ceremony, its social layers, its manner of
speaking or, more important, its hierarchies of manners of speaking, above all within
the proximity of the great court, [and] with the constantly sensed proximity of the folk
element.”43 That sense of the “folk element” brought all the ancillary characters to life:
the widow and her daughters, the tenor and the flutist, the animal seller, the hairdresser,
the waiters, the footmen, the servants – are all products of a vibrant, Mozartian
earthiness.
In a letter to Strauss, Hofmannsthal echoed this connection between Nuremberg and
Vienna:
Just as in [Meistersinger] the Nuremberg of 1500 [sic] is the true vehicle for the whole thing,
and that which gives life to the characters, in [Rosenkavalier] it is the Vienna of Maria
Theresa – a complete and real, and therefore convincing city world composed of a hundred
living interrelations, from Faninal to Ochs, from police constable and innkeeper to the great
lady, from the palace through the backstairs world of the footmen to the peasant in the
farmyard, etc., etc.44
In this “comedy for music” the stylistic disunities are there for all to hear, but no longer
are they so abruptly bandied about as in Feuersnot. Rather they are critically layered in
harmony with Hofmannsthal’s text and worldview. Both the music and the text evoke
Maria Theresa’s Vienna as an “alliance of past generations with later ones, and vice
versa.”45 Thus, although Der Rosenkavalier is set in the 1740s, the score contains allusions
to the classical style of the 1780s, the late romantic sonorities of the 1860s and 1870s, and
even the chromatic diatonicism of 1910. Strauss, accordingly, made musical alliances
with Mozart, Johann Strauss Jr., Wagner, and Italian opera, while Hofmannsthal forged
textual connections with, among other sources, Molière, Beaumarchais, da Ponte,
Wagner, Shakespeare, and – for the levée scene – even the visual world of Hogarth.
These simultaneous asynchronisms, or, as Hofmannsthal called them, “harmony of
contrasts,” became a central common ground for poet and composer.
43
Schuh, Hofmannsthal–Strauss: “Der Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen, Filmszenarium, Briefe, p. 224.
44
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (1 July 1927), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 434.
45
Michael Hamburger, “Introduction,” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Selected Plays and Libretti, Bollingen
Series 33/3 (New York: Bollingen, 1963), p. lviii.
Der Rosenkavalier: toward the social 109
This opera is primarily about the fragility of alliances, about embracing and letting go:
Marschallin: One must be light,
Light of heart, light of hand,
To hold and to take, hold and let go . . .
Life punishes those who are not so, and
God has no mercy upon them.
[Leicht muß man sein,

mit leichtem Herz und leichten Händen
halten und nehmen, halten und lassen . . .
Die nicht so sind, die straft das Leben,
Und Gott erbarmt sich ihrer nicht.]
The Marschallin embodies this worldview on a personal level, and with her given name,
Maria Theresa, we are reminded that there is a sociopolitical dimension to letting go and
making new unions:
You have a dramatization of the issue through a female character [the Marschallin] . . . who
knows how to reconcile, to blend, and to make the transition from one era to another, even
at the sacrifice of herself. It is a historicism of letting go, but allowing something new to
come up in the way of the bourgeois-aristocratic alliance that is formed by Octavian and his
Sophie. There is something elegiac about the whole opera, but it is also rich in history that
is now being put to new purposes. The problem of the passing of the aristocracy to the
zweite Gesellschaft [ennobled bourgeoisie] in turn must learn to yield power to the new
forces of democracy in the twentieth century.46
Strauss’s sonic signifiers evoke the world of Austria on the threshold of its idiosyncratic
Enlightenment, the escapist waltz idiom of post-Ausgleich Austria, and the contemporary
sounds of a Habsburg empire on the verge of war.
Nowhere are the intersections of generations, social class, moral attitudes, and
musical styles better illustrated than in the Act i levée, when, according to custom, a
person of nobility receives appointed guests of the court after breakfast in his or her
bedroom. Midway through the first act, the public suddenly intersects with the private
in the most intimate space of the opera when a horde of characters enter the stage, some
in pantomime, others in macaronic dialogue with collisions of French, Italian, Latin, and
various manifestations of German, from the courtly to the country. This “speech
costume,” as Hofmannsthal named it, suggests the inability of any one language to be
the sole carrier of sincere meaning.
In the levée, the keystone of Act i, we see a microcosm of Vienna within the
Marschallin’s bedroom and observe the intricate relationships – spoken, unspoken, and
sung – that suggest her status and that of the imperial presence in Vienna of the 1740s. Most
46
Carl Schorske, “Operatic Modernism,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 36, 4 (Spring 2006): 680.
of the characters are minor yet important in their allegorical significance: the milliner and
hairdresser – in mime – symbolize a dignified woman of beauty and taste; the flutist and
tenor suggest her patronage of the arts; the three singing orphans show her charity; and the
notary and scholar serve as visual metaphors of justice and erudition. The Marschallin’s
rejection of the intriguers Valzacchi and his assistant Annina makes obvious her removal
from sycophants and other people of questionable morality.47
The stage is crowded, and on the surface the scene seems remarkably chaotic. Even
Strauss at first thought it would “not [be] easy to put into shape” and believed that it might
well take the whole summer, but the opposite proved to be true: by the first week of June
he had sketched out the entire act. Playing off the levée’s bipartite structure, Strauss
constructed the scene around two pieces of diegetic music: the trio of orphans (in a style
reminiscent of the three boys in The Magic Flute), and the tenor’s aria (evoking the aura of
nineteenth-century bel canto). The first part belongs to the Marschallin as she is attended at
her dressing table; the second is for Ochs as he argues with the notary about the marriage
contract. Musically, the striking D♭ major aria (repeated in D) overshadows everything.
Orphan’s Trio Tenor’s Aria

(Marschallin) (Ochs)
a→A D♭ → D
Although much has been written about the connection between Mariandl’s (that is,
Octavian’s) little waltz tune in Act iii, “No, no, no, no! I don’t drink wine” (Nein, nein,
nein, nein! Ich trink’ kein Wein) and the opening, sweeping 3/4 time line from the D♭
final trio (“Hab mir’s gelobt”), the Act i tenor aria in the same key goes mostly unnoticed
as musical foreshadowing. Indeed, the allusion is brief and subtle enough to offer the
illusion of a musical déjà vu at this moment in the third act (Exx. 3.4a and 3.4b).
Hofmannsthal took the text from Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme:
With severity my breast was armed,
And I rebelled against love
When with one stroke I was slain,
On seeing two lovely eyes.
[Di rigori armato il seno
Contro amor mi ribellai
Ma fui vinto in un baleno
In mirar due vaghi rai.]
47
Bernd Edelmann made a significant study of the levée scene in his “Das Lever im I. Akt des
Rosenkavalier: Szene und Musik,” in Richard Strauss und das Musiktheater: Bericht über die Internationale
Fachkonferenz Bochum 2001, ed. Julia Liebscher, Veröffentlichungen der Richard-Strauss-Gesellschaft
München 19 (Berlin: Henschel, 2005), pp. 245–62.
“Our plots are subsequent to characters” 111
3.4a Der Rosenkavalier, Act i, tenor’s aria
3.4b Act iii, final trio
“OUR PLOTS ARE SUBSEQUENT TO CHARACTERS”
Hofmannsthal was not exaggerating when he acknowledged Kessler’s central role in

constructing the initial stages of the opera’s scenario. Those intense conversations
with Kessler over the second weekend of February 1909 produced a rough one-page
sketch (in which the sections that eventually became Acts i and ii were reversed),
which was fleshed out after a meeting between Strauss and Hofmannsthal just days
after the poet’s weekend with Kessler. The meeting of composer and poet inspired the
full scenario as we now know it, which was finished by early March and was further
discussed in detail on the twenty-first when Strauss was in Vienna to conduct that
city’s premiere of Elektra.
Kessler had recently acquired the diaries of Prince Johann Joseph Khevenhüller-
Metsch, who was master of the household to Maria Theresa, and they offered concrete
material for the language, rituals, and protocols of her court.48 Paramount, according
to Kessler, was the pantomimic aspect as well as the establishment of character and of
the clarity “of emotional lines.” Plot was not in the foreground of their thought at this
time; it “grew naturally out of the laws of drama and character . . . Our plots are
48
Alan Jefferson, Der Rosenkavalier (Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 12.
subsequent to the characters, as dramas are in real life.”49 In a letter to Strauss several
days prior to their March 1909 meeting, Hofmannsthal echoed Kessler, stressing the
scenario’s pantomimic details: “Whether I am going too far in my disregard of operatic
convention and whether, in the constant endeavor to maintain a characteristic tone,
I accommodate myself too little to the needs of the singing voice – this is what I would
like to hear from you.”50
In his Ungeschriebenes Nachwort (1911) to Der Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal offers his
view of this new type of opera, a response to Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, which the poet
thought disingenuous, given that it was conceived by a composer who ultimately let
music swamp everything in heavy orchestration and (in his words) “erotic screaming.”
“A work is a totality,” Hofmannsthal reminds us, “and a work of two people can be a
totality . . . The collaborator who specializes does an injustice . . . Music cannot be torn
from the libretto, neither can the word from the active stage. [The music libretto] is
made for the stage, not the book or for an individual at his piano.”51 He expands Kessler’s
assertion that this comedy for music is driven less by plot than by characters:
The human is infinite, puppets are tightly limited; much flows across human beings, while
puppets stand sharply against one another. The dramaturgical figure always lies between
both. The Marschallin is not merely there for herself and neither is Ochs. They stand in
opposition and belong to each other, the boy Octavian is in between and connects them.
Sophie stands opposite, the girl opposite the woman, and Octavian again steps in, separates
them and holds them together. Sophie is quite inwardly bourgeois, as is her father
[Faninal], and thus this group [father and daughter] stands in opposition to the nobility, the
great, which allow themselves much. Ochs is who he is and is still a type of nobleman; Faninal
and he form together a complement, so to speak, one needs the other . . . Octavian wins
over Sophie – but does he really win her and forever? That remains in doubt. Thus, the groups
stand against groups, the bound together are separated and the separated are bound
together. They all belong to one another, and what is best, lie between each other: it is
momentary and eternal, and here is the place for music.52
Thus, the basic plot is uncomplicated, even generic, despite its various sources; but the
character relationships are complex, and, as Kessler first suggested, they drive the plot.
The comic conventions are tried and true, but Hofmannsthal infuses them with depth and
intricacy. Der Rosenkavalier offers the surface promise of a comic period piece – but poet
and composer resist. On the most superficial level, the Marschallin is having an affair with
49
Harry Graf Kessler to his sister, Wilhelma (21 February 1909), in Schuh, Hoffmansthal–Strauss: “Der
Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen, Filmszenarium, Briefe, p. 227. Emphasis in original. Kessler always wrote to
his sister in English.
50
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (16 March 1909), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, pp. 27–8.
51
Hofmannsthal, “Ungeschriebenes Nachwort” (1911), in Schuh, Hoffmansthal–Strauss: “Der
Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen, Filmszenarium, Briefe, p. 221.
52
Ibid.
“Our plots are subsequent to characters” 113
the younger Octavian, while the Baron Ochs is to wed the young, nouveau riche Sophie
with the blessing of her widower father, Faninal, who in turn blesses Octavian and Sophie
at the end. But the pairings (the alliances) are far more multilayered.
As Hofmannsthal maintains, beyond the social boundaries are alliances of generation,
relationship, and gender:
Generation: Marschallin $ Ochs

Octavian $ Sophie
Relationship: Marschallin $ Octavian
Ochs $ Sophie
Gender: Marschallin $ Sophie
Ochs $ Octavian
There is one vital nonbinary alliance, namely the triangular relationship of emotion
between the Marschallin, Octavian, and Sophie, a trio of feelings that Strauss and
Hofmannsthal exploit to the fullest at the end of the opera in the most famous ensemble
of the entire work.
Hofmannsthal stressed, in the earliest months, that the Marschallin and Ochs are the
Hauptpersonen (main characters), and the Liebespaar (lovers), Octavian and Sophie, de
second plan. These Hauptpersonen are the alpha and omega of Austrian nobility, full-
grown aristocrats, for Ochs has a complete – if narrow – sense of past, present, and future,
which feeds his material needs for sex, money, food, and drink. He is the only character
who hears, or even sings, the saucy waltz “Mit mir, ohne mich.” The more reflective
Marschallin, a symbol of Vienna’s lost nobility, thinks well beyond herself. Absorbed with
the past – family, ancestors, and her obligation to the future – she thereby contemplates
the phenomena of love, time, fidelity, and the meaning of inner nobility.
At the gender level, the generational conflict is played out by Octavian, who can never
know that he could potentially become an Ochs himself and that Ochs, indeed, serves as a
“parody both of Octavian’s youth and the Marschallin’s age.”53 Aware of Octavian’s
potential, the Marschallin asks him not to be like “Cousin Ochs,” yet Octavian is of course
oblivious. Ochs and Octavian share a libidinal lack of insight; they are, according to
Hofmannsthal, satyrs behind their masks of nobility.54 Ochs may say that, as a man on
the prowl, he can be like Jupiter in his various incarnations (tausende Gestalten), but so could
Octavian: as lover, count, cavalier of the rose, and even a chambermaid convincing enough
to fool old “Jupiter” himself.
Sophie’s naïveté takes on a different guise in her opposition to the Marschallin, who
sees herself as having once been that same innocent girl “drafted fresh from the convent
into the holy state of matrimony” with an unsympathetic Feldmarschall. To search for
53 54
Ibid. Ibid.
“little Resi” would be as fruitless as looking “for the snows of yesteryear,” the very Resi
whose delicate hands will one day become as frail and gnarled as her Uncle Greifenklau’s
(literally, “griffin’s claw”), whom she visits after Act i. One might ask why Hofmannsthal
interposed this seemingly insignificant memento mori into his love comedy. Indeed, one
could argue that the Marschallin’s preoccupation with her own decay runs the risk of
bordering on morbidity. But Hofmannsthal, the master of emotional balance, knew the
significance of her all-too-human anxiety. He explored this enigma of transience in the first
of his four Terzinen über Vergänglichkeit (Terza Rima on the Transitory):
And still upon my cheek I sense their breath.
How can it be that days that were once so near
Are now gone, forever gone, and completely past?
This is a thing that no one fully grasps,
And much too horrid to lament,
That everything slides away and slips past,
And that my very self, unchecked by anything,
Slid from a small child into the present?
To become as strange as some dog to me, uncannily mute.
That I existed one hundred years ago,
And that my forebears, now in funeral shrouds,
Are as close to me as my own hair.
As fully at one with me as my very own hair.55
[Noch spür’ ich ihren Atem auf den Wangen:

Wie kann das sein, daß diese nahen Tage
Fort sind, für immer fort, und ganz vergangen?
Dies ist ein Ding, das keiner voll aussinnt,
Und viel zu grauenvoll, als daß man klage:
Daß alles gleitet und vorüberrinnt.
Und daß mein eignes Ich, durch nichts gehemmt,
Herüberglitt aus einem kleinen Kind,
Mir wie ein Hund unheimlich stumm und fremd.
Dann: daß ich auch vor hundert Jahren war
Und meine Ahnen, die im Totenhemd,
Mit mir verwandt sind wie mein eignes Haar,
So eins mit mir als wie mein eignes Haar.]
We return, now on a personal level, to the assertion that society (or the state) is an
“alliance of past generations with later ones, and vice versa,” not a remark made by
Hofmannsthal but rather a statement by the historian Adam Müller that Hofmannsthal
55
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1, Gedichte 1, ed. Eugene Weber (Frankfurt am
Main: S. Fischer, 1984), p. 45. Translated by Michael Cooper and Bryan Gilliam.
Prose-comedy versus libretto 115
used as an epigraph for his essay on Maria Theresa. For Elektra any sort of alliance,
personal or social, was impossible, because she was able to restore social order only
through violence. By the time of Der Rosenkavalier Hofmannsthal knew that was an
option no one could survive. Ultimately, the wisdom of the Marschallin – the most
complex character in the operatic canon – will embrace her demise.
PROSE-COMEDY VERSUS LIBRETTO
With Act i in hand and an entire scenario as well, Strauss was ecstatic. The three acts
followed a compelling twofold logic: on the personal level, they progressed from the
most intimate (the Marschallin’s bedroom) to the outer halls of Faninal’s palace, then to
a public inn; on the social level, from the purview of aristocracy to that of nouveau riche
gentrification, and finally to the low commercial. Thus, the completed Act i was a
compelling microcosm of symmetrically layered public and private spaces:
Marschallin–Octavian
Ochs
Levée
Marschallin
Marschallin–Octavian
When Strauss asked for more lines of text to create a trio for the Ochs scene in Act i –
Ochs, Marschallin, and Octavian (Mariandl) – Hofmannsthal was only temporarily
annoyed, fearing that a transition into the levée, the keystone, would upset this
symmetry.
Upon receiving Act ii, Strauss’s flowing Loisach hit some rapids. Hofmannsthal
wished above all to write an unconventional music prose comedy, and his desire played
out well in Act i, where Strauss could create musical highlights for each of the sym-
metrical sections of the main characters’ wonderful exposition, but all fell flat with Act ii.
Conventionally in opera this is the spot that requires a complication. After reading Act i,
Strauss knew he had an original work on his hands, and he wrote to Hofmannsthal that it
would need good actors – “the ordinary singers won’t do.” The important thing was that
Strauss had something “delightful beyond all measure: so subtle, perhaps a bit too subtle
for the general crowd, but that doesn’t matter.”56
Yet with Act ii things did start to matter, and the effect on the “general crowd,”
Strauss’s opera audience, started to weigh heavily on his mind. As he explained to his
librettist, there was simply no action, no moment of conflict: “The first act with its
contemplative ending is excellent as an exposition. But Act ii lacks the necessary clash
and climax: these can’t all be left to Act iii . . . the audience can’t wait as long as that: if
56
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (4 May 1909), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 30.
Act ii falls flat the opera is lost. Even a good third act can’t save it.”57 Anyone who knows
the opera can appreciate the main moments of Act ii (beyond the obvious presentation
of the rose): the illicit Sophie–Octavian duet (“With eyes full of tears” [Mit den Augen
voll Tränen]), the same duo caught by the Italians, Ochs’s amusement and Octavian’s
rising anger, the sword fight between the two, Ochs’s monologue as he convalesces on
the couch, and the purported message from Mariandl that Annina delivers. Nearly all of
this action Strauss suggested himself in his letter in early July 1909.
An Act ii that was pure “prose-comedy” was out of the question for Strauss, and
Hofmannsthal was remarkably deferential. The changes would alter neither the “spirit
of the characters” nor the “concept of the comedy.” But there was a psychological price
to pay, namely the minimization of Sophie as a more significant character, a strategy
revealed in her subsequently deleted dialogue with Octavian and, more important, with
the Baron Ochs, where she shows a resistant strength missing from the final version.
sophie: What do you mean that I belong to you?
baron: (laughs) From head to toe.
sophie: Only for my signature on a scrap of paper?
I have to laugh at you.
I just did it, signed it,
to get out of the room again in a hurry.
It’s the same as if I had not signed it at all.
You can bet your life on that.58
[sophie: Wie meint Er das, daß ich Ihm jetzt gehör’?

baron: (lacht) Mit Haut und Haar.
sophie: Wegen mein’ Namen leicht, auf dem Fetzen Papier?
Muß lachen über Ihn.
Habs’ jeztz getan, hab’s unterschrieben,
Weil ich schnell wieder aus der Kammer wollt draußen sein.
Ist so gut, wie wenn ich’s nicht hätt’ unterschreib’n.
Drauf kann Er Gift nehmen.]
Why did Hofmannsthal defer so readily to Strauss’s criticisms? In a May 1909 letter to
Kessler, Hofmannsthal, at the time working on Ochs’s Act i “aria,” outlines his realization
that his libretto relies too much on mime at the expense of the “arialike.” An “aria-free
dialogue opera” (Dialog-oper) would tempt Strauss to Durchkomponieren, as Hofmannsthal
believed he had done with Elektra, smothering it with continuous orchestral music “like
57
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (9 July 1909), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 37.
58
See the first version of Act ii in Schuh, Hofmannsthal–Strauss: “Der Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen,
Filmszenarium, Briefe, p. 213.
Prose-comedy versus libretto 117
sauce on a roast.”59 Hofmannsthal was thus delighted, at this stage in their career, with
suggestions by Strauss for musical moments that might steer him away from the
Wagnerian symphonic drama. Although critical of Strauss in his letter to Kessler,
Hofmannsthal knew, at a deeper level, that he was not yet a real librettist, a realization
that later led him to the Ariadne project.
The opening scene of Act iii is the longest stretch of pantomime in the entire work,
with well over three hundred bars of music. Fearing that Strauss might suffocate such
delicate pantomime with dense Wagnerian textures, Hofmannsthal suggested, early on
in this collaboration (before completing Act i), that the composer give it a lighter
Viennese touch: “Do try and think of an old-fashioned Viennese waltz, sweet and
saucy, which must pervade the whole of the last act.”60 Strauss, in fact, created a string
of various waltzes, including some for stage orchestra, which pervade much of the act,
as one commentator observed: “Waltzes and waltz tempi dominate the texture almost
from the beginning . . . [They] are longer than in acts 1 and 2 and have a more
continuous role in supporting the dramatic action and dialogue, rather than interrupting
it and articulating it.”61
Hofmannsthal outlines the pantomime in great detail over five lengthy paragraphs,
and Strauss shows his wonderful knack for the theatrical in the way he integrates his
waltz sequences with these gestures, which are carefully indicated and synchronized in
the published score. They may be summarized as follows:
1. The scene of the “crime,” a private dining room, is described in great detail, complete
with a bed in the alcove.
2. Annina appears as a widow in mourning, Octavian as Mariandl in a maid’s costume.
3. Octavian gives Valzacchi the money, making quite plain the shift in loyalties from
Ochs to him.
4. Dubious characters emerge, and Valzacchi synchronizes his watch; the characters
disappear into their hiding places, and Valzacchi rehearses their reappearance with a
clap of his hands.
5. Ochs enters the dining room.
Act iii begins with burlesque; by the end, with the entrance of the Marschallin, it reaches
“the more sublime chords of tenderness.”62 What lay in between was a problem that
Strauss never definitively resolved, for in order for the opera to come to a convincing
close, various loose ends – comedic and psychological – had to be connected. These two
impulses are embodied, first, with the arrival of the police inspector and, second, with
59
Schuh, Hofmannsthal–Strauss: “Der Rosenkavalier,” Fassungen, Filmszenarium, Briefe, p. 240.
60
61
Lewis Lockwood, “The Element of Time in Der Rosenkavalier,” in Gilliam, Richard Strauss: New
Perspectives, p. 257.
62
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (20 September 1909), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 52.
the entrance of the Marschallin. Strauss was displeased with the first draft: the police-
inspector section was too long and needed to “be dealt with quickly,” and as the act
neared the more sublime sphere, the apex (Brennpunkt) had to be the Marschallin’s
entrance and “the Baron’s colossal embarrassment as he suddenly finds himself con-
fronted by the fixed stare of . . . the Marschallin, Octavian, and Sophie.”63 In short, what
Hofmannsthal offered Strauss, especially in Act iii, was less a scaffolding on which to
build music than a full-fledged play.
Hofmannsthal agreed with Strauss’s judgment and after revising Act iii confessed
that the section between the Marschallin’s entrance and Ochs’s exit was “still too
long.”64 Here the demands of dramaturgy and music were working at cross-purposes,
for even in the final version the police-inspector scene was still too long and much of
the chatty business after the Marschallin’s dramatic entrance anticlimactic. Thus, cuts
were made in Act iii not long after the premiere (five alone in the police-inspector
scene and one after the Marschallin’s arrival), and they soon became standard.65
Insecure in his first effort as Strauss’s librettist, Hofmannsthal even suggested a cut
in the final trio – significantly, the very opening lines of their most famous operatic
ensemble. Although Strauss refused the suggestion (“you may safely leave this for me
to judge”),66 Hofmannsthal retained the cut in his edition of the text that he published
as a stage drama.
“BETWEEN MOMENTARY AND ETERNAL”: THE PLACE

FOR MUSIC
Strauss had not composed a three-act opera since Guntram, his first operatic venture,
seventeen years earlier. The remarkable differences between these two works sharply
demonstrate just how far Strauss had come as an artist. The former offered much in
Weltanschauung, with its weighty, often ponderous textual surface, but little in terms of
character interaction, compelling dramaturgy, or effective stylistic variety. The eupho-
nious Rosenkavalier, with its sheen, its melodiousness, and a stylistic diversity held
together by the topos of waltz, seems on the surface to deny the more serious musical
and literary intentions of the composer and his librettist. In short, where Guntram was
the first operatic expression of Strauss’s post-Schopenhauer sensibility, Rosenkavalier was
the first staged embodiment of his post-Nietzschean worldview.
The German term for the sonic realm of Rosenkavalier, then and now, is Wohlklang
(euphony). While critics first lambasted Elektra’s dissonance for its unreflective
63
64
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (10 June 1910), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 58.
65
Jefferson, Der Rosenkavalier, p. 149.
66
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (7 September 1910), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 68. The
English translation incorrectly has the date as “12. (?) 9. (1910).”
“Between momentary and eternal”: the place for music 119
3.5a Act i, Hot Chocolate Waltz
3.5b Mozart Piano Sonata in A Major, K.331: i
sensationalism, Rosenkavalier’s consonance suggested a composer pandering to the

musical market. With the rise of post-Second World War high modernism, the critique
became more malignant. It might be difficult for a younger generation of listeners to
comprehend the vitriol poured on Strauss’s music by critics in the next few decades
following his death in 1949. Their highly charged rejection, derived in part from
ideological convictions about a post-tonal world, now has a hollow ring. In 1952
Joseph Kerman famously decried Der Rosenkavalier as “false through and through . . .
insincere in every gesture.”67 He goes on to find a kind of degeneracy in this music, with
its proclivity to spread unwanted bacteria, a chilling concept that echoes the rhetoric of
the recently vanquished Third Reich. Kerman’s excesses include the notion of Strauss
spreading filth: “anything [Strauss] touched he soiled as pervasively as the waltz soils the
texture of music.”68
Of course, there is no single waltz in Der Rosenkavalier, for to cite Johann Strauss Jr. is
to offer only part of the picture. In his characteristically ahistorical way, Strauss offers an
anthology of nineteenth-century waltzes, from Émile Waldteufel to Johann Strauss Sr.
as well as Jr. Indeed, the so-called Hot Chocolate Waltz (Ex. 3.5a) toward the beginning
of Act i is not a waltz at all, but rather a Mozartian minuet that is based on the
phraseology and harmonic rhythm of the K.331 Piano Sonata in the same key (Ex. 3.5b).69
67
Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (New York: Knopf, 1952), p. 262. 68 Ibid.
69
In his next opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, Strauss quoted an actual melody of Mozart in Harlekin’s song,
“Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen.”
3.6a Glissando
3.6b Portamento
3.6c Détaché
By extracting these waltzes from the opera, an entire typology of waltz types
emerges: the glissando type (Ex. 3.6a),70 the portamento waltz (Ex. 3.6b), the détaché
(Ex. 3.6c), the chromatic-sentimental (Ex. 3.6d), the whole-bar upbeat (Ex. 3.6e),71 and
the syncopated hemiola type (Ex. 3.6f ), among others.72
The way in which Strauss returns to waltzes in Der Rosenkavalier demonstrates a new
expressive strategy, for they certainly lack the purposeful vulgarity of Feuersnot and the
Dionysian tragedy of Elektra. Integral to this social dimension remains the concept of
transformation, with all its musical implications. But unlike Wagner, transformation, or
transfiguration, moves not toward the metaphysical, as it did for Parsifal, or even for the
artist-protagonist in Death and Transfiguration, but rather toward the profoundly human.
This theme will be more sharply profiled in Ariadne, where the characters of Zerbinetta
and the composer discuss the term at length in the Vorspiel; it also serves as the central
focus of the final duo between Ariadne and Bacchus in the final scene of the opera.
Octavian, the title role of Rosenkavalier, is many things: the Marschallin’s lover, a
chambermaid, the Count Rofrano, and, in the end, no longer a boy but a wiser young
man. Octavian is the epitome of the male fantasy that Ochs evokes as “holy Jupiter,” a
fantasy figure who shares something with the mythological shape-shifting heroes of
Ovid’s Metamorphosis. His libidinal musical theme is one of many themes that go
70
This waltz is a specific allusion to Josef Strauss’s Dynamiden-Walzer, Op. 173 (1865).
71
While the most famous prototype is the Blue Danube waltz, Emil Waldteufel employed this style
extensively a generation earlier.
72
Roswitha Schlötterer offers a more exhaustive typology in her excellent study of the Rosenkavalier
waltzes. See her “Die musikalische und szenische Bedeutung der Rosenkavalier-Walzer,” in Musik und
Theater im “Rosenkavalier” von Richard Strauss, ed. Reinhold Schlötterer (Vienna: Verlag der
Österreichischen Akadamie der Wissenschaften, 1985), pp. 133–68. Her outline of waltz types is on
pp. 143–4.
3.6d Chromatic-sentimental
3.6e Whole-bar upbeat
3.6f Hemiola
through numerous transformations in terms of key, rhythm, metre, and tempo (Ex. 3.7),
as he is transformed in different situations: a sexually charged young count in bed with
the Marschallin (Ex. 3.7a), dressed as a maid just as Ochs arrives (Ex. 3.7b), the object of
the Marschallin’s reflections at the end of Act i (Ex. 3.7c), a Rose Cavalier with a new love
in Act ii (Ex. 3.7d), and caught up, with the Marschallin’s blessing, in the thrall of that
new love (Ex. 3.7e).
Thus, according to the old narrative, it was the Wohlklang that fooled audiences into
taking “this patchwork operetta” seriously, according to Guido Pannain in 1933. He adds
that it duped listeners into thinking there was some substance in the work even though
critics and scholars, such as Charles Rosen, knew it was Viennese pastry through and
through.73 Decades later Edward Said challenged this view in a review of later Strauss
works, but the words apply equally well to Rosenkavalier as a
response to the equally demanding rigors of Schoenberg’s and Webern’s innovations, whose
key, of course is the polychromatic and infinitely contrapuntal and transformable tone row.
Strauss’s feat . . . is to provide answers to the multivoiced compositional challenge posed
by the second Viennese School, and to deliver his answer from within a tonal and formal
tradition supposedly left behind after Brahms and Wagner. Far from being a sentimental
throwback, Strauss appears in this light to be reanimating the history of tonal music, showing
that what the great modernists . . . did by way of renouncing the tonal world could be
responded to by re-excavating that history again and again.74
73
Guido Pannain, Modern Composers, trans. Michael R. Bonavia (London: J. M. Dent. 1932), p. 31;
Charles Rosen, Arnold Schoenberg (New York: Viking Press, 1975), p. 16.
74
Said, “Gay and Pepusch,” p. 105.
3.7a Act i, Octavian as libidinous lover
3.7b Act i, Octavian as maid
3.7c Act i, Marschallin reflecting over Octavian
3.7d Act ii, Octavian with new love
3.7e Act iii, thrall of new love
These words of homage to Strauss’s achievement need to be expanded, for the historical
reanimation of Der Rosenkavalier hardly follows the lines of the transcendental,
Brahmsian, German-humanist impulse (which leaves its residue in Schoenberg and
Anton Webern). Strauss’s response to these younger composers was more than musical
technique. He realized that the musical language for the new century should be one that
intentionally lacks stylistic uniformity, a language that reflects a modernist preoccupa-
tion with the dilemma of history, one that arguably foreshadows the dissolution of the
ideology of style in the late twentieth century. Through the lens of Rosenkavalier, with its
ahistorical anachronisms, we see a composer who keenly recognized the disunities of
modern life and believed that they should not be masked by a unified musical style.
But there are indeed unities to be found in Der Rosenkavalier as they relate to Strauss’s
method of operatic composition. The primary one is his reliance on associative keys,
which operate on dramaturgical and harmonic-structural levels. We have noted the

centrality for Strauss of half step relationships, which suggest oppositional forces. The
ease and clarity with which he executes these tonal and motivic networks in Der
Rosenkavalier is unprecedented in his output.
Reinhard Gerlach was among the first to analyze the half step relationships in Act i,
from the libidinal E major opening (in the spirit of Octavian) to the serene E♭ major close
(in the spirit of the Marschallin). These semitonal relationships are obtained throughout
the entire opera, suggesting opposition as well as transformation.75 Thus, beyond the
alliances of time, society, and characters, the tonal relationships pertain to the charac-
ters: the E and E♭ of Octavian and the Marschallin, respectively, the simple C major
world of Ochs, the naïveté of Sophie in her Mozartian G major (with her characteristic
D–B–G ascending six-four, modeled on Gustav Mahler’s theme of the same key in the
childlike “Das himmlische Leben”). Emotional states such as the sublime (D♭ or A♭) or
dreamlike (F♯) play off the above tonal-character relationships.
Thus the tonal structure of Act i matches the broad dramaturgical symmetries
already mentioned (see p. 115):
Act i
E (E♭) → C→ a/D → C→ E♭ (E)

Marschallin/Octavian Ochs Levée Marschallin Marschallin/Octavian
Gerlach refers to E and E♭ as the two cornerstones (Eckpfeiler) of Act i, and as the above
outline suggests, they serve as compelling bookends, or what Robert Bailey calls a
double tonic,76 for they adjoin one another at either end with remarkable fluidity
(Exx. 3.8a and 3.8b).
Act ii continues to play with this semitonal dichotomy and uses Ochs’s seductive Liedl-
Walzer (“With me, without me” [Mit mir, ohne mich]) as both a topical and a harmonic
reference point:
Act ii
G (E, F♯) → D (A♭/A) → E♭ (D) → E

Octavian/Sophie Liedl Liedl Liedl as pure waltz
75
See Part 3 of Reinhard Gerlach, Don Juan und Der Rosenkavalier: Studien zu Idee und Gestalt einer tonalen
Evolution im Werk Richard Strauss (Bern: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1966), pp. 122–66.
76
Ibid., p. 165. Bailey’s theory of the double-tonic complex is discussed in greatest depth in his
analytical essay on Wagner’s Prelude and “Liebestod” of Tristan und Isolde. See Bailey, “An Analytical
Study of the Sketches and Drafts,” in Richard Wagner: Prelude and Transfiguration from “Tristan und
Isolde,” ed. Robert Bailey (New York: Norton Critical Scores, 1985), pp. 113–46.
3.8a Act i, sc. 1
3.8b Act i, last scene
The two main Act ii duets between Octavian and Sophie lie strategically outside these
tonal touchstones. In the first tonal area (G) there are brief incursions of the erotic
E major (to the outbursts of Octavian’s other name, “Rofrano,” as the Faninal household
anticipates Octavian’s arrival), but the most famous detour from G is the “Presentation
of the Rose,” a semitone downward in frozen bliss. This dream world of six sharps
returns to tonal reality as easily as it departed from it when the tableau vivant is broken
and Octavian and Sophie have their first hesitant conversation (“I know you quite well,
my cousin” [Ich kenn’ Ihn recht wohl, mon cousin!]). Their second duet (“Mit den
Augen voll Tränen”) is a confession of love in binary form where (like the tenor’s aria in
Act i) the second strophe is a semitone higher (from A♭ to A).
We recall Hofmannsthal’s early reference in a letter to Strauss to the binary nature of
Act iii: first farce, then a more serious second part. Although Strauss heartily agreed, he
never got the desired concision that would have highlighted this bipartite quality of the
comedic and the psychological. As mere text, the entrance of the Marschallin as the
Brennpunkt still fell short, a deficiency rectified in music by a sudden shift (harmonically,
orchestrationally, texturally, and dynamically) to an extravagant E♭ chord in a character-
istic six-four position. The Marschallin, the personification of the psychological, has
arrived, and the third act takes its final turn (Ex. 3.9).
3.9 Act iii, appearance of the Marschallin
Act iii
c (B♭, E♭, C, D) E→ E♭ (C, D♭) → G

Pantomime Serious drama Final duet
(Farcical waltz sequence) (Entrance of Marschallin) (Octavian–Sophie)
With this turn toward Hofmannsthal’s psychological aspect, two dramaturgical loose
ends are finally tied up, with Ochs’s exit (the buffa, in C) and in the final trio (the seria, in
D♭). The conflict between these two impulses would form the kernel of Strauss and
Hofmannsthal’s next opera, Ariadne auf Naxos, and in the same two keys a semitone
apart.
Der Rosenkavalier is certainly a pivotal work, though not in the high-modernist
narrative sense of a permanent musical-stylistic post-Elektra volte-face.77 Strauss turned
his back on the antisocial central characters who had served as the thematic basis for the
previous operas. Chapter 2 showed how Strauss, exploiting extremes of the comic and
the tragic in Feuersnot and Salome, made his manifesto against murky metaphysical
Wagnerism. Elektra offered him the opportunity to compose an operatic manifestation
of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy. After Elektra, Nietzsche no longer served as a direct
source of inspiration for the composer, and the same was true for his librettist.
Hofmannsthal never returned to Nietzsche’s dark Dionysian vision, and Strauss did
not revisit Nietzsche until the mid-1930s, after Hofmannsthal’s death – most obviously in
his only other Greek tragedy, the late one-act Daphne (1937).
77
As we shall see in Chapter 5, Die Frau ohne Schatten is overall far more difficult harmonically than
Elektra.
Flattered by Strauss’s comparison of him to the librettists Eugène Scribe and Lorenzo
da Ponte, Hofmannsthal hoped that Der Rosenkavalier would be “good or excellent even”
and predicted that “as Elektra has slain her thousands, I look forward to our slaying with
this comedy tens of thousands, rather like Saul and David in the Bible, and they, like us,
had to face the Philistines.”78 The next opera marked a return to myth, but one of a
different kind. As predicted, Rosenkavalier slew tens of thousands and continues to do so;
but Hofmannsthal wanted to do more than write plays for music. Ariadne auf Naxos,
which the composer and librettist described as an experimental interim work, marked
that transition from sung drama to true opera libretto.
78
4 Intermezzo: Ariadne and her transformations
I am another than I was! – Bacchus, in It was supposed to have been an “interim work,”
Hofmannsthal and Strauss, Ariadne according to Hofmannsthal’s original plan as he out-
auf Naxos (1912/1916) lined it to Strauss, who referred to it as an “inter-
mezzo” in at least one of his sketchbooks.1 Neither
he nor the composer envisioned what a complex, time-consuming collaboration Ariadne
auf Naxos (1912/1916) would turn out to be. This work, a theatrical hybrid combining the
spoken word (an arrangement of the Molière-inspired piece Le bourgeois gentilhomme
with incidental music) and opera, was the first real test of their relationship and a source
of friction from its earliest stages in January 1911, to the premiere in October 1912, to the
revision of Ariadne in 1916 and a revised, separate version of Le bourgeois gentilhomme (Der
Bürger als Edelmann) a year later. Strauss was an assiduous composer, and he worked
methodically and relatively fast, always wanting his summer’s compositional project
settled by spring, when the conducting season was coming to its end.
In January 1911 the original summer plan was a large serious work, Das steinerne Herz
(The Stone Heart), an opera to be based on the theme of a “heart that beats and a heart
that is frozen”; it was then shelved for the grand fairy tale Die Frau ohne Schatten. By
spring the poet was not ready to immerse himself in that world; he was still drawn to the
stylized aura of the eighteenth century, especially the work of Molière, which had partly
inspired the Rosenkavalier libretto. The immediate result was Ariadne auf Naxos, which
Strauss began composing “in earnest” in July.
In January rehearsals for Der Rosenkavalier were well under way for a Dresden premiere
on the twenty-sixth, and though Hofmannsthal predicted that Rosenkavalier would prove a
triumph, that was far from apparent in the early weeks leading up to the first performance.
Strauss and Hofmannsthal had created a unique Komödie für Musik for singers with special
acting abilities, and they foresaw challenging rehearsals at the Royal Opera House. Still,
they were unprepared for the greater problems that lay ahead. For one thing, they failed to
get the Ochs of their choice, Friedrich Mayr, and had to settle for the leaden Carl Perron
(“an impossible actor,” according to Hofmannsthal), Dresden’s house baritone, who had
premiered the minor role of Orest. Worse yet was the Dresden Opera producer, Georg
Toller, who had shown such modest insight at the same Elektra premiere.
Hofmannsthal devised ways of getting around the problem of Toller. For one, he
made sure that Alfred Roller – the famed set designer from Vienna who had worked so
1
See, for example, Bavarian State Library Mu. Ms. 9983 [p. 29].
127
successfully with Mahler – would execute the staging. Roller, in close consultation with
Hofmannsthal, created a highly detailed production book, unprecedented by operatic
standards. More important, however, Hofmannsthal made sure that his friend Max
Reinhardt would be on hand to offer advice, even if it meant that at first he would not be
permitted to stand on the stage where Toller served as the official producer. In those
vexing early rehearsals Reinhardt, who had so brilliantly guided Hofmannsthal’s Elektra
in the Prussian capital, had to offer advice from the wings, and for contractual reasons
his name did not appear on the program. Ariadne auf Naxos, created in part for Reinhardt
and dedicated to him, was his well-earned reward. Though it ultimately premiered in
Stuttgart, it was originally intended for his Deutsches Theater in Berlin.
“It is horrible” was the terse description in Strauss’s calendar on the day of the first
rehearsal, though Hofmannsthal described that day in far greater detail: “How sad we all
were yesterday morning at the first rehearsal, how helpless and sad. I feel so sorry for
Strauss, such a tremendously strong, somewhat gruff yet extremely sensitive man near
tears. It really would be a depressing endeavor were Max Reinhardt not involved.”2 A
week of tireless work by Reinhardt and Roller put Hofmannsthal in a far brighter frame
Figure 4.1 Max Reinhardt
2
Marie-Therese Miller-Degenfeld, ed., The Poet and the Countess: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s
Correspondence with Ottonie Degenfeld (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000), p. 40.
“A framework on which to hang the music” 129
of mind, one that enjoyed a dress rehearsal where the opera’s harmony of “poetry,
music, and acting” created something that was “so tender and subtle and so beautiful
that we all had tears in our eyes as we sat watching in the darkness.”3
“A FRAMEWORK ON WHICH TO HANG THE MUSIC”
Hofmannsthal later came to realize that Rosenkavalier did not have quite the musical-
textual unity that he desired. As noted, most of the main musical moments had been
created at the suggestion of Strauss – the Act i trio (Marschallin, Ochs, and Octavian) and
the Act ii second duet for Octavian and Sophie, among others. The genre of prose
comedy, or opera as sung play, fell short of helping Hofmannsthal to achieve his idea of
a Gesamtkunstwerk for the twentieth century. His answer to Wagner was not a work
where singing, dancing, and acting were synthesized into a meta-art, and thus swamped
by music in through-composed music drama, but rather one where these various arts
worked together, all and severally, in a balanced, harmonious whole. Hofmannsthal’s
purpose was to engage the historical in a kind of nostalgic modernism, where he evoked
the spirit of Molière.
On a more practical level, Hofmannsthal was aware that his Rosenkavalier libretto
betrayed his insecurity as a novice librettist and that his extraordinary instincts as a
dramatist obstructed his path to becoming a good librettist. Along with his insecurity
went an inability to trust Strauss to create a drama that was not narrowly defined by the
text, and that, in turn, meant a libretto where all the psychological and dramaturgical
nuances were built into prose comedy. In short, before Hofmannsthal could move to the
next major operatic project, he had to develop confidence in Strauss and in himself that a
libretto should be less autonomous and more a scaffolding or a skeleton onto which the
music could flesh out the psychological characterizations. The libretto as a framework,
rather than a fully realized play, was an even better response to the language crisis
articulated in the Chandos Letter.
Such assurance could only come from practice, by creating a work he viewed as an
experiment or as an “interim work” (Zwischenarbeit). As originally planned, it would last
no more than thirty minutes, though in its final manifestation it was nearly three times
that long. A Zwischenarbeit relieved the pressure of writing a new major opera after Der
Rosenkavalier, as Hofmannsthal himself implied: “I am also inclined to think that this
interim work is necessary, at least for me, to make myself more familiar with music,
especially with your music, and to achieve something which brings us even closer
together than in Rosenkavalier – which as a fusion of word and music satisfies me greatly,
but not wholly.”4 He suggests that in an experimental hybrid genre he could learn to
3
Ibid., p. 52.
4
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (20 March 1911), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 77.
create a libretto where set musical numbers “regain more and more their paramount
importance” and also explore the right kind of text that falls between the numbers,
“where one cannot fall back on secco recitative and prose.”5
To do so, Hofmannsthal turned to divertissement and the French baroque, more
specifically to comédie-ballet, a genre that by definition not only included singing, dance,
and the spoken word, but also always combined the comic and the serious in intricate
ways. For Hofmannsthal – with his doctorate in French literature – a modern
Gesamtkunstwerk should be derived from something neither German nor nineteenth
century, but rather from the French baroque and the milieu of Louis XIV. This archaic
genre, with its dual elements of myth and masque, offered fresh opportunities to
Hofmannsthal. It was, as the poet suggested, “a new genre which to all appearances
reaches back to an earlier one.”6 In this appealing collaboration of Molière and Jean-
Baptiste Lully, the various artistic elements were not to be synthesized, a process that,
for Hofmannsthal, merely meant music taking over all other elements.
We recall that in Nietzsche contra Wagner the philosopher remarks that Wagner does
not dance, and Hofmannsthal, eager to draw Strauss away from the aura of Bayreuth,
saw such possibilities for dance and gesture in situating his divertissement at the end of a
free adaptation of Le bourgeois gentilhomme. Reducing Molière’s five acts to two,
Hofmannsthal also replaced the final “Turkish Ceremony” and all its songs, panto-
mimes, and dances with Ariadne auf Naxos. Hofmannsthal, in his contra Wagner mode,
surely delighted in the unintended irony of the clueless Jourdain’s line, “Music and
dancing, that’s all you need to know. Nothing on earth is more useful to a country, and
nothing on earth is more important for an individual than music and dancing.”7
On 19 May 1911 Hofmannsthal sent Strauss a scenario suggesting that in it were plenty
of opportunities for “set numbers: duets, trios, quintets, sextets . . . This slight scaffold-
ing for your music will have served its purpose if it gives you the opportunity of
expressing yourself on a reduced [read: non-Wagnerian] scale.” Hofmannsthal could
write another play, so to speak, and he could practice libretto writing, or at least a certain
type of libretto writing – all in honor of his great friend Reinhardt, who directed the
premiere.
The original contours of the experiment seemed simple enough: two opposing
worlds – commedia and seria – both in the spirit of Molière. The progression would be
from the comic (the play) to the tragic (the opera), though originally, because it was a
divertissement, the tragic was undercut by stylized irony and juxtaposed with comedy.
Hofmannsthal’s original concept followed along the lines of Parisian satire infused with
mystical transformation, and in this minimalist tryout, Molière’s play is stripped down
5
Ibid. 6 Ibid.
7
What a strange parallel to Elektra’s “Be silent and dance . . . For those as happy as we, only one
thing is fitting: to be silent and dance!”
“A framework on which to hang the music” 131
to its essence: lyricism and dance. The moments for incidental music by Strauss were
already suggested in Hofmannsthal’s adaptation:
Act I
1. Overture
2. Entrance of Jourdain
3. Ariette (soprano)
4. Couplet of Jourdain
5. Duet of shepherd and shepherdess
6. Minuet
7. Scene of the fencing master
8. Entrance and dance of the tailor
9. Closing music (orchestra backstage)
Act II
1. Introduction
2. The dinner
a. First course (salmon)
b. Second course (mutton)
c. Third course (game birds)
d. Final course (omelette surprise)
3. Closing music
Although at first disappointed that he could not proceed with the “Stone Heart” project,
the milieu of the French baroque nonetheless delighted Strauss, who had earlier been so
tantalized by Watteau’s painting The Embarkment for Cythera (1717) that he began
composing a ballet on that theme in 1900. Although he never finished Kythere, he
borrowed music from the sketches both for the Act i minuet and for the dance of the
tailor, a gavotte. Act ii offered opportunities for self-quotation that were a bit more
obvious to the work’s audience: Don Quixote’s battle with the sheep for the mutton
course and allusions to Rosenkavalier bird calls for the game fowl – and, of course, the
tongue-in-cheek allusions to Wagner’s Rheingold with the presentation of Rhine salmon.
In May 1911 Hofmannsthal sent Strauss a detailed scenario for the divertissement.
Within days Strauss had mapped the main vocal parts: Ariadne (contralto – later
changed, of course, to dramatic soprano), Bacchus (tenor), Najade and Dryade (sopra-
nos), Zerbinetta (high coloratura soprano), Harlekin (light baritone), and “the other
three (buffo tenor and two basses).” He also summarized six musical numbers:
1. Recitative and aria for Ariadne
2. Harlekin’s song
3. Zerbinetta’s coloratura aria
4. Male quartet for Harlekin and company, becoming a quintet with Zerbinetta
5. Buffo male trio

6. Finale: Nayade’s warning, duet of Zerbinetta and Ariadne (concluding with Bacchus’s
entry), love duet (Ariadne and Bacchus), final ensemble
The orchestration was originally to have included no more than twenty players (five
strings, single winds, two horns, a trumpet, harpsichord, harp, celesta, harmonium, and
percussion), a number nearly doubled in the final version.
As the original scenario makes clear, Hofmannsthal saw the Ariadne divertissement as
historical, authentic, and simple, and thus somewhat impersonal. Ariadne, the most
famous of baroque opera characters, had been the model of rhetorical pathos from
Monteverdi through Handel and beyond. Yet, as the text began to emerge, it became
clear that the poet wanted it both ways: the ironic Zwischenspiel and a more profound,
more fully invested lyric drama.8 With unprecedented self-confidence in this operatic
hybrid, he wanted more. As Romain Rolland observed, though Hofmannsthal may have
begun his historical pastiche with ironic intent, his virtuosity succeeded so well that he
ended up believing his own irony.9 By the time Hofmannsthal completed the libretto on
12 July 1911, the opera had more than doubled in size, pushing Bacchus’s entry back to
nearly two-thirds of the way into the opera. It is therefore the nymphs, as modern-day
Norns, who provide the audience with the necessary narrative preparation for his
entrance.10
FROM DIVERTISSEMENT TO DRAMA
Early in the genesis of the libretto it became clear that the character of Ariadne had to be
more than stiff historicism, more than a “heroic Pamina,” a Countess (Figaro), or even an
Elsa. In his covering letter to the enclosed scenario for Strauss, Hofmannsthal empha-
sized that although Ariadne should be tenderly outlined, she is “altogether real, as real as
the Marschallin.”11 And, indeed, what Ariadne exclaims in her first aria applies just as
well to the Marschallin: “This one thing I have still to find . . . the girl that I once was!”
If Rolland and others criticized Hofmannsthal’s move toward the psychological
during the libretto’s development, they did so unaware that the poet was projecting
upon this undertaking an important parallel autobiographical event: his growing
8
Karen Forsyth discusses this problem at length in her chapter “The Genesis of the Libretto” in
“Ariadne auf Naxos” by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss: Its Genesis and Meaning (Oxford
University Press, 1982), pp. 56–61.
9
Rollo Myers, ed. and trans., Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland: Correspondence, Together with
Fragments from the Diary of Romain Rolland and Other Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1968), p. 164.
10
Indeed, in a charming production of Ariadne at the Spoleto Festival USA in 2004, the three nymphs
sat knitting as they told the story of Bacchus while awaiting his arrival.
11
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (19 May 1911), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 80.
From Divertissement to drama 133
relationship with the grieving, speechless Countess Ottonie von Degenfeld. At age twenty-
six, in 1906, Ottonie Degenfeld had married Count Christoph-Martin Degenfeld, aide-
de-camp and close friend of Duke Albrecht of Württemberg. Within two years of their
marriage, just two months before the countess delivered their daughter, Marie-Therese,
the count died of cancer. Ottonie Degenfeld suffered a nervous breakdown and for a
while was even unable to walk without help. Hofmannsthal first met Countess Degenfeld
in 1909 through a family member, the countess’s brother-in-law, Eberhard von
Bodenhausen, Hofmannsthal’s friend of eleven years.
Hofmannsthal was determined to bring this vital young woman, who had been
deeply engaged in the arts, back to life by reinvigorating her love of literature. The
published correspondence between Hofmannsthal and the countess suggests the rich
body of literature that they discussed up until the end of Hofmannsthal’s life. As
Hofmannsthal began devising his scenario and writing his libretto, his relationship
with Degenfeld deepened significantly. It was a complex relationship, one in which
they never used the familiar “you” (du) in their letters, though they ultimately signed off
correspondence with their first names. The tone of their letters, especially by the time of
Ariadne’s creation, became more personal and emotional, beyond the tutor–student
relationship, though there is no evidence that it was ever physical.
The entire stage work Ariadne auf Naxos – the opera preceded by the abridged Bürger
als Edelmann – may have been dedicated to Reinhardt, but Hofmannsthal had privately
dedicated the opera itself to Degenfeld, referring to it as such repeatedly in their
correspondence.12 Hofmannsthal composed Harlekin’s song to the mournful Ariadne,
“Love, Hate, Hope, Pain” (“Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen”), specifically for a countess
in great despair:
You must lift yourself from darkness,
Even if to newer pain!
You must live, for dear life,
Live again this one time.
[Mußt dich aus dem Dunkel heben,

