There is this totally damning interview that Klaus Mann, the son of the
famous author, had with Strauss just after the war when he and a comrade
visited the 81-year composer at his villa at Garmisch, with Mann
concealing his true identity and claiming to be 'Mr Brown'. He found the
old composer saying a couple of embarrassingly stupid things, but
labelled them with a moral condemnation informed by the consciousness of
the scope of the war catastrophe, an insight which had escaped the
composer for many years, retreated as he had into a cocoon of artistic
nostalgia.
Strauss, who got irritated by the internationalising trends and
eroding of standards of German music life in the twenties, and deplored
the then fashionable hard-edged 'modern musics', and who had not taken
the trouble to give real attention to political questions of post-1918
society, was dismayed about the postwar government's attitude towards
concert life. So, when the nazis took power in 1933, he saw an
opportunity - as number one of the eminent German composers with
authority in musical matters - to work for the improvement of national
music life. The idea that 'Germanness' was under threat from influences
from abroad, the realization that the international standing and
influence of German music of the past - especially its 'romanticism' and
'pathos' - had suffered in the aftermath of the war, a style of music
and music making which was seen as no longer compatible with the much
'cooler' modern times, had created a longing for resurrection, shared by
many Germans, of 'German cultural identity' which took-on a
particularly conservative and reactionary character, which could easily
be manipulated by the nazis with their fantasies about 'race' and
'national superiority'.
In contrast with Klaus Mann, who had to endure forced emigration and
alienation and uprootedness in the USA, Strauss had experienced the
greatest successes under any regime, and had gradually lost a clear
sight on reality, which had turned, in the thirties, to the bitter
reality that Klaus Mann knew all too well. With his usual combination of
carelessness and contempt for officialdom, hidden behind the rhetoric
of earnest Germanness, Strauss tried to charm the nazi regime so that he
might get his ideas into the government machinery. But that fell flat
because the regime had its own ideas, which were incompatible with
Strauss's. After a quite dangerous confrontation with the dark side of
the authorities, he retreated into his own world, trying to wall-off the
increasingly unpleasant outer reality. Shortly after the war, the vast
scope of what had happened, took some time to sink-in, and the
realisation of his being compromised and the destruction of the country
resulted in his 'Metamorphosen' and the 'Vier Letzte Lieder', which he
never heard because he died before the première. Mann spoke with him
during the period that Strauss tried to get onto terms with what had
happened, and in the same time tried to ignore it all because of its
utter awfulness. He may have said some stupid things, partly because of
the presence of his family (who commented from afar, as reported by
Mann) and trying to put a brave face with the two foreigners, but if
Mann's report is literally true - which we cannot know - it shows us a
petit-bourgeois, narrow-minded man in denial, not a nazi fan. In this,
Strauss was not an exception, as many witnesses and documentation since
WW II demonstrate. In an attempt to preserve his own inner musical
world and to remedy some ills (as he saw it) in concert life, he had
wilfully closed his eyes, ignoring important signals - but could not prevent the fall-out of what
had happened to force him to become aware of it all, or at least of some
of it, and we know that even small doses were - and still are -
extremely painful.
About Me
- The Subterranean Review
- Education: Rotterdam Conservatory, Cambridge University // Activities: composition, writing
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