A Hero’s Life

The NJSO celebrates enigmatic composer Richard Strauss with a series of concerts and lectures.

By: Susan Van Dongen
   If ever a composer lived a life of contradictions, it was Richard Strauss (1864-1949).
   According to musicologist Joseph Horowitz, one of the greatest discrepancies was between Strauss’ nonchalant personality and his highly emotional music. If his favorite private activity was a low-key game of cards, his public passion was getting in the face of his critics until they vented their spleens in some of the most venal writing in the history of arts criticism. For example, one critic wrote that Strauss’ opera Salomé was an "exudation from (a) diseased and polluted will and imagination."

Pianist Vladimir Feltsman will take part in the NJSO’s celebration of Richard Strauss at the War Memorial in Trenton Jan. 11.

   Strauss also seemed to be born at the absolute wrong time. Both World Wars interrupted his ability to make a living. More tragically, the politics of 1930s Germany nudged him into Hitler’s political circle, where he held an esteemed position as president of the Musical Council — appointed by the infamous Joseph Goebbels, who headed the Nazi propaganda machine.
   Strauss blithely carried on the duties of his post, championing works by Jewish and avant-garde composers, which enraged his Nazi employers. Strauss was forced to resign his position and wrote a groveling letter to Hitler begging for another chance.
   When the war was over, Strauss didn’t seem to sit well with anyone — Jews and Gentiles, traditionalists and modernists — and is still one of the most misunderstood figures in 20th century musical history. Thanks to a fresh generation of scholars and critics, however, Strauss is being re-examined in a contemporary perspective.
   From Jan. 9-26, the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra’s fifth annual Winter Festival devotes three weeks to the life and works of this puzzling man, with Strauss: A Hero’s Life?. More than a dozen orchestral performances are planned, as well as intimate pre-concert recitals, lectures and a documentary film. The festival will be making stops at the Patriots Theater at the War Memorial in Trenton, NJ-PAC in Newark and the State Theatre in New Brunswick.
   One of the highlights of the festival will be on Jan. 19, when the NJSO presents Who Was Richard Strauss?, a special concert/symposium featuring music critic Alex Ross and historian Michael Kater. The event takes place at Rutgers University’s Robeson Center near NJ-PAC in Newark and will discuss a variety of topics including Strauss’ unfortunate entanglement in Nazi politics.
   Mr. Horowitz, Humanities Coordinator for the Winter Festival, will host the symposium. He says Strauss’ almost naive involvement with the Third Reich adds to the composer’s enigmatic biography.
   "Strauss had an agenda as a bureaucrat, but he also had these practical musical objectives," Mr. Horowitz says. "Unfortunately, they were not ideological Nazi objectives so he didn’t last very long in that position."
   One of works Strauss was commissioned to do by the Third Reich was the music for the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Mr. Horowitz speculates that this was done in the hopes that it would fulfill Strauss’ obligations to the regime. Perhaps then he could be left alone to promote his own musical goals, such as doing away with the mandatory singing of patriotic and military songs in schools.
   "Strauss had high-minded notions of how to improve the musical life of Germany, but the Nazis weren’t interested in this," Mr. Horowitz says. "They were more interested in using culture for political purposes."

Hermann Baumann will be featured on French horn at NJ-PAC in Newark Jan. 24-25.

   Mr. Horowitz says the Jan. 19 symposium will be a rare occasion to hear experts discuss this puzzling and difficult subject matter. Mr. Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, argues eloquently for the importance of Strauss in 20th century music history. Mr. Kater is the leading present-day historian of music during the Third Reich.
   "The symposium on the 19th is really a singular experience," Mr. Horowitz says. "It’s probably the most outstanding cultural excursion of the festival. You can hear the discussion in the afternoon, take a dinner break and then follow it up with the evening’s concert. This is a new initiative for us and we’re going to make it an annual event."
   Strauss would probably be pleased to know the symposium tackles some prickly issues. Mr. Horowitz says the outwardly unassuming man liked to provoke people.
   "This is one of the things that make Strauss so enigmatic," he says. "There’s this massive contradiction between Strauss’ phlegmatic personal identity and bourgeois private life and his earlier artistic aspirations, which were almost nihilistic.
   "I’m sure he was very gratified when critics reacted the way they did. He liked to shock them. Strauss wanted to shake things up."
   Many composers, artists and writers have used the tragedy of war to express their feelings about man’s inhumanity to man, but there is very little material in the Strauss repertoire that reflects his emotions about either war. There is biographical evidence, however, that Strauss was personally shattered by the bombings of Dresden, Munich and Vienna.
   "It was the destruction of the opera houses that really devastated him," Mr. Horowitz says. "Strauss thought of German culture as eternal, and it was the very bedrock of his identity. He felt his whole world was demolished, yet he only wrote one piece of music that seemed to take stock of this grief — Metamophosen, which was a requiem for German culture."
   Metamorphosen will be performed in Newark and New Brunswick in the Jan. 18-20 concerts, along with the rarely heard Symphonic Fragment from Joseph’s Legende. The pre-concert "preludes" on Jan. 10-13 feature piano compositions written when the Strauss was still in his teens. The festival will also present his mature, well-known works such as the Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, Ein Heldenleben and the Alpine Symphony, all in all, a complete representation of a remarkable career and a keen study of a mysterious man.
   "It’s very hard to place Richard Strauss," Mr. Horowitz says. "The puzzles and contradictions are almost limitless. We’re talking about a very subtle and unfathomable man."
   By the end of the Winter Festival, perhaps some of these mysteries will be solved.
The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra presents Strauss: A Hero’s Life?, the fifth annual Winter Festival,
Jan. 9-26. The festival opens at the Billy Johnson Auditorium of the Newark Museum, 49 Washington St., Newark,
Jan. 9, 7 p.m. with a reception, chamber music and historic films of Strauss conducting. Tickets cost $25.
Orchestral performances take place at the State Theatre, 15 Livingston Ave., New Brunswick, Jan. 10, 8 p.m.
and Jan. 20, 3 p.m.; Patriots Theater at the War Memorial, Barrack and Lafayette streets, Trenton, Jan. 11,
26, 8 p.m.; NJ-PAC, 1 Center St., Newark, Jan. 12, 8 p.m., Jan. 13, 3 p.m., Jan. 18-19, 8 p.m., Jan. 24, 7:30
p.m., Jan. 25, 8 p.m. Tickets cost $17-$65. A recital of lieder featuring soprano Meagan Miller will be held
at the Victoria Theater, NJ-PAC, 1 Center St., Newark, Jan. 14, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15. The Concert/Symposium
Who Was Richard Strauss? takes place at Rutgers University’s Robeson Hall, 350 Martin Luther King Blvd.,
Newark, Jan. 19, 2-5 p.m. Tickets cost $5. For information, call (800) 255-3476. On the Web: www.njsymphony.org