In Chapter 88 of Alexandre Dumas père's Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, the eponymous hero is in his box at the Opéra when he is challenged to a duel. He pretends to be surprised:

But the choice of the young Viscount Albert de Morcerf, Monte-Cristo's opponent, to issue his challenge at the Opéra is really no surprise at all: it is, in keeping with a tradition well established by the mid 1840s, the conventional, even inevitable place for interaction having so conspicuously to do with social rituals and their public performance. For Balzac, the most prolific exponent of that tradition, the physical structure of the Opéra auditorium was nothing less than a metaphor for Parisian society.

The year 1857 was a turning point in the short but sensational history of the roman-feuilleton: Eugène Sue, father of the genre and of a large and rapidly growing family of new readers of fiction, died, and the Revue de Paris was taken to court for outraging public and religious morals with Madame Bovary. The coincidence is suggestive: Flaubert's masterpiece is the tragedy of a woman whose flaw is that she has read too many novels like Sue's. In the words of Umberto Eco, it is the critical summing-up of a life lived in fiction-induced expectation of an ‘événement’ that would never happen. The novel itself is scarcely less direct. Madame Bovary senior expresses the problem with her daughter-in-law in especially down-to-earth terms:

In the field of opera, Paris was more obviously and more celebratedly the capital of the nineteenth century than in any other respect: the developments there between about 1820 and about 1920 are some of the most important in the entire history of the genre. A vigorous critical industry grew up around these developments, including the establishment of the first serious music periodicals and, arguably, of the professionalised discipline of music criticism itself. At the same time, the burgeoning new tradition of urban, industrial-revolution literature was reflecting more and more, and with fresh interpretative intensity, what had become an important part of the society novel: the social event par excellence, the soirée à l'Opéra. From the mid 1830s onwards, this literature often appeared initially in serialised form, in the feuilleton sections of a range of newspapers and in periodical publications, and often side by side not only with the real society columns whose dramatis personae, institutions and events it fictionalised, but also with genuine reviews of performances of current musical-theatrical works.

Thus a dense and sometimes confusing web of textual interpretation of musical events, incorporating a variety of professional concerns, degrees of competence and philosophical-aesthetic positions, began to support, and become enmeshed with, a new practice of repertory opera production whose warhorses remained in action in some cases for decades. The intended readership of all these forms of discourse about opera, as well as the audience of the works in question, was more or less the same.

Introduction

“Your manner has so much in common with mine; we were born for one another and are certain to do fi ne things together.” “You're Da Ponte and Scribe rolled into one.” Richard Strauss rejoiced in working with his longest-serving librettist, the Austrian man-of-letters Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and the feeling was mutual. Theirs, the most successful collaboration in twentieth-century opera, was predicated on mutual, professional respect, notwithstanding the natural conflict befi tting of two creative artists already giants in their respective fields. Elektra (1908), the first of seven operas that helped to redefine the genre for the new century, set the template for a series of works unique as much for the pellucidity of their scoring as for the sheer depth of their libretti. Each partner recognized their commonality as much as those qualities that made them essentially different: Hofmannsthal's sage-like insight into twentieth-century humanity perfectly matched Strauss's candor, penchant for parody, and ground-breaking stylistic pluralism.

One can well imagine Strauss's grief at the sudden death of his colleague, confidant, and friend on July 15, 1929. While preparing to inter his son, who had committed suicide two days previously, Hofmannsthal suffered a fatal stroke. Too upset to attend the funeral, Strauss sent his son Franz and daughter-in-law Alice to Vienna, conveying a moving letter of condolence to the poet’s widow, Gerty, with the following tribute: “Th is genius, this great poet, this sensitive collaborator, this unique talent! No musician ever found such a helper and supporter. No one will ever replace him for me or the world of music!”

With the words of a now forgotten journalist from the composer's own day and the more lasting condemnation by perhaps the twentieth century's most influential music and social critic, we are easily reminded of the image of Richard Strauss as a “money grubber,” which held for much of the last 100 years and only recently has begun to fade. Given a twentieth-century popular culture obsessed with every facet of the lives of celebrities, especially professional athletes, actors, and musicians, it is not surprising that so many people in Strauss's day were curious to know the details of his finances. For several decades – from the mid 1890s to at least the 1920s – he was the undisputed leading figure in serious music for Europe and America. With his audacious tone poems and scandalous operas, he and his music commanded headlines in ways that later composers of art music could only envy.

