Evening Star Newspaper, August 3, 1930, Page 97

High Priest Of M 19 THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, AUGUST 3, 1930. odern Music Regarded Thirty Years Ago as a Rebel of the Musical I1'orld, Dr. Richard Strauss Has Lived to Find Himself a Classi—Today This Fuwous Composer and Conductor Is the Spoiled Vienna Hero, Who Has Been Given a Magnificent Home io Keep Him There. BY WILLIAM LEON SMYSER P2 HE soles of your shoes! The soles of your shoes! If you please, you must let me wipe the soles of your shoes!” The great entrance door has been closed. Gloves, hat and stick have been deposited on the low hall bench. One is preparing to mount the great curved stairway when the as- tonished servant remonstrates. A most important part of the procedure has been neglected: “If the Herr will but permit BT ol L Needless to reply that one has just stepped out of 2 taxi. To demur at having clean shoes further cleaned only provokes the alternative choice of changing intd house slip- pers. . . The servant has knelt on the shining red tiled floor. One is reminded of some biblical scene. The holy of holies where the mas- ter dwells is not to be pro- faned! No atom of vulgar dust may enter! This is in- deed Vienna, first outpost of the Orient. Just as one takes off one’s shoes before the anointed of the East, this al- most literal imitation of the cusiom, before going into his presence, is the symbol of Dr. Richard Strauss. Dr. Richard Strauss is the caliph, the sultan, the high pricst of modern music. “Thirty years ago I was re- garded as a rebel,” he has said to me, flashing that que.r little smile which seems so lost in hic big face. “But today, as you see, I hzve lLved to find m°1f a classic.” i great composer has gone the way of all radicals. What European, starting upon the benches of the Left, has not inevitably evclved, with the power and the consciousness of vested authority, toward conservatism and a throne room of his own? Just as there was once a time when D’'Annunzio sat in the cafe and drew life from the rough—though now he lives retired in his palace and leads the life of a mad prince—so also there once was a time when Richard Strauss, still a timid, naive Munich lad, heard his first festival chorus per- formed at a gymnasium concert, and Ilater, conducted his own “Opus 14” with an orchestra of 13 wind instruments. But that was years ago. Now Richard Strauss, like the author of “La Citta Morta,” has survived to see his own epclheosis. He is & sort of Goethe at Weimar. ne struggle to have and to hold Richard St:.uss has been one of the most spectacular and strenuous engaged In by German cities since the war, It is not merely a rivalry of honor, but also a very practical, mercantile en- terprise, in which any chamber of commerce might take part. For the city where Richard Staruss lives, giving regular series of public appearances as conductor or as composer, is a city with an assured opcratic season, and with the same limitless tourist possibilities enjoyed by Oberammergau and S=zlzburg. TEMPMTAL. overbeariug, Strauss has many times threatened to leave Vienna permanently for Berlin or Dresden. It is to bind him in his place that the government of Austria, following the exampi: ¢f the Italians with their poet, has given him magnificent grounds cut out of the park of the imperial Belvedere Palace, laid out by FPrince Eugene of Savoy, and last occupied—up until the tragedy of Serajevo—by Franz Ferdinand, "n return for his rare gardens and for the unparalleled site of his villa just above that on which Canaletto set up his easel two cen- turies ago when he painted his fzmous oils of the lower, inner city, Strauss has agreed to live in Vienna some four months every year, directing some 20 operas @nd lending to the city the prestige of his name. Vienna is, indeed, exploiting a great mu-i~al talent as a metropolitan asset. In Germany Richard Strauss is just a very successful, highly gifted, ordinary citizen. He does not play the part he plays in Vienna. For in the more Oriental capital he g-ts every- thing he wants. He is the city's darling, as was Johann Strauss—that famous composer of “The Blue Danube Waltz,” with whom he has neither family mor musical relations. And Strauss is happy. He has his garden, his lake, his trees—and his family. Frgu Strauss must enter inio any discus- sion of her husband’s music. Fhe not only aid= in its making. She has b>cn Strauss’ muse and model in “Symphoniz Domestica” and ‘in “Intermezzo.” All th: droll episodes Strauss hints in words and harmonies she has suggested. She has even been kncwn to hold up-one of his dinner parties to search for the place-cards which she must have somewhere, Dr. Richard Strauss. He moves always with mastery. ved over from the last time.” Too cate- a hostess to think of leiting her guests in to table without having it set properly them, she is at the same time too good manager to make new favors when the old are under her hand, just “tucked away.” so Frau Strauss is the efficient man- of the genius, her husband. She had