Wär’ es auch um neue Qual,
Leben mußt du, liebes Leben,
Leben noch dies eine Mal!]13
12
“Every single person who has had a chance to listen to or watch your Ariadne likes it very much.”
Hofmannsthal to Countess Ottonie Degenfeld, 6 September 1911, in Miller-Degenfeld, The Poet and
the Countess, p. 132.
13
On 12 September 1911, a little more than a year before the Ariadne world premiere, which she
attended, Hofmannsthal wrote: “if only you see to it that you live a bit. The harlequin sings it better
than I express it in words.” Miller-Degenfeld, The Poet and the Countess, p. 137. My translation.
Harlekin’s song stands in contrast to those lyrical works of Hofmannsthal’s youth, with
the later poem’s call to life, and helps articulate just how far the poet had come from the
inwardness of his pre-Chandos work. He had long since broken with the aesthetic literary
tradition of his youth, having found the path from preexistence (dream) to existence (the
world). Indeed, this very progression (Hofmannsthal called it “from the temple to the
street”) became the central theme of Ariadne auf Naxos, and it is a process that took
the form of transformation. Preexistence – the world of Hofmannsthal’s early lyric
poetry, one very much like the dark realm of Ariadne’s cave – can only prefigure the
complexities of real, active life. In 1904 Hofmannsthal foreshadowed this need for
Ariadne to emerge from her dark dwelling and join the world of the living in his
“Gespräch über Gedichte”: “If we are to find ourselves, we must not descend into our
inner being: we are to find ourselves outside, outward.” Thus, we make the journey (or
the transformation) from Ich to Über-ich, from becoming to being.14
Unburdened by having to write a “real libretto,” Hofmannsthal paradoxically began to
do just that, and even ideas from Die Frau ohne Schatten (which had been put on hold) bled
in, especially the idea of mutual transformation (allomatische Verwandlung), or the concept
of a reciprocated transformation through love. In Die Frau ohne Schatten, the allomatic
element is between the emperor and the empress, and, on a lower level, between Barak
and his wife; in Ariadne auf Naxos, of course, it is between Bacchus and Ariadne.
Strauss was unaware of Hofmannsthal’s broadening ideas and of Countess
Degenfeld’s role in the shaping of Ariadne as an operatic character, so he could hardly
be blamed for failing to see Ariadne as anything beyond a mere abstraction. Upon
receiving the libretto, he could say little more than he liked it “well enough” (recht gut):
“Only I should have preferred the dialogue between Ariadne and Bacchus to be more
significant, with livelier emotional crescendo.”15 In order to lure Hofmannsthal away
from the abstract, he asked him to think of the dumb oxen in the audience, “starting with
the composer.”16 Hofmannsthal was incensed that his collaborator had failed to under-
stand something that had become so personal, and in mid-July 1910 his anger catalyzed a
letter of response that encapsulated his fundamental notions of Ariadne with remarkable
precision.
What [Ariadne] is all about is one of the straightforward and stupendous problems of life:
fidelity; whether to hold fast to that which is lost, to cling to it even in death – or to live, to live
on, to get over with it, to transform oneself, to sacrifice the integrity of the soul and yet in this
transmutation to preserve one’s essence, to remain a human being and not to sink to the level
of beast, which is without recollection.17
14
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Gespräch über Gedichte,” in Blicke: Essays, ed. Thomas Fritz
(Leipzig: Reclam, 1987), p. 106.
15
16
17
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (mid-July 1911), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 94.
With notable economy, the “Ariadne Letter” (as it became known in published essay
form) stripped away for Strauss Ariadne’s baroque surface and revealed to him an
essential human element. The central focus of the opera was ultimately on sexual
fidelity and the importance of rising beyond one’s present self, yet in that process
preserving one’s inner essence.18 Such a dialectical problem, the paradox of forgetting
while remembering, could be solved only by the act of transformation. This overarching
theme, which remained vital to Strauss throughout his artistic life, from Death and
Transfiguration to the Metamorphosen, resonated deeply with the composer. He could
now get beyond the theoretical, beyond the seemingly stiff figures of opera seria and
commedia dell’arte.
The prologue
Reactions to the premiere, on 25 October 1912, and early performances suggest that the
audience proved to be those very “oxen” that Strauss had foreseen, although their
judgment was not without substance.19 Within the first year of the premiere in Stuttgart
there were first performances in Dresden, Braunschweig, Berlin, Coburg, London, and
Munich. But if we were to compare this list merely to the first three months of Der
Rosenkavalier (Munich, Mainz, Zurich, Hamburg, Milan, Berlin, and Vienna) – and also
take into account Ariadne’s far fewer repeat performances – the disappointment of both
poet and composer is certainly understandable.
The idea of the Molière play was conceived specifically as an antecedent to a divertisse-
ment, which now had become a full-fledged one-act opera. Now that transformation had
become the central theme, Hofmannsthal’s desire to have it both ways failed. Thus, with
Strauss’s encouragement, the play was dropped (along with the original ironic intent), and
in its place stood an operatic introduction (Vorspiel or prologue) that takes us behind the
scenes shortly before the performance of the opera-within-the-opera. Thus, the uncos-
tumed Ariadne becomes the prima donna and Bacchus, the tenor, although the commedia
dell’arte troupe never goes out of character. Other roles were added, such as the amusing
spoken role of the majordomo and the more important addition of the hypersensitive and
indeed volatile composer, sung by a mezzo-soprano.
There are two levels of plot in the prologue: the first is the backstage view of an opera
that is about to be performed and the second, on a deeper level, is to foreshadow and
18
Hofmannsthal returned to this theme in Die ägyptische Helena, when husband and wife, Menelas
and Helen, experience this same process. Helen, much like Ariadne, offers herself to death (risking her
life by offering her husband the potion of remembrance) and is similarly transfigured. In turn she
transforms her husband, for the jealous Menelas is finally able to resolve the good and bad in Helen
(and himself ) and – reborn – he accepts her: “Ever-Same, Ever-New” (Ewig-Eine, Ewig-Neue).
19
The revised version premiered in Vienna on 16 October 1916 and was a far greater success; it
remains the version usually performed.
illuminate the essential aspects of the opera – that not only will there be a bizarre mix of
the tragic and the comic, but that this mix will be simultaneous and not juxtaposed, as
originally planned. This opposition is played on a psychological level in the dialogue
between the composer and Zerbinetta. The backstage perspective offered Hofmannsthal
the opportunity to make strategic theatrical allusions to Ariadne’s transformation in the
opera. Poet and composer were necessarily equal partners in achieving this essential
intelligibility, though the collaborative process, as we know from their correspondence,
was not without often heated exchanges.
References to transformation abound in the prologue, and Hofmannsthal even
paraphrased his own “Ariadne Letter” in the voice of the composer, who – given the
character’s artistic temperament – may be seen as a personification less of Strauss the
composer than of Hofmannsthal himself. In the libretto the composer explains that
Ariadne does not forget:
She surrenders herself to Death – is no longer there – disappears – throws herself into the
mystery of transformation – is born anew – born again in [Bacchus’s] arms. Then he becomes
a god! How else in the world could one become a god except through this experience?20
[Sie gibt sich dem Tod hin – ist nicht mehr da – weggewischt – stürzt sich hinein ins Geheimnis
der Verwandlung – wird neu geboren – entsteht wieder in seinen Armen! – Daran wird er
zum Gott. Worüber in der Welt könnte eins zum Gott werden als über diesem Erlebnis?]
Zerbinetta, unmoved, urges him down from such heights. Later on, in the opera, she
confesses that transformation, which is Ariadne’s destiny, does not last much past
sunrise, until her next love affair; each of her lovers was “like a god in his own way.”
The prologue is prosaic in its mixture of recitative and spoken word, in Strauss’s
constant undercutting of moments that verge on the lyrical, and in his choice of
harmonic setting in C major, a banal tabula rasa of no sharps, no flats, no nonsense –
the same choice of key as the overture to Molière’s play in the original version. At
the end of the prologue, as the tortured young composer storms off the stage (“Who
told you to drag me into this [banal] world? Let me freeze, starve, die in my own!” [Wer
hieß dich mich zerren, mich! in diese Welt hinein? Laß mich erfrieren, verhungern,
versteinen in der meinigen!]), Strauss closes the curtain with a shift to C minor (Ex. 4.1).
With its constant chatter, there is little in the way of a prolonged tonal center for most
of the prologue, save for the amorous exchange between the composer and Zerbinetta
(“A moment is a little, a glance is a lot” [Ein Augenblick ist wenig – ein Blick ist viel])21
set in the erotic key of E, the major mediant. This fleeting poetic moment of a mere
ninety-seven bars is an ironic gem, when Zerbinetta, luring the composer to stay with
20
Translations taken from EMI Records, CMS 7 64159 2 (1968), with Rudolf Kempe and the
Staatskapelle Dresden. Some changes by the author.
21
The play on the word Blick is diluted in translation.
4.1 Ariadne auf Naxos, end of prologue
the opera commission, improvises profundity and fidelity, asking at the end: “Will you
forget this moment right away?” (Vergißt du gleich wieder diesen einen Augenblick?).
The composer is easy prey: “Can such a moment be forgotten in all eternity?” (Vergißt
sich in Äonen ein einziger Augenblick?; Ex. 4.2).
Duped and emboldened by Zerbinetta, the composer’s part shifts down a half step for
the final lyrical moment, to heroic E♭ major, as he declares, “Music is a holy art that
brings together people of courage.” But this exalted state goes on for barely twenty bars
when Zerbinetta interrupts with a piercing whistle that signals her comic troupe to
4.2 Prologue
enter; the composer realizes he was taken in, and the prologue ends in the minor
shading of C. The prologue is remarkably efficient in the way it provides the premise for
the opera, for Strauss was in the unique position of being able to “foreshadow” an opera
whose material (from the first version) was already composed. A less obvious, but no
less potent, foreshadowing of the opera is Strauss’s use of thirds (major and minor) as an
expressive tool. Thus, in the prologue, the three main states of comedy (C), tragic-heroic
(E♭), and erotic (E) are musically at one with modal shadings of a triad in C.
4.2 (cont.)
The opera: music and transformation
In its second version, all traces of the divertissement have been removed; Hofmannsthal’s
Oper has become an opera within an opera. This very status has led commentators
to neglect to emphasize that this operatic portion is, in fact, the next one-act myth-
ology to follow Elektra, and that it was a direct response to Hofmannsthal’s dark
Sophoclean tragedy. Zerbinetta may be Ariadne’s comic opposite, but Elektra is her
tragic counterpart. Hofmannsthal reminds us that life requires forgetting and thus
changing: doing nothing is stagnation and death. Though she was tempted to give up,
Ariadne stepped out of her cave, embraced Bacchus, and lived. Both librettist and
composer fundamentally agreed that the final scene must lead to the unambiguous
culmination of Ariadne’s choice to live. Indeed, in the course of revising, Strauss
suggested doing away entirely with Zerbinetta’s undercutting reappearance at the end
of the opera.
Although Strauss culled six musical numbers from Hofmannsthal’s libretto, the
overall layout is in three scenes:
Scene 1: Ariadne (tragic): B♭ major

Scene 2: Zerbinetta and Company (comic): D major
Scene 3: Ariadne and Bacchus (transcending both through mutual transformation):
D♭ major
If one considers the original 1912 version of the opera, then an addendum must be made
to the third scene, for the original intent was that both Jourdain and Zerbinetta appear at
the very end. Zerbinetta, with her troupe in tow, sings (“in mocking triumph”):
The new god approaches
And we surrender without a word . . .
And are utterly transformed.
Thus it was with Pagliaccio
And Mezzetin!
Then it was Cavicchio,
Then Burattino!
But never by caprice,
Always by compulsion,
Always a new
Tremulous wonder
That the heart should understand itself so little!22
[Kommt der neue Gott gegangen,

Hingegeben sind wir stumm! . . .
Sind verwandelt um und um!
So war es mit Pagliazzo
Und mit Mezzetin!
Dann war es Cavicchio,
Dann Burattin! . . .
Doch niemals Launen,
Immer ein Müssen,
Immer ein neues
Beklommenes Staunen:
Daß ein Herz so gar sich selber,
Gar sich selber nicht versteht!]
Everyone leaves the stage save the feckless Jourdain, who, unaware of their sudden
grand departure, wonders aloud:
Everyone keeps on about my association with people of quality – but I cannot imagine
anything nicer. They have such finesse, such an incomparable air of easy, relaxed courtesy;
I would gladly have given, if not my right arm, then a few fingers at least to have been born a
count or marquis and to have had that certain something which confers such grandeur on
all they do.
[Alle Leute rücken mir beständig nichts als meinen Verkehr mit großen Herren vor – und ich
weiß mir einmal nichts Schöneres als das. Es ist doch bei großen Herren ein Anstand, eine
22
Translation of 1912 original version from Virgin Classics CD (7243 5 45111 2 7) with Kent Nagano
and the National Opera Orchestra of Lyon.
leichte gelassene Höflichkeit ohnegleichen; und ich wollte, daß es mir ein Paar Finger aus
der Hand gekostet hätte, und daß ich dafür ein Graf oder Marquis von Geburt wäre und
dieses gewisse Etwas mitbekommen hätte, mit dem sie allem, was sie tun, ein solches
Ansehen zu geben wissen.]
In short, the illusion is twice broken, first by the faithless Zerbinetta and then by the
brainless Jourdain, and we return to the very music that began the play. Though the
divertissement was expanded to a full one-act opera, Hofmannsthal could not bear to
relinquish irony altogether. In either version, the essential story remains the same: a
nouveau riche gentleman wants to feign aristocracy, a masquerade of sorts that can be
carried out only with some type of “court entertainment”; and for this foolish bourgeois
gentleman, more is better. Jourdain wants to eat his cake and have it too, and that can
only mean combining seria and buffa if he wants his “royal” fireworks at nine o’clock.
Although the two main sopranos are literally and allegorically “A to Z,” Zerbinetta –
despite her frilly talk and coloratura – is full of perception and insight into the human
condition of Ariadne’s loss; and as we know from the Degenfeld connection, Ariadne is
far more human than the stylized character she appears to be.23 Like the empress in Die
Frau ohne Schatten, Ariadne needs a human, or real-life, counterpart (although despite
the mortalness of the dyer’s wife and the worldliness of Zerbinetta, we know the real
names of neither). With the interplay of A (the godly) and Z (the human) on a more
equal level – as was intended for the first version – various dualities come to mind:
fidelity $ promiscuity
eternal $ momentary
transcendence $ illusion
negation $ acceptance
In the second version these binaries are subsumed through the process of transforma-
tion; indeed, Strauss wanted Zerbinetta eliminated entirely from the end. In revising,
Strauss was preoccupied with unity and tying up loose ends; after the transformation
he saw no room for her. Having recently received the new prologue, Strauss even
considered an appearance of the composer at the end (“wistful, poetical”) as a bookend
for the final curtain of the prologue. Hofmannsthal was aghast to the point of feeling
“faint in mind and body.” The poet believed he would betray the work if Zerbinetta,
Ariadne’s human counterpart, “should be deprived of some last word!” Hofmannsthal
recalled that poor Jourdain had no idea “what he ha[d] set afoot,” namely the contrast of
“the heroic ideal and its denial,” but that very opposition remained essential even in the
new version, even if it meant merely a little couplet by Zerbinetta at the end recalling
23
An otherwise bizarre production of Ariadne staged at the Salzburg Summer Festival in 2001
tried, if clumsily, to point out this important fact.
the “real” world, though not breaking the aura of transformation.24 He also reminded
Strauss of his clever musical close in their preceding opera (“spicing of the sentimental
with its opposite is quite in your spirit, like the charming touch of irony in the
sentimental duet at the end of Rosenkavalier”). Strauss took the bait:
Your wish is my command: at Number 326 Zerbinetta shall swiftly step from the wings and sing
mockingly: “Kommt der neue Gott gegangen hingeben sind wir stumm – stumm –”; the
bassoon hints at the rondo theme from her aria, and at Number 327 she vanishes, whereupon
Bacchus’s “flower decorated” (correct?) ship appears on the sea. Does that suit you?25
Hofmannsthal was delighted, and by the third week of June 1916 the entire project was
complete, prologue and revised opera, with a premiere scheduled for 4 October in
Vienna.26
In the opera as in the prologue, Strauss continues to exploit triadic harmonic
relationships – in both their major and minor manifestations – and the consequential
half-step and tritonal relationships as he maps out his musicodramatic plan. From afar
the arrangement seems simple, an approach that is aligned with Hofmannsthal’s
schematic strategy:
Scene 1 (Ariadne: pathos, homophony, string based)
Overture Trio Scena – Primo tempo Song Cabaletta

g (E♭) g (G) E♭ E♭ F B♭
Preliminary sketches show that Strauss was focused on the costumed rhetoric of
baroque pathos at the beginning of the opera, with all the requisite sonic signifiers: a
baroque andante-allegro overture grounded in the string section, numerous half-step
suspensions, and ascending and descending semitones. In his sketches he specifically
labels one such prominent ascending figure the “lament motive” (Ex. 4.3).
These same sketches show that Strauss had copied out portions of Corelli’s Concerti
Grossi, Op. 6, including No. 8 in G minor.27
For Ariadne’s lament in this stylistic hodgepodge, Strauss turned to nineteenth-
century Italy, to a strange hybrid where one might well detect the vague outlines of a
large double-aria complex (cavatina) interrupted by the song of an extraneous character,
namely Harlequin from the world of commedia dell’arte, in a key (though serving as a
dominant to B♭) that is harmonic to the next scene, the comedy of Zerbinetta and her
24
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (15 May 1916), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 246.
25
26
The fourth of October was Emperor Franz Joseph’s name day and a time set aside for theatrical
novelties.
27
Charlotte Erwin, “Richard Strauss’s Presketch Planning for Ariadne auf Naxos,” The Musical Quarterly
67, 3 (1981): 348–65.
4.3 “Lament motive”
troupe. As the above layout suggests, we have a recitativelike scena (“Where was I?”
[Wo war ich?]), briefly interrupted by the comedians; then a lyrical primo tempo (“It was
once beautiful” [Ein schönes war]), likewise briefly interrupted; a song by Harlequin;
and finally the two-part cabaletta (“There is a realm” [Es gibt ein Reich]).28
Thus far Strauss has created allusions to earlier styles in both language and structure,
but with Harlequin’s song, he makes his first quotation. In this poem to Ottonie von
Degenfeld, “Lieben, Hassen, Hoffen, Zagen,” Strauss’s melody, especially clear in
Echo’s response, is a paraphrase of Mozart’s opening theme to his Piano Sonata in A
Major (K.331), here transposed to F major (Ex. 4.4).29
Despite the intentional intersections, interactions, and confusions of style, nomen-
clature, and formal archetypes – a burlesque built on the bedrock of the audience’s
historical knowledge – the harmonic outlines in Ariadne’s scene (in B♭ major) are quite
simple as it moves from the submediant of overture and trio, then to subdominant,
dominant, and tonic. Although F major serves as a dominant in the world of Ariadne, it
serves as a third relation as it elides into the realm of Zerbinetta’s scene:
Scene 2 (Zerbinetta: comedy, dance, polyphony, focus on piano and winds)
Ensemble Recitative Aria Rondo Ensemble finale

f (F) F D♭ D E~D
This scene is likewise built around a major aria complex: “a great coloratura aria and
andante,” Strauss writes to Hofmannsthal in May 1911, “then rondo, theme with
28
Walter Frisch sees the complex somewhat differently, as a Recitative i (with comic interruption),
Aria i (larger comic interruption, which includes Harlequin’s song), then the two-part cabaletta as
Recitative ii (“Es gibt ein Reich”) and Aria ii (“Bald aber nahet ein Bote”). However, this reading
consigns Harlekin’s self-contained song, which Hofmannsthal published later as a poem, to a mere
second, albeit larger, interruption. See Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), p. 233.
29
Two years after Ariadne, Max Reger paraphrased the same theme in his Variations on a Theme by
Mozart, Op. 132.
4.4a Opera, Echo imitates Harlekin
4.4b Mozart Piano Sonata in A Major, K.331
variations and all the coloratura tricks . . . for Zerbinetta, when she speaks of her
unfaithful lover (andante) and then tries to console Ariadne: rondo with variations
(two or three). A pièce de résistance.”
Hofmannsthal was never happy with the coloratura of Zerbinetta’s aria, even though
it was cut back in the second version, and as late as 1918 he suggested that Strauss might
recompose the aria altogether. The poet saw Zerbinetta as Ariadne’s vital counterpart,
but more as an earthly, “unheroic feminine”; Strauss’s musical characterization brought
too much irony to the character. But the composer wanted the aria to be the very
showstopper that it remains; the musical costume is no longer a Corelli concerto or a
Mozart sonata, but rather early nineteenth-century bel canto, and he had specific
composers (Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and Louis Hérold) and singers
(Selma Kurz, Frieda Hempel, and Luisa Tetrazzini) in mind.
This showstopper is not without its costs, for Strauss had an agenda: first, to delight in
his own abilities – as a German – to compose in the bel canto tradition (foreshadowed in
the tenor’s aria of Der Rosenkavalier), then to mock that very tradition in all the
exaggerated gestures, quirky harmonic excursions, and modern piano accompaniment;
and finally to poke fun at an audience conversant with that tradition. The most famous
example of the last is the final high note, where Strauss goads his audience into
4.5 Zerbinetta’s aria
applauding before the aria is over, creating a moment intended to fail: either by
untimely applause from the neophytes or by equally annoying “shushing” from zealous
Straussians (Ex. 4.5).
The issue of displacement, even alienation, is as central to this opera as it is to
Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire, also from 1912, for there too commedia dell’arte is torn from
its proper surroundings. But for Strauss such incongruities served irony: where the
haunted Pierrot remains locked into the constraints of forme fixe, singing in a numbed,
expressionistic Sprechstimme, Zerbinetta is in full control of her body, both sexually (as a
character) and vocally (as a performer). Her pyrotechnical vocal promiscuity shows a
woman without the “feminine frailty” that Hofmannsthal recognized in her. The aria
balances between “ironic wit and complete seriousness,” for in referencing this
rich historical (and essentially foreign) style, Strauss gives Zerbinetta “erotic power”
and a “specifically feminine language shared by no one else on stage.”30 Indeed, by
30
Anne C. Shreffler, “The Coloratura’s Voice: Another Look at Zerbinetta’s Aria from Ariadne auf
Naxos,” in Richard Strauss und die Moderne, ed. Bernd Edelmann, Birgit Lodes, and
Reinhold Schlötterer, Veröffentichungen der Richard-Strauss-Gesellschaft 17 (Berlin: Henschel
Verlag, 2001), p. 387.
Zerbinetta’s rondo, Ariadne has long since “withdraw[n] completely into her cave” as
the coquette sings of her lovers, none of whom, admittedly, was Bacchus, yet
Each one came like a god,
Each one transported me,
When he kissed my lips and cheek,
I surrendered without a word.
[Als ein Gott kam jeder gegangen,

Jeder wandelte mich um,
Küßte er mir Mund und Wangen,
Hingegeben war ich stumm!]
The original key for the rondo was E major, by now Strauss’s key of erotic expression,
and the fact that he transposed it down a whole step (also cutting nearly eighty bars)
might well suggest a desire to simplify one of the most difficult coloratura arias of the
twentieth-century repertoire. But there are musicodramaturgical reasons as well.
Granted, everything about the revision process had to do with simplification and
clarity, a jettisoned play replaced by a prologue whose purpose is to explain the basis
for the opera to follow, even to the point where the composer explains the allomatic
transformation of Ariadne and Bacchus (das Geheimnis der Verwandlung). Zerbinetta’s
sexual expression may be manifested in E major, but her worldly persona is clearly D,
a half step removed from the aura of Verwandlung – the Z to Ariadne’s A. But in
transposing the rondo from E to D, Strauss strengthened the tonal relationship, now
between D and D♭, between world and transcendence. The juxtaposition was integral
to the ending of the first version. Untransposed is the ensemble-finale of Scene 2,
which retains E until Zerbinetta and Harlekin’s “Hand und Lippe, Mund und Hand” at
rehearsal number 178.31
Indeed, in both versions D is suddenly undercut by a semitone in the very first bar of
Scene 3:
Scene 3 (Ariadne and Bacchus: transcendence, homophony and polyphony, sonic surfeit,
breakdown of operatic numbers)
1. Trio Bacchus Trio Bacchus Trio Bacchus Transition I

C♯ (= D♭) c♯–E D♭ A (B♭) B♭ B♭ V/B♭
2. Ariadne 3. Bacchus Transition II 4. Bacchus Trio & Ariadne Zerbinetta Ariadne & Bacchus
B♭ A (E) Ariadne (C), Bacchus (A) D♭ D♭ D♭ (D) D♭
31
Strauss’s strategic placement of E for part of the duet between the character of the composer and
Zerbinetta (“Ein Augenblick ist wenig, ein Blick ist viel”) in the Prologue is a good example of the
foreshadowing made possible by composing a preamble after the fact.
4.6 Bacchian shift to A major
Although the opera is conceived in three scenes, only the last scene – the transformation
scene – is designated as such in the published score (as iii. Szene). True, this final scene is
the most self-contained, separated from the preceding by a C♯ tremolo, yet it still
depends upon sonic memory of Scene 1 (Ariadne’s scene, revolving around her B♭
major) and Scene 2 (the commedia’s scene, moving between F and D major). The
great mastery of this final scene is the way in which both poet and composer skillfully
pace the events (in four subdivisions) leading up to the transformation. Section 1 (the
space belonging to the nymphs) heralds the arrival of Bacchus, who is disoriented in his
new surroundings. In Section 2 (Ariadne’s space), she accepts the fact that “Hermes” (in
fact, Bacchus) has come to fetch her (“It is the beautiful god of peace. I welcome you,
you herald of death!” [Es ist der schöne stille Gott! Ich grüße dich, du Bote aller Boten!]).
In Section 3 (Bacchus’s space) he realizes his own godhead (“Am I not a god, created by a
god?” [Bin ich ein Gott, schuf mich ein Gott]), and in Section 4 he and Ariadne are
mutually (allomatically) transformed.
The harmonic pacing is no less ingenious. Indeed, the initial, sudden move down a
semitone (from D to C♯/D♭) that begins Scene 3 poses a potential problem: how does
one articulate the tonality of transformation (suggesting this scene’s uniqueness),
yet indicate that transformation has not yet occurred? Space does not permit a full
discussion, though a few strategies are worthy of mention (see the above chart of
Scene 3). A sudden change in tempo (Sehr schnell) and timbre (tremolo) marks the abrupt
semitone drop to C♯ that opens Scene 3. This first section, articulated by the trio of
nymphs, often breaks out briefly into A major, suggesting that this opening is more
about Bacchus than anyone else. Indeed, the shift to A occurs at the very moment the
nymphs utter his name (see Ex. 4.6 above).
4.7a Nymphs, “Töne, töne”
4.7b Schubert’s Wiegenlied
At rehearsal number 200 the nymphs shift to Bacchus’s secondary tonic, E major
(which Strauss later uses as a Bacchian signifier in Daphne). But Bacchus, who escaped
the sorceress Circe on the island of Aeaea (where he might have been turned into an
animal), remains an untransformed demigod, according to one of the nymphs (Dryade):
Freed from [Circe’s] encircling arms,
Pale and wondering, undefiled,
Not yet transformed nor enslaved,
A young god stands before her!
[Aus den Armen ihr entwunden

Blaß und staunend, ohne Spott –
Nich verwandelt, nicht gebunden
Steht vor ihr ein junger Gott!]
Here Strauss temporarily returns to C major, the pure harmony of the everyday
prologue and a semitone removed from D♭, though, unlike in the preceding Scene 2,
from below.
The nymphs, whose purpose is to bring Bacchus and Ariadne together, not only
suggest Bacchus’s purity but also offer the promise of his transformation. In the
beautiful “Töne, töne, süße Stimme” – a trio based on Schubert’s Wiegenlied, “Schlafe,
schlafe, holder süßer Knabe” (Ex. 4.7) – that sense of promise is achieved by establishing
D♭ even while avoiding almost all root-position tonics.
Any dream of transformation so soon in the process of Scene 3 is shattered by the
Bacchian breakthrough in A (“Doch da ich unverwandelt”), prepared for by Example 4.6.
But a reprise of the Schubertian trio finds a more appealing tonality (now in root
position), that of Ariadne’s B♭ major from Scene 1 of the opera; Bacchus is lured into
her tonal and physical realm, but not without creating fear and confusion. She imagines
she has seen Theseus (see transition i), and the harmonic instability – the sonic signifier
for her confusion – is not resolved until the end of that first transition, on V/B♭. She now
4.8 Ariadne surrenders to “Hermes”-Bacchus
believes her visitor to be Hermes, the messenger god who would take her to the
underworld. Her serene acceptance of death is the most poignant moment in Scene 3,
a moment of unprecedented harmonic relaxation with brief thematic allusions to her
first scene, culminating in the moment where Ariadne believes she is surrendering to
Hermes (Ex. 4.8).
Strauss negates her delusion, however, taking us as far away from B♭ major as he can,
via a semitone or a tritone (A or E). Here Bacchus (in Scene 3, Section 3) attains a
moment of self-discovery: “I am a god, a god created me” (Bin ich ein Gott, schuf mich
ein Gott).
Finally the process of transformation (Scene 3, transition ii) is about to take place, and
Strauss is entirely at one with Hofmannsthal’s intentions as Ariadne expresses her
bewilderment: “Is there no passage [across]? Are we already there?” (Gibt es kein
Hinüber? Sind wir schon da?). She now exists between two worlds, speaking of a higher
realm yet grounded in C major. But before the final transformation can occur, Bacchus
must recognize his own divinity, and at the end of transition ii Strauss asserts A major
one last time as Bacchus sings, “My godhead wakes in me through you” (Der Sinn des
Gottes ist wach in mir). The composer goes to great pains through either semitone or
tritonal relationships to suggest just how far apart these two principal characters are, but
all those tensions finally resolve through the power of the transformational tonality, D♭
major, which is sustained over a remarkably long period of time, indeed, throughout the
final, fourth section.
In the original 1912 version of Ariadne there is a codetta to that fourth section, one that
undermines the dramatic resolution in transformation, which, as noted earlier, turns out
to be mere illusion. Thus the work ends not in D♭ but in C, requiring an amendment to
the above layout of Section 4:
Bacchus/Trio/Ariadne Zerbinetta Ariadne/Bacchus Zerbinetta Jourdain

D♭ D♭ (D) D♭ D C
This ending is remarkably different. Here the aura of Molière and divertissement returns,
and irony trumps what Hofmannsthal called “the heroic,” a process of undercutting the
“dramatic” by means of semitones: the framing D major above and the prosaic C major
below. It is easy to see how Strauss might otherwise have delighted in such a practice;
musical irony was his stock-in-trade. But he was also a practical man of the theater, and
he wanted a piece that would become part of the operatic repertoire. Thus, in the
revision process his focus was all on clarity, for he knew full well that there was plenty of
residual ambivalence even in the revised version.
Taken together, the first and second versions of Ariadne auf Naxos embody trans-
formation on various levels: from the allomatic Verwandlung of Bacchus and Ariadne on
the narrative plane and then, conceptually, from the thirty-minute divertissement trans-
formed into a one-act opera, at once stylized and human. In 1919 Hofmannsthal
remarked that the opera’s greatest strength was rooted in that Bavarian-Austrian
tradition of mixed elements (heroic mythology, French baroque, commedia dell’arte,
and – as it relates to Ottonie von Degenfeld – the contemporary human condition) all
fused together in music.32 Although neither poet nor composer entirely agreed on
32
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (12 February 1919), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 324.
Ariadne and its meanings, they nevertheless created their finest mythological opera, a
work where music and text integrate as in no other Strauss opera. It is a remarkable
amalgam of style and substance, tragedy and comedy, economy and surfeit, all held
together by a phantasmagoric sonic surface unsurpassed by any of his subsequent
operas.
Hofmannsthal once reminded Strauss that opera had always been a Gesamtkunstwerk;
Wagner had simply revisited a concept that was as old as opera itself: “since its glorious
beginning, since the 17th century and by the terms of its fundamental purpose: the rebirth
of the Gesamtkunstwerk of antiquity.”33 Indeed, Hofmannsthal believed that Wagner’s
project was less a renewal than a deformation of the original concept of a meta-art
through synthesis, and that the modern response should be its very opposite: set
numbers instead of “endless melody,” disunities instead of a totality, Greek myth instead
of Teutonic legend, and, by extension, a Latin response to the Germanic impulse. These
separations of the arts – prose, acting, singing, and dancing – foreshadowed another
response to Wagner several years later: Igor Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat (1919).
By returning to antiquity, yet in a way far removed from the dark tragedy of Elektra,
Hofmannsthal created his first opera libretto, with musical gestures, ensembles, modes
of singing, and the like built into the text. So sure and specific was Hofmannsthal about
the relationship between words and music that he added numerous annotations about
music in the margins of his manuscript to help guide the composer, who responded
positively and directly. From 1911 to 1916, Ariadne, in its various manifestations, was a
long and painful collaborative process of learning and revising, but it bore fruit
containing the seeds of future operatic collaborations. Hofmannsthal had learned the
craft of writing a libretto, and he had hit upon a theme that preoccupied poet and
composer alike for the next decade: not Wagnerian redemption, but rather a trans-
formation through love made manifest in marital relationships. Strauss’s next three
operas, Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, and Die ägyptische Helena, form a triptych of
marriage operas with libretti by Hofmannsthal, flanked by an autobiographical opera
domestica (Intermezzo) written by the composer himself.
33
Ibid.
5 The marriage operas: Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo,
and Die ägyptische Helena
And three become one: work, deed and “What could be more serious than married life,”
child. – Hofmannsthal, Book of Friends
Richard Strauss once remarked about Symphonia
(1922) domestica; “marriage is the most profound event in
life and the spiritual joy is heightened by the arrival
of a child of such a union.”1 On the surface the marriage remark appears to be a pointed
defense of his 1904 “domestic symphony,” criticized by a press who saw the sacred art
of music desecrated in a cinematic celebration of everyday family life. Strauss, of
course, was quite serious: his preoccupation with marriage and fidelity – with domestic
relationships – formed a continuous thread throughout his mature career, and it
represented yet another artistic bond between him and Hofmannsthal.
Although it may not have been his original intent, Strauss created a triptych of marriage
operas following Ariadne auf Naxos: beginning with Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), continu-
ing with Intermezzo (1924), and completed with the composition of Die ägyptische Helena
(1928). The bookend opera libretti were written by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, while the
centerpiece was an autobiographical sex comedy with text by Strauss himself. Despite
their differing approaches (fairy tale, comedy, and mythology), these operas share a focus
on the human intricacies of marriage. Die Frau ohne Schatten explores marriage on
metaphysical and human levels; Intermezzo uses the topic of fidelity as material for
bourgeois comedy; and Die ägyptische Helena delves into the symbolic implications of
the marital bond through the perspective of classical mythology. The plot of Ariadne auf
Naxos may evolve to the betrothal of Ariadne and Bacchus, but its intent was never to
explore what that matrimonial bond might have become. That sense of becoming, in the
worldview of Hofmannsthal and Strauss, has partly to do with the elevating phenomenon
of a child, born or unborn, who plays a small part but a large role in all three operas.
In his Buch der Freunde (Book of Friends, 1917–22), Hofmannsthal asserts that through
children, marriage reaches a “palingenesis” and thus eternity; a link is forged between
past and future, recollection and hope: “As children we participate in the memories of
our grandparents; in old age we take part in the hopes of our grandchildren. The
individual spans five generations or 100 to 125 years.”2
1
Quoted in Hermann Unger, Lebendige Musik in zwei Jahrtausenden: Musikgeschichte in Selbstzeugnissen
(Cologne: Staufen-Verlag Edmund Bercker, 1940), p. 305.
2
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gesammelte Werke: Reden und Aufsaetze iii, Aufzeichnungen, ed.
Bernd Schoeller and Ingebirg Beyer-Ahlert (Frankfurt: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), p. 235.
152
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, Die ägyptische Helena 153
This connection between generations relates directly to the song of the night watch-
men at the end of Act i of Die Frau ohne Schatten:
You husbands and wives, who lie in each others’ loving arms,
you are the bridge, across the gulf
Over which the dead come back to life!
Hallowed be thy work of love!3
[Ihr Gatten, die ihr liebend euch in Armen liegt,

ihr seid die Brücke, überm Abgrund ausgespannt,
auf der die Toten widerum ins Leben gehn!
Geheiligt sei eurer Liebe Werk!]
All three of these marriage operas premiered after the First World War, and in retrospect
we may see in the stage works – with their focus on the potentially mundane world of
domestic relationships – another Straussian response to outdated Wagnerism. Adorno was
one of the earliest to proclaim how the marital institution had been given “bad press” by
Wagner.4 Wotan/Wagner (the “bourgeois terrorist”) contemptuously consigns Hunding
(“the primordial husband”) to the underworld with a mere wave of his hand: “Geh’ hin,
Knecht! Kniee vor Fricka” (Be off, slave! Kneel before Fricka [the goddess of marriage]).
For Wagner there was no place for lasting marriage in a world where metaphysical
love broke all boundaries. In his essay “The Social Character,” Adorno points to the void
between the sexual and the ascetic, two opposite poles that can be reconciled only
through death. Parsifal, Tristan, Tannhäuser, Siegmund, Siegfried, Lohengrin, the
Dutchman – none can marry or (in Lohengrin’s case) stay married. Those who are
betrothed – such as Wotan and Fricka, King Mark and Isolde, Siegfried and Gutrune –
live in a state of what we would now call marital dysfunction. Outside of the domestic
contract Wagner offered the promise of highest bliss, an alternative world, to a
bourgeois audience suffering from the ennui of middle-class, routine family life.5
And thus Strauss shocked his critics and audiences with a symphony on that very
banal family life, debunking this sacred German genre by removing its metaphysical
aura, which the composer believed had become moribund in a modern world. Idealized,
romantic notions of das Ewig-Weibliche – as well as its turn-of-the-century inversion, the
femme fatale – no longer interested Strauss, who never returned to such constructs after
Elektra. Strauss recognized in Wagner an inability to reconcile passion and fidelity.
Beginning with Ariadne auf Naxos, that reconciliation became the younger composer’s
life goal. Wagner was the first major German composer for whom the dual personae of
3
English translation taken from Decca CD 436 243 2 (1992) with Georg Solti and the Vienna
Philharmonic.
4
Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 17.
5
By this yardstick we recognize a strong Wagnerism in Strauss’s first opera, Guntram.
154 Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, Die ägyptische Helena
bourgeois and artist were in constant conflict, as they would be for a generation of
composers to follow. Strauss separated himself from this conflict, judging this late
romantic opposition unfeasible for the twentieth century and embracing the bourgeoisie
of a new generation.
One could argue that the subject of marriage may be found in nearly all of
Hofmannsthal’s libretti: beyond the betrothal of Ariadne and Bacchus, there is the
ill-fated wedding engagement between Ochs and Sophie as well as the unhappy
marriage of the Marschallin and the Feldmarschall, who plays no role in the actual
drama. The proposed double wedding (for Arabella and her sister, Zdenka) at the end of
Arabella no doubt makes for an effective final curtain. Yet most of these works deal with
the promise of marriage, not the actual state of matrimony, with its tests and ordeals
and – equally important for Hofmannsthal and Strauss – its transformation from
husband and wife to father and mother.
If in Ariadne Hofmannsthal had found in transformation a potent, long-standing
theme for Strauss, he did so as well with respect to the birth of a child as a central
component of marriage, “elevating” it, as Strauss called it with respect to Symphonia
domestica and by extension Intermezzo.6 This controversial autobiographical comedy and
prototype of the Zeitoper throws the vicissitudes of married life into high relief with its
topical, prosaic qualities, yet the two side panels of this triptych are no less concerned
with the state of modern marriage beneath the symbolic or mythological surfaces. The
troubling topics, at once eternal and topical, are for all to see with such issues as
infidelity, mistrust, vanity, impotence, infertility, separation or divorce, and – in Die
Frau ohne Schatten and Die ägyptische Helena – even spousal abuse.
Poet and composer, in their mutual exploration of a subject that seems at first glance
so banal, articulated a theme with far larger ramifications. Indeed, it seems to have
connected other post-First World War German modernist directions, such as
Schoenberg and “the new music” (Neue Musik) as well as Weill, Hindemith, and Neue
Sachlichkeit, among others. The larger question, which gained significant resonance after
the war, was the very nature of the modern human being in a new postwar age of
technology and sociopolitical turbulence, where death, dismemberment, and destruc-
tion had to be dealt with daily.
Hermann Bahr, a friend of both Strauss and Hofmannsthal whose wife had premiered
the role of Klytämnestra in Vienna, dedicated a play to Strauss entitled Das Konzert (1909).7
The play anticipates important characteristics found in the later Intermezzo: a world-touring
musician and his wife and issues of fidelity and trust as they spend time apart. But it also
foreshadows other works, such as Hindemith’s Neues vom Tage and Schoenberg’s Von heute
6
Thus, the main theme of Symphonia domestica is that of the child.
7
Bahr, a writer and critic, was an important figure in Jung Wien and in 1890 may have been the first
to use the term “modernism” with respect to this literature in his Zur Kritik der Moderne (1890).
Die Frau ohne Schatten 155
auf morgen, in its investigation of modern marriage as well as sex and gender roles in
contemporary society. In the final line of Schoenberg’s domestic comedy, the child asks his
parents, who have just reconciled their rocky marriage: “Mama, what are modern people?”
(Mama, was sind die modernen Menschen?). This question, directly posed in Intermezzo, is
no less potent in the two operas that flank it.
The role of Strauss and his wife, Pauline, as models projected upon this topic is
openly admitted with regard to Die Frau ohne Schatten and Intermezzo, and it is safe to
assume Pauline played an important role in the shaping of Die ägyptische Helena as well.
Strauss once suggested that he could write ten operas about his wife.8 Helen, the mortal
wife, held an attraction for Strauss because she was “not satisfied to regain her husband’s
affection with the aid of [magic] but . . . after renewed tragic doubts and experiences . . .
insist[ed], in the second act, on winning . . . solely by the divine power of her beauty and
by her own strength.”9 The fact that Pauline could be the source for such different sonic
worlds is a tribute both to Strauss’s protean attributes and to his deep personal and
artistic connection to her.
DIE FRAU OHNE SCHATTEN
Of the three operas, Die Frau ohne Schatten stands out, with its narrative structuring
around two different marriages straddling three worlds: the invisible spiritual realm of
Keikobad, the glittering semimortal kingdom of the emperor, and the noisy, prosaic,
human world of Barak and his loved ones. The empress “stands between two worlds,”
according to Hofmannsthal, “not released by one, not accepted by the other.” Daughter
of the omniscient Keikobad, the empress was captured by the emperor while she was in
the form of a gazelle. She has no human relationship with her husband and is little more
than a trophy (his “prey of all prey”), a sexual object, as is made clear by the nurse:
At first light
he slips from her,
when the stars appear
he is there again.
His nights are her day,
his days are her night.
[Im ersten Dämmer

schleicht er von ihr,
wenn Sterne einfallen,
ist er wieder da!
8
Strauss to Bahr (12 July 1917), in Meister und Meisterbriefe um Hermann Bahr, ed. Joseph Gregor
(Vienna: H. Bauer Verlag, 1947), p. 102.
9
Seine Nächte sind ihr Tag,

seine Tage sind ihre Nacht.]
The immortal world of the empress is one of constant bliss, yet it lacks human passion.
In order to attain mortality – that is, to give and receive human love – she must accept
the totality of the human condition: pain, death, and sacrifice. In short, in order to feel
the fire of human passion, she must accept life’s shadow, and ultimately life’s risks. The
empress, whose heart is as pure yet as transparent as crystal, ultimately refuses to take
the shadow – that is, the humanity – from the mortal Barak’s wife, thus putting the
emperor’s life at risk. Yet through that leap of faith, which recalls Ariadne’s own risk
taking, she attains a shadow of her own.
The comparison between Pauline Strauss and the dyer’s wife rings true, for despite
her earlier, independent fame as a singer, she had increasingly become known as the
composer’s wife. The dyer’s wife, who – out of frustration and vanity – would give her
shadow to the empress, wants more than mere marriage to Barak, the cloth dyer. She
wants an identity beyond her marriage; unlike her husband, she has no name. In their
different ways, the empress and the dyer’s wife learn something that Elektra could never
know: that in order to attain humanity, one must admit a responsibility to the past,
present, and future of humanity.
Genesis and meaning
As early as Hofmannsthal’s first sketch of 25 February 1911 (just a month after the
Rosenkavalier Dresden premiere), we find Strauss’s wife as the center of his plan for Die
Frau ohne Schatten.
First idea (Die Frau ohne Schatten)
Fantastic-comic opera in the style of Gozzi.
In the center a bizarre figure such as Strauss’s wife. The woman without a shadow. The
woman who sacrificed her children in order to remain beautiful (and to maintain her
voice). At the end the genies bring the woman the child, which floats down the river in a tiny
golden sarcophagus.
(look up Gozzi.)
The elements of The Magic Flute: Boys. Priests. Ladies of the Queen of the Night. Animals.
Torches. Entrance to the temple.
On an island? Or: on a river, analogous to the situation in Goethe’s fairy tales.
Envy of all beings who cast a shadow. The shadow of a circling hawk. Bizarre hatred against
good-natured man.
The woman a queen from Serendibe. Doubly divided worlds of gods and demons.
The next day he augmented his sketch:

Die Frau ohne Schatten fantastic opera
Smeraldine – Harlequin
She wants to remain beautiful. He is awkward and good. She gives away her child to a
wicked fairy disguised as a fishmonger. (The shadow as an addition) The empress, a fairy’s
daughter, has lost her child. For her the soul of the child is in the birds, flowers. Someone
procures for her the lost child. Finally she gives it back to the rightful mother. – Who
transcends herself.
[A scene where both women face each other, separated by water.]
[The torch ship of the fairy empress.] Solomon’s judgment.10
In these two back-to-back rough sketches we see nearly all of the essential thematic
sources of this opera that would preoccupy poet and librettist over the next six years:
1. Marital crisis: modern (dissatisfied wife; naïve, good-natured husband) and meta-
physical (a fairy empress without a child).
2. The world of fairy tale through various sources, especially Gozzi and the 1001 Nights.
3. The Magic Flute, not only through the images of dark and light, the temple, and the
like, but also with analogous characters, though the narrative weight differs sharply
from character to character: Sarastro/Keikobad, Queen of the Night/nurse, Pamina/
empress, Tamino/emperor, Papageno/Barak, and Papagena/Barak’s wife.
4. Goethe, in terms of both his sequel to The Magic Flute – where Tamino and Pamina
receive their child in a little golden casket floating down a river – and his poetic
fragment Die Geheimnisse, cited in the above sketch (“Who transcends herself”),11 and
Faust, especially the nurse as a kind of Mephistopheles.
5. Commedia dell’arte – Harlequin (Barak) and Smeraldine (his wife) – which would
ultimately manifest itself in Ariadne auf Naxos, an operatic subject occupying
Hofmannsthal’s poetic imagination at the same time.
6. The Hebrew Bible, 1 Kings 3 (Solomon’s judgment), and, more generally, the New
Testament with regard to Barak (“the blessed one”) who provides for all, is referred
to by all as “father,” and through suffering attains transcendence.
All of Hofmannsthal’s libretti stand out in their wide-ranging eclecticism, in terms either
of source material or of what is intended for the stage, such as Ariadne auf Naxos. But the
rich, even dizzying amalgam of literary references (Goethe, Mozart, Gozzi, Goldoni, The
10
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, 25.1, Operndichtungen 3.1, ed. Hans-Albrecht Koch
(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1998), pp. 178–9.
11
The line from Goethe is “Humanity frees itself from the law that constrains all existence by
transcending itself” (Von der Gewalt, die alle Wesen bindet, / Befreit der Mensch sich, der sich es
überwindet), from his late, unfinished Die Geheimnisse.
Stone Heart, 1001 Arabian Nights, and even the Bible) in Die Frau ohne Schatten is unique
even for Hofmannsthal, and the process of going from a variety of detail to synthesis and
from there to actual dialogue took four years, from the first ideas in 1911 until the final
draft of Act iii in 1915. Strauss did not complete the final score until the summer of 1917.
There is, indeed, another source that Hofmannsthal fails to credit, and that is the
equation between shadow bearing and childbearing; this final aspect tells us much about
the formation of the dyer’s wife. According to a ballad by Nicholas von Lenau called
“Anna” (1838), a pretty young woman suffers from extreme narcissism and vanity.12 She
is afraid of losing all her good looks to childbearing. An old woman (who turns out to be
a sorceress), against her better judgment, tells her how to avoid bearing a child. At the
first suspicion of pregnancy she must return to the old woman: “Come back and get a
final glimpse of your reflection.” If a man should come to court her, she must first rush
to the old lady, who will protect her from childbirth. She complies with the old woman.
When she does finally marry, the husband notices that she casts no shadow, and he
throws her out of the house.
Owing to circumstances creative, biographical, and historical, the gestation period of
Die Frau ohne Schatten was longer than that of any other opera by Strauss – so long that
it is difficult to remember that the work was originally intended to follow Der
Rosenkavalier, which premiered in 1911. Between that premiere and the completion of
Die Frau ohne Schatten, Strauss composed four major works: Ariadne auf Naxos (1912/16),
Die deutsche Motette (1913), Josephs-Legende (1914), and Eine Alpensinfonie (1915).
A first reading of the libretto can be a confusing, even exasperating experience:
magical water, enchanted fish, a singing falcon, unborn children. Both poet and
composer realized that they were creating their most grandiose project yet: its three
acts, eight scenes, and seven symphonic transitions prefigure the cinematic interludes of
Intermezzo. Despite all this complexity, the central themes are lucid and consistent
throughout the musical score. Hofmannsthal’s high-flown ideas may go beyond the
boundaries of the typical libretto, but they are not to be dismissed; in fact, they have
their roots in baroque theater, with all its machinery, scene changes, and heightened
gestures. Remarkably, Hofmannsthal did not begin writing the libretto for nearly two
years. Knowing Strauss’s impatience, he kept his project alive in the composer’s mind
through personal meetings and, more important, in letters. The insightful exchanges
between Strauss and Hofmannsthal in their correspondence compellingly reinforce and
clarify the poet’s main points.
The first source for the opera is not mentioned in Hofmannsthal’s early sketches of
February 1911; a month before he was at work on the scenario for The Stone Heart, an
opera to be based on the theme of a “heart that beats and a heart that is frozen” in which
a poor man of the woods exchanges his heart for one made of stone in order to acquire
12
Lenau’s “dramatic poem” Don Juan had inspired Strauss’s tone poem of the same name.
wealth and power; by the end, he begs that his heart – his humanity – be returned. This
theme of acquiring and losing one’s humanity ultimately would find its way into Die
Frau ohne Schatten, though Hofmannsthal never considered this folk tale a direct source
for the later fairy tale.
Hofmannsthal informed Strauss that he had shelved The Stone Heart on 20 March 1911,
and in the same letter he stated his interest in a “brighter and more joyous” undertaking:
a magic fairy tale with two men confronting two women, and for one of the women your wife
might well, in all discretion, be taken as a model . . . she is a bizarre woman with a very
beautiful soul, au fond; strange, moody, domineering and yet at the same time likeable; she
would in fact be the principal character and the whole thing a many-colored spectacle with
palace, hut, priests, boats, torches, tunnels through the rock, choruses, children.13
In linking the dyer’s wife with Strauss’s own, Hofmannsthal located the composer’s
chief inspiration, the creative source for Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben, and Symphonia
domestica. Strauss was ecstatic, though cautious, as he broke the news to Pauline in
April 1911: “[Die Frau ohne Schatten] is the most beautiful of the beautiful . . . You’ll see! As
for you being portrayed, you need not have any anxiety: he successfully took up a few
very general, fleeting suggestions from me.”14 As a composer who savored contrast, he
was not at all daunted by the grandiosity of design, or by the mercurial complexities of
dialogue, staging, and lighting. Indeed, Strauss was swiftly seduced by Hofmannsthal’s
fantastic plan and within weeks was burning with impatience.
But none of these wide-ranging details had coalesced well enough in the poet’s mind
(“the profound had yet to come to the surface”), and by mid-May 1911, with Strauss
needing his summer project, Hofmannsthal moved on to Ariadne auf Naxos, which
Strauss began composing over the summer. He completed the final score in April 1912
and knew not to press his librettist further, for he recognized that Hofmannsthal had not
yet written a word of the Frau libretto. Hofmannsthal was, however, entirely immersed
in that world of the Near and Far East and in June fed Strauss’s creative appetite with a
scenario for a ballet to be realized by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with Vaslav Nijinsky in
the title role and choreography by Mikhail Fokine.
Josephs-Legende takes its subject from the book of Genesis with the story of the
handsome young Joseph, sold as a household slave to the wealthy Egyptian Potiphar,
whose wife tries in vain to seduce him. Joseph’s firm refusal is to no avail, for in the end
she falsely accuses him of raping her, and he is sent to prison. But the faithful Joseph is
finally rewarded when an archangel appears, his chains fall away, and Potiphar’s wife
strangles herself with her pearl necklace. Although Strauss was not drawn to biblical
subjects, he relished seeing the Ballets Russes in Berlin and was excited by the prospect
13
14
Grasberger, Eine Welt in Briefe, pp. 190–1.
of writing ballet music for Nijinsky. The sonic extravagance of Josephs-Legende recalls
Salome, as does the erotic conflict between the chaste Joseph and the sensual femme fatale,
Potiphar’s wife. The score (especially the combination of harp, celesta, and triple-divisi
first violins) often prefigures certain exotic moments in Die Frau ohne Schatten, such as
the moments when the apparition of the Joseph-like young man appears before the
dyer’s wife.
Die Frau ohne Schatten was still Hofmannsthal’s main preoccupation, and by the
summer of 1912 he had turned over the job of writing the Joseph scenario to his friend
Harry Graf Kessler. On 8 September 1912, with Strauss immersed in Josephs-Legende,
Hofmannsthal declared that the libretto, as a unified whole, had “taken a powerful hold
on my mind,” and though he believed he had fully grasped the subject in its every detail
and was on the verge of writing a first act, he failed to do so. Four months later, in
January 1913, he again wrote to Strauss that he had made “decisive progress,” inspired by
Goethe’s concept of the ideal opera as “significant situations in [an] artificially arranged
sequence”:
There are eleven significant situations, almost pantomimically incisive situations, but it is their
combination – in which two worlds, two pairs of beings, two interwoven conflicts take their
turn, reflect each other, enhance each other and eventually find their equilibrium – which
gives unity to the whole work . . . through music it will receive its final consummation,
through music it will merge both worlds.15
Hofmannsthal’s confidence in his project and his assurances that he was fully in control
of his material were remarkable given that he had not yet written any text, and without
text little of this meant anything of substance for a practical composer. Strauss’s wife
came up with a solution unique in the Strauss–Hofmannsthal collaboration: a working
holiday, more specifically a chauffeured Italian road trip from Verona to Bologna and
then down to Rome, from 30 March through 8 April 1913. The scenery and sunny climate
catalyzed Hofmannsthal’s creativity, and the extended artistic companionship fulfilled
Strauss’s artistic needs; this journey marked the only time in their collaboration that they
spent more than a few days together.
The artistic retreat exceeded their expectations, especially those of Hofmannsthal, who
wrote to his father that Strauss was one of the most charming travel companions he had
ever known. The decisive date was 5 April, when Hofmannsthal narrated – for the first
time – the scenario from start to finish, and the composer was ecstatic about a project
“unbelievably noble, great, ripe and interesting, with magnificent dramatic, moral prob-
lems, [and] marvelous scenic events.” Strauss added that if he could maintain “the strength
and health to complete this work, it will be our most beautiful sublime work.”16
15
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (20 January 1913), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 154.
16
Strauss to his wife (5 April 1913), in Grasberger, Eine Welt in Briefe, p. 205.
But that date was far more crucial for Hofmannsthal, for, as impressed as Strauss was
finally to have the whole work laid out in front of him, he still had no libretto as he
headed into the vital summer months of creative working time. Hofmannsthal urged
patience, saying that he was working assiduously on the first scene (Act ia), and to prove
that concrete pen-to-paper work was taking place he sent Strauss some lines of the nurse
as she and the empress are about to descend to the human world:
A day breaks,
a human day.
Can you smell it?
Doesn’t it make you shiver?
That is their sun,
with which they cast shadows!
[Ein Tag bricht an,