A longer view of history reveals, however, that Strauss is hardly the first significant composer to be placed in a less-than-flattering light where music and money were connected. In the late Middle Ages, there is evidence of priest-composers angling for multiple benefices, with little work to support themselves. In the Renaissance, Josquin des Prez was known for both his high fees and his lack of deference to his employer's wishes.

The years from the completion of his first opera Guntram in 1893 to that of Salome in 1905 were pivotal to the career and aesthetic development of Richard Strauss: his operatic fortunes changed from failure to success, his creative focus from tone poem to opera, his philosophical allegiance from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, and his aesthetic orientation from relative epigonism to assertive independence. The thread that connects these three dissimilar works is their implicit or explicit critique of Wagner. During the final decades of the nineteenth century Wagner's musical style and dramatic themes became the baseline against which all new works were measured, and critics typically referred to Wagner's successors as “epigones” because of their uninspired imitation of the older master. The idealistic, quasi-Schopenhauerian themes of Wagner's works – especially redemption through love, Christian compassion, renunciation, and physical versus ideal love – appeared with limited variations and in diluted or superficial form in the serious operas of Strauss's most prominent colleagues, such as Wilhelm Kienzl (1857–1941), Felix Weingartner (1863–1942), Eugen d'Albert (1864–1932), Max von Schillings (1868–1933), and Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949). In this feebly obedient context Strauss's early operas stand out as radical documents. Although Strauss identified himself as a Wagnerian, this adherence became limited to musical style and principles: a huge, colorful, polyphonic, and dominant orchestra; an intricate web of leitmotifs; chromaticism; and placing drama above purely musical concerns.

The collaboration between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal was one of the greatest composer–librettist relationships of all time, spanning nearly three decades until the poet's untimely death in July, 1929. It was an artistic association at the level of Verdi–Boito or Mozart–Da Ponte but, unlike these two earlier librettists, Hofmannsthal had a successful and independent career as a writer of some of Austria's finest lyric poetry, and his plays remain in the repertoire of German-speaking theater. Before setting Hofmannsthal's Elektra to music, Strauss had worked with various authors and various texts (those by himself, Ernst von Wolzogen, and Oscar Wilde). But with Hofmannsthal he collaborated on six operas, a series interrupted only by Intermezzo (1924). The partnership with Hofmannsthal also initiated an association with Austrians for all his future operatic collaborations: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Gregor, and Clemens Krauss.

Much has been made of the differences between Strauss and Hofmannsthal, the German and the Austrian, and these contrasts in personality, literary tastes, and artistic views are quite true. The famous photograph taken by Strauss's son, Franz, is one of two men standing together outside the composer's villa in Garmisch around the time of Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss, wearing walking breeches, with a cigarette in his left hand and a walking stick in his right, looks directly into the camera, while Hofmannsthal – nearly a head shorter – stands holding a horizontal umbrella, wearing a hat covering his eyes, awkwardly staring away from the camera in the direction of Strauss.

“The Mannheim orchestra was very struck and astounded by the leap from my F minor Symphony to Macbeth,” reported Strauss after a rehearsal of the latter work in January, 1889. This astonishment is not to be wondered at: there is a profound stylistic gulf between the staid Classicism of Strauss's Second Symphony (which the orchestra performed under the composer's direction in October, 1885) and his first tone poem with its corrosive dissonances, structural freedoms, and, most obviously, its overt reference to extra-musical subject matter. In the interim, Strauss had been converted to a ‘totally new way” of composing, one inspired by Liszt and Wagner. While some of his earlier works display high levels of technical assurance, it was not until the first cycle of tone poems – Macbeth (1887–8, rev. 1891), Don Juan (1888), and Tod und Verklärung (1888–9) – that Strauss found a fully original voice. These three works mark the beginnings of an interest in poetic music that would dominate his output until the final decade of his life and would earn him widespread fame, even notoriety, throughout the German-speaking lands and beyond.

The heir to Liszt and Wagner

When Strauss took up his first professional engagement as assistant conductor to the gifted if irascible Hans von Bülow in October, 1885, he could not have foreseen how significantly this position would change his life. At that time, Strauss was in the grips of what he later called his Brahmsschwärmerei, a juvenile passion for Brahms, and shortly aft er arriving at Meiningen he met his idol, who encouraged him and gave him valuable advice. Yet this was not the encounter that Strauss would later describe as the “greatest event of the winter in Meiningen.”