her own career before she started belp- ing him make his, for she was already a suc- cseeful singer in the Munich Opera when his early work as a conductor took him to that city and led to their meeting. She came of a good family. Her father was a gcneral, and she was steeped in military tradition. It is she who has brought into Strauss’ dreamy life an element of order almost fanatic in its abso- lutism and tyranny. If it is she who dictates the purification of all guests before his door, it is also she who keeps him in form as if he were & boxer, was a party one night two years ago at the Kaiser Bar. “Come on, Maestro, you must dance with us!” cried one of the youngest, prettiest ma- trons of the party. “I'd love to . . . I want to . . . but I don’t dare!” Richard Strauss half glanced at his traiper . . . “I'm not allowed” . . . and the great master, his huge cheeks red with em- barrassment, looked as if about to cry. He may rebel, but Strauss is too sane a creator long to think of disregarding his rules. As he grows older they may be relaxed, yet always they are there, controlling even his hours of recreation. There certainly has been more Richard Strauss written because of the existence of Frau Strauss than ever there might have been without her. “Richard,” she is supposed to say to him when the mood is backward and he wanders absently about the house in everybody's way, “Richard, jetzt gehst komponieren!” And this order to compose himself—though at times it may have forced and thinned his inspiration—has been productive beyond meas- ure. Strauss was born in 1864. He is 66 years old. And yet he has told me: “I still compose as I always did . . . save that there is a distinction to make between the work of my early days and my work now. Then I was making a different type of music . . . tone poems, concertos, program pieces . . . the stuff which forms my first manver, “It is necessary to recognize anotker method in the work of composers—that to which I was presently to come when I turned from the lyric to the operatic. Opera cannot be written in a spurt of temperament. After one has hit upon one’s main themes, there follows real physical labor. I must work over the develop- ment of a motif again and again, keeping no hours, till the last line is adjusted. When I am writing an opera I write devotedly. That is the secret.” And devotion is the secret of Strauss’ success. It is one of the many Strauss anomalies that this man who today is the spoiled hero of a metropolis should have stemmed from rural stock in Bavaria. His mother was a brewer's daughter, while his father had left the land and taken to horn playing in the Court Band. Drawn for The Star's Sundey Magazine by S. Even today the story goes that when Strauss retreats frem the woerld to his Summer home, a great rambling country estate not far from his eriginal birthplace, he gives parties for all the peasants round about, drops his grand airs and audience ceremonies and turns from his posturing acelytes to welcome the rude frank- ness and native candor of men. If this is true, it illustrates strikingly a certain nostalgia for the soil which has given Strauss his note of sturdy originality and a preference for instru- ments that touch real nature closely . , . like the waldhorn, for which he has composed a whole concerto. Primitive urges lie close in under the ac- quired sophistication of Stauss’ thought. Fiis “Electra” is the frenzy of savage torture and despair. His “Salome” is an abandonment from straining ascetism to lust. He has put madness, pathos, monumental sadness into ~music. Delirflum is his chief note—la danse macabre! It is to the dance that both his greatest operas mount as to a climax. Yet Strauss also has tried to express In abstract sound the philosophy of Nietzsche's “Thus Spake Zarathustra.” He has caught the humor of Cervantes in his tone-poem, “Don Quixote.” Such a man, at once passional and intellectual, must, like Anteus, return for his art’s sustenance to the earth which has formed him. This is why Strauss is most himself in bhis garden, where, shut off from the noises of Vienna by high stone walls and by the great encireling expanse of Belvedere Park, he can give ear to native sounds and think his native thoughts in real seclusion. Here only can Strauss be trusted to be as unselfcenscious as when he is directing his operas or leading a concert, lost in music. His garden is no small part of the man. It is his only contact, while he is in the city, with his original Bavaria. Its fine old firs and black spruce thickets, its low banks dark with humus and broken by dwarf pine brambles, its shad- owed, unexpected, hidden pools where leaves lie on the water and shy fish dart about, are *¢ni- niscent of his callower youth and retra the motifs of his inspirations. “It is in the movements of great horizc tal boughs and then in the smarter swayings ol their branches and finally in the fluttering ol the ultimate leaves that the musician gets hs original eoncept of rhythm. It is in the win<'s whisperings and the bird's songs