<\/p>\n
Part III- Strauss’s personality and politics are as misunderstood as they are talked about.<\/p>\n
(Part I- \u201cHe was no Mahler, he was no Wagner\u201d is here\u201d<\/a>\u00a0Part III \u00a0Strauss- Innovation and Absolute Music is here<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n Richard Strauss\u2019s music is an intergral and popular part of the modern concert repertoire, and yet, he remains one of our most misunderstood and underrated composers.<\/p>\n We all know the case against Richard Strauss: he was no Gustav Mahler, he was no Richard Wagner, he turned his back on modernity, he was \u201conly\u201d a program-music and opera composer, who couldn\u2019t write in classical forms, he was an egomaniac, he was a Nazi, his music lacks spirituality and depth.<\/p>\n My purpose here is not to rehabilitate Strauss as a historical figure, but to look at whether too many of us have been listening to his music with ears and hearts only partly opened.<\/p>\n 5- He was an egomaniac<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Strauss\u2019s personality seems to really wind a lot of people up (mostly those who never knew or worked with him).<\/p>\n The first thing I would like to say is that, for all composers, it doesn\u2019t really matter if they were kind or cruel, driven or passive, neurotic or iron-willed. It\u2019s the music that counts.<\/em><\/strong> Somehow, most people are able to separate Wagner\u2019s great music from his odious personality, but far fewer are able to separate Schumann\u2019s equally great (if not greater) music from what they\u2019ve read about his<\/em> personality. [The irony is that modern research has shown that the caricature of Schumann as a manic depressive neurotic whose mental struggles inform and limit every bar of his music is horse crap.<\/a> Throughout his career, he had a normal range of ups and downs, as do all creative people, then in 1854, his syphilis progressed to final stage and he had a complete breakdown. We have no music from him written when he was mentally ill. ]<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t take a lot of reading research, or perhaps it takes just reading a bit of reading between the lines, to see that many of Strauss\u2019s personality quirks were really social and emotional defense mechanisms. His apparently cavalier and mercenary attitude to life and music were behaviors adopted to cover up the same kind of vulnerability and insecurity that most composers suffer from. Gustav Mahler understood that about Strauss- Alma Mahler didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n But what about Ein Heldenleben<\/em>? Isn\u2019t it the single most stomach turning example of pure musical egomania in musical history?<\/p>\n Really people- lighten up. I said before that Strauss was one of music\u2019s great humorists. Heldenleben<\/em> is, first and foremost, a really cracking piece of music (one of the 5 most fun works to conduct ever written). It\u2019s also a great lampooning and deconstruction of the whole notion of Romantic heroism. It has a sex scene that is both funny and sexy. \u00a0What could be more funny or more telling than the battle music in Heldenleben<\/em>? It\u2019s ridiculously over the top, and insanely dramatic, and actually is about nothing more serious than a battle between composer and some music critics. Of course, music critics haven\u2019t always had the greatest senses of humor about themselves, so maybe that\u2019s why some don\u2019t get the jokes in the piece. Perhaps the thing that really bothers people about Heldenleben<\/em> is not that Strauss takes himself too seriously, but that he doesn\u2019t take the idea of Romantic heroism all that seriously.<\/p>\n