ein Menschentag.
Witterst du ihn?
Schaudert’s dich schon?
Das ist ihre Sonne:
der werfen sie Schatten!]
In that same letter he tried to create for Strauss a sense of sonic spheres: the Ariadne
chamber orchestra for the spirit world and the full orchestra for the earthly one – from
the transparent to the dark and even opaque.
Those lines of the nurse were all Strauss got for the time being, and over the summer
he finished his Deutsche Motette and worked on Josephs-Legende as well as sketches for
Alpensinfonie. During this period Hofmannsthal struggled with the first scene, with the
transition from grand narrative to real dialogue, and his Christmas present of Act ia (the
opening scene in the emperor’s domain) was delayed, becoming instead a “little New
Year’s Gift.” Strauss began composing immediately and with great speed, making some
minor cuts with the poet’s approval, and on 5 April 1914, exactly a year after
Hofmannsthal’s scenario narration in Italy, he sent Strauss the balance of Act i – the
lengthier second and final scene.
Hofmannsthal was encouraged by Strauss’s enthusiasm, especially with the link
between the dyer’s wife and his own, but the poet cautioned the composer that though
Barak and his wife are the stronger characters in the layout of the story, the empress is
the main spiritual figure. This humanistic fairy tale is about her fate, the engine of the
overarching plot, which moves from purgatory to heaven. Unless Strauss understood
that Die Frau ohne Schatten was an elaborate Bildungsoper for a female character who may
not have the biggest part – yet who, like the Marschallin, plays the central role – he could
not properly compose Act iii. Her attainment of humanity through denial or nonaction,
by refusing to take the dyer’s wife’s shadow, is taken – with important differences – from
Schopenhauer’s idea of “compassion” (Mitleid) and had had its first complete operatic
manifestation in Act ii of Parsifal.17
As late as July 1914 – after he had given Strauss the text for Act ii and had begun work
on Act iii– Hofmannsthal was still not convinced that the composer had comprehended
the empress’s centrality to the plot: “She has not a great deal to say and yet is the most
important figure in the opera . . . she – not the other one – is the real woman without a
shadow.” Hofmannsthal remained convinced that if Strauss did not capture her as a
three-dimensional character (“sensual and at the same time spiritual”), the third act was
doomed. If Act i was the exposition, then the second act was “tying the knot,” followed
by a third act “soaring from darkness to light.”
If the empress was the central character for Hofmannsthal, then the Frau was not far
behind. Indeed, if one accepts the parallels to The Magic Flute, the remarkable contrasts
illuminate the poet’s meaning, for the gender pairings do not match; in fact, they are
reversed. Mozart’s opera centers on Tamino and his comic counterpart, Papageno, who
go through a kind of Bildungprozess, while Pamina and Papagena (the latter nothing
more than a foil for Papageno) remain passive. Hofmannsthal, as he had done in all
previous operas, focuses on the women, for it is the empress and the dyer’s wife who
undergo the tests. The emperor, despite his manly hunter persona, remains weak and
unreflective; his main act is that of being turned to stone, then being released. Barak,
despite all his goodness and humanity, remains remarkably naïve throughout the opera:
clumsy, unaware, and easily fooled. A man who wishes nothing more than to please
others, it is only through his own suffering that he attains transcendence.
Hofmannsthal’s July letter, which clarified the opera’s main roles, marked a turning
point for the composer, who did not write to Hofmannsthal again until 8 October, when
he had finished sketching the first four scenes of Act ii; he completed the remainder of
the act by the end of the month. Strauss’s creative breakthrough was short-lived, for
with the outbreak of the First World War, Hofmannsthal – already an officer in the
Austrian Reserve – was recalled to duty. Although he had embarked on Act iii with the
certainty of real progress, he had to postpone his work, and it was not until January of
the next year that he was able to resume writing, finishing the final act in mid-April 1915.
Strauss, frustrated with his abundance of time and want of text, created a short score of
Act ii during the six-month hiatus.
But Strauss was also pondering potential musical moments for Act iii, which, as a
scenario, he had fully digested; indeed, shortly after receiving Hofmannsthal’s third act,
he returned a detailed list of suggestions. In his letters to Strauss, Hofmannsthal
consistently stated that Act iii would be the shortest, the most mysterious and spiritual,
17
Of course, the idea of attainment of immortality through human reproduction runs entirely against
the grain of Schopenhauer’s “denial of the will.” This paradox is the product of Hofmannsthal’s unique
synthesis of reconciling Schopenhauer with sensuality. The empress embodies this synthesis.
and therefore the most radiant and musical. “The Empress is the principal character in
the spiritual sense,” Ernst Krause observed, “and her destiny is the leaven of the
whole.”18 The spiritual center is the “Solomonian moment” when the empress refuses
to take the wife’s shadow, though Strauss doubted that it would be effective unless there
was more space for music.
The third-act duet between Barak and his wife, the nurse’s exit aria, the emperor and
empress’s duet, and the final quartet all needed more text to make those important
lyrical moments work musically. Without music, the audience would be more baffled
than sympathetic, as Strauss later explained: “at the point where understanding fails,
music begins to come into its own.”19 A powerful duo between the emperor and the
empress (an emotional, human element) was critical to understanding the severity of
her choice – not just that she makes her decision because of the sufferings of Barak and
his wife, but that she fully knows the consequences for her husband. Hofmannsthal
ultimately complied, and the result is the shortest, yet most musically varied act of the
opera: instrumental solo, aria, duet, quartet, and even melodrama.
By the summer of 1915 Strauss, knowing how far behind schedule he was and that the
less productive conducting season was soon approaching, sketched Act iii in the
mornings and orchestrated Act i in the afternoons and evenings. Back in Berlin in
October, Strauss had composed enough of Act iii to play and sing it for Hofmannsthal
on 11 October. He scored Act ii over the winter of 1916, finishing in May, and then
proceeded to compose the third act throughout the summer until completion in August.
During the next concert season he orchestrated Act iii, putting together the final touches
on 24 June.
“The music comes into its own”: humanizing a libretto
As painful and protracted as the Ariadne auf Naxos project proved to be, the experience
benefited both poet and composer. Their experiment had taught Hofmannsthal how to
create space for music within the libretto and to rely on the composer’s ability to suggest
psychological nuances in that music. Admittedly Hofmannsthal got carried away with
the poetry of Act iii, but the spaces were already there in a dormant state and merely
needed expansion. Likewise, Strauss could now draw upon forces as immense and
dissonant as Elektra and as transparent and phantasmagorical as the chamber orchestra of
Ariadne, negotiating between these two sonic worlds.
Die Frau ohne Schatten remains Hofmannsthal and Strauss’s most extravagant opera.
Even now it is often performed without the full orchestral requirements, such as the
glass harmonica in Act iii. The sonic variety is far more easily experienced than
18 19
Krause, Richard Strauss: The Man and His Work, p. 399. Ibid., p. 398.
described as we move from the most diatonic music (the static D major pantomime
between Barak and his wife in Act i) to the most dissonant (Keikobad’s banishment of
the nurse), and from the loudest (at the end of Act ii) to pure silence (after the empress
rejects the wife’s shadow). Vocal and instrumental groups are equally diverse through-
out the three acts: symphonic interludes and chamber orchestra; extensive solos for
cello, violin, and bassoon; and arias, duets, trios, and quartets, as well as on- and offstage
choruses.
We can never know the degree to which Strauss may have perceived the various
sources of Hofmannsthal’s humanistic fairy tale. The same might be said of the intricate
symbols of water, fish, birds, and talisman. We know of this complicated amalgam only
through Hofmannsthal’s sketches, personal notes, letters to friends but – notably – not
his letters to Strauss, for whom the only artistic reality was his final score.
Although the poet’s eclectic sources were central to the genesis of the libretto, for the
most part they were no more important than those for Ariadne or Der Rosenkavalier.
Goethe, however, was an exception, especially as he related to the empress’s attainment
of humanity and the Mephistophelian qualities of the nurse. Strauss had his own wife as
a model for Barak’s wife and himself for Barak. Self-portrayal allowed Strauss to use
some familiar masks: good-natured, down-to-earth, a craftsman who enjoys working
with his hands.
Not since Elektra had Strauss reached such an advanced stage of musical develop-
ment in terms of technical craft, dramaturgical weight, and sustained seriousness of
purpose. And not since Elektra had the composer created such a dense and substantial
motivic network, now applied to a three-act opera. These motives are characterized
mostly by families (the spirit world, the emperor’s world, and the human world) of
strong rhythmic articulations and triadic contours. Strauss began his Frau ohne Schatten
as he had Elektra, with a motive based on the rhythm of a name, here Keikobad – a
character who, like Agamemnon, never appears onstage but hovers above all the
action in spirit form. The concise, pregnant three-note dotted rhythm (encompassing
a major third and a fourth) generates a host of motives associated with both the good
and the bad of his spirit realm. As with The Magic Flute, it is not clear at the beginning
what those boundaries are. Example 5.1 illustrates some of the important motives of
the spirit world.
With all the imagery supplied to him by Hofmannsthal, the great challenge for
Strauss lay in not giving in entirely to his technical brilliance, though, alas, there are
many moments of sonic indulgence. As a listener or as an analyst, there are stretches of
incredible music where there is enough motivic complexity to pull one into Strauss’s
vortex of what he himself called “nervousness counterpoint” (Nervenkontrapunkt), and
he even apologized for it. To take apart these intricate networks is not only beyond the
scope of this chapter but risks falling into the trap of laborious motivic description.
In a memoir, Strauss, for the first and only time, tried to ascribe the complexity of a
5.1a–d Die Frau ohne Schatten themes
musical score to “wartime worries,” which may have caused a certain “nervous
irritation” in the score.20
But surely another explanation was that Strauss was, at bottom, a pictorialist, and
Hofmannsthal’s verbal pictures were simply too much to resist. The landscapes, river-
scapes, and magic palaces interchange with cinematic quickness. The fountains, birds,
invisible spirits, unborn children, apparitions, jewels, and talismans found their way into
Strauss’s score with the same love of detail as in Salome. Yet, stripped of this surface
exoticism, Strauss’s deeper music goals are clear, and indeed, they are what make this
opera so moving.
Strauss’s primary concern with the nature of humanity versus inhumanity is directly
reflected by his musical choices in the score. The inhuman – the seemingly cold world of
the spirit – is musically restless, chromatic, dissonant, harmonically unstable, fragmen-
tary, and the melodies (when there are any) appear remarkably disjunct, presenting
great challenges to the singer. It follows quite naturally that the moments of humanity
are stable, placid, at times even static as Strauss explores diatonic sonic realms and
moments of moving lyricism.
Die Frau ohne Schatten is Strauss’s most ambitious work, unparalleled in its varied
harmonic plan, which is possibly the result of a tonal symbolism matching the literary
symbolism of its poet. If we strip the score to its most basic level – from opening curtain
to the final one – there is a general sense of steady progression from a bleak A♭ minor
(the opening Keikobad motive) to the brilliant, breathtaking C major finale of Act iii,
where Strauss tries to combine central aspects of all the motivic families in a grand
peroration.
What lies in between, harmonically, can be difficult to follow, because it parallels
Hofmannsthal’s description in the letter quoted earlier that Act i is the exposition, Act ii
20
the complication, and Act iii “from darkness to light.” That sense of light and its
relationship to C major has a long history in Strauss’s music: the theme of the Ideal in
Death and Transfiguration, Sun and World in Also sprach Zarathustra, and brilliant
catharsis at the end of Elektra. These roots go back as far as Haydn’s Creation and are
as recent as Schoenberg’s Gurre-Lieder. Strauss tried it again on this same vast level at the
end of Friedenstag, with an extensive choral finale that on various levels mimics
Beethoven’s Fidelio.
Act i: exposition
The expository first act, made up of only two scenes, takes us to all three realms of the
opera: the invisible spirit world, the middle imperial kingdom, and the everyday land of
humans. To say that the opening of the opera is in A♭ minor (despite a curious A♭ major
key signature) explains very little in this dark, slippery first segment. Yet we can find
clarity if we draw another comparison to the opening of Elektra, where the maids narrate
in a vague aura of D minor in the opening scene; in Frau the narration is set as a dialogue
between the nurse and the messenger. Strauss narrates musically in both situations by
unloading a host of referential motives and keys – what Adorno called, in Elektra,
stretches of tonally suspended music “controlled through tonal symbolism.”21
Hofmannsthal segments the act’s two scenes into several sections, which may be
outlined as follows:
Scene 1 (A flat roof overlooking the imperial gardens)
Section 1: Nurse and messenger
Section 2: Emperor (and nurse)
Section 3: Empress and nurse (and falcon)
Sec. 1 Sec. 2 Sec. 3
(a♭) E/E♭ F♯–E–D
Scene 2 (Barak’s hut)

Section 1: Barak, his wife, and his brothers
Section 2: Barak and his wife
Section 3a: Nurse, wife, and empress
Section 3b: Apparition (the above, plus Jüngling and servant girls)
Section 3c: same as 3a (plus, children’s voices)
Section 4: Barak, his wife, and watchmen
Sec. 1 Sec. 2 Sec. 3a Sec. 3b Sec. 3c Sec. 4
B♭ D/D♭ (B) B c A♭
21
Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born, June 11, 1864,” p. 30.
5.2a Act i, emperor as lover
5.2b Act i, emperor as hunter
Beyond the opening narration, which introduces the problem, Scene 1 focuses on the
emperor and even more on the empress. The emperor’s aria is Strauss’s most dazzling
for light Heldentenor, with its upward sweep, forward-propelled dotted rhythms, and
brilliant juxtaposition of E (as lover) and E♭ (as heroic hunter; see Exx. 5.2a and 5.2b).
Strauss casts the protean, perilike empress in the magical, transformative key of
F♯ major. Frozen in the guise of an empress, she has lost the talisman that allows her to
take the shape of an animal, human or otherwise. Strauss’s use of F♯ major in con-
junction with the phenomenon of transformation strongly foreshadows the moment of
Daphne’s transformation into the laurel tree, though in Die Frau ohne Schatten F♯ does
not play so central a tonal role.
The other and more far-reaching semitonal duality in Act i takes us to the human
level, more specifically to that of Barak and his wife. The duality is not one of polar
opposites but in fact represents two sides of the same coin: life as it exists (D major) and
in its idealized or transcendent form (D♭ major). “Let us, then, go down,” exclaims the
nurse; thereafter Strauss creates his first of many symphonic interludes, a powerful
symphonic journey below to the human world, beginning with a brilliant D major
fanfare in the trumpets. The semitonal bifurcation of D/D♭ (Ex. 5.3a) is the harmonic
core of Scene 2 and produces the seed for the great trial and transformation of Barak and
his wife in Act iii.
5.3a Act i, surface joy
This Act iii spousal duet (“Entrusted to you” [Mir anvertraut]), articulating the
moment when they finally realize their meaning for each other, is the most touching
duo in the entire opera (Ex. 5.3b).
The D major of Act iii refers not specifically to Barak and his wife, but rather more
generally to the “water of life,” which is offered to the empress at the expense of the
wife’s “life” (her ability to cast a shadow), which the empress refuses.
Act ii: complication
Although Act ii is segmented into five scenes, its dramaturgical focus is Barak’s hut,
which serves as the opening, midpoint, and end of the second curtain. The second
and fourth scenes are both hallucinatory, regretful soliloquies for the emperor and
empress, respectively, but they are secondary to the dramaturgical essence of this act:
the process of the nurse’s luring the dyer’s wife to relinquish her shadow by conjuring
up a sexual alternative to Barak, namely a magical vision of a youth ( Jüngling) “con-
sumed with desire.” By the end of the act the wife declares, as a fire flames up in the
hearth, that she has put her shadow up for sale; indeed, the wife casts no shadow. The
nurse orders the empress to take the shadow, but she hesitates. Barak, now seething
with rage, is on the brink of killing his wife with a sword that the wicked nurse
5.3b Act iii, deeper joy
has magically placed in his grasp. But just as he is about to strike, his wife exclaims,
“Barak, I have not done it, not yet!”
Scene 1: Barak’s hut
Scene 2: Outside the imperial falcon house
Scene 4: The empress’s bed inside the falcon house
Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3 Scene 4 Scene 5
C–D E♭ F b F–b♭ (G64C64 ) B♭
Thus, the outward tonal appearances of these dramaturgically structural scenes
appear to be quite simple: C (everyday), D (daily life), and F (Barak). But of course
this surface simplicity is a strong foil for the sinister magic that lies beneath. With the
phantasmagoric appearance of the youth, C major soon evaporates, merging effort-
lessly into the erotic E major, which vanishes just as quickly when the nurse covers
him up as Barak enters the hut. In Scene 3, as Barak is drugged to sleep in his own hut,
the apparition reappears, and the semitonal slip is just as easy.
The only tonal anomaly would seem to be the end of the act, with the abrupt shift to
the seemingly remote key of B♭ minor, but that too is integral to Strauss’s musical
narrative. If Act i, Scene 2, Section 1 (in B♭ major) suggests Barak and his community of
brothers, then at the end of Act ii – where the nurse’s witchcraft has inflicted its ultimate
damage on the wife, Barak, and the brothers – that community has been negated, split
apart to the point that Barak tries to kill his own wife. The earth swallows up Barak and
his wife, a river floods the hut and carries the nurse and the empress away on a magic
boat, and all await the judgment of Keikobad.
Act iii: “From darkness to light”
This final act consists of a series of tests for the two married couples, deliberately in the
spirit of The Magic Flute. The complication is over, and Hofmannsthal lays out, with
relative clarity, the point of the entire opera. Over the span of these final four scenes we
are no longer in the human world, but in the realm of the spirit.
Scene 1: An underground grotto
Scene 2: Outside Keikobad’s temple
Scene 3: Inside Keikobad’s temple
Scene 4: A beautiful landscape
Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3 Scene 4
f–D♭ f–D–D♭ (d) E♭–A G–C
Unlike in the preceding two acts, this final one is presented by Strauss with remarkable
tonal lucidity and symmetry as he draws an unambiguous line between the events of
Scenes 1–2 and 3–4. In the first two scenes the empress is still in thrall to the nurse, who
has led Barak and his wife down two separate, dark paths. Husband and wife (D♭ major)
call out to each other, but they cannot see; the empress is offered the wife’s shadow
through the water of life (D major), but she cannot extinguish the sound of their cries
and refuses it. The nurse has no more power and is banished from the spiritual kingdom
(D minor).
At this moment – the second half of Act iii – the empress reaches her turning point (a
classic dénouement) in a moment of unprecedented tonal stasis in E♭, which seems to
negate all the Nervenkontrapunkt and harmonic slipperiness that preceded it. She will go
before Keikobad and stand trial: she sees a vision of her husband turned to stone and still
refuses the water of life, even offering herself for him. The empress, like Ariadne before
her, risks death and attains a new life, a shadow, beautifully articulated by Strauss in a
cascade of falling gestures in the violins (Ex. 5.4).
The double allomatic transformation – the grand peroration – at the end of the
opera pushes away all previous harmonic tensions and ambiguities in favor of
C major, a white tonal canvas without key signatures, which had provided the neutral
background for the other shifting tonal areas throughout the score. Indeed, as if to
5.4 Act iii, empress attains her shadow
compensate for such ambiguity, Strauss offers a final section of nearly two hundred
bars of C major in an unremitting fashion that dwarfs even the coda of the finale of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In a single sonic gesture, large enough that few listeners
could fail to recognize it, the most malignant tonal-motivic formulation (“He will be
turned to stone” [Er wird zu Stein]) is rendered benign as it dissolves into a classic
Straussian six-four chord in C major (Ex. 5.5).
Strauss’s technique of rendering inhuman motives as benign – or, just as frequently,
“corrupting” human ones through harmonic-thematic manipulation – is a procedure he
learned from Wagner, especially as evidenced in Parsifal.
There is no doubt that Hofmannsthal’s libretto can be exasperating at times, what
with its magical waters, enchanted fish, singing falcon, disembodied children’s
voices, and the like. But the power of this richly textured work lies in the way in
which Strauss so often composed against the grain of Hofmannsthal’s libretto. With
self-confidence, even temerity, Strauss accepted the challenge of setting to music –
and making stageworthy – Hofmannsthal’s most complicated text, a grand, complex
fairy tale. Indeed, in a moment of frustration, Strauss confided to Hofmannsthal that
characters such as the emperor and the empress “can’t be filled with red corpuscles
in the same way as a Marschallin, an Octavian, or an Ochs.”22
But by looking into his own heart, he discovered the elusive flesh and blood he
needed by taking Hofmannsthal’s metaphysics of love and translating it into a palpable
human conflict. Strauss takes a high-minded libretto and tethers it compellingly to earth,
22
5.5a “Er wird zu Stein”
5.5b “Er wird zu Stein” rendered benign
to the opera stage and orchestra pit, exploiting a broad range of musical timbres, styles,
and forms as he negotiates the spirit realm of Keikobad, the semimortal world of
the emperor, and the humanity of Barak and his wife. “Only from a distance was it
confusing and disturbing,” the emperor (and presumably the composer) concludes in
Act iii; “if you listen quite quite closely, the sound is human!” What was confusing in the
early years following Die Frau ohne Schatten’s premiere is now clear; the opera can be
counted among Strauss’s most popular stage works.
INTERMEZZO
As Strauss’s work on Die Frau ohne Schatten was winding down in the early autumn of
1916, he was already thinking of new projects, which he suggested to Hofmannsthal: a
modern domestic comedy and a realistic opera based on love and political intrigue.
Hofmannsthal begged off the former, so blatantly autobiographical, suggesting that
Strauss work with Hermann Bahr, who in fact struck the poet as “truly horrid.”
Unrattled, Strauss pushed ahead with his comedy and met with Bahr in September
1916 as he was putting Die Frau ohne Schatten in short score.
Strauss moved toward crass autobiography with a story that, curiously, dates to the
time when he was writing his Symphonia domestica while holidaying on the Isle of Wight.
Intermezzo 173
In a state of domestic nostalgia, the composer devised a “symphonic self- and family
portrait” to be called “My Home” (“Mein Heim”), later titled Symphonia domestica. The
earliest sketch was a little verse by the composer:
My wife, my child, my music,
Nature and sun, they are my joy,
A little calm and much humor,
Even there the devil can teach me nothing!
[Mein Weib, mein Kind, meine Musik

Natur und Sonne, die sind mein Glück.
Ein wenig Gleichmut und viel Humor
Drin tut mir’s der Teufel selbst nicht vor!]23
Still in the aura of his domestic fantasy, Strauss received a bolt from the blue: an angry
letter from his Pauline accusing him of adultery and demanding an immediate
divorce. Pauline, unhappy and jealous when her husband was on tour, routinely
opened his mail. One, from a Mieze Mücke, read: “I expected to see you yesterday in
the Union Bar, but in vain, alas. I am writing therefore to ask if you would be so kind
as to let me have a few tickets for Monday and Wednesday this week?”24 The
dumbfounded Strauss was entirely the victim of mistaken identity. But even after
he got to the bottom of the mystery – the letter was intended for Joseph Stransky
(whose nickname was “Straussky”) – Pauline was not easily assuaged. In a character-
istically Straussian way, the composer turned this painful period in their relationship
into material for an autobiographical comedy, where the couple became Robert
Storch and his wife, Christine.25 Strauss added another layer of complexity with the
inclusion of a totally fictional character, a handsome young Baron Lummer whose
harmless romantic attentions to Christine go no farther than his interest in her
husband’s money.
Strauss’s desire to set a modern, everyday subject, despite Hofmannsthal’s misgiv-
ings, anticipates an antiromantic sentiment that prevailed throughout the Weimar
period, especially among a younger generation of German composers who saw post-
romanticism and expressionism as symbols of a bygone regime. Several years later
Strauss’s thinking process would join this broader context of Neue Sachlichkeit, articu-
lated by Gustav Hartlaub in 1923 – partly the product of postwar cynicism but also, and
more positively, the result of an “enthusiasm for the immediate reality as a result of the
23
Sketch from 25 May 1902, Richard Strauss Archive.
24
In the Richard Strauss Archive, published in Wilhelm, Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait, p. 175.
25
German-speaking audiences recognized the naming pun; Strauss can mean “ostrich,” and Storch
translates as “stork.”
5.6 Intermezzo motives derived from Die Frau ohne Schatten
desire to take things entirely objectively on a material basis without immediately

investing them with ideal implications.”26
For Strauss, nearing the end of Die Frau ohne Schatten, the material basis was modern
marriage, and he intended to strip away its metaphysical aura. Intermezzo is thus an
amazing conflation of old and new, a continuation of the marriage theme but with
different styles and techniques. From the outset Strauss sends us an unambiguous
motivic message that the metaphysics of Keikobad no longer obtains in contemporary
society. The very opening bars of Intermezzo, the so-called marriage motive (Ex. 5.6), go
by so fast that it is hard to believe that they are nothing more than a parody of Keikobad
and the “unborn children.”
Without any introduction, we are thrust as voyeurs into the middle of modern-day
domestic bickering between a composer constantly on tour and a shrewish wife who,
despite the servants, is a hands-on head of household. Strauss, as his own librettist,
delights in offering tongue-in-cheek modernist touches: Christine goes over a tiresome
list of food items for Robert’s train trip, warns him to sit in the middle of the train for
safety, makes telephone calls using the latest American small talk (“all right”), reads the
latest newspapers, and – after suspecting her husband is having an affair – visits the
family attorney in order to obtain a divorce.
This brief scene with the lawyer surpasses all others in its reversal of the metaphysics
of marriage, when a legal divorce conversation serves as a prosaic negation of the
prototypical operatic plot of love and eternity, in which such relationships are more
characteristically dissolved by death. Strauss’s only other scene with an attorney was
Act i of Der Rosenkavalier, when Ochs banters loudly with legal counsel concerning the
nature of Sophie’s dowry. Christine’s blunt scene in her lawyer’s office was unprece-
dented for the time and may well have inspired Hindemith in his Neues vom Tage, of five
years later, when a divorce attorney plays one of the leading roles.
26
Hartlaub to Alfred H. Barr (8 July 1929), quoted in Barr, “Otto Dix,” The Arts 17 (1931): 237. That
quotation reappeared within the context of other statements by Hartlaub and others associated with
Neue Sachlichkeit in Fritz Schmalenbach, “The Term Neue Sachlichkeit,” Art Bulletin 22 (1940): 161–5.
Intermezzo 175
5.7 Tristan chord in Intermezzo
Robert Storch, who appears mostly in Act ii, likewise succeeds in stripping high
German art of its idealized notions. If the focus in Act i is on Christine, her suspicions
and ways of dealing with her pain (which include flirting with a handsome young baron
at a party), Act ii offers Robert’s side, though he takes delight in showing himself as a
conductor who may be idealistic but nonetheless hates rehearsals. One of Strauss’s
favorite scenes was the first of Act ii, where his colleagues play skat, Strauss’s favorite
card game. It is depicted with great accuracy: the audience can at times follow the
progress of the card play. This “behind the scenes” scene of a composer, conductor, and
singer (among other partners) strips the world of music of all its exalted pretensions,
an attitude foreshadowed by his prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos (though the composer
is still revered).
In the cozy atmosphere of a gentleman’s game room (furnished with “modern
paintings and sculpture”), we see a conductor off the podium, a composer away from
his score, and a singer far from the footlights. Storch, the composer and conductor,
enters the room apologizing that the rehearsal could not be cut short, to which the
singer replies, “At the beginning of every season you always have a colossal eagerness
for rehearsals, but by March it soon dies away” (Am Anfang jeder Spielzeit haben Sie
immer einen kolossalen Probeneifer, so gegen März zu legt er sich). Ironic, even
humorous references cut down to size such revered works as Otello, Der Freischütz,
and even Wagner’s Parsifal by taking lines from these works out of context. A classic line
by Storch quotes an untransposed Tristan chord: “Ah, a little bit of skat, the only
relaxation after music” (Ex. 5.7).
The original cover of the Intermezzo vocal score shows a large likeness of the head of a
satyr, suggesting that this work is a Satyrspiel, the comic flip side following Die Frau ohne
Schatten. In turning his Frau ohne Schatten upside down, he repeated what he had done
with the adjacent heroic Heldenleben and antiheroic Don Quixote (which he also termed a
Satyrspiel), but now in opera. So convinced was Strauss that he was exploring new
ground in his anti-opera that he felt compelled to write a preface to the score. In the last
paragraph he concludes that “by turning its back on the popular love-and-murder
interest of the usual opera libretto, and by taking its subject matter perhaps too
exclusively from real life, this new work blazes a path for musical and dramatic
composition which others after me [will] perhaps negotiate with more talent and better
fortune.”27
But the Intermezzo preface is less a manifesto for an operatic Neue Sachlichkeit than a
short treatise offering practical advice to the conductor and singer on vocal production
from Mozart’s time to the present: spoken dialogue, secco recitative, accompanied
recitative, and aria. What Strauss desired above all was realism of expression, which
comes from the intricate and often rapid interplay of these vocal styles. Strauss admitted
to grappling with them in the prologue of Ariadne and in parts of Die Frau ohne Schatten,
with limited success.
The history of opera is, in part, one very long discourse on vocal expression and the
relationship between words and music, which served as the subject of Strauss’s last
opera, Capriccio. The composer was convinced that he was adding a new chapter in his
call for a natural type of vocal expression in a modern setting. His need for the new type
of singer-actor, described in his preface, parallels Peter Gay’s description of Neue
Sachlichkeit as a call for “realism in setting, accurate reportage, return to naturalistic
speech, and, if there had to be idealism, sober idealism.”28
The undeniable source for this new type of opera that Strauss envisioned was his wife
(“outwardly my opposite”), who enjoyed cutting her famous husband down to size in
public and in private. Indeed, originally the composer thought that his multifaceted wife
might well serve as material for a cycle of five Spielopern to be called Die Frau, though, as
we know, Strauss later changed his mind. Although Intermezzo is one of the few Strauss
operas without a female title, there is no other opera by him that is crafted so closely
around a female role.
Christine Storch embodies everything modern about this work as well as every vocal
aspect of the composer’s preface. She speaks on the telephone as she orders servants,
and also speaks when she reads the newspaper, writes a letter, or quotes her husband.
She sings secco recitative for all other aspects of daily business and turns to arioso style
for the young baron and her husband. She sings lyrically only three times in the opera: as
she sinks in reverie by the fireplace (to the shadow motive from Die Frau ohne Schatten) in
27
“Preface to Intermezzo,” in Strauss, Recollection and Reflections, pp. 101–2.
28
Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 122.
Intermezzo 177
Act i, Scene 5; in the final scene of that act as she puts her son to bed; and in the duet of
reconciliation with Robert at the end of the opera.
Hermann Bahr
The Intermezzo preface offers little insight into Strauss’s dramaturgical aims, though
they may be gleaned from his fascinating correspondence with the Austrian play-
wright Hermann Bahr, who was originally supposed to write the libretto at
Hofmannsthal’s urging. Bahr, a successful playwright who had never written a libretto,
was brought into a project that Strauss thoroughly understood. Unsurprisingly, Bahr’s
efforts failed to match the composer’s expectations, and their friendly exchange of ideas, as
evinced by their letters, sheds light on some of Strauss’s most fundamental views of the
project.
Playwright and composer first discussed the plan in Salzburg in the autumn of 1916,
when Strauss outlined his autobiographical setting for a modern opera based on
mistaken identity. After reading the full scenario weeks later, Bahr wondered aloud to
Strauss whether he was the man for the job, especially given the task of composing text
about a delicate affair in his collaborator’s life. Bahr, who sought to tone down the
autobiographical, portrayed Storch as an archaeologist and Christine as a far more
sympathetic wife, and the couple as childless. The two worked together from
October 1916 through July 1917, and though the collaboration ended without a project,
those letters exemplify Strauss’s creative thinking about opera from an unusual per-
spective matched only by his later correspondence with Clemens Krauss, with whom he
collaborated on the text to Capriccio (1941).
In short, Strauss’s letters to Bahr reveal a composer who wanted an opera about
two characters – husband and wife; the young baron should be the necessary short
side of the triangle, a mere foil for the plot. The fact that Strauss ultimately cast the
baron as a tenor (the composer’s least favorite vocal part) suggests how secondary his
role should be seen to be. Yet more important than matters of characterization were
Strauss’s criticisms of the way Bahr handled the drama: the scenes were too over-
wrought and self-contained. More space was needed for the music, and the scenes had
to change with more fluidity.
A new stage was reached when Strauss sent Bahr a series of his own sketched-out
settings that he described as “almost cinematic scenes” ( fast nur Kinobilder), where the
music says everything and the librettist should only provide pace-setting “catch-
words.”29 Die Frau ohne Schatten had its own share of cinematic qualities, with its
numerous scene changes and symphonic interludes, and in his letter to Bahr, Strauss
used the very term “cinematic.” But Bahr was entirely baffled, confessing that he simply
29
Strauss to Bahr (1 January 1917), in Gregor, Meister und Meisterbriefe, p. 100.
could not visualize these characters in the manner in which Strauss saw them. Unable to
satisfy Strauss’s friendly, though impatient, demands, he suggested the obvious: that the
composer write the text himself.30
Symphonic interludes and the cinematic
Strauss’s suggestions to Bahr point to the central role of the symphonic interlude in
Intermezzo, a role important enough to be included in the subtitle: A Bourgeois Comedy
with Symphonic Interludes. The composer-librettist created open-ended scenes that segue
or even dissolve into the interludes in a cinematic way. The influence of film on the
cultural life of the Weimar era was vast in both art and business, and its potential to draw
audiences away from opera worried composers and opera producers alike. Strauss and
Hofmannsthal’s collaboration on the 1925 silent-film version of Der Rosenkavalier, a year
after Intermezzo’s premiere, was partly in response to the increasing popularity of this
burgeoning art form.
Intermezzo surpassed Die Frau ohne Schatten’s eight scene changes with thirteen,
spread over only two acts, and some of those scenes are quite brief indeed. Act i,
Scene 2 lasts only three and a half minutes, while the next scene spans just under three,
and in the ninety seconds between these two scenes we go from a Garmisch-like
toboggan slope to a ballroom at a Bavarian inn not far away. Other adjacent scenes
take us from the attorney’s office to a storm in the Prater, which in turn takes us back to
the Storch villa.
Strauss intended time and space to transcend the staged scene by using those
symphonic interludes to make coherent the rapid cinematic montage technique, creat-
ing a suturing effect between spatially and temporally discontinuous scenes. The non-
verbal status of the interlude allows it to cross borders between diegetic and nondiegetic
worlds, between levels of narration, and between real time and psychological time. An
example of this suturing effect, in which the interlude suspends our sense of real time
and space, is the letter that Baron Lummer sends “through the orchestra” to Christine.
Toward the end of Act i, Scene 6, Lummer, too embarrassed to ask Christine for a loan
in person, sits at the desk writing a letter in which he requests a thousand marks. The
interlude commences as he begins to write, and shortly thereafter the curtain falls mid-
sentence while the music continues. The end of the interlude marks the beginning of the
next scene with Christine, letter in hand, exclaiming: “He wants a thousand marks! He is
surely mad!” (Tausend Mark will er haben! Der ist wohl verrückt!).
Strauss thus responds to Wagner on two levels: thematically, through domestic
marital comedy, and conceptually, with his attention to the concept of time. Surely a
central characteristic of Wagner opera is its capacity to expand time, where a mere
30
Bahr to Strauss (5 July 1917), in Gregor, Meister und Meisterbriefe, pp. 101–2.
Intermezzo 179
glance in Tristan can be transformed into a lengthy orchestral passage or where, at the
end of Parsifal’s Act i, “time becomes space,” to quote Gurnemanz. Wagner’s temporal
expansion was a serious point of criticism for Adorno, who suggested that his music
behaved “as if time had no end.”31 Film generally attempts the opposite – that is to say,
temporal compression: years, days, or months can become minutes before our eyes.
These cinematic qualities were not lost on critics, one of whom described Intermezzo as a
“cinematic play with connective tone painting” (Kinospiel mit verbindener Tonmalerei).32
Critics and audiences alike so delighted in the symphonic interludes that Strauss
separated the four most popular ones and created a concert work, the Four Interludes from
“Intermezzo.” The most popular one of these is the extensive dance interlude with
waltzes that hark back to the Rosenkavalier days, and indeed, some of the waltzes are
taken from unused themes from old sketchbooks, probably some originally intended for
Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss’s return to dance is part of a larger picture, for after Die Frau
ohne Schatten, now living in Vienna, he turned his attention to ballet and dance,
composing such works as Schlagobers, the Couperin-Tanzsuite, and The Ruins of Athens:
A Festival Play with Dances and Choruses, based on Beethoven.
Music
Not only does Strauss play with themes from his previous opera, but he also sets this
satirical pendant in the same key of C major (see the scene diagram below). Gone,
however, are all of Die Frau ohne Schatten’s complicated harmonic excursions; we return
to the familiar diatonic world of the C major prologue to Ariadne auf Naxos. In Ariadne
the secondary key is F major, the harmony of the satirical Till Eulenspiegel, a tonal duality
made clear from the very first scene.
Act i
Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3 Scene 4 Scene 5 Scene 6 Scene 7

C (F) G C C (F) F C f
Act ii
Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3 Scene 4 Scene 5 Scene 6

G (F/F)♯ C C C C F (F)♯
Against this more or less neutral backdrop Strauss makes several clever fleeting colorful
tonal references: the sublime D♭ major (which erupts in Act i, Scene 3 when an
31
Adorno, In Search of Wagner, p. 42.
32
Unidentified newspaper clipping from 9 November 1924, Franz Trenner Nachlass, Munich.
enchanted Christine is swept off her feet by the young baron) or the heroic E♭ major
(which highlights the baron’s cowardice when he writes, rather than asks in person, for
money in Act i, Scene 6).
As the scene diagram suggests, Act ii is shorter than Act i and the layout of keys even
less complex. Although he begins Act ii in G major, Strauss makes pointed references to
F and F♯, which both tonally and thematically refer to the final scene. Indeed, perhaps
the most tongue-in-cheek of the tonal relationships is also the most autobiographical: the
tritonal relationship of the tonic C and F♯ major. Strauss had previously created a tritonal
relationship between himself and his wife in the Symphonia domestica (F and B major,
respectively); now he creates a chromatic relationship that draws a clear distinction
between their real marriage and its ideal representation.
By the 1920s, Strauss’s stormy relationship with Pauline was well known, and the
composer playfully suggests that marital bliss can only exist in a fantasy world (F♯) when
Storch defends his marriage to skeptical friends in Act ii, Scene 1 (“And for me she is the
right one. I have a talent for napping and idling away; I thank her for what she’s made
out of me, especially my good health!” [Und für mich ist sie grade das Richtige. Ich habe
ein Talent zum verdösen, Verbummeln; was aus mir geworden, danke ich ihr,
besonders die Gesundheit!]). This sudden, rhapsodic shift to F♯ anticipates the final
scene, where Robert and Christine find reconciliation in a duet that some commentators
have criticized as too sentimental, overlooking the obvious irony: that only the wave of
a magic wand – in six sharps, no less – could create peaceful marital bliss between
Strauss and his wife. The composer, having established C with such clarity, especially in
the second act, successfully inserts tonal quotation marks around this “sentimental” little
finale.
Schoenberg, for one, found all of this amusing and quite charming, as he confessed to
his student Webern:
I find it inconceivable that [Strauss] can play comedy and make himself appear better than
he is. For all that, he knows far too little as a poet. And since this presentation leaves me
with the definite impression that one is dealing with a very genial, warm person – a
consequence not of his art, but of his personality – it convincingly reveals a side of his
personality that has actually captivated me.33
Indeed, as late as 1946, Schoenberg maintained not only that Strauss as an opera
composer would remain one of the “outstanding figures in music history,” but also
that “works like Salome, Elektra, Intermezzo and others will not perish.”34
33
Ernst Hillmar, “Arnold Schönberg an Anton Webern: Eine Auswahl unbekannter Briefe,” in Arnold
Schönberg Austellung 1974, ed. Hillmar (Vienna: Universal, 1974), pp. 47–8.
34
Arnold Schoenberg, “On Strauss and Furtwängler (1946),” in H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg: His
Life and Work (New York: Schirmer Books, 1978), p. 544.
A return to mythology 181
Intermezzo premiered in Dresden on 4 November 1924. By then Strauss had resigned

as codirector of the Vienna State Opera, which – owing to political friction between the
composer and the Vienna administration – did not premiere the work until January 1927.
Hofmannsthal, who attended the performance, had mixed feelings about the work. On
the one hand, he was surprised by the seriousness of Strauss’s artistic purpose, by the
clarity of vocal declamation and the expressive power of the interludes. On the other
hand, as a libretto it fell short: it was less a plot-driven text than a series of character
sketches, the very cinematic open-endedness that Strauss so wanted. Indeed, in the 1930s
the cinematic equivalent would be the Hollywood “screwball comedy,” the “sex
comedy without the sex,” with a fast pace, lively repartee, and little plot.
A RETURN TO MYTHOLOGY
By the time of the Intermezzo premiere in Vienna, Strauss and Hofmannsthal were
well under way with Die ägyptische Helena: Act i was completed in full score in May
1926, and Act ii was in orchestral score by the following October. Yet Strauss and
Hofmannsthal had not worked together on a major project since Die Frau ohne
Schatten, a curious situation given that Strauss had moved to Vienna to codirect the
Vienna State Opera with Franz Schalk in 1919, an occasion marked by the premiere of
Die Frau ohne Schatten.
One might explain this creative hiatus in various ways. Hofmannsthal had no
interest in working on Intermezzo, and not only was Strauss busy as codirector of a
newly administered State Opera House in postwar financial trouble, but he took two
extended transatlantic tours to raise hard currency for himself as well as for the
Vienna Philharmonic and the young Salzburg Festival. Nonetheless, the fact remains
that the relationship between Strauss and Hofmannsthal had reached an all-time low.
On an artistic level, Hofmannsthal believed the move to Vienna would be a disaster
for its State Opera. He feared Strauss would use his new power to promote his own
works at the expense of a more varied repertoire, a belief he shared openly with his
collaborator:
The great danger of your life, to which you surrender and from which you try to escape in
almost periodic cycles, is a neglect of all the higher standards of intellectual existence. Any
attempt to place oneself above ideas and institutions is an utter negation of what matters to
civilized human beings and, insofar as your works themselves form part of what matters in
intellectual life, it is they, however much you mean to foster them, which will have to pay the
eventual penalty. But I do not think that you have reached the point at which you can
understand the connection.35
35
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (1 August 1918), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 309.
Strauss proved him wrong, and Hofmannsthal graciously admitted his misjudgment.
The other obstacle in the poet’s mind was far more difficult. He feared that his artistic
relationship with Strauss might take on an awkward social dimension, one that the
composer expected and was disappointed not to attain. “Of course our relationship is
now less easy,” Hofmannsthal explained, “for the very reason that it was once some-
thing so very special and rich in content.”36 Hofmannsthal may have admired Strauss the
artist, but he could not endure Strauss the man, whom he viewed as arrogant and
unrefined, made worse by the presence of the outspoken, often histrionic Pauline.
Regular personal contact threatened to bring to the surface those personal feelings that
he had been able to ignore so long as the two men remained at a safe distance. Inwardly,
the composer was unhappy, even hurt, that his move to the Austrian capital did not
mean that he and his collaborator would see each other more regularly, a dismay that he
disclosed only to his closest friends.
All the same, Strauss was determined to return to collaborating with Hofmannsthal.
The fruit of their eventual reunion would be Die ägyptische Helena, though the road to that
goal was neither direct nor easy. Independently of Hofmannsthal, Strauss composed two
concerti for the left hand (for Paul Wittgenstein) and sketched an incomplete “Symphony
on Three Themes” in E♭. Then came two minor projects with the poet: a score for the
silent-film version of Der Rosenkavalier and a project called The Ruins of Athens.
The latter work, for chorus and dancers, was nothing grand – a pastiche that
reworked material from Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens and Creatures of Prometheus. But
in this modest piece we see a mutual renewed interest in Greek mythology – especially
as a source of Austro-German postwar renewal – and the project paved the way for
Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s next mythological opera, Die ägyptische Helena. As in Ariadne
auf Naxos, composer and librettist probed beneath the surface of myth, allegory, and
ritual, finding a way in which they could explore purely human qualities, the nature of
human relationships, and especially the union of marriage. Beneath the eternity of
Greek myth, they explored the everyday.
That Strauss intended his everyday Intermezzo as a comic companion piece to Die Frau
ohne Schatten is made clear in his writings, through shared referential themes, and
through tonal organization. Less clear-cut is Helena’s intended status as the final part
of a “marriage triptych.” Yet the broad thematic allusions to Die Frau ohne Schatten in the
Helena libretto are hard to ignore: marriage, fidelity, trust, and forgiveness. Helen has
two personalities that, in the end, we realize are one: the idealized one, much like the
empress without her shadow, and the mortal, earthly side, much like the dyer’s wife.
Her husband, Menelas, is likewise a conflation of the lofty emperor and the jealous
Barak. Instead of the nurse pulling the strings, it is Aithra, lover of Poseidon. Indeed, one
36
is almost tempted to say that Helena is a marionette play-within-a-play in which Aithra,

the bored mistress of Poseidon, amuses herself while he is away.
After Intermezzo, Strauss wished to continue in a lighter vein, and, encouraged by his
two-act comedy, he declared to Hofmannsthal (a little facetiously) his desire to become
the “Offenbach of the twentieth century.”37 Encouraged by Strauss’s desire for a nimbler
style, Hofmannsthal suggested a mythological operetta based on the story of Helen of
Troy. The subject would be ideal for a lighter orchestra, one without what Strauss
himself called his “Wagnerian musical armor,” that would allow the voices to shine.
Although the final result was far weightier than originally envisioned, Die ägyptische
Helena remains their only real bel canto work, Helen being one of Strauss’s most
impressive soprano roles.
Marriage and myth
Hofmannsthal had criticized Intermezzo not for its subject matter, only on dramatur-
gical grounds. He was in favor of a modern marriage opera, though he found it
impossible to realize along the lines Strauss wanted. He had known of Strauss’s plan
since its inception, and the work’s nonmetaphysical anti-idealism no doubt appealed
to Hofmannsthal on some level. In his prefatory essay to Helena, the librettist specified
that this mythology was one where “no gods at all appear,” where, despite its antique
setting, events should be taken “as if [they] had happened two or three years ago,
somewhere between Moscow and New York.”38 In short, Die ägyptische Helena is a
work where mythology meets Zeitoper, complete with costumes inspired by the latest
in Vogue and an omniscient seashell intended as a spoof of the radio. Thus it has strong
ties to Intermezzo as domestic comedy and to Die Frau ohne Schatten as an opera in
which marriage symbolizes something greater. In Die Frau ohne Schatten that greater
level is societal restoration, while in Die ägyptische Helena a couple’s restoration of
their marriage takes on geopolitical significance.
Unlike Die Frau ohne Schatten, Hofmannsthal’s new libretto was drawn from relatively
few sources. From Euripides he took the idea of a phantom Helen, a ghost whom Paris
had unwittingly abducted and taken to Troy; the real Helen was delivered by Hermes to
the court of Proteus in Egypt. Euripides created far too much magic for Hofmannsthal’s
tastes, but he did offer Hofmannsthal a tool with which to unlock the other part of
Helen’s personality. It is this duality in Helen, as well as in Menelas, that forms the
central theme of this opera.
37
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (5 June 1916), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 250.
38
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Preface to Die ägyptische Helena (1928),” in The Essence of Opera, ed.
Ulrich Weisstein (New York: Norton, 1969), p. 305.
Clarity of literary themes was on the minds of both poet and composer, who
wanted to assure that audiences attending early performances would comprehend the
essential points beyond a potentially confusing amalgam of modern and mythic,
comic and tragic – an admixture harking back to Ariadne auf Naxos. But with Helena,
Hofmannsthal had no operatic prologue in which to thematize these dualities. Thus
his preface, published before the premiere, offered both a plot summary, in the form
of an imaginary discussion between Strauss and his librettist, and a thematic intro-
duction to the opera text.
Far more important than Euripides’ phantom tale was the fourth book of The
Odyssey, where, according to Homer, Telemachus visits Helen and Menelas ten years
after the Trojan War. In their impressive palace, Menelas greets him as “a hospitable
grand seigneur” and Helen as a gracious “lady of the manor.”39 They speak of Troy and
the war with remarkable calm and dignity, despite the past violence, bloodshed, and
treachery. This paradox poses a central question and the raison d’être for the opera: what
happened between the Trojan War – begun when Paris abducted Menelas’s wife, Helen
(and ended when Menelas brought her back after a series of bloody events) – and this
later, palatial, quasi-bourgeois calm?
How amazing to have treated such a famous and awesome event in such a light manner,
and – I cannot help but use the word – how modern, how close to the language of our time.
Yet, one feels compelled to ask oneself, what happened in the meantime? What is it that for
these two people lay between that night long ago and the comfortable situation in which
Telemachus encounters them? What may have happened, in order to turn this marriage once
again into a peaceful and radiant union?40
Thus, the opera concerns the “terrible and redeeming experiences” immediately follow-
ing the Trojan War,41 when Menelas was in a state of shell shock known by far too
many veterans of the First World War, including Hofmannsthal. In a state “close to
insanity,” Menelas arrives at Poseidon’s palace with Helen, whom he intends to kill –
and would have were it not for Aithra, who gives him a potion transporting him to a
tranquil, dreamlike state. By the end of Act i she shows Menelas the “real” Helen, now
asleep in an adjacent room, and he retires to her bed as they drift toward the Atlas
Mountains.
If it had ended there, Hofmannsthal asserted, it would have ended as an operetta, “a
short, frivolous comedy.” Ariadne taught us that the movement from comic to serious
was always an integral part of Hofmannsthal’s creative process. If Act i is about the
dominance of the past and its ramifications, with and without amnesia, then the second
and final act is about the present: those characters who can live on, who can make that
transition from past to present, will survive. Menelas and Ariadne could make this
39 40 41
Ibid., p. 302. Ibid. Ibid.
change; Elektra could not and had to die. That artificial, induced tranquility between
Helen and Menelas failed to make a connection between yesterday and today.
The potion may protect Helen’s life, but having taken away part of her past, it leaves
her half dead. Hofmannsthal’s inclusion – in Act ii – of a couple of extraneous characters,
two desert warriors (Prince Altair of the Atlas Mountains and his son Da-ud), is integral
to this process of marital restoration. Both warriors are smitten by Helen, especially
Da-ud, who begins to revive Menelas’s memory of Paris. Altair invites Menelas to hunt
with his son, and after they leave, Helen recognizes that further deceiving her husband
will only bring sorrow. As Walter Jens observed, in Menelas’s confused state of mind,
his dagger is his only reality: he used it “yesterday” and uses it “today” against Da-ud,
whom he kills.42
The paradox of the second act is that, as essential as these new characters are for
Hofmannsthal poetically, they are dramaturgically extrinsic, disconnected from the
myth and presented too late in this two-act drama to attain any three-dimensional
qualities. They are in awe of Helen’s beauty and thus dehumanized, much like those at
Herod’s court in Salome. Da-ud’s death is no more tragic than was Narraboth’s suicide,
indeed, even less so in the way he is mocked by Hofmannsthal and Strauss alike. Upon
hearing of his son’s death, Altair gazes at Helen and with cruel detachment remarks:
“Let him fall! I have enough arrows in my quiver and enough sons in my tent . . . I shall
prepare a feast [for Helen]!” (Stürze er hin! Pfeile im Köcher, Söhne im Zelt hab’ ich
genug . . . bereit ich ein Fest!). Feminized as Da-ud was by both composer and librettist,
Strauss wanted to take it a step further by creating a trouser role, but Hofmannsthal
would have none of it. Strauss settled for a high tenor, whose musical passage (“Denn es
ist recht . . .”) borrows from the same mocking sentimentality, especially the use of
sixths and thirds, that had characterized Jochanaan when he spoke of Christ’s miracles in
Galilee (Ex. 5.8).43
Just before Menelas returns, Helen orders Aithra to make a potion of remembrance,
which could either kill her (as Da-ud was killed) or allow her to live. She has reached the
critical hour, the one also reached by Ariadne, where life might turn into death but –
more important – death might become life (“Dead-Living! Living-Dead!” [Tot-
Lebendige! Lebendige-Tote!]). In his preface, Hofmannsthal contends that the strength
of Helen is “that she must possess completely the man to whom she belongs,” and a
tranquilized Menelas is only half the man. As in Ariadne, the goal to transformation or
42
Walter Jens, Hofmannsthal und die Griechen (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1955), p. 121.
43
No discussion of the opera has gone without mention of the passage, especially Fritz Busch’s
anecdote. He pointed out that its sentimental qualities bordered on the tasteless; Strauss apparently
replied that even Die Walküre needed its “Winterstürme” for the regular operagoing audience. That
Busch took such Straussian irony at face value is remarkable, especially given the fact that by the
1920s his intentional banalities had become an integral part of his expressive strategies.
5.8 Act ii, Da-ud, “Denn es ist recht”
renewal is reached by forgetting while remembering, finding each other without

forgetting the past:
Half-forgetting
makes for sweet remembering
you will feel a deep assurance
of your divine lover’s return!44
[Ein halbes Vergessen

wird sanftes Erinnern;
du fühlest im Innern
dir wiedergegeben
den göttlichen Mann!]
Helen must bring him back to the point he reached the night before. Returned to
lucidity (and anger), Menelas raises his dagger, then drops it and falls into her arms. A
poet, Hofmannsthal observed, “can make his characters grow above and beyond
themselves into gigantic proportions, for this is what mortals do in rare moments.”45
This rare moment, when Helen insists “on winning through her own strength,” was the
most important one for Strauss, when “by the divine power of her beauty and by her
own dynamic nature” she and her husband become wholly reconciled.46
Hofmannsthal, in his preface and libretto, reminds us that Menelas and Helen
represent opposite allegorical–geographical poles, the Occident and the Orient, respec-
tively, following the lines of contemporary masculine–feminine (Apollonian–Dionysian)
44
Translation from Decca Records CD 430 381–2 (1979), with Antal Dorati and the Detroit Symphony.
45
Hofmannsthal, “Preface to Die ägyptische Helena (1928),” pp. 312–13.
46
“Interview on Die ägyptische Helena,” in Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, p. 104.
conceptions: object–subject, light–dark, outward–inward, marriage–hetaerism. But

