The Proud Tower (57 page)

Art, he announced, should represent the Ideal. “To us Germans great ideals, lost to other peoples, have become permanent possessions” which “only the German people” can preserve. He cited the educational effect of art upon the lower classes, who after a hard working day could be lifted out of themselves by contemplation of beauty and the Ideal. But, he sternly warned, “when art descends into the gutter as so often nowadays, choosing to represent misery as even more unlovely than it is already,” then art “sins against the German people.” As the country’s ruler he felt deeply hurt when the masters of art “do not with sufficient energy oppose such tendencies.”

The theatre too, he explained in 1898, should contribute to culture of the soul, elevate morals and “inculcate respect for the highest traditions of our German Fatherland.” So that the Royal Theatre, which he invariably referred to as “my theatre,” should perform this function, he arranged a series of his favorite historical dramas for working-class attendance at suitable prices. He was a stickler for accuracy of detail in scenery and costumes and, for a ballet-pantomime on Sardanapalus, ransacked the museums of the world for information on Assyrian chariots.

He liked to attend and even personally direct rehearsals at the Royal Opera and Royal Theatre. Driving up in his Imperial black and yellow motorcar, he would establish himself at a big business-like table in the auditorium, furnished with a pile of paper and array of pencils. An aide in uniform stood alongside and held up his hand whenever the Kaiser signed to him, whereupon the performance halted, the Kaiser with gestures explained what improvements he wanted, and the actors tried again. He referred to the actors as “
meine Schauspieler
,” and once when one of them, Max Pohl, was suddenly taken ill, he said to an acquaintance, “Fancy, my Pohl had a seizure yesterday.” The acquaintance, thinking he meant a pet dog who had had a fit, commiserated, “Ach, the poor brute.”

In music the Kaiser’s tastes were naturally conservative. He liked Bach, the greatest of all, and Handel. As regards opera, to which he was devoted if it was German, he would say, “Gluck is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.” At performances he stayed to the end and frequently commanded concerts at the Palace, whose programs he arranged himself and whose rehearsals he attended, expecting them to have been rehearsed previously and everything to run smoothly. On a trip to Norway he summoned Grieg to an audience at the German Legation and having assembled an orchestra of forty players, placed two chairs in front for himself and the composer, who was requested to conduct the
Peer Gynt Suite.
During the music the Kaiser continually corrected the composer’s tempi and expression and swayed his body in “oriental movements” in time to Anitra’s dance which “quite electrified him.” Next day the whole performance was repeated by a full orchestra on board the Imperial yacht,
Hohenzollern.

Admiration for the Kaiser during the early part of his reign was a national cult. After the prolonged rule of his grandfather, Wilhelm I, followed by the painful three months’ reign of a dying man, the advent of a young and vigorous monarch who obviously relished his role and played up to the glamour of a king was welcomed by the nation. His flashing eye and martial attitudes, his heroic poses enhanced by all that brilliant dress and stirring music could add, thrilled his subjects. Young men went to the court hairdresser to have their moustaches turned up in points by a special curling device; officers and bureaucrats practiced flashing their eyes; employers addressed their workers in the Kaiser’s most dynamic style, as did Diederich, title character of Heinrich Mann’s harsh satire of Wilhelmine Germany,
Der Unterthan
(The Loyal Subject): “I have taken the rudder into my own hands,” he says on inheriting the family factory. “My course is set straight and I am guiding you to glorious times. Those who wish to help me are heartily welcome; whoever opposes me I will smash. There is only one master here and I am he. I am responsible only to God and my own conscience. You can always count on my fatherly benevolence but revolutionary sentiments will be shattered against my unbending will.” The workers stare at him dumb with amazement and his assembled family with awe and respect.

The first half of the Kaiser’s reign which began in 1888 coincided with the first flush of the Nietzschean cult. The monarch’s ceaseless activity in every kind of endeavor made him seem to be the universal man, as if, rightfully in Germany, crowning the century of her greatest development,
Übermensch
had appeared, where else but at the head of the nation. Hero-worship was the natural consequence. Diederich in the novel sees the Kaiser for the first time at the head of a mounted squadron as he rides out with a face of “stony seriousness” to meet a workers’ demonstration at the Brandenburger Tor. Transported by loyalty, the workers, who have been shouting “Bread! Work!” now wave their hats and cry, “Follow him! Follow the Emperor!” Running alongside, Diederich stumbles and sits down violently in a puddle with his legs in the air, splashed with muddy water. The Kaiser, catching sight of him, slaps his thigh and says to his aide with a laugh, “There’s a royalist for you; there’s a loyal subject!” Diederich stares after him “from the depths of his puddle, open-mouthed.”

