The Proud Tower (62 page)

Rehearsals of the new opera took place in an atmosphere of uproar; everything was larger, noisier, more violent than life. The score called for the biggest orchestra yet, sixty-two strings including eight bass cellos, forty-five winds including six bass trumpets and a contra-bass tuba, six to eight kettledrums as well as a bass drum, in all a total of about one hundred and twenty. The opera was performed in a single act lasting two hours without intermission with Electra on stage the entire time. Her part was longer than Brünhilde’s in all of
The Ring
put together and her vocal intervals were considered “unsingable.” The role of Clytemnestra was created by Mme Schumann-Heink, who, finding it “such a desperate one that it nearly killed me,” never sang it again. In places where she was required to sing over the orchestra at fortissimo, Strauss, listening from the stalls, would scream over the din and crash, “Louder, louder, I say! I can still hear the Heink’s voice!”

For a legendary drama set in 1500
B.C.
he wanted everything to be “exact and realistic,” insisting on real sheep and bulls for Clytemnestra’s sacrifice. “
Gott in Himmel!
Strauss, are you mad?” howled the stage director in terror. “Imagine the cost! And the danger! What will they do when your violent music begins?” They would stampede, crash into the orchestra, kill the musicians, even wreck valuable instruments. Strauss was adamant. Von Schuch was called in to add his protest. Only after terrific arguments was Strauss persuaded to yield on the bulls and be content with sheep. Equally realistic in his music, he virtually took the role of words away from von Hofmannsthal. The tinkling of Clytemnestra’s bracelets is heard in the percussion; when Chrysothemis speaks of a stormy night the storm rages in the orchestra; when the beasts are driven to sacrifice the noise of their hoofs makes the listener want to get out of the way; when the slippery pool of blood is described the orchestra gives a picture of it. The composer’s mastery of his technical resources seemed superhuman and his breaking of musical laws more reckless than ever. As he put it, “I went to the uttermost limits of harmony and psychic polyphony and of the receptive capacity of present day ears.”

When the evening came for the premiere on January 25, 1909, an international audience was assembled including opera directors from every country on the continent and, according to a possibly overwhelmed reporter, “200 distinguished critics.” “All Europe is here,” the hotel porter said proudly to Hermann Bahr, who came from Vienna.

Without overture or prelude the curtain rose as the orchestra thundered out Agamemnon’s theme like the hammer of doom pounding on the great lion gate of Mycenae. No opera had ever opened so stunningly before. When the curtain fell after two hours of demonic intensity the audience sat for some seconds in stupefied silence until the “Straussianer” recovered and began to applaud. An opposition group hissed but most of the audience was too cowed to do anything until the claque won the upper hand and wrung curtain calls and ultimately cheers for the composer. The brutality of the libretto and the outrages upon musical form provoked the usual controversy. To some the music of
Elektra
seemed no longer music. “Indeed, many serious minded people consider Richard Strauss insane,” wrote one benumbed listener. But on second hearing and at further performances which followed in Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt within four weeks of the premiere, the mastery of Strauss’s score in conveying dread and impending horror leading up to the final murder was undeniable.

Listening to the music Hermann Bahr felt it expressed something sinister about the present time, a pride born of limitless power, a defiance of order “lured back toward chaos,” and a yearning in Chrysothemis for some simple tranquil feeling. Though deeply disturbed he felt it had been a “marvelous evening” and returned to Vienna excited and uplifted. This was what Nietzsche had prescribed.

When it reached London a year later, in February, 1910, notoriety preceded it and musical warfare raged before a note had been heard. Strauss came himself to conduct two performances at a fee of £200 for each. The
Daily Mail
critic was struck by the sobriety of his gestures. “A tall pale man with smooth brow” whose steel-blue eyes flashed from time to time at singers or musicians, he conducted with head immobile and elbows as if riveted to his body. “He seemed a mathematician writing a formula on a blackboard neatly with supreme knowledge.” After the performance
The Times
found the opera “unsurpassed for sheer hideousness in the whole of operatic literature,” while the
Daily Telegraph
reported that “Covent Garden had never previously witnessed a scene of such unfettered enthusiasm.” The rising controversy created a public demand that required Beecham to extend his season. From his point of view it was, excepting the death of King Edward VII some months later, “the most discussed event of the year.” The truth was that by this time it could no longer be heard outside Germany without political overtones. George Bernard Shaw, believing that anti-German hysteria was responsible for the attacks on
Elektra
, leaned backward to the opposite extreme: In an article in the
Nation
he wrote that if once he could have said that “the case against the fools and the money changers who are trying to drive us into war with Germany consists in the single word, Beethoven, today I should say with equal confidence, Strauss.” He called
Elektra
“the highest achievement of the highest art” and its performance “a historic moment in the history of art in England such as may not occur again in our lifetime.”