there is an asymmetry to these reductive binaries, namely the fact that marriage itself
symbolizes these dualities in each of us. Philip Graydon notes that for Hofmannsthal,
marriage meant equilibrium, a quality much needed socially, nationally, and interna-
tionally in the wake of the Great War: “Die ägyptische Helena exists as a critical document
of Hofmannsthal’s postwar, cultural-restorative mission: as no mere art pour l’art libretto
or opera, no mere re-hash and re-mix of timeless subject matter, it stands instead as
Hofmannsthal’s attempt to encapsulate the conflict and contradictions of his era.”47
We recall Rolland’s comment about Ariadne that Hofmannsthal could never write
pure comedy because he always ends up believing his own irony. This may well be true,
but it is also true that, for him, comedy always meant the integration of the social; pure
farce would always be short-lived. The ruins of a contemporary Europe were never far
from his mind as he was writing his opera about the ramifications of the fall of Troy;
Menelas and Europe were “a fractured whole.”48 To Hofmannsthal’s thinking, the
Orient was the foundation of Greek civilization, which in turn was the bedrock of
modern Europe.
With a certain verbal nostalgia, Hofmannsthal called for a postwar Ausgleich between
East and West, to be centered in Austria (the eastern realm), and through a new antiquity.
Austria was, Hofmannsthal suggested, the key to a new Europe only to be attained
by a modern view of ancient Greece as belonging to “the great Orient.”49 The mission
was reconciliation and rejuvenation for a united Europe, with Austria at its center,
Hofmannsthal’s self-described Heimat – though a new Europe would be his Vaterland.
What kind of opera?
At first glance it might seem curious to draw contemporary political connections out of a
libretto intended partly as a kind of operetta. But as Camille Crittenden has shown,
operetta – especially the Viennese variety – savored political humor, and as public
entertainment it reflected current issues far more effectively than so-called serious
opera. Behind the mask of comedy, outside of court venues and strict censorship,
operetta mirrored a society’s anxieties, prejudices, and hopes better than any other
stage genre of that time.50 Helena was never a real operetta. Neither poet nor composer
had that special gift for authentic popular theater; it remains their only collaborative
47
Philip Robert Graydon, “Die ägyptische Helena (1927): Context and Contemporary Response,”
Ph.D. diss., Queen’s University Belfast (2005), p. 193.
48
Ward, Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth, p. 227.
49
David S. Luft, ed. and trans., “Introduction,” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected
Essays and Addresses, 1906–1927 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), p. 18.
50
Camille Crittenden, Johann Strauss and Vienna: Operetta and the Politics of Popular Culture (Cambridge
work whose title was based on one, more specifically Offenbach’s La belle Hélène (1864).
Hofmannsthal saw his first production of the Offenbach in Salzburg in 1911 with the
famed Maria Jeritza in the title role, and it is hardly surprising that he had her in mind as
his Helen from the earliest sketches.51
In letters and in his own preface, Hofmannsthal expressed his preoccupation with the
subject of Helen and Menelas as early as 1919, the year of the Treaty of Versailles.
Although more Goethean (especially Faust ii) than modern in its postwar “classic-romantic
phantasmagoria,” he envisioned a Platonic dialogue between Menelas, Helen, and her
phantom.52 This “psychological dialogue” was never intended for music, and in fact,
when – after Die Frau ohne Schatten – Strauss began asking Hofmannsthal for something
new along the lines of operetta, the poet shelved the project.
The operetta that Hofmannsthal offered Strauss was a different marital mythology,
“Danae: or the Marriage of Convenience,” which never got beyond a scenario (1920), as
Strauss and Hofmannsthal soon became distracted with other projects. But Intermezzo
was coming to an end and the summer of 1923 was approaching without a major music
project, so Strauss turned again to Hofmannsthal for a light operatic subject. The
librettist returned to his subject of Helen, reawakened during their mutual conception
of the Ruins of Athens ballet project. The original Ägyptische Helena was to be in three acts,
with plenty of space for ballet as well as elfin and spirit choruses. At this initial stage,
Hofmannsthal had also thought out his cast of principal singers, something unprece-
dented in their collaboration: Jeritza as Helen, Karl Aargard Oestvig or Richard Tauber
as Menelas, and Lotte Schöne as Aithra, with Hans Duhan and Alfred Jerger as Altair and
Da-ud, respectively.53
By September 1923 Hofmannsthal had decided to conflate Acts ii and iii and Strauss
was already sketching the first half of Act i, though, with the coming concert season, the
premiere of Schlagobers, and planning for music festivals in connection with his sixtieth
birthday on 11 June 1924, he was not able to get back to sketching it until mid-June.
Because Strauss was now living in Vienna, face-to-face workshop meetings were now
possible as the work progressed, making the published letters far less useful in tracking
the opera’s genesis than in any previous mutual project. The broad outlines of the
creative process are, however, clear: Strauss finished the short score for Act i in October
1925, followed by a full score in May 1926. He worked on Act ii intermittently during the
concert season of 1925–6, then devoted himself to composing full time during that
summer. The Act ii short score was ready by October 1926, a full score one year later.
Die ägyptische Helena has always been a problem with regard to genre. Early dis-
cussions pointed toward pure operetta, including some spoken dialogue, though pure
51
52
Ward, Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth, p. 226.
53
speech was ultimately dropped in favor of a parlando style, typical of much of Intermezzo,
for the prose sections. The division of the work into two acts is not unlike the structure
of many comedies – including Intermezzo – but, as Hofmannsthal maintained, the second
act moves to a more serious, elevated lyrical sphere.54 In her study of genre awareness in
the later Strauss operas, Katharina Hottmann sees this mythological opera as a con-
flation of German romantic and French grand opera traditions.55 Some critics recognized
Helena as the first German bel canto opera of the twentieth century, a description
discounted as exaggeration by Willi Schuh. If he is correct, though, it is an exaggeration
that points to the work’s most essential quality, namely that this is an opera primarily for
singers, structured – especially in Act i – around distinct numbers: aria, duet, ensembles,
and choruses.
More specifically, this “singers’ opera” (Gesangsoper) is not only a showpiece for
Helen but, as previously noted, was a role designed for the reigning prima donna of her
day, Maria Jeritza, upon whom Strauss and Hofmannsthal agreed from the beginning.
Strauss, who dedicated his late song “September” to Jeritza in 1948, could not resist the
allusion to Helen when he wrote atop the manuscript: “To the most beautiful woman in
the world.” Sadly, because of financial and contractual issues, Jeritza did not sing at the
world premiere in Dresden and had to wait several days for her first performance in
Vienna.56
Some critics maintained, along the lines of Rolland, that Hofmannsthal involuntarily
migrated from comedy to serious opera in this admittedly complex amalgam of generic
prototypes. But the change in manner was less a matter of vacillation than a deliberate
and crucial part of Hofmannsthal’s original view. If this opera is about the reconciliation
of opposite poles, then the first act is, as Stephan Kohler suggests, about the triumph of
female self-fulfillment (Selbstverwirklichung) over masculine honor and fidelity.57
As is typical of the mature Hofmannsthal, this accomplishment can only be short-
lived, a false victory to be followed by an “apotheosis of truth,” at once purifying and
reconciling:
The contrasts between the two acts do not derive from stylistic inconsistency or [literary]
indecision, rather from deeply held literary and psychological premises of Hofmannsthal.
54
Jens, Hofmannsthal und die Griechen, p. 110–11.
55
See Katharina Hottmann, “Erneuerung der Mythologischen Oper: Die ägyptische Helena,” in
Historismus und Gattungs bewusstsein bei Richard Strauss: Untersuchungen zum späteren Opernschaffen
(Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2005), pp. 522–47.
56
Graydon writes an extensive chapter (“The Whole Prima Donna Business”) on Jeritza and the
competing sopranos surrounding early performances of Die ägyptische Helena. See Graydon, “Die
ägyptische Helena,” pp. 216–76.
57
Stephan Kohler, “Zur ‘Ägpytische Helena’ von Hugo von Hofmannsthal und Richard Strauss,”
program notes to the LP German pressing of the Dorati/Detroit recording: Teldec-Telefunken LP
6.3491–00–501 (1979), p. 4.
5.9 Act i, Helen’s “lament”
In Act i fantasy, mythology, and magic dominate, followed, in Act ii, by disenchantment and
an ethical consciousness . . . Thus, in Act i, which is dominated by allegories and mythical
devices (“shortcuts for psychological processes”), psychology wears a mythical costume
(“the elves: an expression of the critical subconscious”). In the second act all such fantasy
gives way to a “finely differentiated psychology,” [in] which – as Strauss stated it – “all the
nervous counterpoint and all the diffuse colors” of his music stand at his command.58
Strauss, indeed, responds readily to these oppositions of lightness and weightiness, of

elegance and seriousness, from the very start. Not since Elektra had a Strauss opera
opened with such explosive fury, here the unbridled wrath of Menelas, who mur-
dered Paris and recaptured Helen as Troy fell after ten years of war. A mighty
juxtaposition between stark, sustained C minor and F♯ minor chords, these titanic
tritones haunt Menelas throughout the work, returning full throttle after he has killed
Da-ud. Yet, as suddenly as it exploded in the opening bars of the opera, it drops to a
placid piano eight bars later, the beginning of an extended, wistful oboe solo (Ex. 5.9),
a lament for Helen.
What follows is a little aria for Aithra (“The meal is prepared” [Das Mahl ist
gerichtet]), suggesting the oboe passage might be an introduction to her lament in
Poseidon’s absence. But Aithra is not the main character, and that sad oboe theme is
as much – if not more – Helen’s anguish, thrown into relief against the backdrop of
58
Ibid.
5.10 Helen’s themes
Menelas’s fury. Indeed, the first four notes of the theme form the rhythmic kernel of
various motives associated with Helen: her lament (Ex. 5.9), her eternal beauty
(Ex. 5.10a), as Princess of Troy (Ex. 5.10b), as temptress (Ex. 5.10c), and her awakening
in Poseidon’s palace (Ex. 5.10d).
Die ägyptische Helena is no less a fully integrated tapestry of leitmotives, but that
network operates, especially in Act i, deeper beneath the sonic surface, largely because
that very surface is so lyrically oriented. The main numbers of Act i feature Aithra’s arietta
(“Das Mahl ist gerichtet”) of the introduction, Helen’s aria of Scene 1 (“Think of that
night” [Bei jener Nacht]), the enchanting F major duet for Helen and Aithra (“Stronger
than warriors” [Stärker als Krieger]) in Scene 3, and the luminescent E major finale,
“Helen’s Awakening.” Save for Aithra’s lament, all of these numbers are drawn from
the Helen motives outlined above: “Bei jener Nacht” from Example 5.10b, “Stärker als
Krieger” from Example 5.10c, and, of course, the ensemble finale from Example 5.10d,
“Helen’s Awakening.”
This opera may well be about reconciliation of the sexes, where, indeed, the laws
of the “masculine Occident” prevail over feminine “oriental hetaerism,” but musi-
cally this is a match that Menelas cannot win. Not only is he cast as a tenor, Strauss’s
least favorite voice, but his moments in the lyrical spotlight are few, and with his sole
three-note thematic signifier of a semitone followed by a major seventh, there is little
he can do on his own. He spends most of the opera drugged and confused, though not
without the potential for violence. Strauss casts him in a heroic E♭ major, but, as the
scene diagram of Act i shows, those moments are parenthetical to the progress of the
act’s movement from the separation and sadness of D minor to the erotics of E major
in the finale.
Act i
Intro Scene 1 Scene 2 Scene 3 Scene 4 Finale

d A♭ (B♭) c A F♯ (F) D♭ a (E♭) A E (E♭) E
As in most Strauss operas, the harmonic layout of Act i works along functional and
expressive lines, beginning with D minor marital dysfunction and moving to the Trojan
Helen (B♭) urging Menelas to think of that night when they were first in love. Menelas
can think only of her death – in C minor, the first part of the tritone pairing, and a
key with wider ramifications in Act ii. The tonal layout also suggests the centrality of
Aithra (A) and her magic potions (F♯) that create the peaceful – if not drugged –
eroticism of a “first” matrimonial bed.
If Strauss’s lighter touch – where dense orchestral continuity took a back seat to vocal
lyricism – fell short in Act ii, he could hardly be blamed, for here the marital comedy
becomes a kind of marital mystery play, the very Frau ohne Schatten-like “romantic
opera” that Strauss had forsaken in his famous letter to Hofmannsthal, written as the
composer was finishing the earlier opera. With the exception of the opening aria,
“Second Wedding Night” (“Zweite Brautnacht”), set in Helen’s brilliant B major,
there is little room for bel canto: playfulness gives way to sober decision making, not
unlike in Die Frau ohne Schatten – or Ariadne, for that matter.
The ecstasy and promise of Helen’s big aria, a Straussian tour de force, quickly unravels
with the encroaching doubts of Menelas, complicated by the entrance of Altair and Da-ud,
and with the latter’s death the stakes are raised considerably. If Hofmannsthal predicted
that the work was “bound to be Richard Strauss at the end,” the same could easily be said
of his librettist. Beyond “Zweite Brautnacht,” the librettist creates only rare moments of
lyricism as the demands of the plot and its conclusion seem to take over.
After Helen’s aria, there are also few areas of tonal stability, held together by all the
Nervenkontrapunkt that Strauss claimed to have “at his command.”
Act ii

B→c c (D♭) (E♭) e (F) c/d (B♭) (D♭) D
The scene diagram of Act ii makes the act’s harmonic layout look far clearer than it
really is, but clarity is hardly the purpose of an act centered on passion, violence, and
confusion. There is little a composer can do with a disjunct atonal motive such as Altair’s
(Ex. 5.11), save make it part of a nervous contrapuntal continuum.
Against this confusing, cacophonous backdrop Da-ud’s smarmy Scene 2 pledge of
loyalty to Helen, couched in sentimental sixths (see again Ex. 5.5), by now Strauss’s
stock-in-trade for maudlin moments, becomes all the more alienating in its uncom-
promising diatonicism.59 The duet between Aithra and Helen (now wanting a different
potion) in Scene 3 matches the F major Potion Duet from Act i, Scene 3.
59
Strauss presents this first in D♭, then E♭.
5.11 Act ii, Altair’s disjunct theme
The ensemble finale for Act ii is more complex than the one in Act i in terms of
musical forces, motivic interplay, and harmonic layout: all the characters, primary
and extraneous, are onstage. It marks the beginning of a festival in honor of
Helen hosted by Altair, even though his son Da-ud lies dead. The offstage festival
orchestra, in a Middle Eastern style more tasteless than similar sonic moments
in Salome, is always set in D minor and plays simultaneously with the pit orchestra,
which at the outset is very loosely in C minor, creating a strange sense of
polytonality.
Against this ever-increasing din of noise and dissonance, Helen more and more
desperately seeks the potion of remembrance from Aithra, who repeats to her that it
is too dangerous: “The time for the potion is not yet come: I warn you!” (Nicht jetzt den
Trank, es ist nicht die Stunde: ich warne dich!). The Wagnerian allusions are hard to
ignore, but they are quite different. Aithra–Brangäne warns Helen–Isolde against
offering Menelas–Tristan a potion neither of death nor love, but rather of everyday,
clear-sighted life, the potion of recollection. The dialectics of night and day, of love and
death, do not apply. Rather than remain intoxicated with her husband in the realm of
night, moon, and dream, Helen chooses day. And as she stands before him assured that
“he will kill me” (er wird mich töten), their daughter, Hermione, appears, radiant, with
“the light falling on her golden robes and golden hair giving her the appearance of a little
goddess.” The references to Act iii of Siegfried are obvious, although Helen, after
spending the night on Atlas Mountain, was awakened not by a strange lover who shared
her own bloodline, but by her husband.
Strauss’s musical responses to this transformation of sorts are integrally connected to
his tonal plan. An unchanging thematic reference to the potion, “Erinnerung” (Ex. 5.12),
is always in B, and that theme’s sinuous chromaticism suggests both its magic and the
ambiguity of its potential. Problematized, “Erinnerung” resolves to B; solved, it resolves
to D (Ex. 5.13), a key that both resolves that alienation expressed in Act i, Scene 1 and, of
course, foreshadows the ultimate resolution at the end of the opera. Before getting
there, Strauss offers a reprise of “Bei jener Nacht,” no longer a solo aria for Helen but a
duet for husband and wife. The mock sublime suggested by the naïve Da-ud with his
sugary sixths in D♭ is now made real as Helen, for the first time, “looks at [Menelas] fully
in the face,” and he responds: “Eternally chosen, by the look in your eyes, made wholly
one . . . ever-Same, ever-New!” (Ewig erwählt von diesem Blick! Vollvermählt . . . Ewig-
Eine, Ewig-Neue!).
5.12 Theme of memory potion
5.13 “Danger” memory transformed
The allomatic connection central to the framing operas of Strauss’s marriage triptych,
that of transformation, reconciliation, and even a kind of redemption, comes not from
Wagnerian love intoxification nor from a simultaneously instant and eternal love.
Strauss and Hofmannsthal found common ground in the conviction that Erlösung
comes from the dedication of two marriage partners. In their struggles between passion
and ennui, fidelity and temptation, they attain a higher level of existence of forgiving
while not forgetting. “Transformation is the life of life itself,” Hofmannsthal declared,
“the real mystery of nature as creative force. Permanence is numbness and death.
Whoever wants to live must surpass himself, must transform himself: he has to forget.
And yet all human merit is linked with permanence, unforgetfulness, constancy.”60 For
Hofmannsthal, this paradox was life’s great enigma, and the poet believed it was
explored with greatest poignancy in Die ägyptische Helena, his favorite and last completed
opera text for Strauss.
60
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Ariadne auf Naxos, in Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, Dramen V:
Operndichtungen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1979), p. 297.
6 Composing without Hofmannsthal: Arabella and Die
schweigsame Frau
Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau are inextricably

This genius, this great poet, this sensitive
collaborator, this unique talent! . . . No
linked, less for musical or textual reasons (indeed,
one will ever replace him for me in the
they feature two different librettists) than as a
world of music! – Strauss to Gertrud
return to opera as a retrospective genre. Since Der
Hofmannsthal, 16 July 1929
Rosenkavalier, Strauss had composed no two operas
of the same type, whether fairy tale, comedy, or
mythology. That trend ended with Arabella, twice retrospective in that it was loosely
conceived as a kind of second Rosenkavalier and in its historical setting in Vienna, now
in the 1860s. Stefan Zweig’s Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) is likewise a
period piece – Jacobean London – which he based on Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, a
1609 play by Ben Jonson.
As much as Strauss might have thought he could compose historical operas un-
affected by contemporary events, both operas were conceived at moments when the
world seemed to be wheeling out of control. No convincing reading of these two operas
can be separated from the distressing circumstances that surrounded their composition:
Hofmannsthal’s untimely death in July 1929, the Wall Street crash four months later, and
of course the malignant rise of National Socialism, with all its racial and cultural
pathologies. Hofmannsthal’s absence from the premiere of his final opera, Arabella, in
1933 was a personal tragedy. Stefan Zweig’s inability to attend the 1935 premiere of his
Die schweigsame Frau remains a political and social indictment of a regime.
At the time of the Dresden premiere of Helena in 1928, reactionary forces had gained
significant strength in Europe. Mussolini had already been in power in Italy for nearly six
years, and in Germany Paul von Hindenburg (the former Field Marshall of the First
World War) became president in 1925 – a sign that much of Germany preferred looking
backward to past glories in the midst of current political and economic instability.1
For Strauss 1929 was a year of personal and professional catastrophe. On 15 July
Hofmannsthal suffered a fatal stroke at home while preparing to leave for the funeral of
his son, who had committed suicide two days earlier. Strauss and Hofmannsthal were in
the midst of what would be their final collaboration, and by a dark coincidence he
had sent Hofmannsthal a congratulatory telegram approving the final draft of Act i on
14 July, which arrived the next day. Strauss was shattered and unable to attend the
1
See Anna von der Göltz, Hindenburg: Power, Myth, and the Rise of the Nazis (Oxford University Press,
2009).
195
196 Without Hofmannsthal: Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau
funeral, as he explained in a letter to Hofmannsthal’s widow: “I am profoundly shocked

and moreover still indisposed, so that I cannot even see my unforgettable friend to his
last rest . . . My son and Alice are hurrying to Vienna.”2
Both Arabella and Die schweigsame Frau were conceived during unprecedented crises,
and though neither was conceived under the Nazi regime, their premieres during the
early years of the Third Reich were marred by politics at every level. Hofmannsthal was
not the only man of prominence missing at Arabella’s first performance. Fritz Busch,
the co-dedicatee and designated conductor, had fled the country. Stefan Zweig,
Hofmannsthal’s successor and the librettist for Die schweigsame Frau, left Austria in
1934 and became a British citizen in 1938. He ultimately moved to Brazil, where he killed
himself on 22 February 1942, leaving a suicide note saluting his friends and colleagues:
“May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go
on before.”3 Strauss would ultimately see that dawn, but – as the final chapter will
show – its light would fall on opera houses, concert halls, and museums that had been
reduced to rubble.
HOFMANNSTHAL’S POSTWAR “AUSTRIAN IDEA”
Arabella was hardly Rosenkavalier’s later-born twin that most critics initially believed it
to be, even though Strauss and Hofmannsthal had described it that way in their own
correspondence. What they sought was a return to historical comedy, and for
Strauss this meant lyricism, dance, intrigue, and resolution. All of that pertained to
Rosenkavalier, but only in the most general sense. The more serious issues of post-Great
War Austria and beyond and how they might be integrated into a new work were not at
the front of Strauss’s musical imagination. The composer savored the East–West geo-
graphical flavor, but he saw such internationalism as a way of deepening the melodic
and harmonic palette of his new work for a new era with the inclusion of folk song, folk
dance, and other colorful “exoticisms.”
Of Hofmannsthal’s three postwar libretto projects, only Die ägyptische Helena reached
completion. Although Arabella was written out in three full acts, neither collaborator
was satisfied with Acts ii and iii, and Hofmannsthal intended to revise them thoroughly.
Act i had taken quite a bit of mutual effort before Strauss was satisfied. His congrat-
ulatory telegram to Hofmannsthal (“First act excellent”) acknowledged that great effort.
Danae never got beyond a scenario. What all three works have in common, though, is a
reaction to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which Hofmannsthal saw as a
serious cultural failure and from which he never fully recovered, either emotionally or
intellectually.
2
3
See publisher’s postscript in Zweig, The World of Yesterday, p. 437.
Hofmannsthal’s postwar “Austrian idea” 197
After Helena, Hofmannsthal had grown tired of myth. He maintained in a letter to

Strauss that younger opera audiences are against anything “somber and grand,” heroic
and mythic. They want hotels, lounges, tradesmen, waiters. In a word, they “know who
they are” and what they want4 – and it was not another Ring cycle. In this context we
understand Hofmannsthal’s desire for a genuine period piece set in Austria, more
specifically Vienna, during the 1860s or 1870s. This was the time of the Gründerzeit, a
time of growing prosperity combined with political instability, which culminated in an
Ausgleich that would forever change the shape of modern Europe. The interface of East
and West, whether in the form of Menelas and Helen or of Mandryka and Arabella,
continued to be the central theme of Hofmannsthal’s operatic projects with Strauss in
the librettist’s final years.
In the wake of defeat after the Austro-Prussian war, Hungary saw the opportunity for
secession from a weakened Habsburg empire, which Franz Joseph II curtailed by
compromise in the form of a so-called dual monarchy, recognizing Hungary as a
kingdom in a new Austro-Hungarian empire. Its very name is a hyphenation of East
and West (like Mandryka–Arabella). But that hyphen, which meant both union and
separation, was not as symmetrical as it appeared to be, for although each kingdom
had its king, there was only one emperor. The compromise promised new stability, and
there was a new sense of economic optimism – perhaps even a false one, as evidenced by
liberal-class overspeculation, which collapsed with the stock market crash of 1873, a year
before Hofmannsthal was born and the decade of his formative boyhood years.
Indeed, it is impossible to approach Arabella without the context of contemporary
postwar insolvency. It affected everyone at various levels; even Hofmannsthal and
Strauss were not immune. Strauss, who had planned to retire from conducting in 1924
at the age of sixty, lost thousands of pounds he had invested in the Bank of England
(which seized German accounts during the war) on the earlier advice of his banking
friend Edgar Speyer, to whom the composer had dedicated Salome. Strauss’s response to
the tragic circumstances was most characteristic: he went back to work, taking a more
lucrative position at the Vienna State Opera and taking the Vienna Philharmonic on
sold-out tours of North and South America, which paid with hard currency.
However, the impounded money seemed the furthest thing from the composer’s
mind when he dispatched a wire from the ship to Hofmannsthal:
I have finished the full score of Intermezzo and would like to have some pleasant work to do at
Garmisch during the autumn. Best of all, a second Rosenkavalier, without its mistakes and
longeurs! You’ll just have to write that for me some day: I haven’t spoken my last word yet to that
genre. Something delicate, amusing, and warm-hearted!5 (Strauss’s emphasis)
4
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (18 October 1928), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 510.
5
Telegram from Strauss to Hofmannsthal (8 September 1923), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal
Correspondence, p. 364.
The phrase “going back to work” took on an entirely different meaning for the poet,
who was undone by the realities of an empire in ruin. Indeed, he saw an entire continent
in cultural turmoil, noting that Europe’s “collapse . . . [was] a shattering experience.”6
For Hofmannsthal, as for many Austrians and Germans of his generation, Europe was
neither a political nor a geographical entity, but a cultural one. To Hofmannsthal’s
thinking, the task for the future of Europe (by which he meant only the Continent)
was a uniquely Austrian one. Thomas Mann articulated a similar view in his Reflections
of a Non-Political Man (1918), where art, music, and literature existed in a sacred space
removed from the everyday, politicized world. The German nation, as a cultural
phenomenon, could give birth to an individual; but the German state, the product of
consensus and compromise, could only rob artists of their individuality. However,
whereas Mann ultimately reversed his opinion in 1922, embracing democracy and the
Weimar Republic, Strauss and Hofmannsthal held on to their antidemocratic views.
The results of Austro-German antirepublicanism of the 1920s are there for all to see.
They became even more troublesome later, when Strauss decided to participate as
president of the Reichsmusikkammer in the National Socialist regime. No longer could
his familiar stance as a nonpolitical man be taken seriously. Strauss and Hofmannsthal
shared a belief that culture was not only superior to politics but could also serve as a
substitute for it, as we saw in Die ägyptische Helena and will see again in Arabella.
For Hofmannsthal, France, with its history of politics and civilization trumping culture,
was out of the question as a model for a new Europe. Germany (meaning the Prussian
mentality) was too homogeneous, too uncompromising, and unwilling to assimilate with
the East. “This Europe that wants to give itself new form needs an Austria,” wrote
Hofmannsthal; “it needs Austria in order to comprehend the polymorphous East.”7
Austria was the model for Europe’s future, and its historic fluidity of borders was integral
to this model, as Hofmannsthal explained in his 1917 essay, “The Austrian Idea” (“Die
österreichische Idee”), which could in his mind just as easily have been called “The
European Idea”: “The primary and fateful gift for compromise with the East – let us say it
precisely: toward compromise between old European, Latin-German and the new
European, Slavic world – this only task and raison d’être of Austria, had to experience
a kind of eclipse for European consciousness during the decades 1848–1914.”8
Srdan Bogosavljević traces a turn in Hofmannsthal’s attitude toward the “Oriental Slav
character,” which became an essential ingredient in a postwar Austrian ideal. Compared
to the economically corrupt liberals and their speculative gambling, the Slavs offered the
poet a sense of rustic purity. A Slav such as Mandryka needs no money in his countrified
6
Hofmannsthal, “The Idea of Europe: Notes for a Lecture,” in Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the
Austrian Idea, ed. and trans. David S. Luft (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2011), p. 90.
7
Hofmannsthal, “The Idea of Europe,” p. 101. 8 Ibid.
world and opens his pocketbook to Arabella’s needful gambler father without flinching.9
Hofmannsthal’s essay “Czech and Slovak Folksongs” suggests how such spiritual
essence and “authenticity” may be preserved in their lyrical outpourings.10
Hofmannsthal outlines this duality of cosmopolitan corruption and rural whole-
someness in a letter to Strauss dated 13 July 1928:
The atmosphere of Arabella, again, differs greatly from that of Rosenkavalier. In both cases it is
Vienna, but what a difference between them – a whole century! Vienna under Maria
Theresa – and the Vienna of 1866 . . . the atmosphere of Arabella, quite close to our own time
as it is, is more ordinary, less glamorous, more vulgar. The three Counts [Elemer, Dominick,
Lamoral] in frivolous pursuit of all skirts, Waldner that cashiered cavalry captain and his
whole shady milieu, these figures are tainted by vulgarity, tangled up with a rather vulgar and
dubious Vienna – it is this background which sets off the courageous and self-reliant
Arabella and the touchingly impulsive Zdenka. For Mandryka above all this pleasure-seeking,
frivolous Vienna, where everybody lives on tick, is the foil; he is steeped in his world of
unspoilt villages, his oak forests untouched by axe, his ancient folk-songs. With him the
wide open spaces of the vast half-Slav Austria enter Viennese comedy and carry into it a breath
of fresh, totally different air.11
Matthew Werley stresses the importance in the above letter of the year 1866, “on the eve
of the Ausgleich.”12 The more localized action takes place on another eve, Shrove
Tuesday, when carnival hedonism is about to give way to Lenten sobriety, from the
mass consumption of Moët et Chandon (“halb trocken, halb herb”) in Act ii to the
abstemious glass of water in Act iii. On a historical level, the hedonism of speculation
gives way to the stock market crash of 1873. “For Hofmannsthal,” Werley asserts,
“Arabella represented a prophetic warning to contemporary culture that Austria’s shift
from liberalism to conservatism might return during the late 1920s.”13 Within this vital
political context we see that the musical quotations of Slavic folk song in the Arabella
score are far more than superficial local color, at least for Hofmannsthal, who had read
thoroughly an anthology published just a few years earlier of Slavic folk songs gathered
by Paul Eisner.14 This was a vital source for much of Mandryka’s language, and a
9
Srdan Bogosavljević, “Hofmannsthal’s ‘Mythological’ Opera Arabella,” in Theater and Performance in
Austria: From Mozart to Jelinek, ed. Ritchie Robinson and Edward Timms, Austrian Studies 4
(Edinburgh University Press, 1993), pp. 76–7.
10
Hofmannsthal, “Tschechishe und Slowakische Volkslieder,” in Gesammelte Werke. Reden und
Aufsätze iii, 165–7. Ultimately Strauss set at least three folk songs to music in the Arabella score.
11
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (13 July 1928), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, pp. 486–7.
12
Matthew Werley, “Historicism and Cultural Politics in Three Interwar-Period Operas by Richard
Strauss: Arabella (1933), Die schweigsame Frau (1935), and Friedenstag (1938),” Ph.D. diss., University of
Oxford (2010), p. 130.
13
Ibid.
14
Paul Eisner, Volkslieder der Slawen: Ausgewählt, Übersetzt, Eingeleitet und Erläutert (Leipzig:
Bibliographisches Institut, [1926]).
scholar has shown how in at least one instance Hofmannsthal adapted a Slavic ballad for
Mandryka’s speech toward the end of Act ii.15
Hofmannsthal believed such issues should be worked out not politically but cultur-
ally and, more specifically, on the stage, be it a world stage (his Salzburg Festival
project), the theater, or the opera house. Often overlooked, Hofmannsthal’s numerous
essays of the 1920s abound in nostalgic utopias of Habsburg glory, as do a number of his
literary works, mostly unfinished. Several such works shed light on two of the most
important sources for Arabella.
Sources and Austrian nostalgia
One of many uncompleted literary works by Hofmannsthal from the 1920s was his
play Der Fiaker als Graf (The Cabby as Count), begun in 1924 and rooted in the
Viennese Volksstück tradition, a genre that dated back to the eighteenth century
with such figures as Emanuel Schikaneder. These kinds of stage events were more
vaudevilles than serious theater and included songs, dance, and Schrammelmusik.
They took on greater importance during the post-1815 Metternich period, with the
imposition of governmental censorship in all aspects of contemporary media. Under
the veil of comic farce (Posse), these works successfully eluded censors with spoof
and clever wordplay. The venues were all private suburban theaters (including the
Theater an der Wien) and were attended by all levels of society.16 Indeed, one of the
hallmarks of the Volksstück was the comic mixture of social classes and ethnic
backgrounds.17
After the razing of Vienna’s medieval walls, the subsequent erection of the grand
historicist buildings along the new Ringstrasse, and a population shift beyond the
formerly contained inner city, these suburban theaters became even more integral
in the cultural lives of all Viennese. During the period of Arabella, the plays of
such figures as Ferdinand Raimund, Johann Nestroy, and Ludwig Anzensgruber
were extremely popular in the imperial capital. Nestroy’s plays, though relatively
obscure outside Austria, remain mainstays of the Viennese theatrical repertoire to
this day.18
15
Kraft-Eike Wrede, “Die Oper: vom Buch zur Bühne – dargestellt am Beispiel von Richard Strauss’
Arabella,” in Theaterwesen und dramatische Literatur: Beitrage zur Geschichte des Theaters, ed.
Günther Holtus (Mainz: Mainzer Forschungen zu Drama und Theater, 1987), pp. 338–9.
16
Indeed, the Theater an der Wien was the brainchild of Schikaneder; The Magic Flute, written by
Mozart as a vehicle for the comic actor, had premiered in his earlier suburban location, the Theater auf
der Wieden, in 1791.
17
Volksstücke were sometimes referred to as Lustspiele.
18
There was minor influence to be found in adaptations (The Razzler, 1981) by Thornton Wilder
(born in Czechoslovakia) and The Matchmaker, also by Wilder.
Such Volksstücke were in the forefront of Hofmannsthal’s postwar nostalgic imagina-

tion, and The Cabby as Count was not the only project in this genre in the 1920s. Indeed, as
early as 1917 Hofmannsthal had sketched a Volksstück entitled Schwank in Nestroy’scher
Manier (Comedy in the Manner of Nestroy). Other Volksstücke included Lustspiel: Der
Menschenfeind (Comedy: The Enemy of the People), conceived around the time of Fiaker.
These sketches require a different type of detective work for the musicologist, for
Hofmannsthal had no need, with some exceptions, to present his early projects to a
musical collaborator for acceptance. Looking through these many sketches,19 we find little
in terms of concrete plot, which must have existed solely in the poet’s mind as he created
characters of various social and ethnic backgrounds, names, situations, and locations.
Act i of The Cabby as Count takes place in a public space, a tavern or restaurant
(whether this is an indoor or an outdoor space is not specified). Here Hofmannsthal
presents the main characters, but in a very vague manner. Most important is Emilie
(known as Milli), based on a historical character, the real Fiakermilli, Emilie Turecek.20
Milli is a proud, charming woman who, like Zerbinetta, makes no excuses for her
plain speech and has many suitors from all walks of life. Among the counts we might
recognize some names that find their way into the opera: Lamoral, Zdenko, Domenick,
and Matteo. The two main suitors seem to be Tassilo and Aladar, who may have been
married to Milli years earlier in Argentina.
In any case, with the narrative that was surely running through Hofmannsthal’s
mind, reading these loosely connected, often aphoristic sketches makes for a daunt-
ing, even uncanny experience. Two aspects of the play remained fixtures of the
opera: a second-act cabbies’ masked ball, which always took place on Mardi Gras
(Faschingsdienstag), and the role of the Fiakermilli. Thus, The Cabby as Count offered
Arabella little in terms of plot but much in terms of time, place, characters, and
nineteenth-century atmosphere.
Unlike The Cabby as Count, Lucidor offers a real plot and stronger characterizations, but it
too remains sketchlike, with undeveloped minor characters, the most important being
an unnamed wealthy uncle and a suitor, one Herr von Imfanger. We know practically
nothing about Arabella except that she is cool and slightly flirtatious. This scenario, for
an unwritten comedy of the same name, focuses upon Lucille – her love for her family, her
dual gender roles (indeed, a certain infatuation with sexual ambiguity), and her intense
love for Arabella’s main suitor, who would become Matteo in the final opera. Also
important in this sketch is the social and financial setting in first-district Vienna in the
1870s. It is worth quoting the sketch at length:
19
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, 26, Operndichtungen 4, ed. Hans-Albrecht Koch
(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976), pp. 133–63 and 325–43.
20
There was yet another famous Fiakermilli, Emilie Demel, whom Strauss greatly admired as a
singer; it is not known whether Hofmannsthal knew of her.
Lucidor: Figures for an Unwritten Comedy

The story takes place toward the end of the 1870s, when one Frau von Murska lived in an
apartment in a hotel overlooking the Kärtnerstrasse. They owned by right an estate in the
Russian portion of Poland, though it has been sequestered. She has a grown daughter,
Arabella, and a boy, Lucidor.
Von Murska, who carries a small but not unknown title, is a cultured woman (a
“bluestocking”) with a certain standing in smaller Viennese literary circles and even enjoys
an occasional salon in her apartment. Beyond her erudition there are certain notable
eccentricities about her; she is restless, worrisome, and impulsive. In her eyes, Arabella is an
angel, Lucidor a small hard thing without much heart. Arabella is in reality much like her
deceased father: cool, unsatisfied, impatient. Lucidor is, in fact, not a boy at all, but a girl
named Lucille.
It was an impulsive idea, though not one without a strategy, of the mother upon their move
to Vienna. After all, there was a wealthy uncle living in Vienna, one who did not like the
company of women or girls. Lucidor might well one day inherit some of the bachelor uncle’s
fortune, and it was certainly far less expensive to bring one rather than two young women
out into Viennese high society. Growing up, Lucille was a determined tomboy with a small,
boyish figure, who preferred – even as a child – riding horses with a men’s saddle.
Among the various suitors there was a young man named Vladimir who especially liked
Arabella. He was well-off but without parents and siblings; his father was an officer and his
mother a countess. Vladimir became friendly with the family and enjoyed horseback riding
with Lucidor, and they soon became close friends. Frau von Murska was becoming ever
more eager for a closer relationship between Arabella and Vladimir, but Arabella had her eye
on a rustic gentleman from the Tyrol (a Herr von Imfanger), a man, however, socially
unsuitable for the match.
Arabella’s continued coolness toward Vladimir pained young Lucidor, who began writing
love letters to him forging her sister’s name. The Arabella by night (passionate, vulnerable,
touching) was so different from the one by day (aloof and slightly flirtatious), and he began to
enjoy this strange relationship. The nighttime relationship deepened when Lucidor invited
him into her darkened room, which she pretended to be Arabella’s. Only one act was not
permitted in the dark: he could not remove the silk scarf from her head hiding her boyish
haircut. In short, there developed a strange triangular relationship: Lucidor, whose
friendship with Vladimir grew into a brotherly bond, then the Arabella by day and the one by
night. The mother also encouraged Lucidor to strengthen his ties to his uncle with visits
and outings, and Vladimir often came along.
Arabella enjoyed Herr Imfanger but knew that marriage was no option; perhaps she
could enjoy some kind of marriage of convenience [Vernunftehe] with Vladimir, having
Imfanger on the side. Both men believed the other to be a fool and unworthy of Arabella. But
as this situation began to intensify, Frau von Murska’s financial circumstances took a
downward turn. Friends were asking for loans to be repaid, and she knew that soon they
would be leaving Vienna. Lucidor, as Arabella, sent Vladimir an impassioned letter detailing
the family’s misfortune and imploring him to come to their apartment in the early evening. In
the meantime, on a whim, Lucidor went to the uncle and broke the bad news. He was
sympathetic but remained at present uncommitted.
Vladimir arrives at the appointed time and asks the mother for an entre-nous [unter vier
Augen] conversation with Arabella. For the first time he speaks to her as if she were the
Arabella by night, asking her to drop her mask. She replies that she has no idea what [she]
must drop. Vladimir then begins a passionate monologue that at its height is interrupted by
the sudden opening of a door. It is Lucidor, but again not Lucidor, rather Lucille, a girl bathed
in tears, wearing her sister’s nightgown, her short hair hidden by the silk scarf. Lucidor/
Lucille is his trusted fraternal friend and simultaneously his secret female lover. A dialogue
follows.
Whether Lucille became the wife of Vladimir by day and in another land or remained his
happy lover by night will not be recorded here. It remains uncertain whether Vladimir was a
man truly worthy of such devotion. However, the full beauty of such an unconditionally
committed soul as Lucille’s could not have been in any other than these strange
circumstances.21
There are a host of antecedents for cross-dressing that might have influenced
Hofmannsthal, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It to Molière’s Dépit amoureux and,
most obviously, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. Even within Strauss’s operatic oeuvre,
characters as minor as the Page in Salome and as major as Octavian in Rosenkavalier and
the composer in Ariadne have played various roles in Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s
creative imagination. Public fascination with androgynous characters on the stage –
such as Louise Brooks, Clara Bow, and others – influenced fashions and attitudes off it.
The famed bob hairstyle (Bubikopf ) was in demand among women in their twenties at
the time of Lucidor’s writing.
But there was a contemporary popular psychological dimension as well. The time
during which Hofmannsthal wrote this little comedy offers yet another context that
continued to inform the psychological foundation of Arabella even in its final form:
Freudian notions of personality dissociation, the concept of “womanliness as masquer-
ade,”22 and even popular interpretations of Wagnerian metaphysical notions of night
(Lucidor/Arabella) and day (Arabella).
The masquerade as a link between The Cabby as Count (the masked ball in Act ii) and
Lucidor may not even have occurred to Hofmannsthal. At the turning point of Lucidor,
21
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Sämtliche Werke, 28, Erzählungen 1, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt am Main:
S. Fischer, 1997), pp. 73–84. I have tried to retain the tone of Hofmannsthal’s sketchlike voice
throughout my abridged translation.
22
Joan Riviere, Freud’s former patient, colleague, and earliest English translator, wrote a seminal
essay, “Womanliness as Masquerade” (“Weiblichkeit als Maskerade”), in 1929; it was based upon
many of their mutual discussions. Although the soundness of its science may not have stood the test of
time, it was widely circulated in various editions. See, for example, Joan Riviere, “Womanliness
as a Masquerade,” in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan
(London: Methuen, 1986), pp. 35–44.
Vladimir asks Arabella to drop her “daytime mask,” a request she does not understand;
she is saved by the sudden entrance of her sister. Lucidor is in essence a comedy sketch
about a living masquerade in Vienna. In more modern parlance we might use the word
“passing.” Lucille passes as Lucidor, and her mother passes as a bluestocking, even
though she is down on her luck, surviving on questionable loans, even pimping Lucidor
out to a rich uncle. Beyond gender and class, there is also the geographical passing from
Russian Poland to first-district Viennese society.
Molding his sources
Thus, at this stage, before Hofmannsthal began writing the libretto, he had sources
for the social milieu of Vienna in The Cabby as Count and a more personal space in
Lucidor, the former never being developed beyond its operettalike atmosphere, espe-
cially the Act ii ballroom scene. In constructing Arabella, Hofmannsthal expanded
Lucidor, giving life and actual names to underdeveloped or nonexistent characters.
If the operettalike aspects were the general Viennese setting and atmosphere and the
potential for a characteristic love interest between a Western European character and a
mysterious person from the East, including misunderstanding, reconciliation, and even
marriage, then Lucidor would seem to undermine the genre. The mother, no longer
Frau von Murska but Countess Adelaide, now has a husband, Count Waldner, a
narcissist and a broke gambling addict satisfied with his wife’s decision to give the
younger daughter (now Zdenka/Zdenko) a boy-travesty role. He is even willing to
auction off his older daughter, Arabella, to the highest bidder. The countess, who lives
in a world of fantasy and card readers, encourages her husband, to the detriment of the
daughters.
Arabella (a name retained from Lucidor) is allowed to live in her own dream world,
and she habitually rejects men (Elemer, Dominik, and Lamoral) who wish to get close to
her. Zdenka seems to be the most functional member of this dysfunctional family, but
she pays a price – what David and Susan Petersen have called a “self-effacing pathol-
ogy.”23 She must make the best of a seemingly impossible situation through an intricate
series of deceptions (many already outlined in Lucidor) with a resulting pathological
promiscuity with another suitor (Matteo or Vladimir in Lucidor), gender confusion, and
even suicidal thoughts.
Mandryka – a character taken in part from Herr von Imfanger, given his outsider
status – has his own set of problems: sexual insecurity, fear of corrupt city life (earlier
treated comically with the character of Ochs), and manic moodiness. His antisocial
behavior ruins the cabbies’ ball and brings the curtain down on Act ii. As long as he is
23
John David Petersen and Susan K. Petersen, “The Waldner Family: Compulsion and Dysfunction
in Strauss’s Arabella,” The Musical Quarterly 8, 4 (Winter 1991–2): 38.
rich, Count Waldner is willing to overlook such issues. In Act iii Mandryka’s paranoid
behavior is even worse: he says horrible things about his wife-to-be, forcing the
normally indifferent Count Waldner to defend his daughter’s honor with dueling
pistols – which, he soon realizes, he has already pawned.24 The boorish Mandryka
then orders “sharp sabers” when Zdenka, wearing Arabella’s negligé (as described in
Lucidor), makes her confession, threatening to drown herself in the Danube.
But is the operetta aspect really undermined? Doesn’t all this hyperbolic dysfunction
have a comic underside? Viennese operetta was always about social issues, sexual
hypocrisies, and politics. Behind the facade of comedy, beyond the official venues
(and stricter censorship), operetta, like the Volksstück, mirrored a society’s anxieties
more effectively than any higher genre of the time.25 Hofmannsthal was intent on
exposing the dark side of Austrian liberalism, even if the comedy of the unpolished final
two acts was not as refined as that in Der Rosenkavalier. We are reminded that the goal of
“mythological operetta,” with regard to the preceding Die ägyptische Helena, was never
reached, and the genre continued to elude both Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Arabella was
as close as they got, and it remains their most-performed opera of this period.26
From Z(denka) to A(rabella): the evolution of a never-completed libretto
This short survey of the libretto’s genesis is in part a chronicle of tragic incompletion,
but it is necessary to any understanding of the unique structural nature of this most
popular Strauss opera after Ariadne auf Naxos. Hofmannsthal first imagined the work in
1927, the same year as Krenek’s hit Jonny spielt auf. Hofmannsthal – who worried that his
older colleague was sometimes out of touch – wanted something modern and non-
mythological (unlike Helena). That fall Hofmannsthal envisioned a new opera, to be
called The Cabby as Count, a “new comedy for music.” It would include two girls and a
Croatian baritone. Strauss had already acquired a four-volume set of southern Slavic folk
songs, as probably suggested by Hofmannsthal. By the end of December Hofmannsthal
had made a fundamental change in the title: Arabella, or The Cabbies’ Ball. The Croatian
acquired a name, Mandryka; and Arabella, “a modern character,” would be the central
figure, though Mandryka would set the action.27
24
Forgetting pawned merchandise is a theme to be found in Die Liebe der Danae (see Chapter 8),
when King Pollux (a Waldner-like character) offers mines, land, and fisheries, all of which have
been sold. Danae, oder Die Vernunftheirat was a sketch by Hofmannsthal from 1920 and will be
discussed in Chapter 8.
25
Crittenden, Johann Strauss and Vienna, p. 2.
26
It may well be that Hofmannsthal and Strauss were more closely drawn to the spirit of Viennese
operetta than to its Parisian counterpart, which was the model for Helena.
27
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (22 December 1927), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence,
p. 460.
In May Hofmannsthal sent a provisional first act, and it is safe to say that all
Strauss’s criticisms of Act i remained the same through the summer of 1929. Strauss
immediately put his finger on two problems: Arabella, despite her beauty and charm,
was too cool and vague; she knows well whom she does not desire, but we know very
little else about her. He wrote that Arabella had to offer the audience a “lyrical
outpouring,” creating a strong first curtain.28 Early on Hofmannsthal ignored or
simply did not understand that simple request. The second problem was that the
whole act was too piecemeal, an observation that thoroughly exposed Hofmannsthal’s
early creative problems with integrating the Fiaker concept, the prose Lucidor, and an
opera libretto ostensibly based on Arabella. Plotwise, Lucidor was all about Zdenka and
her love for Matteo. The Lucidor scenario translated above readily shows how color-
less the character Arabella remained throughout the sketch. In revising the libretto,
Hofmannsthal’s instincts curiously told him to remove elements of Zdenka–Matteo
rather than to add personality to Arabella.
On 26 July 1928 Strauss received the drafts of Acts ii and iii and immediately found
the second act unsuitable: “no real or apparent conflict” was his overall judgment.29
Arabella and Mandryka fall in love at the outset, and the story is more or less over. In
early August Strauss outlined to Hofmannsthal what he visualized as musicworthy
segments:
1. Meeting scene at the stairs: Adelaide, Waldner, Mandryka, and Arabella.
2. Arabella and Mandryka: betrothal.
3. Arabella’s leave taking with the counts, Zdenka–Matteo scene (assignation overheard
by Mandryka).
4. Arabella with the three counts.
5. Mandryka’s despair, entrance of the Fiakermilli.
6. Mandryka alone, desperate, scene between him and the Fiakermilli, “Where is
Arabella?” “We must go home!”30
Strauss’s dramaturgical summation of Act ii was less an outline than cogent paragraphs –
and quite close to the final design. The letters to Hofmannsthal suggest that Strauss
himself was never entirely fond of the dramaturgical layout of these two acts and
expected that they would get round to them sooner or later.
In the spring and summer of 1928 Strauss was preoccupied with the premiere and
early performances of Die ägyptische Helena and did not turn to thinking musically about
Act i of Arabella until the autumn of 1928. The more he thought about musical ideas, the
less he liked the textual ones. Again, he put his finger directly on the problem. The
28
29
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (8 August 1928), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 496.
30
Ibid., pp. 502–3.
reason Arabella struck Strauss as insipid and devoid of conflict was that she was “more
like a character from a novel than from a play!”31 And that accusation could really be
leveled at the libretto as a whole. It was driven at bottom by prose and prose structure
and, despite what Hofmannsthal might have seemed to believe, by the story of Zdenka
and Matteo.
During that autumn, poet and composer worked diligently on Act i, again cutting
characters and situations that distracted from Arabella. Acts ii and iii would have to wait
until later. They did not return to Act i until May 1929, and then mostly to details already
discussed the previous autumn. In June, however, there was a significant turnaround: at
long last Hofmannsthal felt at one with Strauss that the end of Act i should belong
entirely to Arabella; Counts Dominick and Lamoral should both be cut, leaving only
Elemer. The composer then repeated his unheeded request of May 1928, and on 6 July
1929, in his final letter to the poet, he suggested that “Arabella must at all costs conclude
the first act with a longish aria, soliloquy, contemplation, if only for dramatic reasons.”
Hofmannsthal, in his last letter, agreed, and Act i was quickly ready for composition.32
What has never been discussed in the Strauss literature is the reason Strauss felt it
necessary to send Hofmannsthal a telegram. He was not at a far-removed location, but
rather at home in Garmisch. Was it an effort to dramatize his satisfaction about a process
that took so much time and effort? Or had he heard of the suicide of Hofmannsthal’s son
and wished to send him some immediate good cheer? The latter, though unsubstanti-
ated, seems more plausible.
After Hofmannsthal’s death, the sixty-five-year-old Strauss – who had shown such
resilience through setback after setback – fell into a depression and seemed unable to
emerge from it. The normally stoic, reserved composer suddenly burst into un-
restrained tears while reading aloud from Hofmannsthal’s text to Elisabeth Schumann
and her husband, Carl Alwin, who were paying a condolence visit to Garmisch only a
day after the poet’s death.33 Over the ensuing weeks Strauss came to feel increasingly
isolated, even fatalistic: “I must resign myself to admitting that my period of creating
operas has come to a close.”34
But Strauss knew inwardly what he had to do to transcend this crisis – namely, get
back to work – and even while in his depressed state, he began tentative sketches at the
end of July 1929; a short score was completed on 30 July 1930. But now came the problem
of Acts ii and iii, which essentially remained in their versions of August 1928. There were
good writers – some eager to attach themselves to a famous project – who offered to
31
Ibid., p. 519.
32
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (6 July and 10 July 1929), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence,
pp. 533–4.
33
Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik, p. 501.
34
Richard Strauss, “The History of Die schweigsame Frau,” in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 107.
help, and even better writers who would have remained anonymous,35 but Strauss
waved them all off. The current version would be the final version, a tribute to his
revered Hofmannsthal. Act ii was sketched out by 8 June 1931 and Act iii by November
of that year. Strauss finished orchestrating the entire work on 12 October 1932.
Act i
The length and intensity of Strauss’s and Hofmannsthal’s collaborative work on Act i of
Arabella paid off, for it is dramaturgically one of the best organized and most cogently
paced acts of any opera by Strauss, including Act i of Der Rosenkavalier. The interplay
between tonally stable set numbers and the tonal but tonically ambiguous connective
tissue of parlando-style material seems effortless, despite the purposeful structuring of
events, which unfold as follows:
1. Introduction (card reader, Adelaide, and Zdenka): G minor.
2. Zdenka’s short monologue and dialogue with Matteo.
3. Arabella’s entrance: F major.
4. Arabella’s aria-duet with Zdenka (“Aber der Richtige”): F major.
5. Elemer’s entrance and ultimate marriage proposal.
6. Mandryka’s entrance (monologue and dialogue with Waldner): E♭ major.
7. Brief comic counterpart to above scene (Waldner, Zdenka, Matteo).
8. Arabella’s monologue (“Mein Elemer”): C major (V/F).
As we shall see throughout the work, especially in the second and third acts, Strauss
the skillful music dramatist could easily highlight and diminish certain characters at will.
The introduction is a tour de force of seemingly effortless parlando whose strategy is
to introduce plot, character, and situation through the character of a fortune teller, one
of the oldest conceits of the genre: the musical motives and their associative harmonies
whiz by at cinematic speed. We learn about the children’s no-good gambling father,
“surrounded by worries.” “I see there an officer,” Adelaide declares. “Matteo!” Zdenka
answers. No, he isn’t the man. Within a matter of seconds we know that the unnamed
officer is someone important, with a sudden shift rhythmically (etwas gemächlicher), melodi-
cally (horns), and tonally (shift to heroic E♭). Poor Matteo gets none of this treatment as
the pitch rises in the treble instruments without tempo or tonal change, an extension of
Zdenka’s motive of three short upbeats and a longer downbeat; see Ex. 6.1).36
Strauss was clear from the outset that Matteo was of little interest. Where
Hofmannsthal did not cut, Strauss made unkind cuts, setting his tenor in a most
35
Alice Strauss, personal communication, 10 September 1980. One such writer, according to Harry
Zohn, was Stefan Zweig; personal communication, 30 March 1981.
36
One might assert that Strauss ascribes him E minor, albeit not in a manly root position (see
Elektra’s “Aegisth motive,” always in F and in first inversion).
6.1 Arabella, Act i
unflattering tessitura where his high notes come across as more strident – even annoying –
than heroic (Ex. 6.2).
The tonal stability of Act i is generated by the main characters following an opening
scene of rapid parlando, much card shuffling, and vague references to the tonic G minor.
Amid all the banter, about a quarter of the way into the act, Arabella enters serenely
(moderato) with a sustained A♮ in the oboe hovering above an F 64 chord. There is a
decided calm about her, given both the second-inversion voicing and slower tempi in
contrast to all the activity that preceded it; she has seen someone who will change her
life. Arabella and Mandryka are the main characters of Act i, and they determine the
harmonic points of articulation, first Arabella and the most famous ensemble of the
entire work (“But the right one” [Aber der Richtige]), an F major duet between Arabella
Figure 6.1 Strauss at the time of Arabella
and her sister, with rising and cascading parallel thirds that could only have been
inspired by the duo ending of “Ah guarda, sorella” from Strauss’s favorite Mozart
opera, Così fan tutte (Ex. 6.3a). As is well known, Strauss crafted the duet from a southern
Slovakian song, “Ljubomorna” (Ex. 6.3b).37
Strauss then turns to the “heroic” E♭ as Mandryka enters the scene, introducing
himself to Count Waldner and making clear his intentions. In describing the har-
monic layout, Matthew Werley has compellingly observed a libidinal harmonic
semitone “overshot” of the “target” E♭ in Mandyka’s discussion with Arabella’s
father: E♭ (C, D♭, E♭, E) E♭.38 The honest C major plea for Arabella’s hand is followed
by the dreamy declaration of his love (D♭), heroic boasting (E♭), erotic obsession (E),
and a return to “his” tonic as he shakes Waldner’s hand goodbye. That central
moment of boasting (“Mine are the forests” [Mein sind die Wälder]) may well have
been derived from the ballad style of songs in the Kuhač anthology Collected South
37
Franja S. Kuhač, Collected South Slovakian Folksongs for Voice and Piano Accompaniment in Four
Volumes (Agram: K. Albreacht, 1878–82).
38
Werley, “Historicism and Cultural Politics,” p. 133.
6.2 Matteo’s vocal stridency
6.3a Act i, “Aber der Richtige”