that he heais his first melody.” STRAUSS walks among his trees and past his little lakes. an old man, gray, yet ex- traordinarily tall. One has failed to appreciate his height in the conductor’s box of the Vienna opera, for it has been sunk below the floor level of the auditorium. Here, on the same level path with one, he suddenly appears tower- ing. His thin tepcoat sags in perpendicular lines to accommodate the hands which he has thrust deep into side pockets. His shoul- ders stoop together and he seems cadaverously, illusively lean. The heavy head, square and shaggy as & mastifl's, comes as a surprise. It 1s in preportion with his height, yet not in proportion with the frame which has sunken and narrowed with the years. Dressed all in black, Strauss in his garden never fails to produce a weird impression as he moves slowly along, sauntering down the rows like some giant bloom suddenly become peripatetic and cruising about with its great head bowing on an inadequate stalk. Musicians often have high, bulging rounded foreheads. Strauss’ forehead is more masé* sive, more impressive under its light, curling patch of hair than that of the Beethoven familiar through the famous bust In Strauss’ youth this Jovelike front dominated and almeost overweighed the dream- ing peasant face beneath. It absorbed into itself the im- perceptible blond eyebrow; and lashes. It overshadow the great, dark. round, almost bovine eyes. It rendered ridic- ulous the nose that tilted up inte a diminutive bulb at the end, and made a caricature of the many strivings after a bushy, dapper mustache. Today the Nietzschean prin- ciples, the Wagnerian thun- derings to which Strauss often has vibrated, have put pur- pose into the eyes. Age has broadened the jaw and jowl. Instead of being top-heavy, the face is now pendulous and balanced. There is a certain humor in the lips, above which the mustache has be- come a close-cropped stubble, stoutly aggressive where it once was tentative and flaxen. The rebel who saw visio] and caught new tones off from the spheres has be- come the maestro. While his early voices have not forsaken him, the musician has devel- oped. Had he been merely a pianist he might have re- mained a sort of enfant gate, a De Pachmann. Had he been merely a composer, he might have remained aloof from the practical, a sort of Mozart. But instead, like Wagner, Strauss set out to master the drama. There is something in the stage and in th: contest with an audience which makes a dreamer waken and which quickens his iambic pulse, Strauss has achieved triumphs as notable in his conducting as he has in his composing. Before his first operas he met the publie through his appearances as director. The men whom he directs are really mastered. Under him the orchestra of the Vienna Opera be- comes a perfect instrument, so clear, so easy, so frictionless that the idea of instrumenta- tion ceases, and & concept of pure sound, dise embodied sound, is born. In Wagner's “Tris- tan and Isolde” it is difficult to say when one instrument takes up the strain and another lets it down. There is the perfection of singing when the voices hang above the singers’ heads and seem not to issue from them. Such mouth- less singing is Strauss’ masierpiece as a di- rector. «“I learned conducting,” Strauss tcld me, “une der Bulow. He had me compose a suite Ige wind instruments, and then stood me up in front of his orchestra and made me conduct it without a rehearsal!” After that first plunge, any f-at of directing may well seem easy to Strauss. I have seen him bring to heel that most ungainly of operatic masses, a mob of super- numeraries. It was in “Lohengrin.” The ore chestra, at work every day, maintained its timbre like a well used Stradivarius. The members of the chorus, on the contrary, on this occasion, were either ill-recruited or evilly disposed. They lagged. They watched Strauss’ enecrgetic baton with a studied, malevoleng apathy. J. Woolt, NONE can catch a nuance of fault so swiftly as the Viennese. Those aud‘ences who gather at the epera house when Richard Strauss conducts come criticaily. “You are temporarily in Vienna,” Strauss had sald to me. “That is good. Vienna is the best place to hear my music. Here it is best pres:nted. The operas are best prepared. And as for the gala performances, I direct them myself.” And so throughout the audience on this pare ticular evening there were many who had come armed with small reprints of the score Strauss was to lead, and who sat throughout the entire drama, silently turning pages and reverently following every measure of the beat. Such earnest students, offering thus their highest praise, are indeed the surest gauge and proot of the old conductor’s unfailing excellence . . . vet on this occaslon—they all felt it—some= thing was awry. Little rumors ran about. The chorus was dragging behind, gradually losing the beat. “Badly rehearsed?” *“Underfed?” “Lazy?” ‘‘Sabotage?” Even the parquet and the loges became restive. Strauss had long since felt the dead weigh®- Continued en Twenty-second Page