In Diederich, who is always brutalizing someone beneath him while sucking up to someone above him, Mann savagely portrayed one aspect of his countrymen—the servility which was the other side of the bully. The banker Edgar Speyer, returning to his birthplace in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1886 after twenty-seven years in England, found that three victorious wars and the establishment of Empire had created a changed atmosphere in Germany that was “intolerable” to him. German nationalism had replaced German liberalism. Great prosperity and self-satisfaction acted, it seemed to him, like a narcotic on the people, leaving them content to forego their liberty under a rampant militarism and a servility to Army and Kaiser that were “unbelievable.” University professors who in his youth had been leaders of liberalism “now kowtowed to the authorities in the most servile manner.” Oppressed, Speyer gave up after five years and returned to England.

What Speyer observed, Mommsen attempted to explain. “Bismarck has broken the nation’s backbone,” he wrote in 1886. “The injury done by the Bismarck era is infinitely greater than its benefits.… The subjugation of the German personality, of the German mind, was a misfortune that cannot be undone.” What Mommsen failed to say was that Bismarck could not have succeeded against the German grain.

In the nineties, as a convinced believer in
Übermensch
, Strauss shared the general admiration for the Kaiser. Personal experience as conductor of the Berlin Royal Opera modified it. After conducting a performance of Weber’s tuneful
Der Freischütz
, one of the Kaiser’s favorites, he was summoned to the Imperial presence. “So, you are another of these modern composers,” stated the Kaiser. Strauss bowed. Mentioning a contemporary, Schillings, whose work he had heard, the Kaiser said, “It was detestable; there isn’t an ounce of melody.” Strauss bowed and suggested there was melody but often hidden behind the polyphony. The Kaiser frowned and pronounced, “You are one of the worst.” Strauss this time merely bowed. “All modern music is worthless,” repeated the royal critic, “there isn’t an ounce of melody in it.” Strauss bowed. “I prefer
Freischütz
,” stated the Kaiser firmly. Strauss deferred. “Your Majesty, I also prefer
Freischütz
,” he replied.

If the Kaiser was not the hero he had supposed, Strauss was not long in finding a better one—himself. This seemed a natural subject for his next major work, unbashfully entitled
Ein Heldenleben
(A Hero’s Life). Since
Aus Italien
his subjects had never been moods or pictures, sunken cathedrals or pastoral scenes, but always Man: Man in struggle and search, seeking the meaning of existence, contending against his enemies and against his own passions, engaged in the three great adventures: battle, love and death. Macbeth, Don Juan, the nameless hero of
Tod und Verklärung.
Till, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, were all voyagers on the soul’s journey. A portrait of the artist now joined their company.

Strauss’s personal experience of the two first of the three great adventures had been adequate if not epic. He had had battles with critics which left wounds, and in 1894 he had married. Pauline de Ahna, whom he met when he was twenty-three, was the daughter of a retired General and amateur baritone who gave local recitals of Wagnerian excerpts. Following his lead, the daughter had studied singing at the Munich Academy but had made little progress professionally until Strauss fell in love with her and combined instruction with courtship so effectively that in two years he introduced her to the Weimar Opera in leading soprano roles. She sang Elsa in
Lohengrin
, Pamina in
The Magic Flute
, Beethoven’s Fidelio and the heroine of Strauss’s own opera
Guntram.
Once, when rehearsing Elisabeth in
Tannhäuser
, she fell into an argument with him over tempo, and shrieking “frightful insults,” threw the score at his head and rushed off to her dressing room. Strauss followed and members of the orchestra listened in awe to sounds of feminine rage audible through the closed door, followed by prolonged silence. Wondering which of the two, conductor or prima donna, might have killed the other, a delegation of trembling players knocked on the door and when Strauss opened it the spokesman stammered that he and his colleagues, shocked by the soprano’s behavior, felt they owed it to the honored Herr Kapellmeister to refuse in future to play in any opera in which she had a role. “That distresses me,” Strauss replied, smiling, “as I have just become engaged to Fräulein de Anna.”