6.3b “Ljubomorna”
Slovakian Folksongs for Voice and Piano Accompaniment (see n. 37). In the margin of the
autograph libretto, Strauss writes “Ballad,” without any further attribution.39
Since May 1928 Strauss had known that Arabella’s curtain-closing monologue was
central to the success of the opera’s dramatic coherence, and he had Hofmannsthal cut
out a dialogue with Matteo and position a monologue for Arabella (“My Elemer” [Mein
Elemer]) that both sums up her strange new feelings about a man at whom she stole a
glance (and who has her picture) and sets up her state of mind for the ensuing ballroom
scene of Act ii. It opens in an ambiguous C major, then moves to D♭, referencing
Mandryka’s outpouring of love, “I wish I could see my stranger again” (Ich möchte
meinen fremden Mann einmal noch sehen). It then climbs a fifth higher to A♭ as she
wonders: “He must be a married man?” (Er ist sicher ein verhierateter Mann?). She is
shaken out of her reverie a half step higher (“but today” [aber heute]) and finally returns
to C, which both references the opening of her monologue and closes the act as the
dominant of F major.
39
The same might be true of the ensuing E major section, “All my stewards come” (Kommen
meine Verwalter) but in this case it is Hofmannsthal’s hand that encourages Strauss to write in a
ballad (i.e., folk) style. See the Arabella autograph libretto at the Richard Strauss Archive,
Garmisch.
Act ii
Back in the autumn of 1928 Strauss was skeptical about a musically convincing Act ii –
and, by extension, Act iii. He had no belief in any of the characters and was convinced
that once Arabella and Mandryka were betrothed, it was “the end of the plot proper,” for
then it turns into the subsidiary plot of Zdenka and Matteo.40 The composer was
convinced that the plot must, like that of Der Rosenkavalier, go to a more serious side.
Hofmannsthal replied that he had just finished rewriting Act ii and nearly all of the third,
and that these were precisely his intentions; but, he goes on to say, he should read them
aloud to Strauss in order to convince the composer of what he had in mind. A
conversation over lunch, followed by a full reading, would bring these characters to
life, which is precisely what they did on Saturday, 29 December, at 1:30 p.m.41
But Strauss was still trying to get a fully convincing Act i out of the poet and thus did
not want to press too hard in the meantime. Although there is little documentation of
that December afternoon, its importance should not be minimized, for surely much of
that more serious side to the opera – a side missing from all of their correspondence –
was discussed in Garmisch, very likely the importance of the third act and the recurring
theme of allomatic transformation that was so central to Ariadne and most of the
Hofmannsthal libretti that followed.
The scenic layout of the musically complete Act ii differs little from the plot outline of
8 August 1928, but there are some important changes in detail. For Strauss there was
simply no getting around the fact that the main number of Act ii was the duet between
Arabella and Mandryka (“And you will be my master” [Und du wirst mein Gebieter
sein]), which was strategically misplaced at the beginning of the act. Strauss, ever
determined to play down the Zdenka–Matteo subplot, created a twofold solution:
bringing the Fiakermilli earlier into the act (just after the duet) to serve as both a
humorous historical-coloristic background for the entire act and a specific foil for
Mandryka’s despair,42 making the act less about Matteo than about Mandryka’s break-
down and public embarrassment. The Fiakermilli sings coloratura (meant to indicate
yodeling) in those bright diatonic keys, reminiscent of Zerbinetta, as opposed to the
tortured, dissonant chromaticism of Mandryka.
Kenneth Birkin makes a convincing argument that the entire tonal outline of Arabella
consists of dominant relationships: Act i (F major), Act ii (B♭ major), and Act iii
(E♭ major).43 In the same study he emphasizes how Strauss’s practice of associative
40
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (7 November 1928), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence,
pp. 512–13.
41
42
Surely the nadir of Mandryka’s public behavior is when he kisses the Fiakermilli and asks, “How
much does the key to a countess’s room cost here in Vienna?”
43
Kenneth Birkin, Richard Strauss: Arabella (Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 67.
6.4 Act i, “Das ist ein Fall von andrer Art”
tonalities reinforces psychological nuances, defines emotional (and, I would add, dram-
aturgical) shape, and “determine[s] the formal musical structure of the work.”44 The
dramaturgical problems Strauss recognized with the unfinished Acts ii and iii never
quite went away, despite his own editing of the libretto. They contribute to some of the
muddled tonal structure after the duet “Und du wirst mein Gebieter sein,” which is the
sonic gem of Act ii. The tonal references are strongly tied to Act i:
Scena
F: Mandryka: “How beautiful you are” (So schön sind Sie)
D♭: Arabella: “You want to marry me” (Sie wollen mich heiraten)
F: Arabella: “The right one, if there is one” (Der Richtige wenn’s einen gibt)
A♭/A: Mandryka: “You would go to the well for me” (Du müsstest mir zum Brunnen
gehn)
Duet
E: Arabella and Mandryka: “And you will be my master” (Und du wirst mein
Gebieter sein)
One reference to F major even takes the very words of the Arabella–Zdenka duet, and
the articulations of D♭, A♭, and A are direct references to love, dream, and reality in
her curtain-closing “Mein Elemer.” The tender E major duet is both a tonal and a
thematic allusion back to Mandryka’s E major confession to his future father-in-law,
“[Seeing Arabella for the first time] is something different, for me it is something
holy” (Das ist ein Fall von andrer Art. Es handelt sich für mich um etwas Heiliges)
(Ex. 6.4).
The duet is another set piece derived from Kuhač’s collection of Slovakian folk songs,
this one entitled “Ono je moja djevojka” (Ex. 6.5).
44
Ibid., p. 75.
6.5a Act ii, “Und du wirst mein Gebieter sein”
6.5b “Ono je moja djevojka”

The discovery of the key and Arabella’s misunderstood letter make for the undoing
of Act ii. Mandryka begins to fall apart in jealousy. There is only one thing that the
family and her suitor can agree upon: hurriedly to leave the ball in progress, go to the
hotel, and hope that all is well. Thus Strauss creates a clash of uncomprehending
superficiality (the Fiakermilli and the dancing guests) and painful anxiety on the part
of the injured parties. We hear an almost homely D major setting against the tonally
unstable angst of Mandryka and the Waldners, a musical possibility that Strauss surely
learned from the end of Tristan’s Act i, where the homely C major intrudes like an
unwanted guest, oblivious to the chromatic lovesickness of the lovers. The act ends so
abruptly that Strauss’s friend and stage director Rudolf Hartmann and the conductor
Clemens Krauss suggested it be fused or elided into the beginning of Act iii for a 1939
Munich performance. Thus, instead of the incursion of the lively D major curtain closer,
we go directly to the E major prelude to Act iii.
Act iii
The E major prelude to the third act, which is meant to suggest Zdenka and Matteo’s
lovemaking in the dark, exceeds even the E major opening of Der Rosenkavalier in
both length (86 vs. 122 bars) and frenetic rhythmic activity (stürmisch bewegt). And
if some critics have found it overwrought, it should be observed that months,
perhaps years, of sexual repression and displacement found their outlet on that
night (Ex. 6.6).
Much is made, in terms of the superficial stage action, of the anger between
Mandryka and the others, of Matteo’s dismay with Arabella, and of her parents’
potential embarrassment and anxieties – even to the point of Waldner’s calling for
dueling pistols. But something far deeper is taking place, for in the duet of Act ii Arabella
took her and Mandryka’s betrothal to heart; she took the next step in life, from girlhood
to womanhood, from Hofmannsthal’s dream (Traum) to reality (Wirklichkeit). In the
second act, as in Act ii of Rosenkavalier, in this inner transformative moment of
betrothal, time seems to stand still. But Mandryka has clearly not taken that important
psychological step. Perhaps the most distressing line of the entire act is when Arabella
says to herself:
Things must just take their course,
Life is worth nothing!
What’s the good of anything in the world,
If this man
Is so weak
And hasn’t the strength
To believe me!
6.6 Act iii, opening
[Soll alles gehen, wie es will,

Das Leben ist nichts wert!
Was ist an allem in der Welt,
Wenn dieser Mann
So schwach ist
Und die Kraft nicht hat,
an mich zu glauben!]
Thus far we have seen the importance of allomatic transformation in Ariadne and
even double allomatic transformation in Die Frau ohne Schatten – but there is also the
possibility of a double one of sorts in Arabella, though it takes on a decidedly less

metaphysical role. Arabella has acquired a special self-knowledge through the
bizarre events following the ball, “exhausted but enlarged.”45 This new modern
woman knows she is stronger than Mandryka. She will have to forgive him, for
despite his “rustic strength,” he lacks the courage required for the transformation.
For a humiliating moment, der Richtige has been exposed as anything but strong.
Save for Arabella, all the main characters are guilty: her parents are corrupt,
obsessed with their cards; Zdenka, for all her goodness, does not come to the aid of
her sister but chooses rather to save Matteo, her co-conspirator; and finally, Mandryka
cannot find it in himself to trust the only honest person in the entire opera. The
composer found these character weaknesses musically challenging as well. In the end
he decided to resolve the problems through the wash of music and allomatic trans-
formation. For Matteo and Zdenka, it is the latter’s literal transformation into a young
woman, with new social and sexual responsibilities. Matteo (an unsympathetic tenor)
is the least evolved of the group, not unlike the emperor (also a tenor) in Die Frau ohne
Schatten. For Arabella and Mandryka the transformation entails the attainment of a
higher spiritual plane, symbolized both by the glass of water and by the half-step move
from the B♭ opening of Act ii and the prebetrothal, and pre-Lenten Carnival festivities
to B (C♭), when Arabella descends the staircase, as pure as the water in the glass she
holds (Exx. 6.7a and 6.7b).
This final monologue is one of Strauss’s finest, for textually and musically it sums
up and resolves the problems preceding it (see Arabella’s Final Monologue below).
There are other musical references beyond the staircase music, references that
for the most part retain the original tonality, such as the E major duet as Arabella
offers Mandryka the glass and the poignant return of “Aber der Richtige” as she
acknowledges that they are now truly betrothed (“And so we are betrothed” [Und so
sind wir Verlobte]). And though it has been argued that E♭ is the central operating
key of the final act, Strauss would never have closed the work with a tonality so
deeply associated with the weaker Mandryka. The strong, modern Arabella who thus
far has played Mandryka like a fiddle has the last word: “I cannot be any other
way, take me as I am!”(Ich kann nicht anders werden, nimm mich, wie ich bin!). In
a brilliant gesture, Strauss ends it all with Mandryka’s rustic-heroic “Mein sind
die Wälder” (Ex. 6.8a) of Act i, no longer in his “heroic” E♭ but in the F major of
Arabella, the strongest character of the opera. In short, the movement from E♭ to
the dominant of F in Act i gets played out to the tonic for the close of Act iii
(Ex. 6.8b).
45
Beth Hart, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ideal Woman: A Psychoanalytical Perspective,” The Opera
Quarterly 13, 4 (Summer 1997): 111.
6.7a Act ii, opening
Arabella’s Final Monologue

B: Arabella: “It was good that you haven’t yet gone” (Das war sehr gut, Mandryka);
staircase music beginning Act ii
♭
E : “Then when I sensed you in the darkness” (Dann aber, wie ich Sie gespürt hab)
E: “I offer my friend this untasted glass” (und diesen unberührten Trunk kredenz’ ich
meinem Freund); Act ii duet music
C: Mandryka: “Surely as no one shall drink from this glass” (So wahr aus diesem Glas)
F: Arabella: “And thus we are betrothed” (Und so sind wir Verlobte); “Aber der
Richtige” music from Act i
Strauss finished scoring Arabella on 12 October 1932, while Germany was on its steady
march toward fascism. Just three months earlier the National Socialist Party had the
highest percentage (38 percent) of representation of any party in the parliament.
Strauss, of course, had no idea what lay in store for him with regard to the opera’s
premiere, slated for 1 July 1933 in Dresden. Strauss codedicated the work to Fritz
6.7b Act iii, Arabella descends the staircase
6.8a Act i “Mein sind die Wälder”
Busch of the Dresden Opera, who had been his musical strength during times of
doubt, but Busch, an “Aryan,” had infuriated local Dresden Nazi officials and was
forced to resign his post before the premiere, which was contractually slated for
Dresden.46 On 16 March 1933 Strauss and his son, a lawyer, went to Berlin hoping
46
The other dedicatee was the Dresden intendant, Alfred Reucker.
6.8b Act iii, closing
they might find a legal loophole in the contract with the new government. Perhaps
Strauss’s standing in for Bruno Walter (on 19 and 20 March), allowing the Berlin
Philharmonic to avoid public embarrassment, was an effort to strengthen his
position, but there was nothing to be done; Dresden was the only possible venue.
On 21 March he declared himself “defenseless” (wehrlos) against the Dresden
contract.47 Clemens Krauss, whose wife sang Arabella, substituted for Busch; Krauss
would go on to conduct Friedenstag, Die Liebe der Danae, and Capriccio.
DIE SCHWEIGSAME FRAU
By the time of the Arabella premiere, Strauss was well on to composing his next opera, Die
schweigsame Frau; indeed, he had got as far as sketching the second act. The correspond-
ence between the composer and his new librettist, Stefan Zweig, suggests that the period
of creativity for this opera was one of the happiest in Strauss’s life. In the bleak month of
July 1935, after he had been fired as president of the Reichsmusikkammer and publicly
disgraced by the National Socialist regime, Strauss looked back to those happier times in a
memorandum entitled “The History of Die schweigsame Frau.” After preliminary discus-
sions with various writers, it became clear to Strauss that no one was suitable and that,
after his own Intermezzo, his “‘poetical potency’ was definitely exhausted.”
When I had just about given up hope of ever finding a librettist again, I was visited by
Anton Kippenberg of Insel-Verlag, who was on his way to see Stefan Zweig in Salzburg . . .
Casually I said to Kippenberg: Why don’t you ask Zweig (whom I did not know in person)
whether he has an opera subject for me . . . Presently I got a letter from Zweig, saying he
did in fact have some thoughts but until now had not been bold enough to present them to
me. We made an appointment in Munich [they actually met in Garmisch] where Zweig told
me about an interesting subject for a ballet – but it ranged just about from Prometheus to
Nijinsky, and was too much for me at sixty-eight. After that he suggested, shyly, the Ben
Jonson subject [Epicoene, or The Silent Woman], and I knew at once it was my comic opera and
I grabbed it. In the summer [early June 1932], in Salzburg, he presented me with the idea
for the entire play, which, in its blend of noble lyric poetry and farce[,] constitutes an entirely
new genre of opera buffa. In the autumn the text [for Act i] was done. Except for a minor cut in
Act ii (Morosus/Aminta) I was able to set it to music lock, stock, and barrel, without the
slightest further change. None of my earlier operas was so easy to compose, or gave me such
light-hearted pleasure.48
This “new genre of opera buffa” was, indeed, a unique one for Strauss, his only truly
comic stage work from beginning to end: no pretense to the psychological, no hint of the
cultural-political as was to be found in the quasi-lighthearted Arabella.49 For the first time
Strauss had found a librettist willing to offer up pure comedy without political over-
tones, paradoxically with Germany at the threshold of the most harrowing political
period in its modern history.
47
48
Strauss, “The History of Die schweigsame Frau,” in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 108.
49
Die schweigsame Frau does, however, have ties to the comic Intermezzo and the buffa portions of the
Oper in Ariadne auf Naxos and in some respects contains antecedents (onstage music and dance
ensembles as well as historical music citations) to be found in Capriccio.
Die schweigsame Frau 223
Never before or since had Strauss so committed himself to the Italianate, complete
with a self-contained overture (the last such that he had written was for Guntram, and
that was for entirely different reasons) in the spirit of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century opera buffa. Following a long tradition, he composed it last, weaving together
many of the opera’s main themes. Even the very key (A major) of the overture (he called
it – self-mockingly – a “Potpourri”) references Italian-inspired works such as
Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, and, of course,
Strauss’s own Aus Italien.
Although the work takes place in eighteenth-century London, it draws abundant
thematic elements from such works as The Barber of Seville, Don Pasquale, and even
Falstaff. The main character, the basso buffo, is Sir Morosus, a retired admiral who,
from the explosion of cannon fire in his youth, has developed severe tinnitus in old
age; his aversion to noise, of course, is the source of his torment. In Act i, a loud,
loquacious, and gossipy housekeeper complains to Morosus’s barber, Herr
Schneidebart, about her master’s eccentricities and ailments. She imagines that all
his problems could be solved if he could only find a modest, quiet wife. As the barber
shaves Morosus, who complains about his chatty housekeeper, he makes that very
suggestion of marriage and offers his help.
Suddenly Morosus’s nephew, Henry, enters the scene, and the joy of seeing a
long-lost relative, whom he has suddenly made his heir, soon becomes dismay when
Morosus finds that Henry’s troupe is not a military one, but rather a noisy band of
singers that includes Henry’s wife, Aminta. Morosus, who hears music as just one
more type of noise, immediately disinherits his nephew, insulting the young man’s
wife and the band of singers. With the help of the barber, Henry and the troupe
plot their revenge. They will help Morosus find his “quiet wife” (in fact Henry’s
wife, now to be called “Timidia”), who, after the wedding, will turn out to be a
noisy nag, much to the dismay of Morosus, who will want to be rid of her. A mock
divorce settlement would then allow the troupe, and the barber, access to Morosus’s
fortune.
Act ii reveals how, as planned, Morosus marries Timidia in a mock ceremony. She
then becomes a domestic nightmare. Henry comes to his uncle’s “aid,” suggesting
how he can help set up divorce proceedings the very next day. Things only get worse
in Act iii, when Timidia has redecorated the house and brought in a harpsichord to
accompany her singing. The musical din brings Morosus to utter despair, made worse
by a long-winded legal proceeding that recognizes no grounds for divorce. Henry, out
of pity, cannot let the farce go on and reveals everything as a hoax. Relieved, Morosus
laughs at himself and, with a remarkable change of heart, welcomes everyone into
his home, reconciling with his nephew. In a touching final monologue, he sighs with
the contentment of having family and friends and finding a peace that he had never
expected.
Stefan Zweig and the absence of “noise”
Had this book been written three generations ago, there would be no need for a separate
rubric on Stefan Zweig, who – in the 1920s and 1930s – was the most widely translated
author in Europe. For English-speaking readers of today, he is more or less a footnote,
known best by Germanists as the author of a memoir entitled The World of Yesterday
(1942),50 and among Strauss aficionados as the composer’s one-time librettist who had a
hand in another future project, Friedenstag. In his heyday his name joined the company
of Thomas Mann, Hermann Broch, Joseph Roth, even Hofmannsthal, whose disdain for
Zweig’s work has been well documented.51
Zweig was the master of the essay, the novella, the travelogue, and some
important translations, though he left us no equivalent of Mann’s Doktor Faustus or
Roth’s Radetzkymarsch. A recent attempt by Pushkin Press to revive his work led to
one of most scathing, polemical reviews in the history of the London Review of
Books, with the critic calling Zweig the “purveyor of Trivialliteratur.”52 Michael
Hofmann surely exaggerates when he calls him the “Pepsi of Austrian writing,”
but he is not entirely wrong. Zweig was born into significant wealth, his father a
Jewish textile magnate, his mother’s family a prominent Jewish banking family.
Living in the luxurious first district on the Schottenring, the parents did not practice
their religion.
Wealth gave Zweig freedom to travel and financial independence, and it also gave
him an introduction to some of the most influential figures in European cultural life.
In this sense he was very much like Harry Graf Kessler. His autobiography contains
a who’s who of literary names such as – beyond Mann, Roth, Broch, and
Hofmannsthal – Hermann Bahr, Max Brod, Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Arthur Schnitzler, and William Butler Yeats. Even in the realm of music he was well
connected: Ferruccio Busoni, Leoš Janáček, Arturo Toscanini, Bruno Walter, and of
course Strauss. By coincidence, Zweig was on the same European-bound ship that the
mortally ill Mahler took on his final voyage home from New York, and he wrote
touchingly about it.
The subtext of Leon Botstein’s essay “Stefan Zweig and the Illusion of the Jewish
European” is that Zweig, an avid collector of manuscripts and autographs (Blake,
Goethe, Mozart, Beethoven, even the latter composer’s writing desk), collected friend-
ships and acquaintances in much the same way. Whereas Freud collected things in order
to bring cultural artifacts and ideas into active contact with the collector, much as did
50
See Preface, n. 1 this volume.
51
Oliver Matuschek, Three Lives: A Biography of Stefan Zweig, trans. Allan Blunden (London: Pushkin
Press, 2012; orig. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 2006), p. 143.
52
Michael Hofmann, “Vernacular Dither,” London Review of Books (28 January 2010), pp. 9–12.
Walter Benjamin, Zweig collected autographs of writers and artists “to celebrate a
general banal idea: universality and the sustained timelessness of genius.”53
One of Zweig’s most popular biographies around the time of Die schweigsame
Frau was his semiautobiographical Erasmus (1935), about the great humanist of sixteenth-
century Rotterdam who was able to stay above the polarized religious and political fray,
stepping out of the affairs of a hectic world. His greatest critics wondered aloud how
Zweig, a Jew, thought he could maintain Mann’s pre-Great War notion of the “non-
political man” throughout Hitler’s Reich, whether in Austria or in exile. As an Aryan,
Strauss could maintain the farce longer and without suffering as much pain, but by the
Second World War all bets were off. Surely Zweig should have seen such futility in 1941
when he was writing his essay on Montaigne, a “paean to his everlasting nobility.”
Botstein suggests that Zweig’s tragic Brazilian suicide “was a recognition of the illusory
character of Montaigne’s model of personal withdrawal and spiritual freedom in the face
of external strife, oppression, and calamity.”54
Politics was like a painful noise, and neither Zweig, Strauss, nor Erasmus, Montaigne,
nor Morosus wanted to clutter their lives with it. In Die schweigsame Frau Zweig created
for Strauss a pure comedy. Inner peace was not a state of psychological or spiritual
balance; it was merely the absence of noise, even the absence of music. At the end of the
opera, music does not triumph; rather, it is belittled, as old Morosus sings: “How
beautiful is music. But even more beautiful when it is over!”55
What they both envisioned was the most anti-Wagnerian music imaginable, a score
devoid of psychology, with singers in a state, as Zweig wrote to Strauss, “of happy
relaxation . . . permitting the audience to savor the comedy more fully.” Zweig further
suggests that music should be “sprinkled over from time to time with an ironic,
illustrative spark . . . The orchestra amuses itself, as it were, butting in, making brilliant
asides while the people talk – this would go over as something new, modern, comedy-
like.” The absence of noise may be equated with the absence of the psychological. This
cheerful letter of 19 December 1932 was written just six weeks before Hitler was made
chancellor of Germany.56
Librettist and composer compartmentalized their artistic cultural collaboration with
ease. Not since Der Rosenkavalier had Strauss shown such joy in collaboration, devouring
each act of the text with ravenous hunger and composing with unprecedented speed.
They discussed the project in January 1932, and by January 1933 Zweig had sent Strauss a
53
Leon Botstein, “Stefan Zweig and the Illusion of the Jewish European,” in Stefan Zweig: The World
of Yesterday’s Humanist Today, ed. Marion Sommerfeld (Albany: SUNY Press, 1983), p. 93.
54
Ibid., p. 103.
55
English translations are taken from EMI Records 5 66033 2, 1979, with Marek Janowski and the
Staatskapelle Dresden.
56
Strauss, in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 24.
completed first act. The entire opera was done by October 1934, and Strauss expressed
his delight every step of the way.
“‘Bravi, bravi, always excellent,’ it says in Così fan tutte,” Strauss wrote upon receiving
the first draft of Act i. After receiving the text for Act iii, he wrote, “Thanks and
congratulations! I would not know what to criticize,” and added a citation from his
song “Ich trage meine Minne”: “Yes, now that I have found you, you dear child, it
delights me every day that is granted to me” (Ja daß ich gefunden habe, du liebes Kind,
das freut mich alle Tage, die mir beschieden sind). Zweig was delighted with Strauss’s
positive state of mind, adding that “politics pass, the arts live on, hence we should strive
for that which is permanent and leave the propaganda to those who find it fulfilling and
satisfying.”57
Act i: noise and bells
The expressive array of musical techniques by Strauss – ranging from arias through
airs, parlando, and recitative all the way to spoken dialogue (of which there is an
extensive amount) – is surely derived from his experience composing his two-act
comedy Intermezzo. The entire score is, indeed, a testament to his post-Intermezzo
determination to
no longer [be] content with prescribing pp, p, f, ff, for the whole orchestra, but give a large
variety of dynamic markings for individual groups and even individual instruments, the
exact observance of which, although it is the main requirement to the correct performance of
my orchestral scores, presupposes indeed the existence of a type of orchestral discipline
which is somewhat rare today, but is absolutely necessary for a performance of my scores in
the accurate execution of fp and every espressivo calling a frequently all but unnoticeable
preponderance of one part over its neighbors.58
Yet there is nothing in Intermezzo or any other Strauss opera that anticipates the
Italianate energy of this work. It is a busy score, feathery but with a full-sized orchestra.
Strauss joked at himself when he called it Rossinian meringue, but a bit thicker than its
Italian counterpart.59 For the first time – urged on by Zweig – the composer writes
humor for its own sake. The fast-paced score is his lengthiest in number of bars (but not
his longest in terms of performing time; that distinction belongs to Die Frau ohne
Schatten, which, uncut, comes in at just under four hours).
But as in any Strauss opera there is contrast, and the composer sets up two competing
elements: the spirit of allegro to suggest the noisy, comic, and boisterous – the nosy
57
Ibid., p. 35. 58 Strauss, Recollections and Reflections, pp. 97–8.
59
Strauss to Karl Böhm (16 January 1935), in Richard Strauss–Karl Böhm: Briefwechsel (Mainz: Schott,
1999), p. 36. Strauss uses the term Schmarrn.
6.9a Bizet, L’Arlésienne, “Carillon”
6.9b Die schweigsame Frau, opening of Act i, Potpourri
6.10 Potpourri, 1st subject, Housekeeper
6.11 Potpourri, 2nd subject, Morosus
housekeeper, the scheming barber, and Henry and Aminta and their rowdy musical
troupe; in contrast to all this fragmentary, nonlyrical, quick-paced musical gesturing is
the lyrical andante Morosus, with his simple desire for peace and security. The
“Potpourri” readily shows this dichotomy in clear sonata form, where the first subject
is the former and the second, the latter.
Whether or not Strauss quotes Bizet’s “Carillon” from his L’Arlésienne (1872) at the
beginning of his “Potpourri” is less important when compared with Strauss’s subtle
humor and wordplay in that passage. Had Morusus’s eardrums exploded, he would
have been deaf. His complaint was not of deafness, but rather of too much noise,
which is the chief complaint of someone suffering from tinnitus, a severe constant
ringing or roaring in the ears that gets louder and more distorted with greater external
noise; the condition is usually the result of some noise trauma in the sufferer’s
youth. Tinnitus, of course, comes from the Latin for the ringing of a bell or bells,
and Strauss, who knew his Latin, makes a wonderful joke at the outset of the opera
(Exx. 6.9a and 6.9b).
The two sonata-form subjects evoke the housekeeper and Morosus, respectively, and
the texture is busy throughout. The lyrical, slower-paced desire for peace seems to float
above all of the musical hand waving (Exx. 6.10 and 6.11).
6.12 Act i, “Das wär schön!”
The act consists of four scenes and what Strauss referred to as a Rossini-like “Finale.”
This short first scene, which lacks a firm tonal grounding and features a loquacious
housekeeper and a barber eager to get started, (“For the love of God, please announce
my arrival!” [Zum Teufel, meld’ Sie mich an!]) is entirely in parlando and ends with the
entrance of Morosus.
In the next scene there is still plenty of parlante and even some spoken dialogue by the
barber, who ushers in the lyrical highlight of the second scene. Indeed, this is the first
poignant melody of the opera: the scheming Schneidebart suggests the secret to a long
and happy life for Morosus – a young, happy wife, someone with whom “you joke and
dream until bedtime” (man scherzt sich, und träumt sich zur Ruh). Morosus replies:
“Yes, that would be nice. Someone here that I knew I was here for, to whom I would be
kind and close, breathing with me, thinking with me . . .” ( Ja, das wär schön! Irgendwen
zu wissen, für den man da ist, der einem gut, der einem nah ist, mit dem man atmet, mit
dem man denkt . . .) (Ex. 6.12).
The melody is based upon the refrain of an eighteenth-century Biedermeier Volkslied
by Johann Martin Usteri entitled “Freut euch des Lebens” (Ex. 6.13):
Enjoy life
As long as the little lamp still glows
Pick the lovely rose,
while it still blooms.
6.13 “Freut euch des Lebens”
6.14 “Freut euch des Lebens” in fragmentary form
[Freut euch des Lebens,

weil noch das Lämpchen glüht!
Pflücket die Rose,
eh sie verblüht!]
Although Usteri was Swiss, his song has long remained a part of German popular
culture and continues to be performed on the radio and television. Strauss uses this tune,
or fragments derived from it, throughout the work to suggest Morosus’s desire for love,
peace, and tranquility. In a score devoid of any psychological musical themes or
motives, the tune seems anomalous and is undoubtedly the melody with which the
entire opera is most memorably associated. As Schuh once observed, it serves as an
“opposite pole to the buffo sphere” of the opera.60 Frequently it appears in a fleeting,
diminuted, fragmentary form, such as when Morosus refers to his “unearned fortune in
the autumn of his years” (Ex. 6.14).
But the opera is mostly nonpsychological, and there are no strong, overarching tonal-
representational aspects to the work. A major, the key of the Italianate, is used for
various Italian numbers throughout the work. Indeed, in Act iii, when Timidia sings an
aria from Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea) as part of her
60
Schuh wrote a little commentary on the use of this Swiss-Biedermeier song in 1944 (“Richard
Strauss und ‘Freut euch des Lebens’”), republished in Straussiana aus Vier Jahrzehnten, ed.
Franz Trenner (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1981), pp. 9–14. He cites a handful of examples, though there
are many others articulated throughout the score.
singing lesson, Strauss transposes the selection from its C minor original to A major,
better to fit within Strauss’s Italian key topoi. E major is less the erotic signifier than
one suggesting the boisterous. E♭ major is not an indicator of the heroic; rather, taking
its cue from the end of Act i of Der Rosenkavalier, it is the key of serenity and
acceptance.
There are, to be sure, extended stable key areas, such as the magnificent stretta to the
finale to Act i in G major, the longest diatonic stretch of any single key in the entire
opera. It is also one of the most difficult sections of the opera, a massive ensemble of
seven singers combining rapid tempi, extended vocal ranges, and coloratura against a
thick, augmented, distinctly non-Rossinian orchestra. This stretta is surely the thick
Teutonic meringue to which Strauss had referred in his remark to Karl Böhm, the
conductor of the premiere (Ex. 6.15).
Act ii: from docility to defiance
Zweig divided this longest of the three acts into no fewer than twelve scenes.
Scenes 1 and 2 are introductory ones involving Morosus, the housekeeper, then the
barber, followed by Scenes 3 and 4, where the various candidates to be Morosus’s
wife state their case (Carlotta in spoken dialogue, Isotta in effusive E major, then
“Timidia” in quiet, serene E♭ major). Timidia’s E♭ segment is significant: it fore-
shadows Morosus’s final monologue of Act iii, both in the harmony and in the
reference to “Freut euch des Lebens” (Ex. 6.16). By recalling Morosus’s singing of
his desire for peace and quiet from Act i, we know for certain that she will be his
choice.
After a brief spoken announcement (Scene 5) of their arrival, Scenes 6 and 7 involve
the arrival of the priest and the notary, the mock wedding, and the ensuing celebration.
To suggest the solemnity of ecclesiastical and royal law, Strauss quotes passages from
the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book: two almans (one anonymous, the other by Martin Peerson)
and an In Nomine by John Bull. Although two of these are transposed, Strauss for the
most part maintains the works’ modal integrity (Ex. 6.17). The only problem with the
Fitzwilliam citations is that they predate the described setting of London circa 1780 by
well over a century.61
Scenes 9–12 are postmatrimonial interactions between Morosus, Timidia, and Henry,
when, as Morosus tries to woo her, she creates her sudden personality change from
docility to defiance. This sense of sudden change is musically articulated by the quiet
61
Werley notes that this particular anachronism serves two purposes: it resurrects the period of the
original model by Ben Jonson and helps suggest the fact that the ceremony is no more than a farce.
See Werley, “Historicism and Cultural Politics,” pp. 189–90.
6.15 Act i, stretto ensemble
Timidia with the greatest efficiency when she suddenly hits an unaccompanied high C,
telling Morosus, the lover of silence, to be quiet (“Ruhe! Hab ich dir gesagt!!!!!”); her
outburst causes Morosus to fall to the floor (Ex. 6.18).
The tempo changes to presto, and Timidia lets Morosus have it. She wants to have
fun, to laugh, and, most important, to bring music into the house (“always music,
woodwinds, fiddles, lutenists, harpsichord and spinet, singers, dancers and castrati,
ceaseless music, music!” [stets Musik, Bläser, Geiger, Lautenschläger, Cembalo und
Clavecin, Sänger. Tänzer und Kastraten, immerdar Musik, Musik!]). Morosus
6.16 Act ii, fragments of “Freut euch des Lebens”
cannot believe his damaged ears. The only solution is a legal separation: divorce or
annulment.
Act iii: “Virginem desponsam” or “Virginem corruptam”?
Although the final act is divided into eleven scenes, it is a good twenty minutes shorter
than the preceding one. And whereas the second act focused upon the creation of a
mock wedding, this third one is all about dissolving it and ultimately revealing it as an
utter farce. Beyond the spoken trial, the lyric moments are mostly created by historical
citations from the late Renaissance and early to mid-baroque. Scenes 1 and 2 continue
the spirit of the penultimate scene of Act i. After an Einleitung (a fugato in C major) we
hear carpenters, hammering away as they remodel the house, along with Aminta, the
housekeeper, and a noisy parrot, all driving Morosus to distraction. Henry enters in
6.17 From Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, no. 16
6.18 Act ii “I told you to be quiet!!!!!”

6.19 Act iii, Monteverdi, L’incoronazione di Poppea, “Sento un certo non che”
Scene 3 disguised as Timidia’s voice teacher. The first lesson (Ex. 6.19) is an aria from
Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea (“Sento un certo non so che”).62 The next lesson
(Ex. 6.20), a duet (“Dolce amor!”), is taken from Legrenzi’s opera Eteocle e Polinice.
This duo gives way to another noisy ensemble, topped off by the screeching of the
parrot, which now puts Morosus at his wit’s end. In Scene 6, the chief justice and the
advocate arrive to the music of Bull’s In nomine.63 The headmotive is used throughout
the ensuing scenes whenever there is a reference to British law. The proceedings go
through a number of twists and turns, and finally the judge declares that the ground for
divorce is whether or not Timidia has conjugally known another man before marrying
Morosus. Henry steps up, saying that he is that man. Timidia denies it at first, but after
Henry’s tender love aria she relents.
This “solution” turns out to be just one more cruel twist in this marriage farce: the
judge says that there is nothing in the contract about her having to be a virgin before
marriage, another noisy ensemble ensues, and Morosus threatens suicide by pistol,
sword, or noose. Finally no one can let the charade go any further, and Henry and
Aminta throw off their disguises. A turning-point monologue for Morosus ensues.
Which way will he go: toward anger or amusement? Zweig adeptly sets up tension so
convincingly that an operagoer who does not know the plot cannot be sure. To the relief
of everyone onstage and in the theater, it is the latter (“Ha, ha . . . Me an old sea calf, and
62
Strauss used Hugo Riemann’s Musikgeschichte in Beispielen (1912) as his source.
63
Strauss consulted the Breitkopf und Härtel edition (1899).
6.20 Act iii Legrenzi, Eteocle e Polinice, “Dolce amor!”
you floored me, you cheeky landlubbers. Ha, ha” [Ha, ha . . . So mich altes Seekalb
hineinzulegen, ihr frechen Landratten. Ha, ha!]).
And you, if you ever want to make music, it will no longer bother me. Play-act as much as you will.
Whoever has had a silent wife can bear all the hubbub in the world. So come on and start.
[Und ihr, wenn ihr dazu Musik machen wollt, mich ficht’s nicht mehr an. Spektakelt, soviel
ihr wollt! Wer einmal eine schweigsame Frau gehabt, der kann allen Lärm auf der Welt
vertragen! Also vorwärts und los.]
6.21 Act iii, final scene, “Wie schön ist doch die Musik”
The boisterous frivolity continues a bit in E major, but they soon leave as Strauss
modulates down a serene half step. We end with a full presentation of “Freut euch des
Lebens” as he sings:
How beautiful is music – but even more beautiful when it is over! How wonderful is a
young, silent woman, but how really wonderful when she is the wife of someone else!
How beautiful is life, but how beautiful only when one is no fool and knows how to live it! Ah,
my dears, you have magnificently cured me, I never felt so happy . . . I feel indescribably
well, just quiet, just quiet. Aaah . . . Aaah . . . Aaah! . . .
[Wie schön ist doch die Musik – aber wie schön erst, wenn sie vorbei ist! Wie wunderbar ist
doch eine junge, schweigsame Frau, aber wie wunderbar erst, wenn die Frau eines andern
bleibt! Wie schön ist doch das Leben, aber wie schön erst, wenn man kein Narr ist und es
zu leben weiß! Ah, meine Guten, großartig habt ihr mich kuriert, noch nie hab ich so glücklich
mich gefühlt. Ach, ich fühle mich unheimlich wohl. Nur Ruhe! Nur Ruhe! Aaah . . . Aaah . . .
Aaah! . . .]
The question remains whether Morosus is truly cured. He still dislikes music and
believes that a wife is better off with someone other than himself. But the summational
power of the lovely “Freut euch des Lebens” melody, heard in full at last after so many
fragmentary iterations, seems to overcome any discrepancies (Ex. 6.21).
One has the sense – although it is not entirely true – that most of the lyrical moments
are set numbers, many of them, even the very last number of the work, borrowed from
other composers. Matthew Werley, in his dissertation on Strauss and historicism, cites
Die schweigsame Frau as the “high-water mark of Strauss’s preoccupation with historicist
musical composition,” exploiting some three centuries of Western European music.
Beyond the special use of “Freut euch des Lebens,” these musical citations seem to fall
into two categories. The reflective ones are direct reactions to some aspect of the text –
whether the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book and English law or Monteverdi and Timidia’s voice
lesson. Then there are the apparently unreflective ones: the musical winks to the
audience, such as in Act i, when Morusus complains of London’s noise (with quick
snippets of Carl Maria von Weber, Wagner, and Mozart),64 or the momentary juxta-
positions of his own Die Frau ohne Schatten (“Mir anvertraut”) and Verdi’s Rigoletto (“La
donna è mobile”). Either way, the composer seems to be paying sonic tribute to Zweig
the collector as described by Botstein, as the gatherer of artifacts reflecting the “grand
European tradition.”65
By the time of Die schweigsame Frau’s Dresden premiere in 1935, which Zweig, as a
Jew, could not attend and which ran for a total of only four performances before it was
banned, little about Europe seemed to be grand. In the wake of the First World War, the
world got to see the darker underside of that tradition, whether in the examples of
Spanish and Italian fascism, German Nazism, or Soviet communism. In part, what we
shall see in the final two chapters is the way in which Strauss operated as a man and artist
in a new, unprecedented political world.
64 65
Der Freischütz, Tannhäuser, and The Magic Flute, respectively. Botstein, “Stefan Zweig,” p. 93.
7 The politics of peace: Friedenstag and Daphne
Friedenstag (1936) premiered in July 1938 as part of

If Friedenstag expresses the human ideal
[of peace], Daphne sings of it in nature.
the Munich Summer Opera Festival, directed by
– Joseph Gregor to Richard Strauss Clemens Krauss, whose wife, Viorica Ursuleac,
(1936)
sang the central role of Maria. It was, in fact, the
only opera by Strauss to be premiered in the city of
his birth, and that only after much lobbying by Krauss, who had recently been appointed
music director of the Munich National Theater. This first performance of this one-act
opera was exceptional in another way, for it was to have been paired with Daphne (1937)
later that year in Dresden as a double premiere under Karl Böhm. The original plan was
thus compromised from the start, and it foreshadowed the ultimate scissoring apart of
these two one-acters.
The first performance of the paired works took place as a double bill in Dresden on
15 October 1938 and came in at just under four hours, including one intermission – the
whole thing, according to the conductor, Böhm, “entirely too long.”1 The evening
opened with Daphne and concluded with Friedenstag, which ends in an extensive choral
finale. The two operas soon went their separate ways, and indeed Friedenstag was
dropped from the German repertoire with the outbreak of the Second World War,
never to return despite several modern-day recordings.
The 1930s were, artistically speaking, the bleakest decade in Strauss’s career. They
began without his esteemed librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Hitler came to power
four years later; the composer then lost his next librettist – Stefan Zweig – to Nazi anti-
Semitism in 1935; and that same year Strauss fell out of favor with the government and
was forced to resign his post as head of the Reichsmusikkammer. In 1938 Austria was
annexed into the Third Reich, and the safety of the composer’s Jewish daughter-in-law
and two grandsons – who were living in Vienna – could no longer be taken for granted.
Within a year Germany was on the brink of war, and after a Festkonzert in Vienna
celebrating Strauss’s seventy-fifth birthday, the normally reserved, taciturn composer
stood in the corridor of the Musikvereinsaal, mumbling, with tears in his eyes, “Now
everything is finished! Everything is past!”2 His diaries from September 1939 indicate
that with the invasion of Poland he foresaw the destruction of cultural institutions he
had known intimately all his life. Paradoxically, however, this unsettling decade also
1
Personal communication (15 October 1978), New York City.
2
Otto Strasser, Und dafür wird man noch bezahlt (Vienna: Paul Neff Verlag, 1974), p. 182.
238
Enter Joseph Gregor 239
represented one of Strauss’s most prolific periods as an opera composer. The years
from 1932 through 1941 saw no fewer than six operas: Arabella (1932), Die schweigsame
Frau (1935), Friedenstag (1936), Daphne (1937), Die Liebe der Danae (1940), and Capriccio
(1941).
But beginning with Friedenstag, after the departure of Zweig, the nature of
operatic collaboration changed remarkably. Strauss now took an active, even dom-
inant part in the creation of the libretto, a role that would have been unthinkable
during his time with Hofmannsthal. Moreover, he never hesitated to seek the advice
of others, including that of the conductor Clemens Krauss, Strauss’s friend and
ultimate partner for the libretto of his final opera, Capriccio. But the leading collab-
orator during the post-Zweig era was Joseph Gregor, a prolific theater historian,
close friend of Stefan Zweig, and acquaintance of Hofmannsthal. Although Gregor
was neither a Hofmannsthal nor even a Zweig, he was Strauss’s only alternative
during a time when the septuagenarian preferred opera composing to more search-
ing for yet another partnership. Gregor, despite his literary shortcomings, was
second only to Hofmannsthal in libretto output, and he also served as Strauss’s
third successive Austrian librettist, which, as we shall see, formed some important
thematic continuities.
ENTER JOSEPH GREGOR
Joseph Gregor served as librettist for both Friedenstag and Daphne, though with the
former he acted essentially as a cover author for Zweig, who conceived the idea, wrote
the scenario, and rewrote extensive passages for his younger colleague. Zweig had
wanted to step down as Strauss’s librettist as early as the summer of 1934 and began
suggesting to Strauss various possible successors, such as Rudolf Binding, Robert Faesi,
and Alexander Lernet-Holenia. But Strauss stubbornly refused each one and, indeed,
rejected Gregor as well. Zweig patiently held his ground, declaring that he would be
willing to assist Gregor page by page if necessary.
After nearly a year, and as the summer of 1935 approached without a major project on
the horizon, Strauss finally emerged from his state of denial: he realized the impossibility
of another Zweig libretto and the inevitability of one by Gregor. Zweig remained true
to his word, advising Gregor while in English exile up to the Austrian Anschluss in March
1938.3 Zweig recognized Gregor’s shortcomings, but he saw him as deeply knowledge-
able, adaptable, and – most important – open to criticism.
Much has been made of Gregor’s literary deficiencies, which will be discussed later in
this chapter as they relate to Friedenstag and Daphne; but little has been said about his
3
This artistic and personal friendship is vividly illustrated in Kenneth Birkin, ed., Stefan Zweig–Joseph
Gregor: Correspondence, 1921–1938 (Dunedin, New Zealand: University of Dunago Press, 1991).
particular strengths – strengths significant enough that Zweig believed they counter-
balanced his limitations as a writer. Exasperating as his leaden poetic style might have
been, Gregor wrote with great authority as a cultural historian in the field of drama, and
Strauss had known and admired Gregor’s Weltgeschichte des Theaters (World History of
Theater) since its publication in 1933. Other significant works were his Das Wiener
Barocktheater (The Vienna Baroque Theater [1922]) and Kulturgeschichte der Oper (Cultural
History of Opera [1941]).
Gregor had entered the University of Vienna at the age of nineteen. There he studied
philosophy with Friedrich Jodl, a leading figure among the Austrian positivists who had
first worked as a Privatdozent at the University of Munich, where Strauss had attended
his lectures in 1882–3. Gregor studied music theory with Robert Fuchs and musicology
with Guido Adler. His associations within the theatrical world were no less impressive:
he worked as a production assistant under Felix Weingartner at the Vienna Court Opera
in 1910, the same year in which he met Max Reinhardt, who was in Vienna for a visiting
production of Hofmannsthal’s König Ödipus.
Although he received his doctorate in musicology in 1911 and served as a Lektorat in
that discipline from 1912 to 1914 at Franz Josef University in Czernowitz, his passion was
for theater. Once he joined the theater department of the Austrian National Library, he
dedicated the rest of his life to theater scholarship. In 1922 he created the Theater
Collection of the Austrian National Library, where he served as director until his
retirement. While there he acquired private archives from Vienna’s most important
theaters as well as private collections of major playwrights and directors.
Even deeper was Gregor’s passion for creative writing: arranging classical works for
the modern stage or composing plays, poems, and novels in his own right. In the
creative process, Gregor constantly consulted Zweig in significant detail. Thus, Zweig’s
suggestion of a theater historian as Strauss’s next librettist is not as strange as it might
appear on the surface. Zweig already had an easy working relationship with Gregor and
saw in him a man with a remarkable and resourceful knowledge of the theatrical
(including operatic) repertoire who had hands-on experience in theater production,
and a gifted arranger and assimilator of theatrical classics.
Gregor continued the legacy of Strauss’s Austrian librettists in another way: his
commitment to a post-First World War concept of an Austrian neobaroque. Although
he was part of a younger generation, Gregor nonetheless shared a kind of imperial
longing with his literary predecessors, a belief in a culturally united Europe centered in
Vienna. In the theatrical work of Hofmannsthal, such as in The Salzburg Great Theater of
the World and The Tower, we see this grand, utopian notion of the world as theater, the
stage being Austria, especially the baroque architectural “stage sets” of Vienna and
Salzburg. The Salzburg Festival, cofounded by Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt in 1921, is
unthinkable without this context and without the annual staging of Hofmannsthal’s
Everyman outdoors in the midst of Salzburg’s Old City.
Figure 7.1 Strauss with Joseph Gregor
In the wake of the political disaster of the First World War, Austria’s cultural renewal
was to come from a holistic unity, a unique Austrian Gesamtkunstwerk of a theatrical
totality. This worldview – in part a response to Wagner – can be traced from
Hofmannsthal to Gregor, and its outward manifestation for the stage is the unity or
marriage of cultures, whether the West–East marriages of Helen and Menelas or
Arabella and Mandryka, or the unity of Germany and Greece in a piece such as
Hofmannsthal’s reworking of The Ruins of Athens. Zweig’s theatrical concept of a
unification of north and south – Protestant and Catholic – using the background of
the seventeenth-century Thirty Years’ War is a further extension of such a concept.
Gregor identified with these nostalgic, totalizing baroque tendencies and their
promise of cultural rebirth, as he explained in The Vienna Baroque Theater. Here he
suggests that a spiritual power lives on in postwar Austria, fulfilling a desire for a
heightened universal festival spirit, the essence of baroque theater:
In the alpine lands, the festival idea has taken over . . . In this, Vienna is the natural center,
Vienna stands there, in the nobility of its monuments of which not even these times can rob
us, palaces such as the Belvedere, gardens like Schönbrunn, the impressive ceremonial
quarters of the Hofburg. All effuse Baroque festivity – all seek a new spiritual rebirth.4
Indeed, as we shall see, Gregor was probably more in agreement with Zweig’s festival
concept for Friedenstag than was Strauss, who was less interested in a Festakt than an
opera of human drama.
4
Quoted in Birkin, Richard Strauss: Arabella, p. 39.
The scenario, as originally drafted, was the final day of the Thirty Years’ War, when a
German commander (none of the characters had names) inside a fortress under siege has
sworn an oath never to surrender to the enemy. But the besieged town below the
fortress is starving and fears it will be attacked, so the mayor begs the commander to
capitulate. Although he knows full well that he can no longer hold off the enemy, the
commander refuses. Instead of surrendering, he informs his officers that they will blow
up the citadel rather than hand it over to the enemy.
He tells his men that those who wish to leave may do so, and when his wife enters
moments later he asks her to leave as well, but without telling her of his fatal resolution.
She soon guesses his decision and vows to remain with him to the end. As they prepare
to destroy their fortress, three cannon shots are heard below. The men, despite their
orders, prepare for battle, believing it better to die in conflict than in suicide. But there is
no further shooting. The sound of bells resonates throughout the town, and a peace
emissary with a white flag arrives, followed thereafter by the enemy general himself.
The two commanders confront one another nervously but ultimately reconcile with an
embrace. Hearing their commander urge everyone toward reconciliation, the towns-
people rush in, and the opera ends with a mighty hymn lauding universal brotherhood.
Such a static, allegorical scenario – with its military setting and preponderance of
male characters – went entirely against the grain of Strauss’s lifelong operatic thought,
and it may be argued that the composer was never entirely satisfied with the opera.5
Unable to compose compelling music theater for heroic male statuary, Strauss decided
to feminize Zweig’s original concept. The wife, much to Zweig’s quiet disappointment,
became Maria, the only character to have a name.
Maria – who has been described by some commentators as a kind of Leonore figure,
dedicated to saving her husband and by extension to freeing the larger collective, or as a
combination of Leonore and Goethe’s Gretchen, who not only frees but redeems – takes
on a significant, active role. As Zweig conceived it, the two critical moments in this
festival drama are passive ones: at the sound of the bells, when the populace realizes that
the cannon fire meant peace; and at the end, when the two commandants begin in
confrontation and end in reconciliation.
Strauss realized the theatrical incoherence of such a plan: narrative consequence
without any dramatic logic or justification. The composer instinctively gave Maria an
active role: first she interprets the bells as a sign of peace for the men around her; then, as
the two commanders go from skepticism to outright physical confrontation, Maria
intervenes, putting herself between them as they draw their swords. The composer was
loath to return to the days of Guntram, where the heroine, Freihild, was the embodiment
of inaction; he recalled that this contributed to the drama’s inherent flatness. Now, as an
augmenting character and the sole lyrical role in the work, Maria offered Strauss the
5
There is no evidence that he ever conducted the work.
necessary musical and dramaturgical balance he needed to create the necessary conflict
so lacking in Zweig’s scenario, and Gregor obediently carried out the composer’s
suggested changes.
Though by the late spring of 1935 it had been understood that Gregor would succeed
Zweig, he did not meet the composer until 7 July. And as late as the end of June Strauss
still maintained, unrealistically, that Friedenstag could only be realized by Zweig himself
(“I don’t compose camouflaged operas . . . texts invented by Zweig I will compose only
under the name Zweig”).6 But Strauss’s stubbornness changed suddenly owing to a
serious clash with the Nazi government, one that blindsided even the politically savvy
Strauss.
In May 1935, while Strauss and Zweig were discussing the latter’s future as an
operatic collaborator, Joseph Goebbels, the minister of propaganda, decided to change
fundamentally the course of the Reichskulturkammer (RKK), the German Chamber
of Culture. The original promise of relative artistic autonomy, made in 1933 to the
leaders of the various cultural subdivisions, had been broken. Strauss was only the
highest-profile case of a growing tension between these subdivision leaders and party
functionaries in the RKK. The composer had made it clear from the outset that he
would neither move to Berlin nor involve himself in any day-to-day work; worse, he
refused to sign any documents that would have led to the expulsion of Jews from the
Reichsmusikkammer (RMK), the German Chamber of Music.
Goebbels hired Hans Hinkel, an early party loyalist, in May 1935 to help restructure
the RKK, which moved to a more centralized mode of governance. This change meant
finding more cooperative leaders and making sure that all Jews were expelled from the
RKK. Soon after his appointment, Hinkel solicited a secret memo from Heinz Ihlert – a
party member since 1927 – on the state of the RMK, and on 22 May Ihlert returned a
severely negative report that blamed Strauss for most of its problems.
According to Ihlert, Strauss had pursued only his domestic agenda (seine eigene
Hauspolitik), made himself inaccessible by refusing to move to Berlin, appointed only
his confidants, declined to sign bylaws forbidding Jewish membership in the
Genossenschaft Deutscher Tonkünstler (Alliance of German Composers), and acted
as a “completely detached bystander,” with little interest in the politics and structure of
the RMK. Ihlert recommended that the RMK presidency be reduced to figurehead
status, with the addition of an executive president to take care of day-to-day manage-
ment.7 And, of course, there was the embarrassment of Strauss’s continuing to have a
Jewish librettist as collaborator.
6
Strauss to Zweig (28 June 1935), in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 103.
7
Ihlert to Hans Hinkel (22 May 1935), Bundesarchiv, Aussenstelle Berlin. The first page of this
five-page letter is reproduced in Fred Prieberg, Musik im NS-Staat (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982),
p. 211. The letter is cited in Michael H. Kater, Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits (Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 361 n. 167.
Figure 7.2 Strauss with Joseph Goebbels in 1934
From that moment onward, Strauss’s days as president of the RMK were numbered,
for there was no way he could remain in that position within the restructured,
centralized organization. His infamous heated letter to Zweig of 17 June 1935 was too
good to be true, for Goebbels now had the excuse he needed to fire Strauss, a dismissal
that had already been planned. In that letter – a desperate late effort to convince Zweig
to remain as his librettist – Strauss criticized the Nazi government and claimed to be only
“aping” the office of president. After Strauss’s removal, the composer and conductor
Peter Raabe assumed the role of president; not surprisingly, the opportunistic Ihlert
became executive president.
Goebbels was fond of reminding Strauss, during his tenure as president of the RMK,
that “the world is not as you see it from your Garmisch study.”8 That world surely came
crashing in on the composer in July 1935 with his dismissal from his position. On 6 July
1935 Governmental Minister Walter von Keudell arrived in Garmisch with orders
from Walter Funk, Goebbels’s right-hand man, summoning the composer immediately
to Nazi headquarters in Berchtesgaden. Strauss and his wife had already left for
8
“Die Welt sieht eben doch anders aus als in der Garmischen Studierstube!” From an unpublished
Strauss memorandum dated 19 February 1936 (Richard Strauss Archive, Garmisch).
Berchtesgaden the day before, having in all likelihood received a tip. If Strauss thought
he could proactively make his case, he was sadly mistaken. Strauss’s son and daughter-
in-law accompanied von Keudell to Berchtesgaden, where Funk, on Goebbels’s orders,
demanded that Strauss resign all government posts for “reasons of health.”
Strauss was “stupefied” (bedeppert),9 according to Pauline, and it was in that frame of
mind that he first met Gregor in Berchtesgaden less than twenty-four hours after his
dismissal. Their original meeting was scheduled for Garmisch, a plan that was changed,
of course, given the unexpected announcement from von Keudell. Strauss – finally
resigned to the fact that he had lost Zweig as a librettist and now humiliated by a party
bureaucrat – had reached his nadir. But, unknowingly, he had found his solution as well,
all within a day. Although he had expected little from the historian-cum-librettist, Gregor
would supply Strauss with his next three libretti.
Four years later Gregor described that 1935 meeting in detail, recalling that these
three opera scenarios were among six proposals that he brought with him, though he
did not mention Berchtesgaden by name:
On 7 July I met Richard Strauss at a spa on the Alps. Not in Garmisch. While the fog of a
rainy afternoon flowed, he read the six folios, drafts based on ideas that I had already
mentioned. I still remember, with great precision, that he did not read any of the pages more
than approximately two minutes, and he did not read any a second time. Rather he had
already put three drafts aside, drafts that he indicated to me had dramatic themes that
would interest him. Thus, in a short quarter of an hour, the working program for the next four
years was established.10
Exactly what the proposals were remains unclear, and the situation is further muddled
by the fact that Strauss did not himself remember reading a Danae draft at the meeting.
However, if we follow the logic of Gregor’s account, the four-year program probably
included Friedenstag, Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae.
A “highly political opera text”?
Friedenstag has been interpreted as everything from Nazi propaganda to pacifist political
resistance.11 The circumstantial evidence supporting the former would seem clear
enough: it premiered in Munich, the birthplace of the Nazi Party, and flagrantly
espoused propagandistic notions of peace just as Germany was covertly gearing up
for war. Moreover, Friedenstag’s theme of reconciliation between north and south,
9
10
Joseph Gregor, Richard Strauss: Der Meister der Oper (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1929), pp. 246–7.
11
Compare Gerhard Splitt, “Oper als Politikum, Friedenstag,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 55 (1998):
220–51, with Pamela Potter, “Strauss’s Friedenstag: A Pacifist Attempt at Political Resistance,”
The Musical Quarterly 69, 3 (1983): 408–24.
between Lutheran and Catholic, suggests an effort to legitimize the Anschluss of Austria,
which had taken place just three months earlier. The opposite argument for passive
opposition is made less by refuting these arguments one by one than by interpreting
them all as part of a covert resistance – in a sense, beating the government at its own
game. After all, Germany had not yet declared war, and its official propaganda policy
was still that of a country seeking to bring stability and balance to Europe, a theme
articulated during the 1936 Olympic games. This argument holds that Strauss, the
seasoned card player, knew full well that governmental banning of the opera on the
grounds that it thematically supported peace would embarrass the prewar regime.
Friedenstag remains Strauss’s most controversial opera, the first stage work envi-
sioned during the Nazi regime. Because it was conceived, composed, and performed
during the Third Reich, it is impossible not to regard the work as a political opera, given
the government’s policy of total social-cultural coordination (Gleichschaltung) adminis-
tered by the RKK, as presided over by Goebbels. Since July 1935 Strauss had been persona
non grata in the eyes of the Nazi regime, having been fired from the RMK; thus, despite
Strauss’s stature as an artist in the 1930s, he was required to submit Friedenstag to the
cultural ministry, and he was not at all sure it would clear. Even if it did, what would
happen to the work should war break out? “How many years,” he asked a friend, “will
these inevitable consequences then paralyze the good intentions of theater directors to
revive a work extolling the union of peoples?”12
That it was, in fact, received with enthusiasm as a “highly political” libretto, ideal
for the new Reich, made the seventy-two-year-old Strauss recoil in disgust (“childish
nonsense” [Kindergarten], he wrote to his wife on 6 December 1936).13 He got the
needed approval – from an unnamed party bureaucrat – but at a high cost to his
already damaged reputation. Once the work passed the censor, positive reviews for its
future premiere in 1938 were guaranteed, for in 1936 Goebbels abolished art criticism
(Kunstkritik) in favor of art commentary (Kunstbetrachtung), which would take a
positive tone. A negative criticism of an artwork endorsed by the RKK was tanta-
mount to a critique of the regime itself.
Despite his disagreement with the political interpretation of the Propaganda
Ministry, Strauss was in no position to protest publicly if he wanted his premiere.
Regardless of Zweig’s central role in Friedenstag’s genesis, Strauss knew that he could
not demand that Zweig’s name be attached to the publicity placard, as he had done in
the case of Die schweigsame Frau, when he enjoyed national prestige and protection as
president of the RMK. The number of personal and professional accommodations he
12
Claude Rostand, Richard Strauss (Paris: E. Columbe, 1949), p. 153.
13
Richard Strauss Archive. The full correspondence between the composer and his wife has never been
published and, for reasons of privacy, likely never will be.
was willing to make on behalf of this one-act work seems strange given the significant
doubts he had about it even as he began the compositional process.
Strauss had received Gregor’s libretto on 24 August 1935, but as late as October he
still had serious misgivings about the entire project, as he confessed to Zweig: “The
whole subject is, after all, a bit commonplace – soldiers, war, famine, medieval
heroism, dying together – it isn’t quite my dish, with the best of good will.”14 That
same month Strauss made a similar declaration to Clemens Krauss, whom he had
also approached for advice: “This medieval heroism: this ‘dying together’ etc. etc.
already found its definite, idealized conclusion in Siegfried’s Funeral March – one
should have thought! Instead of self-slaughter[ – ]self-completion. Instead of
Napoleon – Goethe!”15 Strauss’s beloved Goethe and Krauss’s advice helped the
composer out of his impasse, hence the decision to put more focus on an Ewig-
Weibliche of sorts in Maria, the sole female lead, whose lyrical soprano served as a
necessary counterbalance to the prosaic male soloists.
Unfortunately, the Friedenstag libretto is far from Goethe in literary quality; it remains
a loosely knit hodgepodge, one that proves the adage that too many cooks spoil the
broth. Every participant in this project had something different at stake: Zweig’s naïve
notions of world peace, Gregor’s ambition to be Strauss’s next librettist, Krauss’s
interest in forming a closer artistic relationship with the composer, and Strauss’s desire
to continue his career as an opera composer. True, Strauss had the original idea for a
one-act festival play ending in the Peace of Constance, but the ultimate Friedenstag, and
its Thirty Years’ War setting, fell far short of his expectations, especially now that it was
in the hands of Gregor.
Gregor was at the greatest disadvantage: a second-rate poet, forced to compose a
libretto that was another’s conception. Of his three libretti, Daphne stands out as the
strongest precisely because it was his only original work for Strauss. If the composer
complained that Friedenstag was a “laborious piece of craft,” it was not entirely Gregor’s
fault, for it is not clear that Strauss himself knew precisely what he wanted from this
incoherent text – beyond good music theater, which would prove to be impossible given
the severe dramaturgical limitations from the outset.
Michael P. Steinberg’s convincing comparison between Friedenstag and Die Frau ohne
Schatten points sharply to the lack of coherence in the former. With Die Frau ohne
Schatten, Hofmannsthal offered Strauss a text of psychological depth and delineation,
and the composer responded readily with a richly differentiated musical score of his
own. Both operas depend on silence at a critical moment in the drama. In Die Frau ohne
Schatten it is the silence of a psychologically motivated expectation: the shadowless fairy-
14
Strauss to Zweig (31 October 1935), in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 104.
15
Strauss to Krauss (8 October 1935), in Richard Strauss–Clemens Krauss: Briefwechsel, ed. Günter
Brosche (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1997), p. 208.
tale empress puts her husband at mortal risk by making a moral decision not to take the
humanity, symbolized by the shadow, of another woman. In the tense silence, the
outcome is not immediately clear. Out of that silence, the violins quietly cascade
downward, casting a sonic shadow as the empress becomes aware of her newly gained
humanity. It is, as Steinberg suggests, “the resolution of the psychological tension and
the moral resolve of the (now-)heroine.”16
The same could hardly be said of Maria, who never manages to become anything
more than an allegory of peace, despite all of Strauss’s good intentions. As the church
bells toll out of the silence, Maria is as much an observer as everyone else onstage,
disconnected, as Steinberg observes, from “the circumstantial resolution that bursts
upon the scene. The result is an effect, a trick, with no underlying dramatic logic.”17 As
an allegorical and often purely sonic counterbalance to the male soloists, she can only
maintain a single affect – exaltation – throughout the work. Her spoken metaphor is
“light” (Licht), a word that Gregor repeats no fewer than ten times, only to be surpassed
by its source, “sun” (Sonne), with over a dozen iterations.
Carl Dahlhaus sees her opening monologue, a hymn to the sun, as a deeply conflicted
and confusing reversal of Tristan’s Act ii,18 one made all the more perplexing by the
ensuing duet with her husband, the commandant, as they sing of love and death, death
and peace – undifferentiated – not in a Liebesnacht, but rather a Liebestag, a not-so-subtle
reminder of the opera’s title. In a simultaneous duet, they sing:
Maria: Hear me, War!
Mine is the last and everlasting victory!
The sun has called me by its light!
Beloved, I follow the call of light,
Beloved, I come to die with you.
Commandant: Hear me, War!
I was only ever a soldier!
Loyalty is all I knew, my guide through life!
Loyalty to my sovereign!!
I bless you, War!
Loyalty has called me by its light!!
Beloved, we follow the everlasting call,
Beloved, I come to die with you.19
16
Michael P. Steinberg, “Richard Strauss and the Question,” in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His
World, p. 179.
17
Ibid.
18
Carl Dahlhaus, “Eine Ästhetik der Widerstands? Friedenstag von Richard Strauss,” Beiträge zur
Musikwissenschaft 28, 1 (1986): 20.
19
Translation from EMI Records CD 5159402 (1999), with Wolfgang Sawallisch and the Symphony
of the Bavarian Radio.
[Maria: Hör es, Krieg

