Richard Strauss and Toscanini’s Hat

Strauss’ last opera, Capriccio, was composed in Germany in 1940 and 1941, and received its first performance in Munich in October, 1942.

In the current production of the Met, Renée Fleming sings the role Countess Madeleine. Introducing the opera to the world-wide audience by satellite last Saturday, she said no one knows what went on in Strauss’ mind when he wrote it. She was referring to Strauss’ position in Nazi Germany and to the conspicuous lack of connection between the opera’s content and the world in which it was composed.

That, of course, is true. No one knows to what extent Germany’s leading composer was burdened by guilt for having yielded to flattering Nazi leaders, especially to Goebbels, and for having accepted, in 1933 when they came to power, the directorship of the Third Reich’s Reichskulturkammer. He was sixty-eight at the time. Toscanini was outraged. “To Richard Strauss, the composer, I take off my hat,” he said. “To Richard Strauss, the man, I put it on again.” In 1936, Strauss composed a hymn for the Olympic Games.

He had always been a risk-taker – Salome (1905) is a shocker, even today. At the same time, he was a conservative. In 1919, he sensed that post-revolutionary Germany was going to be uncongenial to him and accepted the position of director of the Hofoper in Vienna, not far from his native Bavaria. Though he had been a leader of the rebellious avant garde at the turn of the century, much influenced by Nietzsche, he had felt at home in imperial Germany and been on good terms with the Kaiser. His basic attitude was expressed in his early opera, Guntram (1894), which criticized the “beautiful dream of liberal humanity.” “The laws of my mind determine my philosophy of life,” the hero believed. Ayn Rand could not have said it better. But, like Nietzsche, he had never been a German nationalist. His scope was European.

So what went on in his mind in 1940 and 1941 while the Nazis seemed to be winning the war, when he composed Capriccio, already the subject of the opera Prima la Musica e Poi Le Parole by Mozart’s much maligned antagonist Antonio Salieri? His old Jewish friend and librettist, Stefan Zweig, who had given him the idea, was in exile. As was Max Reinhardt, the uniquely inventive director of his Rosenkavalier in 1911, clearly the model of La Roche, a leading character in Capriccio.

If Strauss wasn’t burdened by guilt, he should have been. Decency demanded that he should have gone into exile with Stefan Zweig and Max Reinhardt. Unlike them, he was a world celebrity and would have been received in any musical capital with honours.

But he chose to stay in Germany, in the firm belief that he was above politics.

So what was he thinking when he composed the charming, elegant, stylish chamber-opera Capriccio, a musical conversation-piece that took place in a château in Paris and dealt with the question of what was more important in opera – the words or the music, a question that could not be more remote from the life-and-death questions uppermost in everybody else’s mind at the time? Composing it cannot be called an act of defiance – that would have been out of character. But it was a political gesture nevertheless. He must have wanted to suggest sotto voce, without offending anybody: Art, Beauty and European Civilization are treasures infinitely more valuable than Nazi victories.

Toscanini’s hat remained firmly on his head. One does not have to be a decent human being to create beautiful music. The Italian composer of madrigals, Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613), the Prince of Venosa, murdered his wife and her lover when he caught them in flagrante in bed. Afterward, he left their mutilated bodies in front of the palace for all to see.

His madrigals were as beautiful as Capriccio.

The portrait of Richard Strauss is by Max Liebermann.