Strauss recognized that in the style of
Salome
and
Elektra
he had gone as far as he could go. Suddenly, as after
Heldenleben
, having enough of the grand manner, he decided to give the public a comic opera for a change, in the style of Mozart’s
Marriage of Figaro
, to prove that Strauss could do anything. As librettist Hofmannsthal approved and early in 1909 was at work drafting an “entirely original” scenario set in Eighteenth-Century Vienna, “full of burlesque situations and characters” with opportunity for lyrical melody and humor. On receiving the opening scene, Strauss found it delightful and replied, “It will set itself to music like oil and melted butter.” Collaborating by correspondence through 1909 and the first half of 1910, librettist and composer constructed a new opera to be called
Der Rosenkavalier.

The juvenile lead was to be sung by a woman dressed as a man.
Hosenrolle
(trouser parts) for women were a convention which Mozart himself had used for Cherubino but the Hofmannsthal-Strauss concept of Octavian was a rather different matter, not devoid of a desire to titillate. When Strauss’s prelude to the opera describes with characteristic realism the pleasures of the sex act and the curtain rises on the Marschallin and her young lover still in bed, the discovery that both are women was likely to produce in the audience a peculiar sensation of which the authors were certainly aware. The idea was originally Hofmannsthal’s. Strauss later claimed that the device was necessary because no man young enough to sing Octavian would have had the experience necessary to be an accomplished actor. “Besides,” he added more frankly, “writing for three sopranos was a challenge.” He met it, especially when the three sing together in the last act, with exquisite song, In
Elektra
the men’s parts had been of small account and in
Rosenkavalier
the only male part was that of a coarse lecher who appears either as unpleasant or ridiculous. Baron Ochs represented the German idea of the comic. As Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal during the composition, he missed “a genuinely comic situation—everything is merely amusing but not comic.” He wanted the audience to laugh; “Laugh! not just smile or grin.”

The inevitable animals made their appearance in the form of a dog, a monkey and a parrot. When Strauss demanded from Hofmannsthal a love scene between Sophie and Octavian to which he could write a duet “much more passionate,… as it reads now it is too tame, too mannered and timid,” Hofmannsthal replied pettishly that these two young creatures “have nothing of the Valkyrie or Tristan and Isolde about them” and he wished to avoid at all costs having them “burst into a kind of Wagnerian erotic screaming.” This was hardly tactful and incompatibilities of temperament between composer and librettist were becoming evident. A touch of Tristan in fact appeared, not to mention some borrowing from Mozart and even from Johann Strauss. With bland anachronism a Viennese waltz, unknown in the Eighteenth Century, was a main theme.

By April, 1910, the full score of Act II was already at the printer before Strauss had received the libretto for Act III. Its situations contrived for the Baron’s embarrassment turned out to have been adapted by von Hofmannsthal from
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, with the difference that, unlike Falstaff, Ochs remained unrelievedly unlikable. By the end of summer the opera was finished and on January 26, 1911, two years after
Elektra, Rosenkavalier
had its premier at Dresden. It was rarely to be off the opera stage thereafter. Composer and librettist endowed it with all the shimmer of super-civilized Vienna. It glistened like the silver rose that was its symbol. All Strauss’s skill, resourcefulness and audacity—and his duality—were in the score. His highest gift of musical expressiveness could convey the bustle of an Eighteenth-Century levee, the delicious discovery of young love, the comic terror of the duel, the sweet sadness of the Marschallin’s renunciation, and at the same time be used for coarse jokes and bottom-pinching humor. He gave the world a silver rose, beautiful, glittering and tarnished.

In 1911 Strauss was at the peak of the musical world, the most famous composer alive, “one of those,” wrote a biographer of musicians, Richard Specht, “without whom we can no longer imagine our spiritual life.” Although he and Hofmannsthal set to work at once on another opera,
Ariadne auf Naxos
, Strauss had reached his own peak and the palm was already passing.