Mein ist der letzte, ewige Sieg!
Sonne, sie rief mich mit ihrem Licht!
Geliebter, ich folge des Lichtes Werben,
Geliebter, ich komme, mit dir zu sterben.
Kommandant: Hör es, Krieg
Ich war nur Soldat!
Nur Treue kenne ich, weisend übers Leben,
Treue ihm, der mein Herr war!
Gesegnet, Krieg!
Treue, sie rief mich mit ihrem Licht!
Geliebte, wir folgen dem ewigen Werben,
Geliebte, ich komme, mit dir zu sterben.]
As a character, Maria comes closest to Leonore, who, with her loving devotion to her
husband and deeds of courage, obtained both a personal and a communal freedom. But
as an allegory, Maria has not earned any of these lofty notions; her sole act of putting
herself between the swords of the commandants is entirely gratuitous. Yet, as we shall
see, Beethoven was very much on Strauss’s mind as he composed the score.
From confusion to coherence
In his last opera, Capriccio, Strauss poses the question: “Words then music, or music then
words?” Dahlhaus asks a similar question toward the beginning of his Friedenstag essay:
“Opera as drama or drama as opera?”20 Given the sizable gap between poetic intent and
musical realization in this work, the answer is academic; Strauss confessed as much to
Zweig when he lamented that Gregor’s verses had no depth without music. Despite his
empty praise to Gregor after the libretto reached its final stage, Strauss knew he had a
mediocre work on his hands, and he knew what he had to do.
The result is an opera with a simple, concise, yet powerful musical structure, a score
that shows evidence of a seasoned composer who could draw on musical instincts
developed over decades of operatic writing. Every dramaturgical enigma that could not
be solved by the clarity of the word would be washed away by the power of the music. If
a convincing peroration could not be generated by the text in the final part, it could be
created by the score. Lacking Hofmannsthal’s words and their psychological delinea-
tion, Strauss had to go it alone. The result is a work of power and beauty, but with little
in the way of musical subtlety.
Gregor, after he had heard the composer play through the newly composed score in
Garmisch in mid-February 1936, was overwhelmed, and he wrote to Zweig that
20
Dahlhaus, “Eine Ästhetik der Widerstands?,” p. 18.
7.1a Beethoven, Symphony no. 5, mvt. iv
7.1b Friedenstag, music after the bells of peace
the music is yet again of great freshness. Like mighty pillars, the war-atmosphere, the
soldiers’ songs, the duet, the funeral march of the opening, rise up to be crowned by the huge
dome of the final chorus. He succeeded in doing something terrific. I do not exaggerate when
I say that “Herrscher Geist zu Dir!” will be compared with the [Beethoven] Ninth Symphony
finale. Endlessly captivating, at the end quite simply in C major after the complex and
fractured tonalities of the opening. I was ecstatic.21
He wrote a similar letter to Strauss, who, embarrassed, replied: “I hope you haven’t
overestimated me in your authorial joy.”22
Nonetheless, there are points to be gleaned from Gregor’s letter that articulate
important musical matters. The first is the general musical trajectory from dark to
light, the comparison to Beethoven, and the extensive use of the chorus, especially the
choral finale, which in its tonal simplicity was intended to offset the sonic bleakness of
the opening scenes of the opera. Gregor cited the D major finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,
which is certainly applicable on a certain level. But the closer match would be the
C major finale of Fidelio, which had been noted as early as the Friedenstag premiere and
has been discussed by scholars over more recent decades. Another Beethovenian
moment not mentioned in the literature is the point when the bells are first heard and
the music unfolds in rhythms based on one of Strauss’s favorite themes, from the final
movement of the Fifth Symphony (Ex. 7.1a).
Strauss first used the Beethoven theme as a model for his theme of the “ascent” in the
Alpine Symphony and later paraphrased the Beethoven again for the short melodrama of
the wanderer (“Up to your citadel, my goddess!”) in his collaborative reworking, with
Hofmannsthal, of The Ruins of Athens (1924), which was chosen for the first half of the
Friedenstag premiere (Ex. 7.1b).
Latent in Gregor’s February letter is the basic formal reading of the opera, which
provided the foundation for Strauss’s tripartite musical realization:
21
Gregor to Zweig (17 February 1936), in Birkin, Zweig–Gregor Correspondence, p. 265.
22
Strauss to Gregor (21 February 1936), in Tenschert, Strauss–Gregor Briefwechsel, p. 50.
Part 1: The social and political (D minor)

Part 2: The human (C minor)
Part 3: The intersection of the two (D major/C major)
Of the three Gregor operas, two (Friedenstag and Die Liebe der Danae) begin in D minor,
and in both cases – although the settings have nothing in common – the key is used to
suggest social breakdown, hunger, and poverty. In the former, the setting is the Thirty
Years’ War; in the latter, it is the court of King Pollux, which is in a state of ruin and
bankruptcy. Both openings are relentless in their avoidance of lyricism as they embrace
an ironic, modernist tone commonly associated with Weill and Hanns Eisler, but
arguably with roots in the music of Mahler. Some have even used the adjective
“Mahlerian” to describe the pervasive march topos with which Friedenstag opens23 – a
topic that permeates much of the first part as a sonic backdrop to the cries of misery and
hunger realized in some of Strauss’s most dissonant music, especially in its stark,
unmediated tone (Ex. 7.2).
Part i, which is scored entirely for male voices, is essentially a closed unit of D minor
with allusions to the primary tonic (C minor) by two diegetic musical numbers: a
nostalgic folk tune sung by the Piedmontese messenger and a march as the starving
delegation (“like a band of ghosts”) from the town below enters the citadel to tell the
commandant of famine and widespread hunger. The Italian song (“The rose, a lovely
flower like youth”) is set in G major and the march, in C minor, a reference to the
Funeral March of the same key in Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony.24 The tenor folk song
of peace was the idea of Gregor, who had heard the song while serving in the First
World War, and it serves, as Werley has suggested, as a “forerunner” to Maria’s own
song of peace beginning the second part of the score. Part I, with its mostly male voices
(soldiers, townspeople, and the like), lasts for over half an hour. More than a third of the
work has now passed without the entrance of the sole female character. The soldiers
leave, and she encounters an empty, dark room: the fire is extinguished, weapons lie on
the floor in disarray, and the room is cold. Alienated from her surroundings, she laments
the war’s effect on her sad marriage, yet still affirms fidelity to her husband, vowing that
if she could only make him smile again it might bring peace.
Such triviality, with no mediation between the commonplace (an unsmiling husband)
and the epic (the final hour of the Thirty Years’ War), exemplifies much of the text, and
it surely posed a challenge to the composer. Worse yet are the redundant, almost
obsessive solar metaphors written for Maria (“High above this town of pain and hunger
the shining sun has risen! It fills me with new strength” [Hoch über diese Stadt der Qual,
des Hungers, hebt strahlend sich die Sonne!]), but Strauss responds with an aria of great
23
Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma (Cambridge University Press, 1999),
p. 318.
24
The Eroica funeral theme is quoted verbatim at the end of Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945).
7.2 Scene 1
7.3 End of Maria’s peace aria
power and beauty, very much in the tradition of the “Zweite Brautnacht” from Die
ägyptische Helena. Strauss maintains the ecstatic convincingly, especially as it culminates
in a brilliant, soaring E major peroration (“Oh come, bliss, in this last hour!” [O komm in
letzter Stunde Seligkeit!]) that suddenly collapses on a prosaic C minor (“No, only empty
hope!” [Nein – leere Hoffnung alles!]) as her husband appears (Ex. 7.3).
The remainder of Part ii consists of the dialogue and duet sung by the commandant
and Maria. Again it is Strauss’s music that brings this moribund text to life, as he reaches
back to Elektra – more specifically the Recognition Scene – for his model. Both the
commandant and Orest are ghostly figures surrounded by the aura of death; they sing in
cold, sustained tones accompanied by a choir of grand, funereal trombones. Maria and
Elektra act as dramatic foils for their lifeless counterparts, and both succeed in animating
them by the end of their respective scenes.
The Elektra connection was not lost on Gregor, who believed this section of the opera
to be one of the great recognition scenes, especially in its orchestral grandeur. “It is the
‘recognition’ of true being and feeling,” he observed. “The woman is the stronger one, it
is the man who stands in awe.”25 As Dahlhaus noted, Gregor’s contrasting texts of
husband and wife are dialectically unconvincing,26 and Strauss takes it upon himself to
find a higher unity through the score. Their C minor duet achieves a convincing aura of
fulfillment as it culminates on the Neapolitan, D♭ (Ex. 7.4).
The peripeteia of Part iii may well be the unmotivated reversal that Steinberg says it
is; however, Strauss crowns the moment with the longest stretch of choral music in any
of his stage works – a full one-third of the twenty-five-minute final section. There may be
no compelling dramaturgical logic between the turn of events and Maria’s concerns, but
all that is swept aside by wave after wave of powerful Straussian Wohlklang: full chorus,
orchestra, even theater organ. As Strauss moves from opera to oratorio, from deed to
word, the remnants of Zweig’s original Festakt conception return to the surface. The
chorus consists of two parts: the first in D major, as the people greet the enemy
commander (“Welcome, radiant sovereign” [Sei uns gegrüßt, leuchtender König]),
and the second in C major (“Dare to think it, dare to have faith, dare to look upwards
at divine radiance!” [Wagt es zu denken, wagt zu vertrauen, wagt in das göttliche
Leuchten zu schauen!]). If Gregor and Strauss were thinking of both Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony and Fidelio as models, then Friedenstag’s tonal layout serves as convincing
confirmation, with its movement from D minor (misery) to D major ( joy), from
C minor (war) to C major (peace and brotherhood). The choral finale is hardly
Strauss’s finest, but what it lacks in subtlety he makes up for in rhythmic power, skilled
harmonic pacing, and sheer volume, all of which push Gregor’s modest text aside in a
stupendous wave of sound.
It is hard to imagine that an opera that ends on such a positive note, with a choral
finale of such potency and dynamism, could have been preceded by a period of such
despair – summer 1935 – when, according to Pauline Strauss, her husband believed his
opera-composing days were over. In moments of artistic impasse, Strauss was rarely
passive: he characteristically turned toward smaller forms of composition in order to
25
Gregor, Richard Strauss: Der Meister der Oper, p. 253.
26
Dahlhaus, “Eine Ästhetik der Widerstands?,” pp. 20–1.
7.4 Duet, Maria and Commandant
work through his creative block. Such was the case with Friedenstag in the late summer
of 1935, when he turned to reading Friedrich Rückert’s poems, three of which served as
the basis for his Männerchöre. Given Strauss’s lifelong bonhomme persona, keeping his
audience at arms’ length, these men’s choruses stand out for their personal qualities.
Two poems that Strauss considered setting, then dropped, get even closer to the
composer’s disgust with current German politics and fear of impending war. “Friede
im Innern” (Inner Peace) laments a world taken over by a dark force, as suggested in the
second stanza (the emphasis is the composer’s):
Down with deception, down with lies,

Away with all the stratagems
So that what’s known as politics
And feeds pathetically on them
Misleads none other than itself
Not its opponent, spiritual life.
[Fort den Trug, und fort die Lüge,

fort die schlauen Winkelzüge
daß, was Politik sich heißt,
die damit sich kläglich fristet,
niemand als sich selbst belistet
nicht mehr ihren Feind, den Geist].
“Sühnung” (Atonement) matches the composer’s anxiety at the thought of war:

All through the world there passed
Battle’s destroying thunder.
No gate was locked so fast
It was not burst asunder;
No place stood up so high
It was above the tide.
I still see horror’s traces
A hundred thousandfold –
The meadow full of corpses,
The blood in stream and wold,
And human hands, in infamy,
Bear spots they’ll never wash away.27
[Es zog das Schlachtgewitter

verwüstend durch die Welt.
Es war so fest kein Gitter,
Das nicht davor zerschellt.
So hoch war keine Stelle
Wohin nicht schlug die Welle.
Ich seh des Greuels Spuren
Noch hunderttausendfach,
Die Leichen auf den Fluren,
Das Blut in Fluß und Bach,
Und auch an Menschenhänden
Die Flecken, die sie schänden.]
27
For complete translations of these poems, see Bryan Gilliam, “Friede im Innern”: Strauss’s Public and
Private Worlds in the Mid 1930s,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 57, 3 (2004): 583–4.
Daphne: the peace of nature 257
Strauss composes these short a capella men’s chamber choruses in a style far removed
from that of the opera stage’s public rhetoric. Like many of his “semiprivate” works, he
chose not to assign them opus numbers. In their focus on nature and spiritual life, these
poems seem to foreshadow central aspects of Daphne.
DAPHNE: THE PEACE OF NATURE
In the letter of 17 February 1936 in which Gregor rhapsodized over the Friedenstag score
after first hearing it in Garmisch, the librettist articulates how these two one-act operas
were complementary works that should always be performed together: “If Friedenstag
expresses the human ideal [of peace], Daphne sings of it in nature.” The two operas –
originally matched in length at under ninety minutes each – would be symmetrically
coupled by choral finales celebrating these very themes.
As we survey the genesis of Daphne in the various drafts of its libretto, we shall see
that this second work became an opera of deep personal significance for Strauss, one that
grew well beyond its original scope in both length and concept, much to the chagrin of
Gregor. Daphne was his only original libretto for Strauss, and – because of the compos-
er’s active role in the shaping of the text – probably his best. Gregor wrote the original
scenario, which he showed Strauss in Berchtesgaden in July 1935:
DAPHNE. One-act tragedy with dances and choruses. – Wonderful Greek landscape. People,
identical with nature and with the gods! – The old Peneios is at the same time the river and
the singing fisherman who lives at the river. Gäa is his wife and at the same time the
beautiful green earth at the Peneios. Their daughter Daphne of deep innocence . . . Playing
with the waves at the Peneios are choruses of nymphs. Two suitors: the cowherd Apollo,
wise, baritonal, surrounded by his maiden priestesses, and the young tenor-like shepherd
Leukippos. Daphne remains puzzled even when the cowherd shows her his lightning . . .
Leukippos, pursued with jealousy by Apollo, has the idea to dress up as a girl. This totally
changes Daphne’s conception and she treats him as a girlfriend. Through this mistake [of
identity] he achieves the goal of his desire. Now Daphne is completely dismayed [at
Leukippos’s deception] and reveals everything to the cowherd! – Apollo reacts in both a
godly and a mortal way and kills Leukippos. Peneios asks Zeus to transform the people
back to their original state. Zeus responds and, amid the play of water nymphs and in front of
the flames of the cremation of Leukippos, the Daphne tree grows upward.28
The subtitle (One-Act Tragedy with Dances and Choruses) suggests a certain kinship with
Friedenstag and, more broadly, a commonality between Hofmannsthal, Zweig, and
Gregor: the Austrian neobaroque. In the form originally conceived by Gregor, as the
curtain-raiser for Friedenstag, Daphne is another kind of Festakt, a neobaroque masque,
with all that genre’s bucolic evocations. “It is a baroque costume play,” according to
28
Gregor, Richard Strauss: Der Meister der Oper, pp. 245–6.
Steinberg, “what the opera seria Ariadne auf Naxos would be if it were not a play within
a play.”29
It is thus significant that this scenario was inspired by a static visual: a nineteenth-
century painting of Apollo and Daphne by Theodore Chasseriau in which the depiction
of Apollo as an ardent, romantic god stands in contrast to that of Daphne, with her
childlike, asexual innocence. But there was another visual source as well, and one far
more important for Strauss: Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne in the Villa Borghese.
He had seen it on various occasions in Rome, and he revisited Bernini’s work while
composing Daphne, even keeping in his studio a photograph of it lent to him by
Gregor.30 In this baroque rendition of Ovid’s story, where Apollo is struck by the
arrow of passion and Daphne by the arrow of its exact opposite, we see Daphne in
flight and in the process of transformation. The transformative process receives scant
mention in Gregor’s original scenario, which focuses on the Bacchic festival as the
centerpiece.
The festival aspect of the work of course attracted Strauss the least, and in the three
major revisions of this text, that aspect is continually minimized. After reading the first
version in September 1935 – one that was crowded with characters, including Zeus and
the water nymphs – Strauss was generally displeased with its awkward pseudo-Homeric
jargon and in particular with the dramaturgically superfluous Zeus, who speaks in
“schoolmasterly Weltanschauungs banalities.”
It is nothing more than a sequence of events, not a trace of any dramatic climax; seriously
lacking is a major confrontation between Apollo, Leukippos, and Daphne in which Daphne
explicitly expresses her virginal [jungfräuliche] stance toward both of them: awe of the god
whose presence she senses, sisterly love for the friend of her youth.31
Strauss saw nothing but stiff pageantry, a nineteenth-century style tableau vivant where
even the act of transformation took a back seat to an awkward final dialogue between
Gäa and Peneios as they look upward for their last glimpse of Daphne: Apollo has come
and gone, leaving their daughter as a laurel tree. “You will nourish it,” Peneios tells his
wife, “and in its shadow we will take our rest.” “Yes,” Gäa grimly responds, “and we will
ask our daughter to protect us from the rays of Phoebus Apollo.”
Zweig was equally disappointed with Gregor’s first draft but more diplomatic and
specific about the weakness of the text, especially its ending: “You let this mythological
play end in a psychological dialogue and thus neglect a great dramaturgical and musical
possibility.” Instead of having Gäa and Peneios sing after the final chorus, they should
remain silent and
29
Steinberg, “Richard Strauss and the Question,” p. 180.
30
Strauss insisted that an image of the Bernini adorn the cover of the piano-vocal score.
31
Strauss to Gregor (25 September 1935), in “Selections from the Strauss–Gregor Correspondence: The
Genesis of Daphne,” trans. Susan Gillespie, in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, pp. 239–40.
call to Daphne and touch her leaves with their hands, etc. In short, a sphere of holiness,
reverence, and contentment ends the work in an elevated spirit. A great myth is created and,
at the same time, a wonderful touching and transfigured picture. Along with this I can
really hear Strauss’s music in its spiritual vein as at the end of the first act of Die Frau ohne
Schatten, and I believe it would be a welcome to him, with the sounds of a celeste, to return
the work to eternity.32
Gregor spent the rest of 1935 drafting a second version, which he sent the composer the
following January. Gone were the extraneous characters, and Gregor indeed tried to
create a sense of wonderment at the end along the lines of Zweig’s suggestions.
However, the aura of baroque pageantry was, if anything, strengthened thereby. The
chorus was directed to enter the stage in ten male–female pairs, each singing a couplet as
they enter:
The first pair: Be protector of our love!
The second pair: May your gentle shade refresh us!33
[Das erste Paar: Sei du Beschützer unserer Liebe!

Das zweite Paar: Dein holder Schatten. Erquicke uns!]
Once assembled in front of the laurel tree, they sing a revised C major chorus: “Blessed
tree, high above humanity, you loom upward!” (Gesgneter Baum, hoch über die
Menschen, ragts du empor!).
Strauss, frustrated that Gregor could not free his imagination from the pageantry of a
Festakt, took his text to a third party, a trusted friend at the Vienna State Opera, Lothar
Wallerstein. Wallerstein, the regisseur and stage director with whom Strauss had
collaborated on the reworking of Mozart’s Idomeneo (1930), gave the libretto a close
reading and discussed his thoughts with Strauss in March 1936. Strauss instructed Gregor
to meet with Wallerstein in Vienna, and the result was the third and final version of the
opera. The vital triangular relationship between Daphne, Leukippos, and Apollo was
strengthened, especially in terms of Daphne’s opening monologue. Strauss was now
ready to compose his opera, and it became one of his favorite works.
Strauss had composed Friedenstag, his least favorite opera, according to Zweig’s and
(by extension) Gregor’s plans. The composer had greater ambitions for Daphne, and he
was determined to write an opera of expressive power despite the absence of real
poetry. Faced with a mundane, prosaic libretto, Strauss was forced to reach both beyond
and within himself for musical inspiration. Without Hofmannsthal, Strauss instinctively
returned to the Innerlichkeit of German romanticism, to Rückert – as noted above – and
especially to Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy.
32
Zweig to Gregor (3 September 1935), in Birkin, Zweig–Gregor Correspondence, pp. 251–2.
33
My translation.
It is difficult to resist forging a link between the final stanza of Rückert’s “Inner Peace”
and Strauss’s reading of Gregor’s scenario in July 1935, when he was summoned to
Berchtesgaden and fired as president of the RMK. According to Rückert’s poem, the evil
force of politics might well feed on its own lies and deceptions, but it cannot deceive the
spirit. With an image that remarkably anticipates the final scene of Daphne, when the
title character is transformed, God drops a seed into the wound of humanity out of
which grows a tree of freedom and peace. Blood is washed away, purified by water, and
the rebirth of the spirit is suggested by the flowering of nature.
Let this very blade, this palm,
With its slim and towering stem
Be the new tree of freedom, the balm!
Watered not with blood, but dew,
Let it sprout toward heaven’s realm
And its shadow earth o’erwhelm.
[Dieser Halm, ja diese Palme

mit dem schlanken Riesenhalme,
sei der neue Freiheitsbaum!
Nicht mit Blut, mit Thau begossen,
Soll er rein zum Himmel sprossen
Schattend über’m Erdenraum.]
Strauss’s conversations with Wallerstein included discussions of The Birth of Tragedy,

which he related by letter to Gregor:
Apollo betrays his godhead by approaching Daphne with Dionysian feelings; she feels this
betrayal in his kiss . . . After this adventure, Apollo, before he can mount his sun chariot
again, must also undergo a purification within himself, which has a dramatic climax in the
killing . . . of the Dionysian element within himself. The symbol of his own purification would be
Daphne’s salvation through her transformation into the laurel tree!34
Throughout the genesis of Friedenstag, Strauss was unable to make a strong con-
nection with the material at hand; but Daphne was a different matter, and the opera-to-be
was taking on larger proportions both thematically and concretely in terms of length.
Privately, Strauss was cooling to the idea of presenting the two operas together on a
double bill, one in which there were to be fundamental structural links embedded in the
score, such as two final choruses in C major.
In Daphne, Strauss rediscovered earlier artistic precepts that had lain dormant since as
far back as Elektra, rooted in the Nietzschean Dionysian Greek spirit, which played itself
34
Strauss to Gregor (9 March 1936), translated in “Selections from the Strauss–Gregor
Correspondence,” in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, p. 254; emphasis in original.
out to the very end of Elektra’s maenadic death dance. The opera section of Ariadne auf
Naxos showed how Hofmannsthal had turned himself and Strauss toward a brighter
Hellenism, one that included the element of transformation. The lamenting Ariadne
accepts renewed life in the arms of Bacchus and is thereby transformed to a higher level
of humanity. Daphne’s transformation is of an entirely different kind. The humanity
that young Daphne sees around her is one of deceit and corruption, for Apollo came to
her as a brother and yet seduced her. Apollo, realizing his transgression, asks Zeus to
transform Daphne from human form to a more perfect object of nature – the laurel tree.
By the early spring of 1937, Strauss had composed as far as the final scene when he
reached a serious creative impasse. The trouble lay, not surprisingly, with Gregor’s text.
Strauss was interested above all in the magic of Daphne’s transformation, while
Gregor’s choral finale only offered a tableau vivant. Without informing his librettist,
Strauss consulted his friend Clemens Krauss. “Just read through it once,” the composer
implored; “I can’t get on with the ending.” Krauss replied that the idea of bringing
people onstage to sing to a tree “was absurd” and suggested that Strauss “close the piece
with the visible transformation [of Daphne] and the gradual transition of human
language into the voice of nature.”
The impasse was broken, and an elated Strauss wrote to Gregor within days. The
letter epitomizes their working relationship, for what Strauss offered his collaborator
was less a suggestion than a direct order: “No human being other than Daphne must
appear on stage, no Peneios, no solo voices – no chorus – in short, no oratorio.” He
added:
During Apollo’s last moments of song, Daphne, regarding him in astonishment, arises
slowly from the corpse of Leukippos and after Apollo has exited she wants to follow him, but
after only a few steps remains as if rooted to the spot and now – in the moonlight but
completely visible – the miracle of transformation occurs: only with the orchestra alone! At
most Daphne might speak a few words during the transformation, which turns into stuttering
and then wordless melody.35
Gregor was crushed. Strauss’s directive, less a suggestion than an ultimatum, destroyed
any hope of feasible double bill. The librettist’s poetic plan for two works with final
choruses extolling the human ideal of peace and the peace of nature, respectively, was
shelved. Gregor complained bitterly to Zweig about the great pains he had taken to
convince Strauss to retain the chorus, without success, and grudgingly made the
changes. Though it altered his original concept of the opera, which now shifted its
focus to the process of transformation, he later admitted that the revised ending “was
one of the most musical inspirations of [Strauss’s] genius.”36
35
Strauss to Gregor (12 May 1936), “Selections from the Strauss–Gregor Correspondence,” pp. 267–8.
36
Gregor, Richard Strauss: Der Meister der Oper, p. 266.
7.5a Daphne, opening
Musical plans
A curtain-raiser for an evening of two one-act operas should be the shorter of the two,
and at nearly twice Friedenstag’s length, Daphne was a poor partner for the earlier work.
Outwardly Strauss was still deferential to Gregor about the paired-opera concept, but he
had no illusions that this would be anything but a mismatch of the highest order. Their
differences go far beyond the idea of two contrasting operas united by a single pacifist
purpose. The outward sense of unity was finally negated once Gregor’s “oratorio” was
wholly eliminated.
Strauss’s great “masculine” works were his tone poems; the martial, masculine qualities
of Friedenstag frequently acted as roadblocks to his creative process. The overall impression
of Friedenstag is of an extensive minor mode: dark, dissonant, and dense. The consonant
transparency of Daphne, with its greater focus on the solo voice – rarely in sonic struggle
with the orchestra – represents a welcome return to Strauss’s operatic ideal of the feminine
and its mythological associations, not heard since Helen and Ariadne.
Whereas Friedenstag opens in a severe, defamiliarized march, Daphne (subtitled A
Bucolic Tragedy) offers a pastoral G major wind serenade, Strauss’s Mozartian key of
innocent bliss, as an introduction led by solo oboe.37 James Hepokoski has discussed the
G major idyll (introduced by oboe) from Don Juan at length and even looks to the
opening theme of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll as a possible model for melodic shape. A closer
musical parallel is the beginning of the slow section of Symphonia domestica (rehearsal
number 49), where husband and wife experience idyllic bliss at sundown as the child
goes to sleep. It too is a miniature woodwind serenade introduced by the oboe (Ex. 7.5).
37
Lockwood, “The Element of Time in Der Rosenkavalier,” p. 252.
7.5b Symphonia domestica
The binary contrasts between the two one-act operas are readily clear: Teutonic
versus Mediterranean, brass versus winds, density versus transparency, dissonance
versus consonance, choral versus solo; the list goes on. Admittedly, it took three drafts
of the libretto, with unprecedented intervention by Strauss, to make an allegorical
spectacle into a human drama, but the collaboration was all the better for it. By the third
version the libretto had been expanded to give a more human dimension to certain
characters (such as a solo for Gäa), but all of what Strauss had thought to be useless
literary filler (the Weltanschauungsbanalitäten) had been stripped away. What was left
was a progression of scenes, each one introducing a new character, until the midpoint,
with the entrance of Apollo exactly halfway into a drama of approximately one hundred
minutes’ duration:
Exposition (40 minutes)
Prelude: Wind serenade, G
Scene 1: Shepherds, E
Scene 2: Daphne, G–F♯
Scene 3: Leukippos, F
Scene 4: Gäa, A♭
Scene 5: Maidens, B
Scene 6: Peneios, C
Scene 7: Apollo, D
Complication (15 minutes)
Scene 8: Apollo and Daphne, d–(E)–D
Catastrophe (15 minutes)
Scene 9: Festival, E
Scene 10: Apollo and Leukippos, E♭–e♭
Apotheosis (30 minutes)
Scene 11: Daphne’s mourning, f–F
Scene 12: Apollo’s farewell, A–E♭
Scene 13: Daphne’s transformation, F♯
Gregor may well have been the eminent theater historian, but it was Strauss – whose
own preoccupation with Greek tragedy extended back to the Gymnasium – who helped
transform this libretto from stasis to a classic, multipartite tragic form, which rested on a
clear exposition of characters as well as a coherence of action and motivation at the
center of the drama, the Dionysian festival of the blossoming vineyards culminating in
what Strauss, using the language of Aristotelian poetics, called the Katastrophe. The
apotheosis, of course, had not yet been fully worked out either dramatically or
musically.
It is hard to imagine a greater contrast to Friedenstag than this second one-act opera,
with its swift succession of scenes all built around named characters. In Friedenstag,
an opera based on historical human events, the dramatic expression is all allegory,
while Daphne, as myth with its roots in allegory, offers real human conflict: love,
jealousy, betrayal, and remorse. Strauss presents the main characters to us with their
individual tonal groundings as well as motives – triadically constructed – to reinforce
that sense of clarity so lacking in the harmonic and thematic language of Friedenstag
(Ex. 7.6a–d).38
The exposition centers mostly on G major and ends on its dominant with the entry of
Apollo, in disguise as a cowherd. The most significant deviations prepare for the E major
Bacchic festival: the shepherds and the maidens who will perform the ritual dances in
this annual celebration of springtime fertility.39 Two other deviations are more signifi-
cant to Daphne herself. At the end of her opening aria, she is drawn to the comfort and
solace of the laurel tree (“O that I could stay here with you, my beloved tree” [O wie
gerne bleib ich bei dir, mein lieber Baum]) a semitone removed from her simple
38
The exception is Gäa, who has the smallest solo role and has no signifying theme.
39
Strauss’s earliest use of E major as a Dionysian tonality is, as we recall from Chapter 3, in Elektra,
which culminates in her maenadic dance of death in the final scene.
7.6a–d
G major grounding, while her mother – in a semitone removal in the other direction –
beckons her to come home and take part in the fertility rites with the other maidens.
The festival itself – with the male and female fertility dances – is awkward and
difficult to stage convincingly, and Strauss’s made-to-order music at this point is of little
help. Gregor’s prized rituals are executed out of pure narrative necessity, and Strauss
had him cut them back to a minimum in order to focus on the confrontation between
Apollo, Leukippos, and Daphne and on Leukippos’s murder, which must be presented
onstage.40 Strauss’s instructions yielded classic symmetries: the entry of Apollo in the
middle of the work and the catastrophe at the classic two-thirds point in the drama, right
after a double anagnorisis (the unveiling of the female-clad Leukippos and the revelation
that the lowly cowherd is the sun god Apollo).
Apollo’s disclosure (“Every sacred morning” [Jeden heiligen Morgen]), sweeping
aside D to the heroic E♭ major, is musically the grandest moment of the catastrophe.
God though he is, Apollo (in post-Nietzschean fashion) yielded to the Dionysian within
him and murdered a mortal, upending his heroic musical setting with a sudden eruption
of E♭ minor. The tonal narrative continues as Daphne mourns over the corpse of
Leukippos (F minor) and Apollo confronts his transgression in the tritonal axis between
A and E♭ major.
But now Strauss had to confront a significant musical problem. For the first time,
Strauss faced composing an opera whose finale was tonally predetermined; he and
Gregor had tentatively agreed that, as paired operas, Daphne and Friedenstag should both
culminate in C major choruses. The earliest extant sketch fragments do not indicate very
clearly how C major was to fit into a larger tonal structure, especially given the fact that
40
Strauss to Gregor (1 April 1936), in “Selections from the Strauss–Gregor Correspondence,” in
Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, p. 260.
Table 7.1 Daphne’s opening monologue
Part Key Rehearsal no. Text
1 G major 17 + 3 mm. “O bleib gelieber Tag!”

(F♯ major) 18 − 5 mm. “du läßt mich leben mit meinem Brüder . . .”
2 Modulatory 21 + 6 mm. “Wenn du mich verläßt . . .”
3 Modulatory 23 “Warum lieber Vater . . .”
4 F♯ major 26 + 5 mm. “O wie gerne bleib ich bei dir . . .”
(G major) 28 − 4 mm. “. . . und so mein Brüder.”
such sketches unmistakably show that a key narrative–tonal relationship in the opera
would be G versus F♯ major, representing Daphne as a mortal and her transformation
into a laurel tree. Her opening monologue (Table 7.1) exemplifies this central relation-
ship. Here Strauss creates a convincing musical symmetry. The outer sections stand as
tonally stable bookends, while the two inner sections are modulatory, often breaking
down into accompanied recitative with orchestral motivic commentary. Each of these
outer bookends features a brief incursion of the other key (in both instances with a
reference to her brothers, the trees), providing a strong sense of unity to an aria that ends
a semitone lower than it began.
It is unequivocal that, from the earliest letters to Gregor, Strauss prized Daphne’s
transformation over all else, whether it be her love scene with Apollo, the festival, or
the murder of Leukippos. The musical sketches suggest this focus as well. What sense
would C major make in light of this crucial narrative–harmonic relationship? Strauss
again looked away from the text and into himself: the C major connection at the end
would be through Peneios, a character with whom Strauss began increasingly to
identify. Strauss saw Peneios as a Zarathustra-like visionary who had once been a god
(“Gott war ich einst”) but was now alien to an indolent, uncomprehending commun-
ity. The C major setting, with solo cello introduction, is remarkably close to a C major
cello concerto Strauss had planned and sketched in 1935, probably after the humil-
iation in Berchtesgaden in July. The sketches show a clearly articulated subtext:
“Struggle of the artistic soul [cello] against pseudo heroism, resignation, [and] melan-
choly; the call to the joy of life – opposed by the orchestra.” The struggle against
resignation would win out at the end as Peneios gave his blessing to his transformed
daughter.
Before scrapping the final choral text, as noted above, Strauss tried his hand at
composing it. A preliminary sketch reveals the composer’s original C major plan, but
it also readily demonstrates his struggle to come up with a felicitous ending (Ex. 7.7).
Strauss labels the sketch “Adoration of the tree,” and at the foot of the page he offers
his own candid assessment: “Not very good! Especially for Peneios as priest!” But why
the reference to Peneios if the chorus should be singing at this moment? After all, his
7.7 Sketch for rejected choral finale

priestly monologue has already occurred. Strauss may well have played with the idea of
having Peneios participate with the chorus in some way, or he may have entertained the
notion of having him sing instead of the chorus. He labels this sketch Schlussgesang (not
Schlusschor), both on the page and in the sketchbook’s table of contents.
A glance at this sketch brings to mind Strauss’s confession to Hofmannsthal during
the genesis of Die Frau ohne Schatten that unconvincing, two-dimensional textual
material produces an “academic chill” in the musical setting. This repetitive, static
musical fragment (Ex. 7.8) is a prime candidate for what Strauss’s wife described as
“note spinning.” The idea of an F♯ major operatic ending, a semitone below the
beginning, was never far from his mind, and he even considered transposing the
whole chorus to F♯, as he indicates in the upper left-hand corner of the first page
(Schlussgesang Fis Dur). As the upper right-hand corner of that page suggests, Strauss
canceled the sketch altogether; he made no use of this motivic material.
We recall Strauss’s directive to Gregor that at the end there should be no voices, no
Peneios, and – in short – “no oratorio!” Instead, Strauss composed what he called an
“extended orchestral piece” (langes Orchesterstück), not an adoration of the transformed
tree but the transformation process itself. He suggests this process by revisiting the G–F♯
relationship of Daphne’s monologue (Table 7.1), though in the transformation scene, as
we make a final journey into the magical sonic realm of F♯, any references to G are a
memory of who Daphne once was.41 Like most F♯ major passages by Strauss (Don
Quixote’s dream, the Presentation of the Rose), this miniature tone poem with vocal
obbligato is at once richly textured and luminescently transparent, with the string
section divided into multiple parts. The musicotransformational process is in two
parts: the dynamic, harmonically restless process of Verwandlung and the phantasma-
gorical end of that process, from the sung text to wordless melody (Table 7.2).
The climax of Part 1 is the return of the Daphne motive (see again Ex. 7.6a), five bars
after rehearsal number 249, presented in augmentation and setting the last words she
utters as a mortal being. This climactic moment is an incursion of G major just as we are
about to enter the stable realm of F♯ in Part 2, recalling the earlier incursion of G major
Table 7.2 Daphne’s transformation
Part Key Rehearsal no. Text
1 Modulatory (“V/F♯”) 238 “Ich komme . . .”

