Richard Strauss admirers should note that Amazon has published Nicholas Clee’s autobiographical work, Things I Am Ashamed Of, as a Kindle Single at 99p.
THINGS I AM ASHAMED OF on the Kindle Singles store
Things I Am Ashamed Of is a memoir and a study of ordinary foibles, of the kind to which most of us are prone. Drawing on the works of writers from Anita Brookner to Stefan Zweig, and of musicians from Richard Strauss to Laura Nyro, this is a funny and unsettling account of what it means to behave well, and badly.
Clee on Strauss: Richard Strauss was the pre-eminent figure in musical life in Germany. In opera, he had once been notorious as the composer of Salome (1906), which climaxed – the sexual term is appropriate – as the delirious heroine, her rapturous singing punctuated by brutal, dissonant chords, kissed the severed head of John the Baptist. The Austrian premiere took place in the presence of fellow composers Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, Alexander Zemlinsky, Alban Berg, and Giacomo Puccini; it was such a key event in the history of modernism that Alex Ross chose it as the opening scene of The Rest Is Noise, his award-winning history of 20th-century music. Strauss’s Elektra, “one more onslaught of dissonance and neurosis” in Ross’s words, followed in 1909. But Strauss’s rebelliousness turned out to be like that of the rock star who in his youth smashes up guitars on stage and, in later life, shoots and fishes on his country estate. Der Rosenkavalier was a different kind of work, and signalled a change of direction in Strauss’s music. Yes, Strauss offers this bittersweet comedy – set in Vienna in the 1740s, and about an ageing, married woman, the Marschallin, who gives up her lover, Octavian, to a younger rival – through the filter of a modernist sensibility. The curtain rises to reveal the Marschallin with Octavian in her bedroom, and the waltz music in the orchestral interludes is as anachronistic as the modern pop and hip-hop in Baz Luhrmann’s film of The Great Gatsby. But the opera is lush, romantic, and nostalgic; it is far from radical.

As his work had suggested, Strauss was never likely to be a dissident when the Nazis came to power. He was too conservative, too egotistical, too preoccupied with music and with his musical career. And there was a further factor: his daughter-in-law, Alice, was Jewish. He felt that he had to use his influence to protect her and her family, and his two grandsons. He was trapped into an awful complicity.

In autumn 1933, Strauss accepted an offer from Joseph Goebbels, the Reich propaganda minister, to become President of the Reich Music Chamber (RMC). One of his rewards, on his 70th birthday the following year, was to receive from Goebbels a bust of the composer Gluck, and from Hitler a photograph signed “To the great Richard Strauss, in sincere admiration.” This cosy relationship purportedly incited the conductor Arturo Toscanini to remark: “To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.” (Zweig, who was present when the remark was supposed to have been made, reassured Strauss that it was a fabrication.)

Strauss wrote to Zweig to scoff at the notion of the superiority of “Aryan” music: “I recognise only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none,” he asserted – this, after in 1933 signing a letter attacking Thomas Mann, who had written critically of Richard Wagner, for traducing “upright German cultural giants”. Complicity forces many humiliations. (In 1973, the Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich was reported to have signed a letter denouncing the dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov.) Strauss’s letter to Zweig was intercepted and sent to Hitler; not long after, Strauss lost his job.

With his professional and familial fortunes dependent on the goodwill of the regime, Strauss desperately backtracked, writing to Hitler to claim that the letter to Zweig “does not represent my view of the world nor my true conviction”. He did not get a reply. Nevertheless, he remained President of the Nazi-controlled Permanent Council for the International Co-operation of Composers, and he composed the Olympische Hymne for the Berlin Games of 1936. In 1939, Hitler and Goebbels attended the premiere of his one-act opera Friedenstag.

By this time, Strauss was in no doubt that his relatives could be safe only if he retained influence with senior Nazis. On Kristallnacht (9 and 10 November, 1938), the pogrom against Jews and Jewish-owned businesses, his grandsons were beaten up, marched to the main square in Garmisch, and forced to spit at the Jews rounded up there. Strauss begged Goebbels to grant them “Aryan” privileges, enabling them to be treated as other Germans; Goebbels strung him along, waiting for two years before raising the matter with Hitler. When his daughter-in-law Alice’s grandmother was interned, Strauss campaigned fruitlessly for her release, eventually taking his chauffeur-driven limousine to the gates of Theresienstadt concentration camp and announcing to the guards, “I am Dr Strauss, the composer”; it cut no ice, and he returned home defeated. The old woman died in the camp, and 25 other relatives of Alice Strauss were victims of the Holocaust. In 1944, Strauss was away from home when the Gestapo arrested Alice and her husband Franz, and he had to go begging to the authorities again, this time successfully. He took Alice and Franz with him to his villa in Garmisch, where they spent the remainder of the war under house arrest.