The pattern of this occasion was retained in marriage. The wife shrieked, the husband smiled and evidently enjoyed being bullied. At parties Frau Strauss did not permit him to dance with other ladies. At home she practiced housewifery with “ruthless fanaticism,” requiring her husband to wipe his feet on three different doormats before entering his own house. Every guest of no matter what age or rank was greeted by the order, “Wipe your feet.” Floors were as clean as table tops and servants who failed to leave the contents of linen closets in mathematically perfect rows were pursued by the inevitable shrieks of wrath. Enthusiastically submitting to, as well as inflicting, punishment, Frau Strauss engaged the daily services of a masseuse of the violent school during whose visits Strauss was obliged to go for a walk to avoid hearing the tortured screams of his wife. She bore him one child, a son, Franz, born in 1897, who at once expressed the family tradition of
molto con brio
by “screaming like hell,” according to a proud report to the child’s grandparents.

When to her husband’s accompaniment Frau Strauss sang his songs, which usually ended with a long coda on the piano, she flourished a large chiffon handkerchief which she would fling down with a gesture at the end to keep the audience’s eyes on her instead of on the pianist. To guests she would explain in detail, while Strauss listened with an indulgent smile, how and why her marriage was a shocking
mésalliance.
She should have married that dashing young Hussar; now she was tied to a man whose music was not even comparable to Massenet’s. During a visit to London when Strauss conducted
Heldenleben
and a toast was proposed in his honor at a dinner at the Speyers’, his wife excitedly interrupted, “No, no!”—pointing to herself—“no, no! to Strauss
de Ahna
.” Strauss merely laughed and seemed to an observer to enjoy his wife’s claim of precedence.

She was responsible for his orderly habits. His worktable was a model of neatness, with sketches and notebooks arranged, filed and indexed as scrupulously as the records of a law firm. His handwriting was exquisitely clear and his scores “miracles of calligraphy,” with hardly an erasure or correction. His songs might be dashed off at odd moments, sometimes during the intervals of concerts or operas when he was conducting, but his longer pieces were composed only at his summer home, first at Marquardstein in Upper Bavaria, later at his second home near Garmisch. Here in his studio he worked regularly from breakfast to lunch and often, or so he told an interviewer, through the afternoon and evening until one or two o’clock in the morning. He enjoyed writing his incredibly intricate scores, often so complicated in their excessive subdivision of groups and interweaving of melodies that the theme was beyond the reach of the listener’s ear. Discernible to the eye of an expert score-reader who would marvel at the mathematical ingenuity of the scheme, such music was called
Augenmusik
(eye music) by the Germans. When complimented on his skill Strauss said it was nothing compared to that of a new young man in Vienna, Arnold Schönberg, who required sixty-five staves for his scores and had to have his music paper specially printed. Strauss’s own facility was such that he said to a visitor, “Go right on and talk for I can write this score and talk at the same time.” A symphonic poem took him three or four months, with scoring usually completed in Berlin between rehearsals and conducting engagements.

Visitors at the summer home were met by arrangements which exhibited a talent for organization on the part of Frau Strauss not inferior to that of the late Field Marshal von Moltke. A speaking tube was fixed to the gate under a sign telling the visitor to ring a bell and then put his ear to the tube. A voice over the tube demanded his name and if found acceptable, informed him the gate was now unlocked. Another sign instructed him how to open it and to be sure to close it behind him.

Frau Strauss did not permit dawdling. If her husband should be found on occasion wandering aimlessly around the house, she would command, “
Richard, jetzt gehst componieren!
” (Go ahead and compose!), and he would obey. If he worked too hard she would say, “Richard, put down that pencil!” and he would put it down. When he conducted the first performance in Vienna of his second opera,
Feuersnot
, Frau Strauss attended in the box of the Austrian conductor-composer Gustav Mahler and fumed throughout, as Frau Mahler recalled: “Nobody could like this trash; we were liars to pretend, knowing as well as she did that there wasn’t an original note in it. Everything was stolen from Wagner and a dozen others better than her husband.” The Mahlers sat in silent embarrassment not daring to agree, for “this shrew was quite capable of twisting the words in our mouths and suddenly screaming that we had made all those comments.” After enthusiastic applause and many curtain calls, Strauss, beaming, came to the box and asked, “Well,
Pauksel
, what do you think of my success?”