2 F♯ major 250 + 6 mm. [Vocalise]
41
This bookending relationship between first and final scenes has its roots in Elektra, with its
relationship between E and C major.
in the last part of her opening monologue (Part 4 of Table 7.1). At the end, however, we
realize its full significance. With the progression of the G 64 down a half step to a C♯7
chord – a sustained five-bar preparation for Part 2 – Daphne’s process of transformation
is finally complete. That final clash between G and F♯, culminating in the latter key,
suggests that she has completely left the realm of mortals (Ex. 7.8).
Stirred by the magic of Daphne’s transformation, the composer of Death and
Transfiguration knew that he had to reject his librettist and compose something on his
own terms. The revised conclusion was not merely a matter of discarding oratorio: by
embracing the instrumental realm, he both eliminated Gregor’s leaden text and found a
far deeper mode of expression, something far greater than anything the librettist
intended. In composing an orchestral ending, Strauss looked back not only to the
symphonic finale of Elektra, but also to the days of his tone poems. Indeed, after this
enchanting orchestral peroration, Strauss would explore the phenomenon of trans-
formation one last time in the dystopian Metamorphosen (1945), but with far different
results.
The concept of a double bill was stillborn once Strauss started composing Daphne; it
touched upon far too many themes that had moved Strauss throughout his creative life.
Strauss went ahead and let Clemens Krauss premiere Friedenstag, without Daphne, in
July 1938. Three months later the two works were – according to contract – performed
together in Dresden under Böhm. This was the premiere of Daphne, and it was the clear
favorite, with forty curtain calls. After the dress rehearsal Strauss’s wife reached over the
pit and placed a kiss on the top of his head, remarking, “You won’t get a second one,
you’re far too sweaty!”; Daphne remained her Lieblingsoper to the very end. Strauss
played the Transformation Scene for her regularly in their final four months back in
Garmisch in 1949.
Strauss’s ultimatum that there be “no oratorio” had a double meaning. There was, of
course, the surface rejection of Gregor’s choral plan; but the larger message was that
oratorio began and ended with Friedenstag, never to be repeated, as demonstrated in his
last three operas. Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio may have been criticized for their
detachment from contemporary inhumanities, which will be discussed in the next
chapter. But Friedenstag and Daphne confront war and peace, humanity and inhumanity,
action and indifference in ways that are unthinkable outside their contemporary
contexts.
Strauss’s unfinished projects – the other Männerchöre poems and the cello concerto –
show a deeply troubled composer who was coming to realize that this new political
regime was like no other he had known. At the end Daphne laments being doubly
deceived by her two suitors, and in 1935 Strauss might well have thought the same of a
regime that in late 1933 courted him for a high government position with the promise of
artistic reforms. Within eighteen months the party apparatchiks, whom Strauss called
illiterate and disgraceful, eagerly threw him out and sought to keep him guessing about
7.8 Daphne transformed

the future safety of his family. Was it a coincidence or a cruel gesture that his Jewish
daughter-in-law was put under house arrest exactly one month after Daphne’s Dresden
premiere, while Strauss and his wife were vacationing in Italy?
From the time of Friedenstag onward, Strauss, having lost any direct ties he had had to
the Nazi regime, had no peace of mind. He could obtain protection for his daughter-in-
law and grandsons, but only on a case-by-case basis – a strategy designed “to use and
abuse the composer at one and the same time,” according to Michael Kater, “to make
him pay for the sins of the past and nip further rebellion in the bud.”42 The two one-
acters were conceived and premiered as Germany was secretly readying itself for war;
the last two operas – Die Liebe der Danae (1940) and Capriccio (1941) – were composed
during the conflict itself. Strauss has been criticized for composing opera on “trivial
subjects,” given the grim realities of the time. The criticism, simplistic as it might be,
deserves further discussion and will be addressed in the final chapter.
42
Michael Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford
8 Opera in time of war: Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio
Die Liebe der Danae (1940) and Capriccio (1941) are Strauss’s final two operas, works
created under the shadow of European strife and first performed during what Goebbels
termed “total war,” with all its consequences.1 They are also works of significant
overlap, less aesthetically than circumstantially, whether that was intentional or not.
When Strauss declared that Danae would be his last opera, one that should not be
performed until after the war – even if it meant a posthumous premiere – he was
serious. And, as it turned out, he was correct, for the official first performance took place
in Salzburg in August 1952, nearly three full years after Strauss’s death. But what does
that make the other work, Capriccio, which premiered in Munich in October 1942, while
Strauss’s personal ban of Danae’s performance was still in effect? Was it no less an opera
than Danae?
Even more puzzling is that Danae was in fact performed before Strauss’s death in 1949
in what was, technically speaking, a dress rehearsal. Krauss had finally talked Strauss –
against the composer’s better judgment – into a premiere production at the 1944
Salzburg Festival. The work was to be mounted in August, and rehearsals were already
under way when on 20 July there was a serious attempt on Hitler’s life. Goebbels
immediately closed all theaters throughout the Reich, including Salzburg. After much
pleading by friends in Strauss’s circle who had high connections in the government, a
compromise was found.
An intervention by Heinz Drewes, vice president of the RMK, led Goebbels to ask the
Gauleiter of Salzburg to allow rehearsals to continue, with the strict understanding that
the production would not go beyond a Generalprobe for invited friends and guests. At
that rehearsal Strauss spoke briefly before the private audience of friends and colleagues,
lamenting the sad state of German culture in 1944, where theaters had either been closed
or reduced to rubble. Occidental culture, he lamented, had come to end, an observation
that would have led to the arrest and likely execution of an ordinary German, especially
in this late period of Nazi conflict when increasingly draconian security measures had
become the norm.2
1
The first such declaration was made after Germany declared war on the United States in
December 1941 following America’s declaration of war on Japan, one day after Pearl Harbor was
attacked on 7 December.
2
Personal communication (2 September 1995, Munich) with Gertrud Wagner, who was in attendance.
272
Opera in war: Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio 273
Both of these works had their roots in the prewar years. Danae’s went back as far as
1920, when, before working on Die ägyptische Helena, Hofmannsthal sketched out a
mythological comedy called Danae, oder die Vernunftheirat (Danae, or the Marriage of
Convenience). Capriccio dated back to 1934, when, while doing research in the British
Library, Stefan Zweig came across a libretto by Giovanni Battista Casti, Prima la
musica e poi la parole (First the Music, Then the Words). Antonio Salieri had set the text as
a little chamber opera to be performed in conjunction with Mozart’s one-act Der
Schauspieldirektor (The Impresario) at Schönbrunn in 1786.
Furthermore, both Danae and Capriccio have a direct connection to Joseph Gregor.
We recall from the previous chapter that Gregor came up with a Danae scenario
independently of Hofmannsthal, a plan he had shown to Strauss when they first met
in Berchtesgaden on 7 July 1935, though Gregor ended up working mostly with
Hofmannsthal’s material. But even before their July meeting, Zweig, who was groom-
ing Gregor as his likely successor, discussed a range of libretto possibilities with the
latter, including the Casti material. Indeed, there is a full-fledged scenario (Erst die Worte,
dann die Musik) that was drawn up in June, with the setting changed from Italy in the
eighteenth century to Germany in the 1820s.3 Prima la musica was soon dropped in favor
of Friedenstag and then Daphne. By then the latent Capriccio was forgotten in favor of Die
Liebe der Danae. Danae – like Wagner’s Ring – is the story of love, gold, redemption, and
renunciation, specifically a renunciation by Jupiter, the king of the gods, and a passage in
the opera that Strauss likened to Wotan’s Farewell.
Pollux, king of Eos, has gone bankrupt, offering his creditors worthless collateral,
when he finally admits that he has sent away his nieces to find Midas of Lydia, the man
with the golden touch, with the hope he might wish to marry Pollux’s beautiful
daughter, Danae. Danae is obsessed by gold and even had a powerful dream that she
was showered with shimmering pieces of the brilliant metal in her bedchamber. King
Midas (a former donkey driver, now empowered by Jupiter) arrives with a likeness of
Danae,4 and Pollux assures his court that their troubles are over. But, strangely, Midas is
disguised as his lowly messenger, and in a moment that recalls the silvery Act ii of
Rosenkavalier, the “messenger” soon falls in love with the bride-to-be.
It is all a ruse by Jupiter, who plans to seduce Danae in the form of Midas (in order to
trick his jealous wife, Juno), and the real lovestruck Midas cannot go through with it. He
breaks the deal with Jupiter and reveals his identity and his love for Danae. Jupiter takes
away Midas’s golden touch and returns him to his original identity; the god forces her to
choose between him and Midas, between gold and poverty. She chooses the latter and
3
The manuscript’s typeface belongs to Gregor’s machine, though – as Kurt Wilhelm points out –
Zweig’s stylistic fingerprints are to be found throughout the sketch. Kurt Wilhelm, Fürs Wort
brauche ich Hilfe: Die Geburt der Oper “Capriccio” von Richard Strauss und Clemens Krauss (Munich:
F. A. Herbig Verlag, 1998), pp. 27–8.
4
One thinks of Mandryka arriving with the portrait of Arabella in Act i of the opera.
274 Opera in war: Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio
spends the rest of her life experiencing something the jealous Jupiter can never know:
marital bliss.
POLITICS
Both Danae and Capriccio, completed in 1940 and 1941, respectively, sparked controversy
during the war and in its wake, but along entirely different lines. These two works
seemed to flout Nazi governmental guidelines for wartime opera: neither was partic-
ularly heroic, nor did they glorify the image of a German Volk. Worse yet, Capriccio was
set in prerevolutionary France. After the war the same facts were used to criticize a
composer who seemed insensitive to his grim contemporary surroundings, composing
“escapist music” during a time of German aggression in Europe.
George Marek took a particularly strident tone in 1966:
When he began to work on Danae, the Anschluss of Austria was consummated. As he
proceeded to compose, Germany invaded Czechoslovakia (March 15, 1939) and, being
unopposed, stormed into Poland a few months later (September 1, 1939). Four days before
Strauss completed Act i of Danae, England and France had declared war. Two weeks
before Strauss finished Danae Paris had been taken.5
An unopposed Germany had also marched into Belgium on 4 August 1914, while Strauss
was composing Die Frau ohne Schatten, Stravinsky had just finished his Three Pieces for
String Quartet, and Berg was putting the finishing touches to his Three Pieces for Orchestra,
Op. 6. What should they have been composing, if anything?
The question of music during a time of war is not irrelevant, but it is rarely con-
textualized, as exemplified by Marek’s criticism. What was Strauss supposed to have been
writing in the 1940s? What should any composer – German, American, Greek – have been
writing during that period? What, ultimately, is the role of a composer during any war?
Without approaching the issue of politics and art on a broader, more contextualized level,
we are left with little more than moralizing and finger-pointing. One thing is certain: in a
country where the National Socialists had politicized all aspects of German culture,
Strauss – rightly or wrongly – saw Danae and Capriccio as lying outside the realm of
politics. Moreover, letters, monographs, and biographies published since the mid-1980s
show sadly indeed how politically aware Strauss was during this period.
Strauss was cognizant of the inevitability of war during the summer of 1939. We recall
from Chapter 7 his breakdown in the artists’ room at the Musikverein after conducting a
seventy-fifth-birthday concert on 11 June 1939. Nearly three months later, Pauline Strauss
made a terse entry in her diary: “Declaration of war – it’s just as well . . . we are all
5
George Marek, Richard Strauss: The Life of a Non-Hero (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967), p. 297.
Hofmannsthal’s 1920 Danae draft 275
depressed.”6 For better or for worse, composing was his prime source of comfort, even
of salvation, during a grim period not only of war but also of state anti-Semitism, which
directly affected his own family.
After Strauss was fired from his post as president of the RMK in 1935, the National
Socialist regime resisted any real reconciliation. With the outbreak of war and the
intensification of anti-Semitism that culminated in the decision for a “final solution” at
Wannsee in 1942, any of the top government officials could have made a blanket
decision to protect Strauss’s family and home. Their refusal to do so forced the
composer to seek protection in one instance after another for the duration of the
Reich, and he usually sought the help of three men in particular: the infamous Hans
Frank (governor-general of Poland),7 Baldur von Schirach (Gauleiter of Vienna), and
Heinz Tietjen (intendant in Berlin and friend of Hermann Göring). Strauss depended
most on Tietjen, a friend, and his decision to dedicate Die Liebe der Danae to him
stemmed largely from Tietjen’s help during the war years.
HOFMANNSTHAL’S 1920 DANAE DRAFT
There is of course a discernible, if not direct, twentieth-century political context if we

take into account Danae’s origins in Hofmannsthal: it is the same post-First World War
politics to be found in his other two other postwar libretti, Die ägyptische Helena and
Arabella, in modernized myth and historical comedy, respectively. The national debt,
bankruptcy, and physical ruin were hardly abstractions for Hofmannsthal when he
wrote the scenario for Danae in 1920. Indeed, we may draw a direct contextual line from
that scenario to the Strauss–Hofmannsthal Ruins of Athens project of 1924, another
extension of Hofmannsthal’s idea of rebirth through modernized Greek myth, now
using Beethoven as an intermediary. In a critical scene, invented by Hofmannsthal, a
character taken from his travel essay Moments in Greece – a lonely German wanderer –
appears at sundown and asks Athena to deliver him from earthly ruins: “Let me go up to
your citadel, my goddess! Will you receive me with all the light of your evening?”
(Hinauf zu deiner Burg, meine Göttin! Empfängst du mich mit dein ganzen Licht deines
Abends?).8
6
7
Among other things, Hans Frank, a music lover, helped Strauss keep his home off limits from the
quartering of German soldiers late in the war. The composer showed his thanks with an embarrassing
laudatory vocal canon of November 1943 (“Wer tritt herein so fesch und schlank?”): “Who steps in
here so smart and slender? / It is our friend, Minister Frank. / Like Lohengrin as an envoy from
God, / He saved us from misfortune.” As agonizing as it is to read such drivel, it is doubtful that Strauss
knew the full extent of Frank’s war crimes at that time.
8
Original German and English translation taken from CD Koch Classics 3–6536–2 (1999), vol. 9 from
the series “The Unknown Strauss,” Karl Anton Rickenbacher and the Chorus and Orchestra of the
Bamberg Symphony.
An understanding of Hofmannsthal’s Danae scenario is important for three reasons:

because of the postwar context outlined above, because it illuminates Hofmannsthal
libretti of the past (Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau ohne Schatten) and those to come
(Helena and Arabella), and most important because the poet’s overall plan remained
Strauss’s creative source throughout the project. As we shall see, Strauss continually
insisted to Gregor on Hofmannsthal’s scenario – much to the new librettist’s displeasure
and frustration.
All of Hofmannsthal’s mythologies – including Elektra – share a desire for modernity,
which, as the poet made explicit in his preface to Helena, meant “no gods [should] appear
at all.”9 That was the main reason for the exclusion of Zeus/Jupiter and Mercury from
the original scenario, creating a sense of distance, lightness, and that aura of Lucian and
other early Roman comedies. Hofmannsthal wished to inject the new opera with the
spirit of the first two acts of Rosenkavalier, as well as the Ariadne prologue: “The subject is
an early mythical antiquity, treated with impertinence, a Milesian fairy tale in the
manner of Lucian.”10
HOFMANNSTHAL’S SCENARIO FOR DANAE: A SUMMARY
Act I
A great old king on a small island is in debt, and his only child, the beautiful Danae, must
marry for financial survival. Midas of Lydia has seen her likeness and sets sail to marry
her. Four lovely young [female] cousins of the bride-to-be arrive as well. Each has had an
affair with Zeus, a love god who floats invisibly above the entirety somewhat like
Keikobad. Midas’s luxurious ship arrives, but he prefers to arrive in the disguise of his
messenger, who is also a tailor.
The tailor and Danae spend time together as he takes her measurements for her
wedding gown. He soon gains her trust and speaks quite openly about his “master”
Midas, who was once poor but on a journey met an old man (Zeus) who was charmed
by young Midas and gave him wealth and the golden touch, with the condition that all
could be revoked at the whim of the giver. Deeply moved by the story, Danae tells him a
dream: at night in her bedchamber someone visited her in the form of golden rain. The
tailor continues, saying that the old man had ordered Midas to seek Danae’s hand but he
was afraid.
The tailor conjures up a golden veil out of thin air and places it over Danae, who
hears the same strange music that she heard when the golden rain fell. Her father, the
9
Hofmannsthal, “Preface to Die ägyptische Helena (1928),” p. 305.
10
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (30 April 1920), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 338. The
Milesian tales, written by Aristedes of Miletus (second century bc), were stories of licentious love and
adventure.
Hofmannsthal’s scenario for Danae: a summary 277
old king, enters, overjoyed by the veil. The four queens arrive with their husbands as
preparations for the wedding get under way. Amidst the joy, Midas, downstage,
implores Zeus: “Enough of my gold, the world at last has wonderful meaning for
me.” Everyone dances at the joy of having so much gold come into the family.
Act II
The scene is a grand hall where the wedding feast is to take place. The chair for Midas,
however, is empty. Midas’s entourage enters with a bizarre, phantasmagoric ballet, very
much in the style of the more exotic moments of Die Frau ohne Schatten. Still there is no
Midas. There is only a letter, which Danae reads: “Put on your golden veil and meet me
alone at the shrine of Zeus.” She does so, to the dismay of the wedding party.
In a large circular room, Midas steps out of the darkness. She praises his greatness; he
asks her not to confuse greatness with wealth, saying that mortals are the “weak
carriers” of power. Still, she praises his omnipotence, suggesting that he could make a
palace out of nothing, which he then does with the stretch of his hand. They continue to
talk about wealth. For Danae, riches are everything because she is poor at heart, unable
to give; she can only receive. Midas is enchanted by her misguided candor and calls upon
Zeus for guidance.
The music of Zeus begins a duet between the lovers and prompts Danae to
remember her golden dream; surely it was Midas who had entered her bedroom.
Danae chooses to give him a garnet bowl full of fruit and collapses before him. At the
moment he catches her the front stage darkens, and Midas tells Danae who he is and
who he is not. She replies, “You are what I want.”
Act III
This act is not worked out in detail. Zeus has revoked Midas’s wealth, to his brief
dismay, though Danae continues to love him. The richest king has become a poor one.
A marriage of convenience has become one of love: “gold is overcome.”11
Commentary
In Hofmannsthal’s scenario, the plot is driven by the duality of Danae and Midas and not
the triangular relationship of that couple mixed with Zeus.12 Thus, Hofmannsthal
presents us with his classic dualities such as Ariadne and Bacchus, Barak and his wife,
11
Hoffmansthal, Sämtliche Werke, 25.1, Operndichtungen 3.1, pp. 107–12.
12
Zeus became Jupiter in the final version.
Helen and Menelas, and Arabella and Mandryka. All of these characters are incomplete
people who, through allomatic transformation, go from the projected “I” (lust for gold)
to the higher “I” (love for another person).13 As Danae herself confesses, she cannot give
but can only take in her world of the projected “I,” and yet at a critical moment at the
end of Act ii she serves Midas fruit in a ceremonial way, offering it to him in her first
unselfish act without knowing what that act might bring.
Whereas Ariadne offers herself to death (Hermes) and Helen offers herself to
Menelas’s sword, Danae is prepared to sacrifice herself to a life of poverty. Pride
becomes modesty, gold gives way to the power of love, and wealth gives way to
wisdom. The shadowless empress rejected the golden “water of life,” just as Danae
ultimately had to forswear the rain of gold. Fidelity, sacrifice, and deed are all part of the
same totality.14 By discovering Midas’s human side, she finds her own. As Martina
Steiger observes, “The true transformation takes place inside her and reaches a higher
realization in Act iii.”15 Typically in a Hofmannsthal libretto, the turning point giving
way to the Über-Ich takes place in the final act, and thus he paints himself into a
dramaturgical corner by solving the crisis in Act ii. This problem is likely the reason
the poet could not get past the vital second act.
Midas is likewise undeveloped, a phenomenon suggested by his divided persona as
himself and his messenger. His physical presence is conspicuously missing at the
wedding feast, represented not by deed but by word in the form of a letter. Midas, like
Bacchus, is neither a full god nor a full human being. Menelas, who has taken the
potion of forgetting, is likewise robbed of a vital part of his past, of his humanity. And
Mandryka, at the end of Arabella, confesses that he foolishly believed that he could
attain happiness only through the work of his “sturdy fists.” One might be tempted to
find a Wagnerian love redemption in these cases, but – as stated in Chapter 5 – the
redemption is the result not of any love intoxication, but rather of the dedication of
two marriage partners.
Given the mythological setting, the Helena connection seems most obvious, but
there are strong foreshadowings of Arabella (pre-Lucidor) in its setting of bankruptcy,
with a father and an only daughter who might restore wealth through marriage saved
by the arrival of a wealthy stranger from afar with picture in hand. Indeed, at a certain
stage in the opera’s genesis, Hofmannsthal suggested that the costumes for Danae be
those of Vienna in the 1860s, the Gründerjahre that culminated in an economic collapse
to which Hofmannsthal’s own father fell victim, an event never far from Hugo’s frame
of reference.
13
The same journey from Ich to Über-Ich as in Ariadne auf Naxos; see Chapter 4 this volume.
14
Martina Steiger, “Die Liebe der Danae” von Richard Strauss: Mythos, Libretto, Musik (Mainz: Schott,
1999), p. 48.
15
Ibid., p. 49.
Gregor’s Danae
As rich as Hofmannsthal’s Danae was in literary themes and in its potential for arias,
duets, ensembles, and dance, there were real dramaturgical problems (especially in
Act iii) and insurmountable staging demands in Act ii (even more fantastic than in Die
Frau ohne Schatten). Hofmannsthal never fleshed out the third act, and the project was
soon forgotten in favor of Die ägyptische Helena.
Strauss’s need for a lighter opera after Die Frau ohne Schatten and in the wake of war
has been well documented. The composer, weighed down by the worries of postwar
Germany, wanted to move toward comedy, at one point even suggesting “a political
satire in late-Grecian garb, with [Maria] Jeritza as a haetara from Lucian.”16 Political
satire was his answer to the new European order after the Great War, a conflict that
ended not with a peace treaty but with a cease-fire. Thus, as that armistice threatened to
collapse and war again cast its shadow over Europe in 1938 after German remilitarization
and some brutal annexations, Strauss was in no mood to continue composing military
subjects or bucolic tragedies.
The timing seemed perfect when in 1936 Strauss’s friend Willi Schuh reminded the
composer of Hofmannsthal’s long-forgotten scenario, which had recently been pub-
lished in the literary journal Corona. Strauss was overjoyed and immediately put Gregor
to work on this earlier Weimar-era project. But Gregor was quietly angered that Strauss
had denied that he had already been shown a different Danae scenario when they first
met in Berchtesgaden on 7 July 1935. Of the six one-page scenarios that Gregor handed
Strauss, the composer chose Friedenstag, Daphne, and – according to the librettist –
Danae. Whether Strauss chose Danae or, as the composer maintained, Semiramis as the
third project, we do know that Gregor wrote an independent Danae draft, which is in the
Archive of the Vienna Philharmonic:
Danae
Lustspiel in the style of early Roman comedies.
The Greek King Akrisios, who has abdicated his throne, has retreated with his daughter,
Danae – an extraordinary beauty – to a Roman villa (perhaps Pompei or Baja). There is little
money, thus one must be careful with the choice of a son-in-law. It is in this context that an
oracle arrives and says that he will be murdered by the son of Danae. He is shrouded in
sadness and receives no visitors. This angers Jupiter, who quarrels with Apollo and orders him
to take back the nonsensical [prediction]. Apollo does so, and there follows a reception at
Akrisios’s villa where the gods appear with the upper Roman Five Hundred. Jupiter tries
everything in his godly power, Apollo remains reserved since the fiasco with the oracle, but
Mercury first works for [ Jupiter] as a poetic journalist, then appears as a negotiator for the
delicate question. Akrisios becomes ill and longs for a miracle. Danae must return to the
16
Strauss to Hofmannsthal (27 June 1919), in Schuh, Strauss–Hofmannsthal Correspondence, p. 328.
tower. There it suddenly rains gold, she bathes in gold, everything sounds and sings of gold.
Akrisios is overcome with joy and settles his overdue debts, then Danae bursts in with the
news of what has happened. In haste King Polydektes, a poor fool, has been chosen as groom.
Both name and standing have been saved.17
After having read Hofmannsthal’s draft, at Strauss’s insistence, Gregor remarked to the
composer how amazingly similar they were. This is not really true – beyond a poor old
king and his only daughter, who is visited by Jupiter in a shower of gold – and such a
comparison might well have been Gregor’s way of getting Strauss to create the opera
along the lines of his, and not Hofmannsthal’s, scenario. Whatever the case, Strauss
rejected Gregor’s draft out of hand and demanded that he make an opera text out of
Hofmannsthal’s sketch.
And Gregor tried. Whereas Jupiter is the invisible omniscient, omnipotent one,
Gregor puts him onstage disguised as a magician. Indeed, all of the delicate magical
effects that Hofmannsthal presented as theatrical illusions, Gregor brought to the
footlights. Midas appears before Jupiter as a donkey driver. After some prosaic dialogue,
Jupiter gives Midas the golden touch right on stage, though it is not clear how he
becomes a king. Future drafts make it even more confusing.
Hofmannsthal’s scenario focused on two lovers, each seeking happiness in the
wrong places, while Gregor made it a love triangle between Midas, Danae, and
Jupiter. The next draft complicated things further with two pairs of lovers: Danae–
Jupiter and Midas–Xanthe (Danae’s handmaiden). Strauss expressed his disappoint-
ment throughout the process, constantly urging Gregor to be subtler, finer, and
more graceful but not knowing how to explain beyond urging him to stay closer to
Hofmannsthal’s scenario.
Gregor found himself in the same awkward position as he did while writing the
Friedenstag libretto, when he was less a librettist than an intermediary between Strauss
and its original author, Zweig, and then even between others such as Krauss and
Wallerstein. Indeed, Strauss not only solicited their advice but urged Gregor to contact
them for face-to-face meetings. This process of seeking outside advice had become the
norm in the formation of the Daphne text, but now with Danae outside assistance was
unprecedentedly strong. Strauss would receive Gregor’s text and, with the advice of the
other three, make cuts and changes and hand it back to Gregor, expecting the alterations
to be executed quickly and without question. We can easily see how this odd, asym-
metrical working relationship would soon come to an end. Gregor was a librettist in
name only, and the next logical step – in Strauss’s thinking – was ultimately to let Gregor
go from the team of writers, which is precisely what the composer did in creating his last
stage work, Capriccio. Given the active roles from the outside, the composer–poet
17
Gregor’s scenario is published in Steiger, “Die Liebe der Danae” von Strauss, p. 111.
relationship, and the fact that Gregor, Krauss, and Wallerstein preferred face-to-face
discussions (quite unlike Hofmannsthal), it is difficult to pinpoint with much accuracy
how this libretto developed from scenario to full text.
The final result is an opera with some awkward dramaturgical moments. Gregor is
not entirely to blame, given that Hofmannsthal himself could not come up with a third
act. In the end, as with the previous Gregor operas, Strauss smoothed over the rough
spots with music of great power and luminescence, especially in the third act, which
Gregor had not envisioned in his first draft. Strauss too had misgivings about a third
act, just as he had had misgivings about the role of Jupiter on the stage.18 Curiously,
that final act and the character of Jupiter ultimately touched Strauss more than any
other.
“Sentimentality and parody are the sensations to which my talent responds most
forcefully and productively,” Strauss once observed, and Reinhold Schlötterer sees a
trajectory from the playful-light (spielerisch-leicht) to the sentimental-heavy (sentimentalisch-
schwer), from the Greek to German, as we move from Act i to Act iii.19 Gregor’s insistence
on an onstage Jupiter may well have been his most important contribution, though it took
Krauss to convince Strauss of this fact: “I am very happy that you want 3 acts. The entirety
[of the play] must come close to the style of Spanish theater, therewith no parody of the
gods!”20 Jupiter, despite his comic–erotic aspects, remains the king of the gods, and he
must not be seen rushing off to Olympus abruptly at the end of a second – and final – act.
As European events darkened, as Strauss began to contemplate his mortality, and as
he began expressing to friends that this opera would be his farewell to Greek mythology,
which for him dated back to Elektra, the composer projected more and more of himself
and others onto Jupiter. He is the king of the gods, yet he feels unfulfilled and indeed is
envious of mortal love. At the end, like the Marschallin near the end of Act iii of Der
Rosenkavalier, he blesses the love of Danae and Midas, just as Hans Sachs blessed the love
of Walter and Eva.
But the Wotan connection seems most powerful in this current context of Strauss’s
life, since the Ring cycle is about the corrupting power of gold. In Act iii of Danae an old,
resigned Jupiter visits Danae for the last time in order to consecrate her marriage to
young Midas. As he bids her farewell, he confesses his envy of Danae’s mortality, much
in the same way Wotan envies Brünnhilde’s at the end of Die Walküre: “For one [mortal]
man alone shall win the bride,” Wotan laments, “one freer than I, the god!” In that same
vein of resignation Jupiter confesses:
18
Although it cannot be fully documented in the correspondence, Krauss and possibly Wallerstein
served as lobbyists for a third act.
19
Reinhold Schlötterer, “Richard Strauss, Der griechische Germane, und seine letzte mythologische
Oper, Die Liebe der Danae,” in Richard Strauss: Der griechische Germane, ed. Ulrich Tadday,
Musik-Konzepte 129/120 (Munich: Text und Kritik, 2005), p. 128.
20
Krauss to Strauss (22 June 1938), in Brosche, Richard Strauss–Clemens Krauss: Briefwechsel, pp. 231–2.
O human joy!
Easily you tread
The path of love.
For flowers and gold
You exchange human happiness!
Only the god is poor!21
[O Menschliches Glück!
Leicht wandelt ihr
der Liebe Pfade,
für Blumen und Gold
tauscht menschliches Glück!
Der arme Gott!]
By the end of the creative process, Strauss identified so strongly with Jupiter that he
decided to change the name of the opera from Danae (its working title) to Jupiter’s Last
Love. Krauss’s wife, Viorica Ursuleac, who was chosen to sing the title role of Danae,
then suggested The Love of Danae, to which Strauss agreed.
Act I: Spielerisch-Leicht
The first curtain opens in the comic spirit of Arabella, though not the faded Viennese
hotel of 1860 where the once-rich Count Waldner has wasted his fortune on drinking
and gambling. Waldner may not be able any longer to charge brandy to his room, but
King Pollux of Eos is in a far worse state of affairs. His creditors are all around him,
rummaging through his throne room, taking what few valuables they can find not nailed
to the floor or wall. There seems to be something less harmless than Lucian in this
opening scene – one might be tempted to say it is almost Brechtian in its edgy critique of
late capitalism in mythological form. That very Brechtian sense is given quite a bit of
help from the great capitalist–composer himself, Richard Strauss, as he conjures up the
sonic residue of a great opera from a decade earlier, Weill’s Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt
Mahagonny (The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny), less perhaps in terms of harmonic
language than in the relentless rhythmic iterations of “three shorts and a long,”
presented in a sharp gestical, almost motoric, fashion with rhythmic imitation between
treble and bass (Exx. 8.1a and 8.1b).
Satire is the overriding element in this first act, which is divided into four scenes, most
of them set in public spaces: the throne room, the palace courtyard, and the harbor.
Filling these public places is an extensive use of chorus (more than in Acts ii and iii
combined), sharply rhythmic, animated, and mostly diatonic with quirky modulatory
21
English translation from CD CPO 999 967–2 (2003), conducted by Ulrich Windfuhr with the
Kiel Opera Chorus and Philharmonic Orchestra.
8.1a Die Liebe der Danae, opening
8.1b Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, opening
excursions: in either the white-key tonal world of C major (one thinks of the C major
prologue to Ariadne) or the equally simple key of D major. The exception to public space
(Danae’s bedroom) and key (G♭ major) is vital to the operatic narrative: Danae’s dream
of Jupiter’s nighttime visitation in the guise of golden rain.
Although enharmonically the same as the F♯ Silver Rose Duet in Act ii of Der
Rosenkavalier – and Strauss employs similar orchestrational effects (celesta, harps, flutes,
and the like) – the sound of G♭ produces a warmer effect that the composer sonically
linked to gold (Ex. 8.2). Embedded in the brass and barely audible is the characteristic
dotted-triplet figure suggesting Jupiter’s sexual potency, which – on account of his
peripatetic nature – is not rooted in any one key (Ex. 8.3).
The culmination of this dream sequence is the moment when Danae narrates her
dream to Xanthe, which gives way to the highlight of the first act: the duet between
8.2 Danae, Act i, golden rain
8.3 Jupiter’s peripatetic potency
these two sopranos (Danae a classic Straussian spinto and Xanthe an equally classic full
lyric; see Ex. 8.4). The voicing of this duet, with its soaring thirds, is strongly reminiscent
of the duet of Arabella and Zdenka in Arabella.
Strauss’s tonal narrative can at first glance seem a bit peculiar or even inconsistent;
but unlike many of his other operas, Danae is a work about multiple disguises: Jupiter as
Midas (C), as golden rain (G♭/F♯), and as god (D♭); Midas as man (C) and as king (F).
One might even argue that Danae exists in two guises as well: the selfish, gold-loving
princess (D) and the loving wife (B♭).
Given these complexities, Strauss responds with remarkable clarity just beneath the
often-chromatic surface. The tonal trajectory of Act i is of D going to C, with excursions
to D♭ at various strategic places. Both Midas (as Chrysopher, his messenger) and Jupiter
(as Midas) arrive to grand cadences on C, yet in both cases C often yields to D♭. And in
the case of Jupiter, Strauss shifts to the godly Neapolitan within twelve bars of his
entrance (Ex. 8.5).
The tonal structure looks far more logical – and symmetrical – on paper than it does
in the score, for no sooner does Jupiter arrive than Danae faints, Jupiter throws a
thunderbolt and stomps off, the orchestra collapses in C major, and the act is over. In
8.4 Act i, golden rain duet, Danae and Xanthe
short, the act, which has been so careful in its light satire, falls off at the end – worse,
with a seemingly gratuitous burst of anger from the king of the gods. That anger was
indeed motivated in a previous text draft: Danae faints into the arms of Midas-
Chrysopher, but Strauss correctly commented that if that were the case, she would
suddenly turn into gold. Thus, Act i can be summarized as follows:
Act i
Scene 1: King Pollux’s throne room
Scene 2: Danae’s bedchamber
Scene 3: Palace courtyard – Harbor (Midas-Chrysopher’s arrival)
Scene 4: Harbor ( Jupiter-Midas’s arrival)
D G♭–C D–C (D♭) C (D♭–D)
8.5 Act i, Jupiter’s entrance
Act II: the limits of Heiterkeit
This second act, according to Strauss’s plan, was to provide a kind of transition from the
Heiterkeit (cheerfulness) described in the opera’s subtitle (Eine heitere Mythologie) to the
more serious consequences of Jupiter’s and Midas’s decisions. The subtleties of tran-
sitions, elisions, and the like were beyond Gregor’s grasp, and the opera was going in a
serious direction far too quickly. Thus, Strauss moved the scene between Jupiter and
Danae’s cousins the queens from Act i to the opening of Act ii.
Europa, Leda, Semele, and Alkmene were all former lovers of Jupiter, who engaged
in sexual encounters with them while in various disguises: as a cloud, a swan, a bull,
even a husband. As they ready the bridal chamber with flowers, it is hard to resist
thinking of Act iii, Scene 1 of Lohengrin (“Treulich geführt”). But the sonic allusions to
the flirtatious Rhine Maidens seem stronger, as does the lively sexual banter, where they
do anything but renounce their love for Jupiter. “Are you sorry the bull was so power-
ful?” asks Europa. “You don’t like the swan?” asks Leda. “You don’t even miss the
thundercloud?” asks Semele. They all remember their sexual escapades fondly as they
see right through Jupiter’s new disguise as Midas.
This light G major banter serves as a prologue to the more serious dramaturgy at
hand. The real Midas enters just as the queens exit, and Jupiter, having recognized
Danae’s feelings for the real Midas at the harbor, cross-examines Midas in an animated
dialogue. Jupiter reminds Midas of his lowly origins as a donkey driver before the god
gave him the power of the golden touch and warns him that should he kiss Danae, she
would turn into gold (Ex. 8.6).
The exchange ends with a short aria by Jupiter in which Gregor seems to borrow
from Erda’s monologue toward the end of Das Rheingold: “Be careful, Wotan, be careful.
Flee the ring’s curse” (Weiche, Wotan, weiche! Flieh des Ringes Flucht!).
Consider, Midas, Jupiter’s power!
Consider the happiness he brought you!
Consider the power well known to you,
Consider, if you do not tremble before the fall.
Consider, Midas, the girl’s heart.
Consider poverty and shining ore –
Consider, Midas, consider!
I shall no longer cross
The path that was chosen!
She approaches – she herself – I will call her here!
Consider, Midas, consider!
[Wäge, Midas, Jupiters Macht,

Wäge das Glück, das er dir gebracht!
Stärke Wäge, dir vertraut,
Wäge, ob’s vor dem Fall nicht graut!
Wäge, Midas, des Mädchens Herz,
Armut wäge und leuchtendes Erz –
Wäge, Midas, wäge!
Nicht kreuze ich mehr
die gewählte Bahn!
Sie kommt – Sie selbst – ich rufe sie heran!
Wäge, Midas, wäge!]
8.6 Act i, Jupiter cautions Midas
We see yet another of many allusions to Wagner’s Ring cycle in this modern mythological
parable about wealth and human worth: the confusion of monetary and human value.
This conundrum of love and gold is the very theme of Wagner’s cycle: “[In Danae] the
noble Siegfried, who is doomed to lose his love, is replaced with a donkey-driver who wins
the prize of love. The incompatibility of love and power is an immutable principle for
Wagner’s Alberich, but it does not at first occur to Midas that he cannot have both.”22
22
Leon Botstein, “Strauss’s Overlooked Masterpiece,” program book for Die Liebe der Danae
(Bard SummerScape Festival 2011), p. 13.
Danae also complicates the conventional female role of woman as love incarnate. Like
Freia, she is an object of desire, but Danae’s influence is not obscured by a mound of gold;
rather, Danae herself becomes gold. The simple opposition between love and gold as an
object of desire in Wagner’s Rheingold collapses in Strauss’s rendition. Strauss uses myth
and musical memories not to reduce life to a set of untenable romantic oppositions, but to
render important questions about life entirely human. In so doing, he deflates Wagner’s
mythological pretension.23
In the past Strauss had always tried to steer Gregor away from his tendency toward
Wagnerisms. In Danae this is clearly not the case, and the reason may be linked to a
strong sense of nostalgia on Strauss’s part in this valedictory opera.
Layered into this second act is an allusion to the love duet in Act ii of Tristan.
The two acts certainly serve similar functions, for they are both turning points in
their characters’ seemingly heedless self-destruction. The critical element, which
Gregor makes almost too clear, is the mentor turning on his master on an erotic
impulse. In Danae it is the erotic duet between Midas and Danae (“Complete my
dream!” [Vollendet mein Traum!]), cast in Strauss’s characteristic E major tonality,
in the next scene (Ex. 8.7). The sweep and lyricism of this bel canto duo of this type
harks back to Die ägyptische Helena in those critical moments between Helen and
Menelas.
As in the Tristan love duet, the final cadence collapses as the king (or king of the
gods) enters the scene. His appearance is doubly disastrous: not only has Jupiter
caught Midas in an act of betrayal, but also Danae has become the victim of his golden
touch and has turned into a golden statue. Here Gregor created a Hofmannsthalian
moment, though it was not in the original scenario: Danae must make a choice, as had
Ariadne, the empress, and Helen. “Choose me,” demands Jupiter; “I offer you a
temple of gold.” Midas – once again a poor donkey driver – asks Danae to choose
him: “I offer you the greatest gift of all – a loving, faithful heart.”
She chooses the latter, and Jupiter is enraged. With a shift to the Valhalla tonality of
D♭ major, Wotan-Jupiter reminds Brünnhilde-Danae that he would have built the
grandest golden palace atop the highest hill in Olympus where they could have looked
down upon gold-greedy mortals: “The fate of the gods was offered to you! The fate of
the humans is what you chose. This god shall be far from you!” (Götterschicksal war
euch geboten! Menschenschicksal habt ihr gewählt! Ferne bleib euch der Gott!). It is an
intentional twist on the motive of power versus love, immortality versus mortality –
dualities as they are presented in Die Walküre. But with Jupiter, at least at this stage in the
drama, there is no serenity, only pure anger, and he disappears with a sudden shift to
F minor as the curtain falls. Act ii is outlined below:
23
Ibid.
8.7 Act ii, love duet, Danae and Midas
Act ii
Scene 1: Hall in the king’s palace
Sec. 1: Four queens (Leda, Semele, Europa, Alkmene) and Jupiter
Sec. 2: Jupiter and Midas
Sec. 3: Four queens (quite short)
Sec. 4: Danae and Midas
Sec. 5: Jupiter
Sec. 1 Sec. 2 Sec. 3 Sec. 4 Sec. 5
G C (A) B B♭–E d♭–c–D♭ (f)
Thus, the most important harmonic event is the movement from C major in section 2
(Midas and Jupiter disguised as Midas) to D♭ in section 5 (Jupiter as god), while the
critical love duet moves from Danae’s love (section 4 B♭) to a higher, erotic level at the
end of the section.
Act iii: the griechische-Germane
By the end of Act ii the Greek-Milesian fairy tale is over; the plot has run its course.
Midas broke his end of the bargain and must pay the price of lifelong poverty, though
that meager life is to be shared with his ideal love, whom he has chosen over material
pleasure. The story goes from the classical to the Teutonic as Gregor and Strauss
explore the very themes that attracted Wagner to his lifelong project, The Ring of the
Nibelung. Jupiter, Danae, and Midas become ironic personifications of Wotan,
Brünnhilde, and Siegfried, respectively; even the comic Mercury can be seen as a
kind of Loge. As we begin our new drama – which is no real drama at all, for it
explores central human-psychological constellations – Strauss reminds us musically
whence we have come. These sonic memories are outlined in detail and in chrono-
logical order before delivering us to the current state of Danae and Midas alone in the
Syrian desert.
Act iii consists of four simple scenes, all built around the key of Danae’s love, B♭ major.
Prelude: G♭–E
Scene 1: Dusty road in the Syrian desert (Danae and Midas in B♭)
Scene 2: Southern mountains
Sec. 1. Jupiter and Mercury (C)
Sec. 2. Jupiter and the four queens: Leda (A♭), Semele (G), Alkmene (A), and
Europa (B♭)
Sec. 3. Jupiter, Pollux, and the creditors (C/G♭)
Sec. 4. Jupiter and Mercury (C)
Scene 3: Midas’s hut: Danae’s cantilena (B♭), Jupiter’s Maja narrative (A)
Danae: “Midas!” (B♭)
In the prelude to Act iii, on pages 223–6 of the vocal score, the reminiscing orchestral
musical events are as follows:
1. Danae–Xanthe duet (opening)
2. Jupiter’s potency (rehearsal number 2)
3. Danae–Midas love duet (4 bb. after rehearsal number 3)
4. Jupiter’s rage – Danae as a golden statue (12 bb. after rehearsal number 4)
Midas and Danae awake in Syria and see all around them the life they have chosen, in a
tent at the side of a dusty road in the desert. The duet they sing is the most tender of the
entire opera, for whereas in Act ii their fiery duo has all the Straussian erotic signifiers –
the upward trajectory, the forward-thrusting rhythms, even the ubiquitous erotic
8.8 Act iii, love duet, Danae and Midas
E major setting – here in Act iii Strauss creates an ensemble of domestic bliss (in Danae’s
love key, B♭) in rocking conjunct motion (Ex. 8.8).
Clemens Krauss, the source for many of the dramaturgical events in this final act,
asked Strauss to insert one more comic moment, this one involving Mercury, Jupiter,
and the four queens. In this scene of farewell to his earlier conquests, Jupiter is also
saying goodbye to all his earthly visitations, returning to Olympus and Juno forever.
Strauss labels the quartet of queens a Kanon, though it is hardly strict and sounds little
like the Mozartian model in Così fan tutte upon which Strauss claimed it was based
(Ex. 8.9).
Jupiter bids farewell, though he impulsively decides to visit Danae one more time on
his way home in the guise of a wanderer. The scene-change music is the most moving of
the entire opera, perhaps of all late Strauss. In it one easily hears the profound emotional
impact of Jupiter’s self-imposed renunciation; but we just as easily hear a despondent
8.9 Act iii, Queens’ canon
composer at the end of his life who openly admitted to friends that perhaps he should
have followed Jupiter himself. Moments of musical confession are rare in Strauss; this
anguished orchestral utterance is surpassed in its sustained seriousness only by the
Metamorphosen.
If Strauss, the lover of contrasts, could not bear to undercut musically such warm,
darkly luminescent music in the score, the sorrowful seventy-six year old could do so in
writing. In mid-February 1940 he wrote to Krauss: “It would be nice if you all could
come by on Saturday or Monday. Here the [alpine] air is free of germs. In the meantime
I have smeared together a half a sketchbook of schmaltzy melodies.”24 Schmaltz or not,
Strauss’s heightened muse led him further to the next scene, to Danae’s moving B♭
cantilena, “How peaceful I feel in this humble room” (Wie umgibst du mich mit
Frieden; Ex. 8.10). Ernst Krause lauds its Schubertian quality, and it is hard to disagree.
24
Strauss to Krauss (14 February 1940), in Brosche, Strauss–Krauss Briefwechsel, p. 317.
8.10 Act iii, Danae’s cantilena
Krauss knew his old friend well, and he must have known that as long as Strauss kept
his focus on Jupiter-Wotan, he would reach into himself and produce something
profound. When Danae first sees Jupiter, she asks, “Are you happy, stranger?” Strauss
found Gregor’s phrase not only trivial but also unmotivated and used this moment of
criticism as an opportunity to explicate the depth of his feelings about this opera,
especially about Act iii:
One thing is denied the Almighty God, the creator of the world: the happiness of human love,
the self-sacrificing fusion of two really in love.
Thus as before: who is happy? A creator, a designer – thus a god – an artist. But both
are egotists (I sound very trivial); in the urge of creativity, in being entirely lost in one’s work,
that which benefits the general, the feelings of love from sex to sex are not contained.
Who is happy? He who desires and still hopes. Thus Danae in her yearning after gold, in
her wish dreams, where the god draws near in the form of golden rain. In Act ii the
dream of gold is extinguished when Midas wakens her human sympathies and when she
sacrifices the achievement of her ambition – to be enthroned as a golden statue among the
gods – for the sake of a destiny amidst poverty and the loyal fulfillment of duty at the
side of a true lover. There the question arises within her: “who, then, could it have been
who had the power to procure for me this heightened destiny?” . . . This certain erotic
moment, which lay in the [Act i] golden rain scene, which Danae once so strongly felt,
must also shine through in the [later] moving encounter with the god when he is making
his final renunciation.25
Curiously, Strauss – who usually had to rein Gregor in – told him to not restrict himself
in terms of length: “If it contains genuine wisdom and beautiful poetry, then however
the more there is of it, I will still be able to cope. And in a posthumous work everything
is allowed!”26
This letter is revelatory for many reasons. Less than a month earlier his daughter-in-
law had been placed under house arrest in Garmisch (“We are petrified”),27 and Strauss
fully believed that because the clouds of war were hovering over Europe, his life (which
meant being a creative artist) was over. Strauss – who loathed confession – now
confessed his worldview on life and art; we need not look farther than Feuersnot (1900)
to understand the full context. Back then, the sexual act was the strongest expression of
the will to life, the will toward creativity. But from Hofmannsthal he learned that it was
not enough, and perhaps he knew that anyway. Strauss stood apart from most of his
contemporaries in that joyful aspect of creation. Happiness was not in attaining the
artistic end, but in the blissful means, in the thrall of the creative urge, in “being entirely
lost in one’s work.”28 In short, redemption did not come from the created artwork, but
from work itself. This must be the meaning of Strauss’s credo: “Liberation through
work” (Befreiung durch die Arbeit).
In the same letter to Gregor, Strauss suggests that the general question of happiness
(das Glück in Allgemein) should serve as the basis for the only monologue of the opera, the
so-called Maya Narrative (Majaerzählung), which tells the story of an “all-powerful god, the
creator of the world” who is denied the happiness of human love. Jupiter once visited
the beautiful Maya in a shower of blossoms. So thick and fragrant were they that he lost
her and could never keep her out of his mind; each spring being a reminder of his lost love.
This is a narrative of Wagnerian proportion and pretension, nearly a quarter of an
hour in length, and contains some of Strauss’s most difficult music for the baritone, in
terms of both tessitura and the sonic battle the singer must wage with a full-throated
Strauss orchestra. Both at the dress rehearsal and at the premiere, Krauss made cuts and
transpositions, which in subsequent productions have often been retained. The narra-
tive’s bright, breezy A major setting, which foreshadows a similar affect in the opening
of “September” of the Four Last Songs, is taken from a portion of Act ii, Scene 2 – an aside
to Midas when Jupiter confesses that he needs from Danae not godly but mortal love
(Ex. 8.11).
25
Strauss to Gregor (5 December 1938), in Tenschert, Strauss–Gregor Briefwechsel, p. 149.
26
Ibid., pp. 149–50. 27 Trenner, Richard Strauss: Chronik, 15 November 1938, p. 593.
28
Strauss to Gregor (5 December 1938), in Tenschert, Strauss–Gregor Briefwechsel, p. 148. In Strauss’s
later works the sexuality of Feuersnot seems to have become sublimated in the idea of being lost in
one’s work.
8.11 Act ii, Jupiter’s “Maya Narrative”
Leon Botstein, a longtime advocate of Die Liebe der Danae, once observed of the
Majaerzählung:
Alone at the end of the opera, Jupiter embodies most fully the realization communicated by
the musical form of the opera itself: that the one solace surrounding the failure of human
relationships and the key instrument to sustaining them may be the art of music itself.
Jupiter’s observations in the glorious end of this opera are plausible precisely because of the
transcendent power and stunning beauty of Strauss’s musical invention. Music does not
insulate humanity from pain and tragedy, but it makes them bearable to continue.29
“A CONVERSATION PIECE FOR MUSIC IN ONE ACT”
The chronological superfluity between Die Liebe der Danae and Capriccio is fairly
significant, and in fact the root idea for Capriccio, as mentioned earlier, dates back to
Strauss’s collaboration with Zweig in 1934, when the poet was working at the British
Library. He found a text for an opera intermezzo: “The small piece by itself is not usable
but could easily be adapted. Delightful is the title, Prima la musica, poi le parole, ‘First the
29
Botstein, “Strauss’s Overlooked Masterpiece,” p. 15.
“A conversation piece for music in one act” 297
music, then the words.’”30 The libretto, by Casti, was set to music by Salieri for an
evening of Fasching divertimenti commissioned by Joseph II for the orangery of the
Schönbrunn Palace. Another highlight of the double bill on that February evening in
1786 was a little Singspiel by Mozart entitled Der Schauspieldirektor. Not much of Casti’s
text was usable, but the idea of a composer (un maestro de cappella) and a librettist
(un poeta) as rivals in art as well as love (for una prima donna) informed the central plot of
Capriccio.
The worsening political situation in Germany finally forced Zweig out of the picture
as Strauss’s librettist and motivated his ultimate emigration to Brazil,31 and the Casti
project, which Zweig created into a sketch, was soon shelved in favor of Friedenstag,
Daphne, and Die Liebe der Danae. But as Strauss made his way through Danae, he became
increasingly preoccupied with the Casti idea. Who would have thought it would go
through no fewer than five collaborators?
Despite the number of contributors, the story, set in Paris in 1775, is fairly simple,
though compellingly organized. Flamand and Olivier (composer and poet) both court
the Countess Madeleine; she cannot choose between them. LaRoche, theater director,
sees little use for either of them, for without his efforts on the living stage their work
remains little more than ink on paper. A subplot emerges with a minor love affair
between Madeleine’s brother (the Count) and the actress Clairon, who is in a play by
Olivier, directed by LaRoche.
Before rehearsals, Clairon and the Count read a portion of the play, which culminates
in a love sonnet. Olivier disapproves of its interpretation and reads it himself. Flamand,
who is seated at the keyboard, begins improvising toward the end of Olivier’s reading.
Soon the sonnet is set to music, and the Countess is asked to choose between the two.
Madeleine declines but says she will meet Flamand tomorrow morning at 11 in the
library.
LaRoche, Clairon, and the Count have just returned from play rehearsals, and a lengthy
discussion about words and music ensues. A full-fledged fugal argument results, capped
off by a monologue by LaRoche. The only thing upon which they agree is to write an
opera about it. Everyone, save the Countess Madeleine, leaves for Paris, leaving her to
muse in solitude about the day’s events. The major-domo of the house steps in, reminding
her that she has an appointment with Olivier as 11 in the library. She is aghast. There is no
way to change the double appointment. Madeleine sings the sonnet one last time to
decide – “My Countess, supper is ready,” announces the major-domo.
This simple final libretto went through many hands, beginning with Casti and
including Zweig, Gregor, Strauss, Krauss, and even Hans Swarowsky, who came up
30
Strauss to Zweig (23 August 1934), in Tenschert, A Confidential Matter, p. 54. Zweig had been
reading Casti’s libretti for Pergolesi in London since January of 1934.
31
Where he and his wife committed suicide on 22 February 1942.
with the sonnet. Initially it seemed as though the trajectory of the textual construction
would follow that of the previous opera libretti: a libretto with outside interventions,
but with Joseph Gregor’s name on the score. However, that is not what happened.
In late March 1939, while composing the Particell of Danae’s Act iii and, characteristically,
thinking of a new project, Strauss was drawn back to Zweig’s Casti sketch, during which
time he likely reread E. T. A. Hoffmann’s essays Poet and Composer as well as Sufferings of
a Theater Manager.
In the spring of 1935, when Zweig still saw himself as a kind of ghostwriter for Gregor,
they had worked together on a number of potential operatic projects, among them the
Casti scenario. The draft (Entwurf ), several pages in length, was mostly Zweig, and it
contained several elements that all three artists agreed upon, especially the early
nineteenth-century German setting along the lines of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister – thus
the setting in a remote German castle peopled with aristocrats and musicians perform-
ing and theorizing about music. The scenario did not interest the composer greatly, and
it was shelved until late March 1936.
Dissatisfied with Friedenstag and Daphne as paired one-acters, the composer began
to search for a prologue for Daphne, his favorite of the two. The prodigious Gregor
had a full portfolio of sketches for small-scale opera-ballet-type prologue material: “The
Revenge of the Aphrodites,” “Nephretete,” “Nausikaa,” and “Zenobia,” among others.
None of these exotic ideas interested the composer in the least.
The seventy-five-year-old composer, who had written operas in practically every
style treating a wide range of themes, had no doubt begun to survey his career. The
eternal issue of words and music, a dialectical problem he took to heart and struggled
with all his life, had become a principal preoccupation by the 1920s, specifically with
Intermezzo, the only other Strauss opera besides Capriccio with a preface. This short
treatise offered advice to the performer on vocal production from Mozart to the present,
exploring the various modes of vocal technique in the prologue of Ariadne and in parts of
Die Frau ohne Schatten. In this state of mind, Zweig’s old idea of Prima la musica, poi le
parole quite naturally came to the forefront of his imagination.
Gregor was not thrilled with the idea, seeing little to the opera beyond the title and
the abstract theme, but he had worked on it four years earlier and was invited to
Garmisch to discuss it on 27 March 1939. After much discussion, Strauss asked Gregor to
create a fresh scenario along the lines of what he had done with Zweig, with the
following important change: any allusion to Goethe and a German romantic setting
should be dropped. In May Gregor sent Strauss the following:
First the Words, then the Music.
Lively Intermezzo after an Idea of Abbate de Casti
Last measures of Daphne. Then a moment of silence. Curtain. The scene is that of an opera
stage, seen from behind, with a view of the curtain falling after Daphne [to be followed by
Friedenstag]. The great conductor takes a bow [and] comes back finally with Daphne[,] who
has had trouble extricating herself from the branches of the tree.
A message is brought that the great singer, who was to sing Maria in the following
Friedenstag, cannot be found. The car has not yet arrived. The great conductor has become
nervous and tells the intendant to find a replacement – the intendant picks out the singer who
is to replace her 25 minutes before the opening curtain.
Stage workers arrive and begin working on the new staging. The citadel [for Friedenstag] is
lowered, the scenery begins to change. The young soprano is delighted to substitute.
Hurriedly [the young soprano’s] boyfriend comes in, a very modern composer and conductor.
She confesses to him that she may not be up to this role and will need some significant cuts.
Her friend, who would like to see her in this role, promises to recommend cuts to the
intendant and conductor.
We are now backstage in a closed room with a piano. The intendant arrives in growing
unrest . . . Only 20 minutes to go. The modern composer recommends major cuts, perhaps
even Maria’s major aria; the intendant agrees.
The great conductor returns[,] extremely nervous. They [composer and intendant] try to
clarify to him the necessity of cuts. The modern [composer] suggests that with “old music” it
doesn’t matter what one cuts.
The intendant suggests that as long as the cannon firings and the final chorus are retained,
the public will remain satisfied. The conductor is horrified and declares that he will cancel,
when suddenly the young soprano walks by in her Maria costume. The director [conductor]
is suddenly interested, tries to play a section [of the opera] with her on the piano. The
boyfriend is jealous and declares that he has changed his mind: he must protest what is being
done against the spirit of the music drama. He makes a scene with his girlfriend. They both
leave. The great conductor, very offended, leaves for the telephone.
Intendant left alone in dismay. Only 15 minutes to go! The public cannot be sent away not
knowing what is going on. The regisseur advises: change the whole show. Just a few days
earlier [the operetta] Pusztasehnsucht was performed with great success, the famed composer
is still in the house because of choral and costume rehearsals, etc. They could perform the
third act of the operetta instead of Friedenstag. The intendant agrees.
The regisseur gives the signal. Great noise ensues. The citadel is removed and the
operetta set descends. The operetta composer arrives with his entourage. With a superior
air he tells the intendant that he is willing to allow an act of his work to be performed in order
to save the evening. Players gather together: the watchmen [from Friedenstag], shepherds
[from Daphne], Hungarians and gypsies from the operetta. Monologue of the operetta
composer: Nothing is more difficult than finding some measly words for a hit [operetta].
One tries this and that, always a stupid text. In the middle of the monologue the conductor
arrives.
The operetta composer condescendingly asks the conductor if he could recommend a few
decent titles for his latest work. “First the words, then the music,” he blurts at him, and he
throws everyone out. The conductor is alone and dismayed at the great soprano’s continued
absence and the misfortune of the evening. Monologue about opera. The young soprano
enters tentatively dressed half as Maria, half as a gypsy countess.
The conductor can’t help but laugh. This gives her courage, and she confesses that she
wanted a great success but had a quarrel with her boyfriend.
As he gently strokes her cheek, the great soprano rushes in, already dressed as Maria.
The car broke down in the snow, but she got another one. Highly indignant at seeing the
young soprano in the crazy costume. The great conductor clarifies things as well as he can.
She asks the young soprano: “You wanted to substitute for me? In this [operetta] act?” And (to
the conductor): “You wanted to let her?”
The conductor hurries to get everything ready. Everyone rushes into place. The operetta
set is removed. The citadel returns, the watchman is brought up. The great conductor
gallantly kisses the famous soprano’s hand and says: “Es ist wieder Friedenstag.”32
Strauss was aghast; Gregor’s libretto sketch had nothing to do with what the composer
had envisioned. None of Strauss’s ideas were thematized in what seemed to be nothing
more than a promotion of Gregor’s two previous libretti. Strauss correctly recognized it
as an unfortunate rehashing of Ariadne auf Naxos. The sad pun at the end (“Again it is Day
of Peace,” i.e., peace has been restored) fell flat, as did most of the heavy comedy
throughout the script.
In his letter expressing his disappointment, the composer reminded the librettist of all
the approaches to the relationship between words and music through the history of music:
First words, then music (Wagner)
Or first music, then words (Verdi)
Or only words, no music (Goethe)
Or only music, no words (Mozart) . . .
[How about the] the conflict between the performer and the poet! First the regisseur – then
the Kapellmeister!
First the Kapellmeister – then the regisseur is similarly a theme as first the poet, then the
composer.33
The central problem was twofold. First, Strauss had strong ideas about the abstract
themes, but had no idea how to translate them into compelling stage action. Intermezzo
was a successful Strauss libretto because it was rooted in an event taken from his own
life. The source for Capriccio was, unfortunately for Strauss, theoretical, an allegorical
abstraction removed from life.
Second, engaging Gregor in a theatrical project based on theory only played to
Gregor’s weaknesses. The brilliant theater historian and critic was always at his best
in the world of ideas rather than in the practicalities of the stage. The fact that he was
not a musician, lacking any hands-on knowledge of opera production, only made
matters worse.
32
Published in Wilhelm, Fürs Wort brauche ich Hilfe, pp. 48–9.
33
Strauss to Gregor (12 May 1939), in Tenschert, Strauss–Gregor Briefwechsel, p. 181.
His first scenario is presented in full above only to show how far from the mark
Gregor’s first idea was and what a long way Strauss had to travel by autumn 1940
in order to get what he wanted. Gregor produced several versions between the spring
of 1938 and October 1939, when he finally – in part at the urging of Krauss – was taken
off the project. In a letter of 25 October, Strauss was already giving voice to this
thought, which was only strengthened in a letter by Krauss to the composer on the
next day.
Alas I must say that the draft that Dr. Gregor sent you shows, once again, that he cannot
create a compelling presentation of a theatrical work. He puts the cart before the horse.
Without a [convincing] scenario one can’t write a play. The dramaturgical flow is
incomprehensible. His draft consists of a series of loose, often not logical, succession[s] of
clashing scenes, which create no sense of momentum for what should scenically unfold . . .
Certainly for the sake of propriety you should not break off further work with Gregor.
But I think it is best if you tell him that you are of the opinion that you should write the
libretto yourself, based on a certain scenario that you created with my advice.34
It was a situation not entirely unlike what Strauss faced with Hermann Bahr in the
construction of the Intermezzo text, and Strauss referred to that obvious parallel in
his tactful letter to Gregor. Strauss’s uncharacteristic politeness, diplomacy, even
deference to Gregor was paramount, for not only was he still in the midst of
working on Danae, but he also wished not to alienate a potential collaborator on
future projects: “And as, for example, Hermann Bahr – who completed an entire
draft – finally wrote me about ‘Intermezzo’: ‘Only you can do this.’ And under
the force of this recommendation I did so – and thus after much vacillation and
doubts [I] have ultimately decided once again to try to fabricate [the Capriccio text]
by myself.”35
Of course, Strauss’s letter was as disingenuous as it was diplomatic, for the composer
had no intention of going it alone, knowing as he did that the job could not be done
without the assistance of Krauss at a number of levels: from setting and scenario to
actual dialogue and even the addition of new characters. Tracing the genesis of the
libretto from the moment Krauss stepped in is difficult, given their close proximity in
Munich, which led to numerous personal meetings and discussions rather than corre-
spondence. The final typescript lists both as co-collaborators, but sketches suggest that
Krauss was far more than that, and Strauss was deliberate in putting his name first in the
opera’s subtitle: “A Conversation Piece for Music in One Act by Clemens Krauss and Richard
Strauss. Music by Richard Strauss.”
34
Krauss to Strauss (26 October 1939), in Brosche, Strauss–Krauss Briefwechsel, pp. 249f. My
abridgment.
35
Strauss to Gregor (28 October 1939), in Tenschert, Strauss–Gregor Briefwechsel, p. 210.
Figure 8.1 Strauss with Clemens Krauss rehearsing Capriccio
Intertextualities: a short survey
Krauss, the illegitimate son of a minor aristocrat, Hector Baltazzi, took the name of his
mother, Clementine Krauss, a dancer with the Vienna Imperial Opera; her sister
Gabrielle was already a famous operatic soprano in the leading houses of Europe and
was a member of the company at the Paris Opéra. Krauss was multilingual, and his
linguistic expertise, which included Italian and French, was of great importance to
Strauss, whose knowledge of languages beyond German was limited. Before Strauss
let Gregor go his own way, Krauss had already sketched out a scenario, based on
personal conversations with the composer, that is a fairly direct antecedent of the final
libretto.
For Gregor, opera history was a scholarly pursuit, but Krauss was by his own
admission a “hobbyist” in the field. Such a designation should in no way suggest a
lack of depth; indeed, Krauss had keen insight as a conductor of many of these historical
works. Krauss suggested that the setting be fixed at a time between 1770 and 1789 in a
palace near Paris.
This is the time of the great debate about opera reform in the work of Gluck. The Parisian
premiere in 1774 of “Iphigenia in Aulis” and “Orpheus,” in 1776 “Alceste,” in 1779 “Iphigenia on
Tauris.” With this last work we can work through our ideas. This debate deals with the
greatest minds of the time, including Rousseau as a champion of Gluck, and Mormontel and
D’Alembert against Gluck.36
36
Krauss to Strauss (17 October 1939), in Brosche, Strauss–Krauss Briefwechsel, p. 244.
Historical precision was not paramount in the minds of either artist, even though
historical intertextualities form the full fabric of the work. In a century when
European opera seemed to be so self-aware, Capriccio stands out even more, as
historically unsophisticated as it might be. The French–Italian debate is essentially an
argument between the director (pro-Italian) and the composer and the poet (both pro-
French). The director praises the judgment of Goldoni:
Yesterday I met old Goldoni . . .
“Your [French] operas are awful,” he called to me,
“Paradise for the eyes, hell for the ears!
One waits in vain for the arias,
They all sound like recitatives!”37
[Gestern traf ich den alten Goldoni . . .

