CHAPTER 1: The Golden Age (opening)
When Richard Strauss conducted his opera Salome on May 16,
1906, in the provincial Austrian city of Graz, several leading figures
in European music gathered to witness the event. The première of Salome
had taken place five months before, in Dresden, and word had got out
that Strauss had created something beyond the pale—an ultra-dissonant
Biblical spectacle, based on a play by an Irish degenerate whose name
was not mentioned in polite company; a work so frightful in its
depiction of adolescent lust that imperial censors had banned it from
the Court Opera in Vienna.
Giacomo Puccini, the creator of La Bohème and Tosca,
made a trip north to hear what “terribly cacophonous thing” his German
rival had concocted. Gustav Mahler, the director of the Vienna opera,
attended, with his wife, the beautiful and controversial Alma. The bold
young composer Arnold Schoenberg arrived from Vienna with his
brother-in-law, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and no fewer than six of his
pupils. One of them, Alban Berg, traveled with an older friend, who, in
a memoir, described the “feverish impatience and boundless excitement”
that all felt as the evening approached. The widow of Johann Strauss
II, composer of On the Beautiful Blue Danube (and no relation
to the composer of Salome), represented old Vienna. Ordinary
music-enthusiasts filled out the crowd—“young people from Vienna, with
only the vocal score as hand luggage,” Strauss noted. Among them may
have been the seventeen-year-old Adolf Hitler, who had just seen Mahler
conduct Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Vienna, on May
8. Hitler later told Strauss’s son and daughter-in-law that he had
borrowed money from relatives to make the trip. There was even a
fictional character present—Adrian Leverkühn, the hero of Thomas Mann’s
Doctor Faustus, a tale of a composer in league with the devil.
The Graz papers carried news from Croatia, where a Serbo-Croat
movement was gathering force, and from Russia, where the Tsar was
locked in conflict with the country’s first attempt at a democratic
parliament. Both stories carried tremors of future chaos — the
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914, the Russian
Revolution of 1917. But, for the moment, Europe maintained the facade
of civilization. The English Minister of War, Lord Haldane, was quoted
as saying that he “knows Germany and loves Germany’s literature and
philosophy,” and that he enjoyed reciting passages from Faust.
Strauss and Mahler, the titans of Austro-German music, spent the day
in the hills above the city, as Alma recounted in her memoirs. A
photographer captured them outside the opera house, apparently
preparing to set out on their expedition—Strauss smiling in a boater
hat, Mahler squinting in the sun. The company visited a waterfall and
had lunch in an old inn, where they sat at a plain wooden table. They
must have made a strange pair: Strauss, tall and lanky, with a weak
chin, a bulbous, balding forehead, strong but sunken eyes; Mahler a
full head shorter, a muscular hawk of a man. As the sun began to go
down, Mahler became nervous about the time, and he suggested that the
party should head back to the Hotel Elefant, where they were staying,
in order to prepare for the performance. “They can’t start without me,”
Strauss said. “Let ‘em wait.” Mahler replied: “If you won’t go, then
I will—and conduct in your place.” Or so Alma claimed. She assumed that
Strauss was hiding his anxiety behind a facade of nonchalance.
Mahler was forty-five, Strauss forty-one. They were in most respects
polar opposites. Mahler was a kaleidoscope of moods—childlike,
heaven-storming, despotic, despairing. As he strode from his apartment
near the Schwarzenbergplatz to the opera house on the Ringstrasse, cab
drivers would whisper to their passengers, “Der Mahler!” Strauss was
earthy, self-satisfied, more than a little cynical, a closed book to
most observers. The soprano Gemma Bellincioni, who sat next to him at a
banquet after the performance in Graz, described him as “a pure kind of
German, without poses, without long-winded speeches, little gossip and
no inclination to talk about himself and his work, a gaze of steel, an
indecipherable expression.” Strauss came from Munich, a backward place
in the eyes of sophisticated Viennese such as Gustav and Alma. Alma
underlined this impression in her memoirs by rendering Strauss’s
dialogue in an exaggerated Bavarian dialect. Not surprisingly, the
relationship between the two composers suffered from frequent
misunderstandings. Mahler would recoil from unintended slights; Strauss
would puzzle over the sudden silences that would ensue. He was still
trying to understand Mahler some four decades later, when he read
Alma’s memoir and annotated it. “All untrue,” he wrote, next to the
description of his behavior in Graz.
“Strauss and I tunnel from opposite sides of the mountain,” Mahler
said. “One day we shall meet.” Both saw music as a medium of conflict,
a battlefield of extremes. They reveled in the monumental sound that a
hundred-piece, late-Romantic orchestra could make, yet they undermined
its spectacular sonic heroics with moments of instability, impurity,
implosion, collapse. The epic narratives of nineteenth-century
Romanticism, from Beethoven’s symphonies to Wagner’s music dramas,
invariably ended in a blaze of transcendence, of spiritual overcoming.
Mahler and Strauss put those narratives into question and sought out
other kinds of stories. They recognized the common ground between them,
and each worked to support the other’s music. Strauss’s first major act
upon becoming President of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, or
General German Music Association, in 1901, was to program Mahler’s
Third Symphony for the festival the following year; indeed, Mahler’s
works dominated the Association’s programs for several years running.
So much Mahler was played under Strauss’s watch that some critics took
to calling the ADMV the Allgemeiner Deutscher Mahlerverein. Others
dubbed it the Annual German Carnival of Cacophony.
Mahler, for his part, was deeply impressed by his colleague’s music, and especially by Salome.
Strauss had played and sung the score for him the previous year, in a
piano shop in Strasbourg, and passersby pressed their faces against the
windows in curiosity. Salome promised to be one of the highlights of
Mahler’s Vienna tenure, but the censors balked at accepting an opera in
which Biblical characters are made to perform unspeakable acts.
Furious, Mahler began hinting that his days in Vienna were numbered. He
wrote to Strauss in March 1906: “You would not believe how vexatious
this matter has been for me, or (between ourselves) what consequences
it may have for me.”
So Salome came to Graz, an elegant city of one hundred fifty
thousand people, capital of the agricultural province of Styria. The
State Theater staged the opera at the suggestion of the critic Ernst
Decsey, an associate of Mahler, who assured the management that it
would create a succès de scandale. “The city was in a state of great
excitement,” Decsey wrote in his autobiography, Music Was His Life.
“Parties formed and split. Pub philosophers buzzed about what was going
on…. Visitors from the provinces, critics, press people, reporters, and
foreigners from Vienna … Three more than sold out houses. Porters
groaned, and hoteliers reached for the keys to their safes.” The critic
himself fueled the anticipation with a high-flown preview article,
acclaiming Strauss’s “tone-color world,” his “polyrhythms and
polyphony,” his “breakup of the narrow old tonality,” his “fetish ideal
of an Omni-Tonality.”
As dusk fell, Mahler and Strauss appeared at the opera house. They
had rushed back to town in their chauffeur-driven car. The crowd
milling around in the lobby had an air of nervous electricity. The
orchestra played a fanfare when Strauss walked up to the podium, and
the audience applauded stormily. Then a deathly silence descended, the
clarinet played a softly slithering scale, and the curtain went up.