Born in Munich on June 11, 1864, Richard Strauss entered the world at a crucial time of change for the political and cultural environment in which he would develop as person and musician: three months earlier, Ludwig II had acceded to power over the Kingdom of Bavaria, while almost six weeks earlier, Richard Wagner had first arrived in Munich under the new king's aegis. That these related events did not have an immediate impact on Strauss in his earliest years does not diminish their ultimate real and symbolic significance for his life and career: he emerged as musician within a city where the revolution in music was a matter of public debate, especially to the extent that its progenitor Wagner directly influenced the monarch and indirectly had an impact on affairs of state.

Character of the city

However, of all German-speaking major cities, Munich may have been the least suited for artistic upheaval, given the nature of its institutions and the character of its citizens. In his study Pleasure Wars, Peter Gay paints a picture of a Munich that was hopelessly polarized, between the cultural offerings sponsored by the ruling Wittelsbachs and the middle class that preferred popular types of entertainment.

Not long ago, the idea of devoting an essay to Richard Strauss's influence on twentieth-century composition might have seemed absurd. From around 1918 onwards, the erstwhile “leader of the moderns” and “chief of the avant-garde” was widely ridiculed as a Romantic relic, whose undoubted native talent had been tainted by poor taste or unprincipled commercialism. Charles Ives identified Strauss with “the comfort of a woman who takes more pleasure in the fit of fashionable clothes than in a healthy body.” Aaron Copland described Strauss's tone poems as “the offspring of an exhausted parentage … the final manifestation of a dying world.” Igor Stravinsky, in conversation with Robert Craft in the late 1950s, issued an incomparably withering putdown: “I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musical substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a musician today.” Stravinsky went on: “I am glad that young musicians today have come to appreciate the lyric gift in the songs of the composer Strauss despised, and who is more significant in our music than he is: Gustav Mahler.” Strauss in no way despised Mahler, but the point holds. Composers at various points on the stylistic spectrum, from Copland and Britten to Boulez and Berio, hailed Mahler, not Strauss, as the fin-de-siècle prophet of modernity.

Writing in 1931, music critic Max Steinitzer opined, “Under the general title ‘The Unknown Richard Strauss,’ radio broadcasters … would find enough rich and rewarding material for an hour of piano music, as well as lieder, chamber, orchestral, and choral music.” Steinitzer had been a reliable advocate for Strauss, whose stature by the 1930s was downgraded from that of a pioneer of modernism to a figurehead for Germany's late-Romantic musical past. Steinitzer found in the margins of this composer's oeuvre unfamiliar works of surprising variety that stood to off er fresh insights on him – specifically, music from the early part of Strauss's career, before his international emergence with the tone poems Don Juan (1888) and Tod und Verklärung (1888–9).

Steinitzer's proposed radio program never hit the airwaves, and for the most part the diverse music of Strauss's youth and young adulthood has remained little known. Several factors account for the obscurity of Strauss's early works. First, many of them were not published until the last quarter of the twentieth century, and hence were rarely performed or recorded. (Of course, the fact that there were few performances and recordings of this music placed little demand on its publication.) Second, the truism that Strauss's compositions prior to his tone poems were but a training ground is not unfounded: clearly, the young composer cycled through genres, forms, and styles rather than settling into an individual voice.

Introduction: music about music

Though he occupies a modest corner of the pantheon, Richard Strauss produced what is arguably the most familiar ninety seconds of European music: the dazzling, radiant sunrise of Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), an iconic sound-tableau as deeply embedded in today's popular consciousness as the main theme of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Endlessly appropriated by artists high and low, this music sears itself instantly into the memory, with a thrilling brand of high-definition tone-painting calculated for maximum emotional and visual effect. Strauss would create a multitude of compelling musical illustrations during his seven-decade career, from the exquisite moonlight of “Die Nacht,” Op. 10, No. 3 (1885) to the melancholy lark-song of “Im Abendrot” (1948). But in Zarathustra he spoke with a transcendent power not easily duplicated, by himself or anyone else.

Sensitive listeners will remark that this passage is not just a representation of nature in music, but a commentary on the nature of music. Beneath its masterful cinematography Strauss's exordium surveys all the technical elements of the art: the range of audible sound, the overtone series, the major and minor modes, the basic principles of functional harmony, and the western instrumentarium. Moreover, it pays homage to earlier musical creation-scenes, with clear echoes of Beethoven's Ninth, Wagner's Das Rheingold, Haydn's Die Schöpfung (The Creation), and any number of Bruckner symphonies.