“Eure Opern sind schrecklich,” rief er zu mir.
“Für die Augen ein Paradies, für die Ohren eine Hölle.
Vergebens wartet man auf die Arien,
sie klingen alle wie Rezitative!”]
Every component of opera is thematized: absolute music (the opening string sextet),
dance (the passepied, gigue, and gavotte), Italian aria (“Addio, mia vita”), and even a
vocal fugue (a reference to Falstaff, “Everything in the world’s a joke”). Musical citations
include Christoph Willibald Gluck, Giuseppe Sarti, Niccolò Piccini, François Couperin,
Jean-Philippe Rameau, Mozart, Verdi, and even Strauss himself. A retrospective glance
at Strauss’s career shows that the composer was hardly the impartial historian with
respect to these historical works.
Strauss never hid his dislike for Italian opera from the baroque to the present. He
placed himself squarely on the side of Gluck, which had far-reaching consequences in
his career.38 Hidden beneath this reference lived the spirit of Wagner, who – in
Strauss’s view – was the culmination of Gluck. It is hardly coincidental that at the
time the composer arranged Iphigenie auf Tauris “for the German stage,” he was
enjoying his closest relationship with Wahnfried, especially with Cosima Wagner; he
was quite frank that Wagner’s arrangement of Gluck’s Iphigenie in Aulis, written for
the Dresden stage (1847), was his model. In his Teutonic fantasy, Gluck was squarely
a German composer, the first stage in a progression to Mozart, Beethoven, Weber,
37
My translation.
38
“I shall never be a convert to Italian music, it’s such rubbish. Even the Barber of Seville can only be
enjoyed in an outstanding performance.” Strauss to his parents (27 April 1886), in Schuh, Briefe an
die Eltern, p. 94.
8.12 Capriccio, Italian duet, “Addio mia vita”
and then Wagner – and it is safe to assume that Strauss saw himself as the culmination
of that process.39
Italian opera has no chance in Capriccio, despite the sympathetic director’s
protestations to the contrary. Strauss disliked Italian opera for its focus on the singer
at the expense of the work, the careless setting of text, and the insipid, unpolyphonic
orchestral writing. For the Italian duet Strauss suggested to Krauss that he wanted “an
addio with the wrong music,” a line that Krauss himself inserted into the libretto
through the voice of the countess as she reacts to the duet: “The text does not seem
to suit the music very well.” Strauss goes to great pains to create that homely, almost
cruel caricature of an Italian aria. The homeliness comes from a laborious working out
of a motive that robs the melody of any sense of lyricism. Worse yet, Strauss articulates a
pulse of 3/4 time in the voice while the orchestra accompanies in 6/8 time (Ex. 8.12).
The dances are another matter, for baroque dance, especially French baroque dance,
was a genre that attracted Strauss his entire life, from his very first publication (“Eine
39
Werley explores this Wagner–Gluck connection in some detail in his chapter “Mapping Strauss’s
Musical Past,” in Historicism and Cultural Politics, pp. 22–114.
kleine Gavotte für Klavier,” from Aus alter Zeit [1879]) to the Lully arrangements for
Bürger als Edelmann (1912) or the later Couperin dance projects of the early 1940s.40 It
seems fitting that the first and last dances that he published were gavottes. Indeed, there
is significant overlap between Capriccio and Strauss’s Couperin-based ballet Verklungene
Feste (1941). All three Couperin dances in Capriccio are products of this French ballet
enterprise.
There is an even earlier historical allusion that creates the musicodramatic backbone
of the entire opera: the sonnet by Pierre Ronsard. The entire opera revolves around this
sonnet, supposedly written by the poet, Olivier. We follow the compositional genesis of
this little piece throughout the opera, first read aloud by the countess’s brother, then
read a second time by Olivier with Flamand at the keyboard improvising passages
simultaneously, followed by a full musical setting sung by Flamand, which segues,
embellished, into a vocal trio. The highlight, of course, is the final performance of the
sonnet by the countess in the final scene of the opera. Although not mentioned in any of
the creative correspondence, one wonders if the evolution of the Prize Song (in
Wagner’s Die Meistersinger) had any influence on Strauss’s creative strategies.
As early as the autumn of 1939 Strauss wanted a love sonnet from the eighteenth
century. He asked Krauss to look for one, but neither was able to come up with a
suitable text. They searched in vain until Krauss contacted his friend Hans Swarowsky, a
brilliant young conductor and linguist who found a poem not from the 1700s but
from the seventeenth century, an ode to love by Pierre de Ronsard, a leading figure
from the Parisian poetic circle known as La Pléiade. This group of poets had a twofold
purpose in their efforts to add what they believed to be depth and dignity to French
poetic expression: a common interest in the literatures of antiquity and the Italian
Renaissance, hence the Italian love sonnet chosen by Swarowsky.
It is not clear whether Krauss or Strauss knew they were adding yet another layer to
the word-versus-music subject of Capriccio, for Ronsard was equally interested in the
relationship between music and text and was a member of the Académie de Poésie et de
Musique, a group of artists and intellectuals who, inspired by the ancient Greeks, sought
to synthesize poetic and musical-rhythmic modes, the result being a very homophonic
style of chanson. The poems were called vers mésurée and their settings, musique mésurée.
But it is clear from the context of the plot and the way in which Strauss set the text that
the sonnet did not interest Strauss beyond the fact that it was an old love poem to a
woman of high standing.
Strauss set this sonnet before almost any other work on the opera on 22 November
1939 and sent the autograph, in A major, to Swarowsky.
40
Wayne Heisler, The Ballet Collaborations of Richard Strauss (New York: University of Rochester
Press, 2009) remains the best source for information regarding Strauss’s lifelong fascination with
French baroque dance.
8.13 The Sonnet
Your image in my ardent bosom Kein Andres, das mir so im Herzen Je ne saurois aimer autre que
glows, loht vous,
Enthroned there to keep my heart Nein, Schöne, nichts auf dieser Non, Dame, non, je ne saurois
on fire. ganzen Erde le faire:
Where you [are], there dwells my Kein andres, das ich so wie dich Autre que vous ne me sauroit
sole desire begehrte, complaire,
In vain would Venus beckon if she Und käm’ von Venus mir ein Et fust Venus descendue entre
chose. Angebot. nous.
What, oh what pain your gentle Dein Auge beut mir himmlisch- Vos yeus me sont si gracieus et
eye bestows; süsse Not dous,
Indeed, one gaze can wild despair Und wenn ein Aufschlag alle Qual Que d’un seul clin ils me
inspire, vermehrte peuvent defaire,
The next restore my fondest hopes Ein andrer Wonne mir und Lust D’un autre clin tout soudain
entire; gewährte me refaire,
Your glance deals me life or mortal Zwei Schläge sind dann Leben Me faisans vivre ou mourir en
blows. oder Tod. deux cous.
Were yet my spar prolonged Und trüg’ ich’s Quand je serois cinq cens mille
beyond all measure fünfmalhunderttausend Jahre ans en vie,
No other being’s favor would I Erhielte ausser dir, du Autre que vous, ma mignonne
treasure, Wunderbare, m’amie,
No other passion could my heart Kein andres Wesen über mich Ne me feroit amoureus
embrace – Gewalt. devenir.
All through my waking hours my Durch neue Adern müsst’ mein Il me faudroit refaire d’autres
thoughts enfold Blut ich Giessen, venes,
All night my slumb’ring eyes in In meinen, voll von dir zum Les miennes sont de vostre
dreams behold Überfliessen, amour si plenes,
Thus shall it be till from this earth I Fänd’ neue Liebe weder Raum Qu’un autre amour n’y sauroit
part. noch Halt. plus tenir.41
After hearing Flamand sing the sonnet, Olivier complains, “I knew it, he destroys my
verse. The beautiful symmetry is lost. Rhyme nullified – sentences dismembered.” And to
a certain extent, he was right. Strauss (Flamand) took a four-stanza (4 + 4 + 3 + 3) Italian
sonnet and turned it musically into an A (4) B (4) A (3 + 3) arialike form, set in a clear F♯
major in which the B section wanders from A major to D minor (Ex. 8.13). Musical rhyme
and poetic rhyme are mostly at odds, and Strauss seems to go out of his way to obscure the
3/4 time at the outset of the sonnet with syncopations and ties over bar lines. It is based
more on a rhythmic-motivic idea ( ), which he derives in various ways.
Musicodramatic structure
The presentation of the sonnet is one of several stages (Strauss called them Etappen) around
which the thirteen scenes are organized (the major structural sections are shown in italics):
Instrumental introduction: string sextet (F major)
Scene 1: Presentation of the argument by professionals (F major)
Flamand (composer), Olivier (librettist), La Roche (director)
Scene 2: Continuation of the argument by patrons of the arts
Countess (opera patron), Count (her brother)
41
English translation (put in verse form) and the original French and German taken from DGG 2709 038
(1971), with Karl Böhm and the Bavarian Radio Symphony.
Scene 3: Above characters combined

La Roche, count, countess, Flamand, Olivier
Scene 4: Presentation of the love sonnet, introduction of Clairon (actress) (D–F♯ major)
Count, countess, La Roche, Clairon, Olivier, Flamand
Scene 5: First love scene
Countess, Olivier
Scene 6: Singing of the sonnet as solo, then trio
Flamand, Olivier, countess
Scene 7: Second love scene
Countess, Flamand
Scene 8: Countess discusses her two suitors with her brother
Count, countess
Scene 9: Culmination of the theoretical argument (longest scene, F major)
All characters, including two Italian singers, dancers, fugal ensemble, director’s
monologue
Scene 10: Decision to write an opera around this argument (F major)
All characters
Scene 11: Servants’ scene (theory debunked)
Servants
Scene 12: Comic interlude before finale
M. Taupe (souffleur)
Scene 13: Finale (countess’s monologue) (D♭ major)
Countess, Haushofmeister
From the earliest stages (shortly after Gregor’s initial fiasco), Strauss consistently envi-
sioned five fundamental elements of Capriccio: (1) an opening instrumental piece, (2) a
rivalry between composer and poet, (3) an opera within the opera, (4) the director’s
monologue, and (5) the countess’s closing monologue. The idea of a love sonnet followed
as early as November 1939, and after many different tries the opera-within-an-opera took
the form of Scene 10, as a decision to compose an opera on the events of the day.
With the possible exception of Intermezzo, no opera had been so clear in dramatic
structure; certainly no stage work had been so clear in harmonic organization, basically a
double-tonic dyad of F and D♭ major.42 Even the melodic motives are straightforward,
and at least one is given per character (Ex. 8.14).
There is even a motive for “opera” (or, better yet, “musical inspiration”), which is
taken from the opening of the eighth song of Krämerspiegel (The Tradesman’s Mirror),
42
The opening string sextet is one of his clearest, and cleverest, sonata forms, where the exposition
and development are presented nondiegetically in the orchestra pit, and the recapitulation opens the
curtain with singing layered above it.
8.14a–f
where, in the opening theme’s song-without-words, the texture represents genuine

musical inspiration being destroyed by crass “business interests” (Ex. 8.15).
Art is threatened by tradesmen
And that’s a fine mess.
They bring death to music
And transfiguration to themselves.
[Von Händlern wird die Kunst bedroht,

Da habt ihr die Bescherung.
Sie bringen der Musik den Tod,
Sich selber die Verklärung.]
Strauss takes this same theme, setting it for solo horn and orchestra, and uses it as
the introduction to the final scene; often this passage is called the “Moonlight Music”
(Ex. 8.16).
Everyone except the countess has now left for Paris. The countess’s monologue, last
of the thirteen scenes, marks the sonnet’s final destination in its upward journey from
the prosaic baritonal reading of the text to a musical setting sung by a tenor, and finally
to Strauss’s favorite instrument – the soprano voice. In order to make up her mind, she
8.15 Krämerspiegel, “Von Händlern wird die Kunst bedroht,” piano introduction
8.16 “Moonlight Music”
sings through the sonnet one last time. Whom will she choose? Strauss’s final curtain
seems to leave the question open. Yet this final scene, one of the great Straussian
soprano monologues, radiates with some of Strauss’s finest composition.
Beginning with the luminescent “Moonlight Music,” the listener is drawn entirely to
the world of sound. To paraphrase the countess’s opening line, “The stream of tones
pulls [us] forward.” If we are to believe the libretto, the grand question is left unsettled –
but this is Strauss at his most disingenuous, for the final twenty-five minutes of this
opera is swamped by some of Strauss’s greatest late music, and it is almost impossible to
believe that anyone in the audience is at this point thinking of the text. Capriccio is a
grand artifice. Strauss, the seasoned opera composer, knew – even in his final stage
piece – that in order to have an effective final curtain, music, not words, must reign
supreme.
Yet, after sifting through Strauss’s various letters and comments during the entire
genesis of the work, there may have been a monologue closer to the composer’s
heart: that of La Roche, the director. It is placed in the pivotal ninth scene, a scene that
reminds us of the work’s subtitle. Scene 9, the longest one, has an important
subsection which is called “Fuge (Discussion of the Theme: Words or Music),” an
animated argument among the main characters. The centerpiece is La Roche’s
monologue, where he asks:
Where are the [modern] masterpieces that speak to the hearts of the people, in which their
souls are reflected? Where are they? I cannot discover them, although I keep searching.
Only pale aesthetes stare at me; they make fun of the old and create nothing new.43
[Wo sind die Werke, die zum Herzen des Volkes sprechen, die seine Seele widerspiegeln?
Wo sind sie? Ich kann sie nicht finden, so sehr ich auch suche. Nur blasse Ästheten blicken
mich an: sie verspotten das Alte und schaffen nichts Neues!]
Although Strauss claimed to have had Max Reinhardt in mind as a model for the
role of the director, it seems to have been to some extent an extension of Strauss
himself. La Roche’s invective takes us to another subject altogether: the current
state of theater as a totality and the lack of good new theatrical music works,
bypassing altogether the issue of music versus text. This problem obsessed Strauss
during the last decades of his life. German opera was the highest expression of
German culture, and for an atheist whose religion was German humanism and
whose gods were Gluck, Mozart, and Wagner, the perceived demise of that culture
placed much at stake. As Charles Youmans observed, “If [Strauss] hoped for a kind
of immortality through his artistic work, his works depended on the survival of
Wagner, at least as much as Wagner depended on Goethe and Friedrich von
Schiller.”44
Except for La Roche’s witty sense of humor, there is little or no Reinhardt in this
character, but every bit of Richard Strauss. In fact, in these late operas we see a new
type of character emerge: a resigned old man seemingly out of touch with the world
43
See Böhm DGG recording text booklet.
44
Charles Youmans, “The Development of Richard Strauss’s World-View,” in The Richard Strauss
Companion, ed. Mark-Daniel Schmid (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 96.
around him. That Strauss – seeing himself from the outside – had the ability to situate
himself within this context, even to the point of making some good irony out of it, was
fairly remarkable for a creative individual toward the end of his life. Jupiter immediately
comes to mind – the king of the gods, heading resignedly back to Olympus, having
renounced the mortal world. In Daphne, even old Peneios had a vision of Apollo’s arrival
(“I was once a god, a god as he!”) and was mocked by the collective (including his wife:
“You eternal dreamer!”).
Epilogue
The idea of an oblivious baritonal main character certainly applies to the intransigent
commandant, whose wife is the one who first hears the bells of peace. We find another
example in Strauss’s only opera buffa, Die schweigsame Frau, in which poor Morosus is
cut off from the world owing to a severe hearing problem. The source for this type of
resigned character, as an expression of the composer, might have come in part from the
death of Hofmannsthal, who was Strauss’s creative anchor from 1906 through 1929.
Paralleling the poet’s death was a second factor: the rise of National Socialism, Strauss’s
embarrassing, hypocritical early accommodation with the regime, and his failure,
despite his capitulations, to maintain a position in it.
In this context we might return to the 1935 sketch for the unfinished cello concerto
discussed in the previous chapter, Strauss’s “struggle of the artistic soul [cello] against
pseudo-heroism, resignation, [and] melancholy; the call to the joy of life – opposed by
the orchestra” (Kampf der Künstlerseele gegen den Pseudoheroismus, Resignation,
Melancholie, Aufforderung zur Lebensfreude – Orchester dagegen).1 The issue of
pseudo-heroism could very well have stemmed from Strauss’s just having finished
work on Friedenstag, about which he had mixed feelings; but it is just as likely that the
current state of German politics lay equally heavily on his mind. The central importance
is less the pseudoheroism than the struggle, like La Roche’s, against resignation and
melancholy.
The sharply insightful Hofmannsthal once told Strauss, “You have not looked for
many friends, and you have not had many”; Strauss would not have disagreed.2
Hofmannsthal needed and cherished his friendships, but the composer – judging from
his own statements – was quite the opposite. The subject of isolation brings us back to
the chapter on Guntram and metaphysics. Strauss, always cheerful and aloof, may have
had few close friends, but he had three important mentors: his father, Hans von Bülow,
and Alexander Ritter. As a growing prodigy he naturally moved beyond the orbit of his
father; he lost his second mentor through unforeseen circumstances (Bülow’s sudden
resignation in Meiningen). Only in the last case did he choose to sever their artistic
dialogue over an extended period of time, and that last break was the most painful.
1
See Gilliam, “Friede im Innern,” Appendix i, p. 33.
2
Hofmannsthal to Strauss (1 August 1918), in A Working Friendship: The Correspondence between Richard
Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ed. Willi Schuh, trans. Hanns Hammelmann and Ewald Osers
(Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 309.
313
314 Epilogue
Figure E.1 Strauss a year before his death in 1949.
Once he had given up his mentors, however, he began to believe he could create a
serious modern response to Wagner’s oeuvre; that the breakup with Ritter occurred
during the creation of Guntram does not alter that fact. Ritter wanted Guntram, the
singer from afar, to be redeemed, to be brought back into the fold. Strauss, to the
contrary, created a type of Walter von Stolzing who lacked a Hans Sachs to guide him.
To Ritter’s sensibilities it was as if Strauss – for his first opera – had conceived a
Meistersinger where the work ended squarely with Walter exclaiming, “Nicht Meister,
nein!” For Capriccio, his last opera, Strauss created a character, La Roche, as a Hans Sachs
without his Walter, and although Strauss made light of a mentor’s absence, it grieved
him immensely. That was why he wrote all those artistic testaments about the future of
opera, written for any number of potential Walters (Gregor, Böhm, Schuh, Rudolf
Hartmann, even Bavarian cultural officials), hoping at least one might take heed.
Although at the time of the Capriccio premiere, on 28 October 1942, Europe was in the
midst of a terrible world war, now joined by the United States, it never crossed the
composer’s mind that there could be some sort of link between his work and the war.
Art was another realm for the composer, despite the fact that it had been so politicized
by the Nazis and the fact that, paradoxically, he had chosen to work with them early on
Epilogue 315
in the regime. During a visit by Schuh to the composer’s home in Garmisch in 1944,
Strauss read aloud a letter by Goethe written just five days before the poet’s death:
“Confusing conclusions about confusing deeds dominate the world, and I have nothing
more pressing than if possible to increase that which remains and is left to me and to
keep my originality in hand.”3
It reminds us of the 5 December 1938 letter to Gregor concerning Danae: for Strauss,
happiness – perhaps even redemption – came not from the finished work of art, but in
the blissful process of creation, in the joyful thrall of composing. This kind of creative
absorption had been the cure for every crisis in his life, and to understand this idea we
must stretch beyond classic notions of escapism. The subtext of the Gregor letter was
clear: Strauss would stop composing only after his body had ceased to function. Brahms
ends his Requiem with the lines “that they will rest from their labor, for their works
follow after them.” Surely, for the nonbelieving Strauss, such an idea was of some
comfort. Indeed, while in a Lausanne hospital recovering from surgery in March 1948,
he was working on a children’s opera, The Donkey’s Shadow, for his grandson Christian’s
Gymnasium in Ettal. Although that project was left unfinished, Strauss was happy
enough to have had a completed Capriccio – for that work, he confessed to Schuh
after the dress rehearsal, “I can never surpass.”
3
Willi Schuh, “Richard Strauss at Eighty,” in Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World, p. 293.
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INDEX
Adler, Guido, 240 Berger, Alfred von, 92, 96

Adorno, Theodor W., xii, xiv, 45, 52, 82, 83, 153, Bergson, Henri-Louis, xii
166, 179 Berlioz, Hector, 223
Akademisch-dramatischer Verein, 47 Roman Carnival Overture, 223
d’Albert, Eugen, 10 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 258
Tiefland, 10 Bie, Oscar, 45, 51, 52
d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste, 302 Binding, Rudolf G., 239
Alwin, Karl, 207 Birkin, Kenneth W., 8, 213
Anschluss (with Austria), 5, 239, 246, 274 Bizet, Georges
Anzensgruber, Ludwig, 200 L’Arlésienne, 227
Aristedes of Miletus, 276 Blake, William, 224
Aristotle, 264 Blech, Leo, 10
Auber, Daniel, 21 Bloch, Ernst, xii, xiii, 41, 66
Ausgleich, 4 Bodenhausen-Degener, Eberhard Freiherr
von, 99, 133
Bacon, Francis, 91 Bogosavljević, Srdan, 198
Bahr, Hermann, 51, 65, 87, 91, 154, 172, 177–178, Böhm, Karl, 226, 230, 238, 269, 314
224, 301 Botstein, Leon, 224–225, 237, 288, 296
Das Konzert, 154 Bow, Clara, 203
Zur Kritik der Moderne, 154 Brahms, Johannes, xii–xiii, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 121,
Bailey, Robert, 123 315
Ballets Russes, 159 D Minor Piano Concerto, 18
Baltazzi, Hector, 302 Requiem, 314, 315
Bank of England, 197 Brecht, Bertolt, 282
Beaumarchais, 108 Breuer, Josef, 92, 96
Beecham, Thomas, 61 Broch, Hermann, 224
Beer-Hofmann, Richard, 91 Bronsart, Hans von, 21
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 17, 179, 224, 249, 250, Brooks, Louise, 203
275, 303 Bull, John, 230, 234
Eroica Symphony, 251 In Nomine, 230, 234
Fidelio, 166, 242, 250, 254 Bülow, Hans von, 12, 16–18, 19, 21,
Fifth Symphony, 171, 250 37, 313
Ninth Symphony, 250, 254 Busch, Fritz, 185, 196, 219, 222
Bekker, Paul, 10, 41, 46, 70, 95, 99 Busoni, Ferruccio, 10, 224
Bellini, Vincenzo, 144
Benjamin, Walter, 224 Caddy, Davinia, 62
Berg, Alban, 4, 274 Café Griensteidl, 91
Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 274 Carpenter, Tethys, 82
333
334 Index
Casti, Giovanni Battista, 273, 297, 298 Forsyth, Karen, 132

Prima la musica e poi la parole, 273, 296, 298 Four Seasons Hotel (Munich), xi
Chasseriau, Theodore, 258 Frank, Hans, 275
Christianity, 2, 24, 42, 47, 66 Franz Joseph I (Emperor), 142, 197
comédie-ballet, 130 Freie literarische Gesellschaft, 47
Corelli, Arcangelo, 142, 144 Freud, Sigmund, 92, 96, 224
Cornelius, Peter, 21 Freudian, 50, 203
Corona (journal), 279 Frisch, Walter, 143
Couperin, François, 303, 305 Fuchs, Robert, 240
Crittenden, Camille, 187 Funk, Walter, 244
culture industry, 52
Gay, Peter, 176
da Ponte, Lorenzo, 108, 126 Georg II, Duke of Meiningen, 17
Dahlhaus, Carl, 248, 249, 254 Gerhäuser, Emil, 56
Deathridge, John, xiii Gerlach, Reinhard, 8, 123
decadence, 2 Genossenschaft Deutscher Tonkünstler, 243
Degenfeld, Christoph-Martin, 133 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 302, 303–304, 311
Degenfeld, Marie-Therese, 133 Alceste, 302
Degenfeld, Ottonie von, 133–134, 141, 143, 150 Iphigenia in Aulis, 302, 303
Dehmel, Richard, 62 Iphigénie en Tauride, 302, 303
Del Mar, Norman, 7, 9 Orpheus, 302
Demel, Emilie, 201 Goebbels, Joseph, 243–245, 246, 272
Diaghilev, Sergei, 159 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, xiii, 7, 13, 22, 92, 156, 157,
Donizetti, Gaetano, 144 160, 164, 224, 242, 247, 298, 300, 311, 315
Don Pasquale, 5, 223 Faust, 157, 164, 188
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 22 Die Geheimnisse, 157
Crime and Punishment, 22 Lila, 13
Drewes, Heinz, 272 Goldmark, Karl, 10
Duhan, Hans, 188 Goldoni, Carlo, 303
Göring, Hermann, 275
Eckermann, Johann Peter, 7 Gorky, Maxim, 87, 93
Edelmann, Bernd, 110 Lower Depths, 87, 93
Eisler, Hanns, 251 Gozzi, 156, 157
Eisner, Pavel, 199 Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, 21
Erasmus of Rotterdam, 225 Graydon, Philip, 187
Euripides, 91, 183–184 Gregor, Joseph, 3, 5, 36, 55, 85, 238, 239–271, 273–297,
Expressionism (Expressionismus), 4 298–302, 308, 314, 315
The Extinguished Flames of Audenarde, 45, 47 Kulturgeschichte der Oper, 240
Eysoldt, Gertrud, 67, 78, 87, 88, 93 Das Wiener Barocktheater, 240, 241
Weltgeschichte des Theaters, 240
Faesi, Robert, 239 Grünfeld, Heinrich, 87
fairy-tale opera (Märchenoper), 10
Fischer, Franz, 18 Handel, Georg Friedrich, 132
Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, 230, 233, 237 Hanslick, Eduard, xiii
Flaubert, Gustave, 65 Hartlaub, Gustav, 173
Fokine, Mikhail, 159 Hartmann, Rudolf, 216, 314
Index 335
Hausegger, Siegmund von, xiii Lustspiel: Der Menschenfeind, 201

Haydn, Franz Joseph Der Turm (The Tower), 240
The Creation, 166 Hogarth, William, 108
Heisler, Wayne, 305 Holloway, Robin, 77
Hempel, Frieda, 144 Homer, 184, 258
Hepokoski, James, 36, 43, 44, 262 Hottmann, Katharina, 189
Hérold, Louis, 144 Humperdinck, Engelbert, 10
Hesse, Hermann, 224 Hänsel und Gretel, 10, 51, 52
Heuss, Alfred, 70 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 65, 78
Hindemith, Paul, 3, 4, 154
Neues vom Tage, 154, 174 Ihlert, Heinz, 243–244
Hindenburg, Paul von, 195 Isben, Henrik, 17
Hinkel, Hans, 243 A Doll’s House, 17
Hirschfeld, Robert, 64 Das Fest auf Solhaug (Gildet paa Solhoug), 17
Hitler, Adolf, 6, 225, 238, 272 Ghosts, 17
Hoffmann, E.T.A., 298
Poet and Composer, 298 Jameson, Fredric, 52
Sufferings of a Theater Manager, 298 Janáček, Jeoš, 224
Hofmann, Michael, 224 Jens, Walter, 185, 189
Hofmannsthal, Franz von, 195, 207 Jerger, Alfred, 188
Hofmannsthal, Gertrud (Gerty) von, 195, 196 Jeritza, Maria, 188, 189, 279
Hofmannsthal, Hugo August Peter Elder von, 160 Jodl, Friedrich, 15, 240
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, xiv, 2–5, 84, 85, Jonson, Ben, 195, 222, 230
181–194, 224, 238, 239, 240–241, 247, 249, 250, Epicoene, or The Silent Woman, 195, 222
257, 259, 261, 268, 273, 275–281, 289, 295, 313 Joseph II (Emperor), 297
Terzinen über Vergänglichkeit, 114 Judaism, 2, 42, 64, 224
Der Triumph der Zeit, 87
Chandos Letter, 91, 95, 106, 129, 134 Kalisch, Alfred, 102
Elektra, 276 Kater, Michael, 271
“Gespräch über Gedichte”, 134 Kerman, Joseph, 119
Moments in Greece, 275 Kessler, Harry Graf von, 87, 106, 111–112, 116, 117,
König Ödipus, 240 160, 224
Christinas Heimreise, 86, 106 Keudell, Walter von, 244, 245
Jedermann (Everymann), 240 Khevenhüller-Metsch, Johann Joseph (Prince), 111
Ungeschriebenes Nachwort, 112 Kienzl, Wilhelm, 10
“The Austrian Idea” (essay), 198 Kippenberg, Anton, 222
Das steinerne Herz (fragment), 127, 131, 157, 158–159 Klose, Friedrich, 10
Danae: or the Marriage of Convenience (Danae, oder Kohler, Stefan, 189
Die Vernunftheirat), 188, 196, 205, 273, 275–281 Körner, Karl Theodor, 13
Lucidor, 201–205, 206 Korngold, Julius, 62, 64
Der Fiaker als Graf (The Cabby as Count), 200, Kramer, Lawrence, 68
203–204, 205 Kraus, Karl, 88
Buch der Freunde, 152 Krause, Ernst, 70, 163, 293
Das Salzburger Große Welttheater (The Salzburg Krauss, Clemens 6, 85, 177, 216, 222, 238, 239, 247,
Great Theater of the World), 240 261, 269, 272, 280–281, 292, 293, 294, 295, 297,
Schwank in Nestroy’scher Manier, 201 301–305
336 Index
Krauss, Clementine, 302 musical atheism, xii

Krauss, Gabrielle, 302 Schopenhauerian metaphysics, 19
Krenek, Ernst, 3, 205 Strauss’s rejection of metaphysics, 1, 24, 25, 37,
Jonny spielt auf, 205 39, 40, 45, 183
Kristiansen, Morten, 46, 52 Metternich, Klemens von, 200
Kuhač, Franja S., 210, 214 Molière, 108, 110, 127, 129, 130, 150
Kurz, Selma, 144 Le bourgeois gentilhomme, 110, 127, 130, 135, 136
Dépit amoureux, 203
Lassen, Eduard, 21 Montaigne, Michel de, 225
Legrenzi, Giovanni, 234 Monteverdi, Claudio, 132, 229, 237
Eteocle e Polinice, 234, 235 L’incoronazione di Poppea, 229, 234
Lenau, Nicholas von, 158 Moreau, Gustave, 65, 78
Leoncavallo, Ruggero, 10 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 14, 72, 79, 108, 119,
Lernet-Holenia, Alexander, 239 143, 176, 200, 210, 224, 237, 273, 297, 298, 300,
Levi, Hermann, 18, 42 303, 311
Liliencron, Detlev von, 62 Mozartian, 108, 123, 262, 292
Lindner, Anton, 39, 67 Piano Sonata in A Major, K.331, 119, 143–144
Liszt, Franz, 15–16, 19, 20, 63 Idomeneo, 259
Liszt-Verein, 47 Der Schauspieldirektor, 273, 297
Literaturoper, 61 Le nozze di Figaro, 108, 132
London Review of Books, 224 Don Giovanni, 72
Louis XIV, 130 Cosi fan tutte, 210, 226, 292
Louis, Rudolf, 69 The Magic Flute, 12, 79, 110, 156, 157, 162, 164, 170,
Lucian, 276, 279, 282 200, 203, 237
Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 130, 305 Mücke, Mieze, 173
Müller, Adam, 114
Mackay, John Henry, 25 Mussolini, Benito, 195
The Anarchists, 25 mythology, 5
Mahler, Gustav, 123, 127, 224, 251 Greek drama, 4
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 65
Mann, Thomas, 198, 224, 225 Napoleon, 247
Doktor Faustus, 224 National Socialism, 4–6, 195, 198, 219, 222, 237, 238,
Mann, William, 7–8 243, 245–246, 269, 274–275, 313, 314
Marek, George, 274 necrophilia, 1
Marmontel, Jean-François, 302 neoclassicism
Marxism prefigured in Der Rosenkavalier, 2
philosophers, xii Nervösität, 51
Mascagni, Pietro, 10 Nervenkontrapunkt, 164, 170, 192
Mayr, Richard, 127 Nervenkunst, 65
Mendelssohn, Felix, 70–71, 223 Nervenopern, 40, 64
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 71–72 Nestroy, Johann, 200
‘Italian’ Symphony, 223 Neudeutsche Schule, 19
metaphysics, xi, 24, 41, 84, 152, 153, 174, 218, 313 Neue freie Presse, 19
hints of longing, 6 New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit), 4, 154,
metaphysical Wagnerism, 22, 125, 203 173, 176
music as religion, xi, 11 Newman, Ernest, 63–64
Index 337
Nicolai, Otto, 21 Riemann, Hugo, 234

Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, 1, 22, 24, 25, 36, 40, 43, 45, Rilke, Rainer Maria, 224
91, 92, 118, 125, 259, 260 Ritter, Alexander, 10, 12, 14–15, 17, 18–20, 22, 24, 25,
Birth of Tragedy, 91, 92, 125, 259, 260 26, 37, 84, 313, 314
Also sprach Zarathustra, 43 Riviere, Joan, 203
Beyond Good and Evil, 50 Rolland, Romain, 67, 132, 187, 189
Nietzsche contra Wagner, 43, 130 Roller, Alfred, 127–128
Nietzschean influences, xii, 2, 5, 15, 49 Ronsard, Pierre de, 305
The Gay Science, 43 Rösch, Friedrich, 19
Übermensch, 47, 50 Rosen, Charles, 121
Nijinsky, Vaslav, 159, 160, 222 Rossini, Gioachino, 226, 228, 230
The Barber of Seville, 223, 303
Oestvig, Karl Aargard, 188 Roth, Joseph, 224
Offenbach, Jacques, 183, 188 Radetzkymarsch, 224
La belle Hélène, 188 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 302
Olympic games (1936), 246 Rückert, Friedrich, 255, 259, 260
Ovid, 120, 258 Ruecker, Alfred, 220
Metamorphosis, 120
Said, Edward, 6, 121
Pachl, Peter, 50 Salieri, Antonio, 273, 297
Pannain, Guido, 121 Salzburg Festival, 141, 181, 200, 240, 272
Peerson, Martin, 230 Samazeuilh, Gustave, 70
Perfall, Karl von, 18, 42 Sarti, Giuseppe, 303
Pergolesi, Giovanni, 297 Schalk, Franz, 181
Perron, Carl, 127 Schikaneder, Emanuel, 200
Petersen, David and Susan, 204 Schiller, Friedrich, 13, 311
Pfitzner, Hans, xi, 10 Schirach, Baldur von, 275
Piccini, Niccolò, 303 Schlötterer, Reinhold, 52, 281
Possart, Ernst von, 42 Schlötterer-Traminer, Roswitha, 64–65, 120
Puffet, Derrick, 71–72 Schnitzler, Arthur, 91, 224
Pushkin Press, 224 Schoenberg, Arnold, xii, 4, 45, 122, 145, 154, 180
Pschorr, Georg, 66 Evolutionary thought, xii
Gurre-Lieder, 166
Raabe, Peter, 244 Pierrot lunaire, 145
Raimund, Ferdinand, 200 Von heute auf morgen, 154–155
Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 303 Schöne, Lotte, 188
reception, 39 Schopenhauer, Arthur (also see “metaphysics”),
redeption (operatic subject/Erlösungsopern), xi–xii, xiii, 1, 15, 18–19, 22, 23, 25, 36, 43, 49,
xiii, 1, 10, 22, 46, 53, 69, 151, 194, 278 52, 161
Reger, Max, 143 Schubert, Franz, 148, 293
Variations on a Theme by Mozart, op. 132, 143 Wiegenlied, 148
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel, xiii Schuh, Willi, 189, 229, 279, 314, 315
Reichskulturkammer (RKK), 243, 246 Schumann, Elisabeth, 207
Reichsmusikkammer (RMK), 198, 222, 238, 243–244, Scribe, Eugène, 126
246, 260, 272, 275 Seidl, Arthur, 15, 25, 41, 43–44, 51, 52, 65, 84
Reinhardt, Max, 67, 86, 87, 93, 128, 130, 133, 240, 311 Semiramis, 279
338 Index
sexuality, 40–41, 46, 69 Villa (Garmisch), xiii, 85

Shakespeare, William, 15, 108, 203 Wagner (youthful interest in), xiii, 19
As You Like It, 203 Wagnerian elements (allusions), 5–6, 26, 49, 183,
Silverman, Debora L., 62 193, 295
Singgedicht, 51, 61, 81, 86 Wohlklang, 118, 121, 254
Socrates, 92, 106 Vocal works
Oedipus and the Sphinx, 106 Morgen, 25
Sombart, Werner, 52 Heimliche Aufforderung, 25
Sophocles, 96, 139 Hochzeitlich Lied, 67
Speyer, Edgar, 197 Ich trage meine Minne, 226
Spoleto Festival, 132 Krämerspiegel, 308, 310
Steiger, Martina, 278 Taillefer, 87
Steinberg, Michael P., 247, 248, 254, 258 Die deutsche Motette, 158, 161
Steiner, Max, 77 Männerchöre, 255, 269
Stirner, Max, xi, 1, 22, 24, 25, 36, 43, 49 Four last Songs, 7, 189, 295
Ego and His Own, 24
Instrumental works
Stolze, Gerhard, 79
Aus alter Zeit, 305
Stransky, Joseph, 173
Arabian Dance, 66
Strauss, Alice, 97, 196, 238, 245, 271, 295
Burleske, 18, 32
Strauss, Christian, 238, 271, 315
Tone poems, 1, 20, 37, 41
Strauss, Franz (father), 12, 18, 39, 63
Aus Italien, 223
Strauss, Franz Alexander (son), 15, 196, 220, 245
Macbeth, 69
Strauss, Johann, Jr., 43, 108, 119
Don Juan, 27, 33, 36, 62–63, 69, 158, 159, 262
Strauss, Johann, Sr., 119
Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung),
Strauss, Josef, 120
3, 27, 47, 120, 135, 166, 269
Strauss, Pauline de Ahna, 8, 20, 21, 37, 42, 62, 63, 155,
Till Eulenspiegel, 1, 44–46, 61
156, 159, 160, 164, 173, 176, 180, 182, 244, 245,
Also sprach Zarathustra, 8, 13, 43, 47, 63, 64, 71, 74,
246, 254, 268, 274
81, 100, 166
marriage to Strauss, 20
Don Quixote, 1, 39, 55–56, 131, 176
Strauss, Richard
Ein Heldenleben, 1, 39, 45, 159, 176
Bildungsoper, 33, 161
Symphonia domestica, 8, 63–64, 69, 87, 152, 153,
Bildungsreise, 22, 24
154, 159, 172–173, 180, 262
Brahms (youthful interest in), xii–xiii
Eine Alpensinfonie, 158, 161, 250
cinematic qualities, xii, 1, 3, 63, 178
Parergon zur Symphonia Domestica, 182
female characters, 61–62, 66, 262
Panathenäenzug, 182
on German humanism, xii, 122, 311
C major Cello Concerto (fragment), 266, 269, 313
harmonic language, xii, 100, 122
Metamorphosen, 3, 7, 135, 251, 269, 293
historical skepticism, xiv
image and personality (paradox of), xi, xiii, 12, Miscellaneous
41, 185 Enoch Arden, 42
library (personal), xiii Der Rosenkavalier (film), 178, 182
Mozart (affinity for), xiv, 7 Stage works
methodological approaches to his music, xii, 7–9 Scenes for a Singspiel, 12
opera buffa, 4 Battle with the Dragon (fragment), 13
operetta, 4 Lila (Spigspiel fragment), 13
stylistic anachronisms, xii, 52 Don Juan (operatic project), 38
Index 339
Till Eulenspiegel (operatic project), 38, 45, 179 Daphne, 3, 5, 27, 33, 125, 148, 238–271, 273, 279, 280,
Guntram, xiii, 1, 5, 6, 10–11, 13, 15, 17, 18–38, 40, 42, 297, 298–299, 312
43, 44, 45, 49, 66, 69, 79, 81, 85, 118, 153, 223, Die Liebe der Danae, 5–7, 205, 222, 239, 245, 251,
242, 313 269, 271, 272–296, 297, 298, 301, 315
Kythere (ballet project), 78, 87, 131 Verklungene Feste, 305
Feuersnot, xiii, 1, 36, 38, 39, 69, 81, 84, 85, 86–87, Capriccio, 6, 85, 176, 177, 222, 239, 249, 269, 271,
108, 120, 125, 295 272–274, 280, 296–312, 314, 315
Ekke und Schnittlein (operatic project), 67 The Donkey’s Shadow (Des Esels Schatten), 314, 315
Coabbradibosimpur oder Die bösen Buben von Strauss, Richard (grandson), 238, 271
Sevilla (operatic project), 67 Stravinsky, Igor, 151, 274
Salome, xii, xiii, 1–2, 1, 3, 10, 33, 36, 42, 45, 49, 50, L’histoire du soldat, 151
53, 61, 85, 86–87, 88–89, 95, 97, 106, 125, 160, Three Pieces for String Quartet, 274
165, 180, 185, 193, 197, 203 Swarowsky, Hans, 297, 305
Elektra, xiii, 2, 3, 8, 36, 39, 53, 75, 78, 82, 85–107, 111,
116, 118, 120, 125, 126, 127, 128, 139, 151, 153, 163, Tauber, Richard, 188
164, 166, 180, 190, 208, 254, 260, 264, 268, 269, 281 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 42
Der Rosenkavalier, xii, xiii, 2–3, 8, 27, 56–57, 59, 85, Tetrazzini, Luisa, 144
88, 89–90, 97, 100, 106–126, 127, 129, 131, 135, 142, Thuille, Ludwig, xiii, 10, 13–14, 19, 24
144, 156, 158, 164, 174, 179, 195, 196, 197, 199, 203, Tietjen, Heinz, 275
205, 208, 213, 216, 225, 230, 273, 276, 281, 283 Toller, Georg, 127–128
Ariadne auf Naxos, 3, 4, 5, 6, 27, 86, 97, 105, Toscanini, Arturo, 224
106, 117, 119, 120, 125, 126, 127–151, 152, 153, 154, Turecek, Emilie, 201
157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 175, 176, 179, 182, 184, 185,
187, 192, 203, 205, 213, 222, 258, 261, 276, 278, Überbrettl, 47, 61
283, 298, 300 University of Munich (Ludwig-Maximilians-
Josephs Legende, 87, 158, 159–160, 161, 163 Universität), 15
Der Bürger als Edelmann, 127, 133, 305 University of Vienna, 92
Die Frau ohne Schatten, 3, 5, 9, 75, 77, 97, 127, 134, Ursuleac, Viorica, 222, 238, 282
141, 151, 152–172, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, Usteri, Johann Martin, 228–229
182, 183, 188, 192, 217, 218, 226, 237, 247–248, “Freut euch des Lebens”, 230, 232, 236, 237
259, 268, 274, 276, 277, 279, 298 utopian function in music, xii
Schlagobers, 179, 188
Couperin-Tanzsuite, 179 Verdi, Giuseppe, 300, 303
Intermezzo, 3, 6, 151, 152–155, 158, 172–181, 182, 183, Falstaff, 223, 303
185, 188, 189, 197, 222, 226, 298, 300, 301, 308 Otello, 175
The Ruins of Athens (Die Ruinen von Athen), 4, 179, Rigoletto, 237
182, 188, 241, 250, 275 Verwandlung (transformation), 3, 5
Die ägyptische Helena, 3, 4, 5, 97, 106, 135, 151, Vogue, 183
152–155, 181, 195, 196–197, 198, 205, 206, 253,
273, 275, 276, 278, 279, 289 Wachten, Edmund, 8
Arabella, 3, 4–5, 97, 154, 195–222, 239, 273, 275, 276, Wagner, Cosima, 18, 21, 23, 24, 49, 61, 62, 63, 64,
278, 282, 284 69, 303
Die schweigsame Frau, 4–5, 195–196, 239, 246, 313 Wagner, Gertrud, 7, 272
Friedenstag, 5, 166, 222, 224, 238–257, 259, 260, Wagner, Richard, 7, 17, 20, 43, 47, 48, 50, 61, 63, 92,
262, 264, 265, 269, 271, 273, 279, 280, 297, 108, 120–121, 129, 130, 151, 153, 171, 178–179, 237,
298–300, 313 241, 278, 291, 300, 303–304, 311
340 Index
Wagner, Richard, (cont.) Weber, Carl Maria von, 237, 303

Ewig-Weibliche (eternal feminine), 23, 24, 153, 247 Der Freischütz, 12, 175, 237
family, Strauss’s relationship with 2, 37 Webern, Anton, 122, 180
Gesamtkunstwerk, 3, 112, 129, 130, 151, 241 Wedekind, Frank, 62, 87
legacy, xi–xii, 10–16, 20, 22, 23, 24, 25, 37, 49, 117, Erdgeist, 62, 87
194, 314 Weill, Kurt, 3, 4, 154, 251, 282
Music Drama, 61, 129 Der Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, 282–283
mythology (Wagnerian), 4 Weimar Republic, 198
Opera and Drama, 22 Weingartner, Felix, 10, 240
parody, xi, 52 Weinstube Leibenfrost, 19, 42
Stabreim, 14 Werbeck, Walter, 44
Wagnerism, xii, xiii, xiv, 1, 18, 42, 44, 61, 84, 153, 225 Werley, Matthew, 199, 201, 210, 230, 237, 251, 304
writings, xiii Wette, Adelheid, 51
Operatic works Wilde, Oscar, xiv, 39, 53, 65, 79, 81, 88, 93
Rienzi, 12 De Profundis, 66
Der fliegende Holländer, 56 Wilder, Thornton, 200
Tannhäuser, 22, 237 The Matchmaker, 200
Lohengrin, 22, 26, 27, 29, 62, 287 The Razzler, 200
Tristan und Isolde, 14, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 27, 30, 31, Wilhelm, Kurt, 273
47, 51, 175, 179, 216, 248, 289 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 92
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 2, 48–50, 51, 61, 84, Wintle, Christopher, 8
108, 305, 314 Wittgenstein, Paul, 182
Der Ring des Nibelungen, 14, 56, 57, 197, 273, 281, Wolf, Hugo, 10
288–289, 291 Wolzogen, Ernst von, 38, 41, 46–48, 51, 52, 53, 61, 67,
Das Rheingold, 131, 287 81, 85, 86–87, 106
Die Walküre, 6, 13–14, 18, 50, 185, 281, 289 Wolzogen, Hans von, 38, 47
Siegfried Idyll, 262 Wüttemberg, Duke Albrecht of, 133
Siegfried, 13, 43, 193
Götterdämmerung, 247 Yeates, William Butler, 224
Parsifal, xi, xiii, 10–11, 12, 19, 22, 27, 30, 47, 84, 162, Youmans, Charles xiii, 20, 26, 44, 311
171, 175, 179
Wagner, Siegfried, 10, 61, 62, 63, 84 Zauberoper, 10
Waldteufel, Émile, 119, 120 Zednik, Heinz, 79
Wallerstein, Lothar, 259, 260, 280–281 Zeitopern, 3, 154, 183
Walter, Bruno, 221, 224 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 87
Wannsee Conference, 6, 275 Zohn, Harry, 208
war, 256 Zweig, Lotte (née Altmann), 297
Thirty Years’ War / Peace of Westphalia, 5, 241, Zweig, Stefan xi, xiv, 2, 4–5, 85, 195–196, 208,
242, 247, 251 222–237, 238, 239–240, 241, 242–243, 244, 245,
World War I, 4, 153, 162, 165, 184, 187, 195, 196, 246, 247, 249, 254, 257, 258, 259, 261, 273, 280,
225, 237, 240, 241, 251, 271, 275, 279 296, 297, 298
World War II, 5, 225, 238, 245, 272, 274–275, 295, Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von
314, 315 Rotterdam, 225
War of the Bouffons, 6 Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday),
Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 131 xi, 224

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ROUNDING WAGNER’S MOUNTAIN

bryan gilliam is Bass Professor in Humanities at Duke University, North Carolina. He is

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of ﬁgures page x

4 Intermezzo: Ariadne and her transformations 127

7 The politics of peace: Friedenstag and Daphne 238

of Bergsonian élan vital, was indiﬀerent to post-Wagnerian notions of redemption

MUSIC AND THEATER: YOUNG STRAUSS AND WAGNER

He continued that, having fully realized this discrepancy, he became a “full-ﬂedged

Figure 1.1 Hans von Bülow with Johannes Brahms

Indeed, the disproportional emphasis placed on Ritter in Meiningen has unfairly

MUNICH, WEIMAR, AND THE GENESIS OF GUNTRAM

As a musician, Strauss grew exponentially in Meiningen. He met Brahms as well as

Figure 1.2 Pauline de Ahna Strauss as Freihild

THE MEANINGS OF GUNTRAM

[Heiland, mein Herr

Figure 1.3 Alexander Ritter

THE MUSIC OF GUNTRAM

1.1a Guntram, opening

1.1b Lohengrin, opening

1.2a Brotherhood theme

1.2b Parsifal, Grail theme

1.3a Tristan quotation

1.3b Tristan, prelude

1.4a Tristan chord

1.4b Tristan, prelude

1.6a Guntram, love theme

1.6b Daphne transformed

journey from G to G♭ major. In the realm of G, it is an ethereal Neapolitan; in the

Act i Act ii Act iii

[Dein eisiger Blick

[Hier ruht her- u. tugendsame Jüngling Guntram –

Eulenspiegel. After considering a number of possible opera projects, including a staged

All warmth springs from woman,

FAILURE IN MUNICH: THE PATH TO STRAUSS’S FIRST

Understanding Feuersnot is unfathomable without the context of Munich, on two levels:

ERNST VON WOLZOGEN: STRAUSS’S FIRST LIBRETTIST

Figure 2.1 Ernst von Wolzogen

WAGNER THE ALMIGHTY

A SURFEIT OF STYLES: WORD, TONE, AND MUSICAL-DRAMATIC

2.1 Feuersnot, Diemut’s entrance

2.4 “Peasant dance”

2.5 Don Quixote, Dulcinea theme

2.6a Kunrad springs toward Diemut

2.6b Der Rosenkavalier, opening

2.7 Valhalla quotation

2.8 Drinking song

2.10a “Redemption” to B♭ major

FEUERSNOT’S COMPANION PIECE: A “RELIGIOUS” TURN

With the composition of Salome, Strauss created a compelling symmetry: if Zarathustra

NERVES AND MAYBUGS

[salome: Ich will deinen Mund küssen, Jochanaan!

“A PREACHER IN THE DESERT”: JOCHANAAN

2.12a Salome, Jochanaan theme

2.12b Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

WITH “FEET OF WHITE DOVES” AND THE VOICE

2.13 Jochanaan’s reference to Christ

2.14 Also sprach Zarathustra

2.15 Jochanaan’s prophecy

2.17a Salome as pure princess

2.17b Salome’s charm

2.17c Salome’s sexual passion

2.17d Salome’s desire to kiss Jochanaan