In 1908 in Paris the Russian Ballet company of Sergei Diaghilev burst like a gorgeous tropical bird upon the Western world. Its season was a triumph of wild throbbing exotic splendor, another “flash of lightning out of the North.” Instead of the tired routines of classical ballet it brought fresh excellence of music by contemporary Russian composers, new librettos, imaginative choreography and brilliant modern stage design, all assembled like a bed of jewels to set off a blaze of dancing that was virile and superb. The male dancer was the star, no longer a mere
porteur
to lift the ballerina, but a wind who brought vitality and zest sweeping onto the stage. Above all the rest was one, Vaslav Nijinsky. When he appeared with an astonishing leap into the air and seemed almost to pause there, people felt the excitement of perfection and knew they were seeing the greatest
ballon
dancer who ever lived. He was an angel, a genius, an Apollo of motion. He took possession of all hearts. The whole ensemble took Paris by storm. Devotees predicted the downfall of opera. “It was as if,” wrote the Comtesse de Noailles, “something new had been added to the creation of the world on its seventh day.”

New movements in the arts were erupting everywhere. At the Salon d’Automne in 1905 and 1906 the
Fauves
(Wild Beasts) led by Matisse exhibited in riotous color and distorted line their credo of painting independent of nature. In 1907–8 Picasso and Braque, discovering essential reality in geometrical forms, created Cubism. In its terms Léger celebrated the machine and a train of other artists followed. In Germany the new idea broke out in a school of Expressionists who searched for emotional impact through exaggeration or distortion of nature. Two Americans broke old molds: Frank Lloyd Wright at home and Isadora Duncan, who, touring Europe in the years 1904–8, introduced emotion into the dance. Rodin, speaking for his own métier but voicing a new goal for all the arts, had already said, “Classical sculpture sought the logic of the human body; I seek its psychology.” Seeking it too, Marcel Proust in 1906 shut himself up in a cork-lined room to embark upon
Remembrance of Things Past.
Thomas Mann took up the search in
Death in Venice.
In Bloomsbury, Lytton Strachey prepared a new kind of biography. The Moscow Art Theatre demonstrated a new kind of acting. The Irish Renaissance flowered in Yeats and in J. M. Synge, who in
Riders to the Sea
and
The Playboy of the Western World
proved himself the only writer since Shakespeare to produce an equally fine tragedy and comedy. The time vibrated with a search for new forms and new realms. When on July 25, 1909, Blériot flew the Channel, confirming what the Wrights had begun, he seemed to mark a wiping out of frontiers, and everyone in Europe felt in his triumph “a soaring of feelings no less wonderful than that of the planes.”

All the fever and fecundity of the hour seemed captured by the Russian Ballet. That it should come out of Imperial Russia, considered at once barbaric and decrepit, was as surprising as had been the summons to disarmament by the Czar. A great interest in things Russian aroused by the Franco-Russian Alliance and the Exposition of 1900 had inspired the enterprising Diaghilev to bring an exhibition of Russian art to Paris in 1906. Paintings and sculpture, ikons, priestly brocades and the jeweled marvels of Fabergé lent by the Imperial and private collections and by museums filled twelve rooms under the patronage of the Grand Duke Vladimir, Ambassador Izvolsky of Russia and Mme Greffulhe. The next year Diaghilev brought Russian music in a series of dazzling concerts with Rimsky-Korsakov conducting his own work, Rachmaninoff playing his own piano concerto, Josef Hofmann playing a concerto by Scriabine, and the magnificent basso Chaliapin singing excerpts from Borodin’s
Prince Igor
and Moussorgsky’s
Boris Godunov.
Building on the enthusiastic welcome, Diaghilev planned a greater triumph in a season of ballet and Russian opera. The Imperial Russian Ballet lent its leading artists, Anna Pavlova, Nijinsky, Adolph Bolm and Tamara Karsavina, with Michel Fokine as choreographer. For stage design and costumes, Diaghilev obtained the gorgeous and barbaric talent of Léon Bakst, supplermented by outstanding painters, Soudeikine, Roerich, Alexandre Benois and others. The sensation of the first season was
Cleopatra
, whose music was a melange from at least five Russian composers. Russian themes mingled with Egyptian and Persian and even the original sorceress of the Nile could not have matched the ravishing beauty and figure of Ida Rubinstein borne on a palanquin surrounded by a whirling bacchanal of veils and rose leaves arranged to conceal the fact that as a dancer she was as yet barely trained. Paris found her almost “too beautiful, like strong perfume.”