Patrick Bade
Richard Strauss: A Case Study

Patrick Bade - Richard Strauss A Case Study

- Ah, okay. So Ingrid’s visiting. So Ingrid’s one of the original 20 from a year ago. So she’s visiting, so we’re just walking.

• [Member] But now, she’s part of the new 12,000 we have.

• Well, yeah, one of the 12 million, yeah. Oh, dear. Patrick, this is one of my oldest friends from Potchefstroom. That’s where I come from originally before we moved to Swaziland. So meet my friend Ingrid.

• Hi. Hi, Patrick.

• Hi.

• She’s been listening. And Ingrid’s also an artist and a great fan of yours.

• Very much so. So I’ve been listening to most of your lectures whenever I’m in London. They’ve been amazing. Absolutely amazing.

• So okay, everybody, I think that we should… Morning, everybody. This is going to be my last morning for a while in LA and I am so looking forward to going back to New York to see my parents. And Patrick, now over to you. Thank you.

• Thank you, Wendy. I’m going to begin with some music. I’m going to begin with the most beautiful song that I know in the most beautiful version of it. This is Strauss’ song, “Morgen!”, that we’re going to hear in the orchestral version. This is a broadcast on German radio of 1941. The singer is the Austrian tenor, Julius Patzak, and the orchestra is conducted by the composer himself. It’s a very deceptive song. It sounds simple. It’s not simple, because the singer is never actually in time with the accompaniment. The singer is singing against the accompaniment, but has to maintain a sense of perfect stillness and tranquillity. And I don’t know any other version that does it quite as well as this one.

Audio plays.

Now, Julius Patzak is a singer that I revere almost as much as I revere Richard Tauber. For me, he’s the the second greatest tenor of the Germanic world in the 20th century. So I was really quite upset a couple of weeks ago. I was researching something totally different. By accident, I came across a letter that Patzak wrote to Hitler in 1934. Hitler had admired him in a concert and he sent a huge bouquet of flowers. And Patzak wrote a rather effusive thank you letter. It begins . It’s a need for me to write you to thank you for this wonderful bunch of flowers. So obviously, that’s rather distressing and disappointing. But thinking about it, what would you do, actually, if you were living in Nazi Germany and you want to stay there and you want to have a career, and Hitler sends you a bouquet of flowers? What do you do? Well, I can tell you, you better send a thank you letter because you’d be in big trouble and it would be the end of your career if you didn’t. I don’t think Patzak was… I’ve got this massive dictionary. I’ll show it to you. This tells you everybody who is anybody in the art world, in Germany, what they did, if they were party members. Well, he wasn’t a party member, and I have no reason to believe he was a Nazi sympathiser.

But again, in August, 1944, so very, very late in the war, he took part in a performance of Strauss’ opera, “Ariadne auf Naxos” in Krakow for the pleasure of the . And that is, again, it’s something the mind can hardly grasp. August, 1944, Hungarian was being exterminated just down the road at Auschwitz, and you’ve got this exquisite opera being put on for the pleasure of one of the greatest monsters in history. So these are some of the things that we have to deal with today. Now, that song was actually written by Strauss in 1894 as a wedding present for his wife, Pauline. Here, you see them together at the time of the wedding. And I think these two photographs, in a way, indicate the nature of their relationship. Pauline was bossy, rude, obnoxious. Nobody liked her. I mean, everybody writes about her, having met her, and most people were actually appalled by the way she treated the composer. But he, clearly, he’s one of those slightly masochistic men, I think, and he, clearly, adored her all the way through his life. Strauss, he’s born in 1864. It’s a very long life, as a composer, one of the longest. He starts off as a, not exactly a wunderkind, but a youthful prodigy.

He was producing very mature work in his early 20s, and he landed up as a geriatric prodigy, producing some of his greatest work at the end of his life in his mid 80s. This is where he was born, in Munich. His mother belonged to the Pschorr family, a beer-brewing family, and he was born behind the Pschorr Brewery in the centre of Munich. Sadly, bombed in the war. It no longer exists. So in the 1880s, he established himself as the most daring, the most radical composer in the Western world. He was the cutting edge of Western music. Everything he did was news, everything was shocking, everything was outrageous. And he managed to maintain his position as the of Western music for a very long time, for 20 years, from 1889, when he composed his tone poem “Don Juan” up until ‘99 when his opera, “Elektra”, was a sensational, extremely controversial event everywhere it was put on. When I was researching my book, I was going through all these propaganda magazines, and I came across an interview that he gave to one of these Nazi propaganda magazines, , in 1942, clearly, very reluctantly. He’s extremely tight-lipped. He’s very uncooperative with the interviewer.

And one of the few things that the interviewer can get out of him is a boast that he had invented atonal music. This was a very strange thing for a composer to say to a Nazi magazine in 1942. The Nazis did not like atonal music. They regarded it as degenerate. But he certainly came very, very close to atonality in “Elektra”. “Elektra”, it requires the biggest orchestra, I think, of any opera in the standard repertoire, 117 people. And I’m going to play you a moment of unbelievable cacophony. I always find this incredibly exciting and moving in the context of the opera. It’s the moment where Elektra recognises her brother, Orestes, and she lets out a huge cry of and the whole orchestra goes berserk. Every one of those 117 instruments is going off on its own. It’s like feeding time at the zoo. I’m afraid it’s going to be very diminished unless you have fantastic speakers. But when you hear this in the house, it’s totally overwhelming.

That’s '99, and two years later, he composed the opera, which has become his most popular, “Der Rosenkavalier”, and that marked a major C change. He’s now looking backwards to the 18th century. He said he wanted to write an opera in the manner of Mozart. And it’s strange how, overnight, pretty well, well, '99 to 1911, in historical terms, that’s overnight, he went from being the to the grand old man of European music. So from 1911 right up until his death in 1949, that is the position that he held. Now, I want to concentrate, in this talk, really, on his relationship with the Nazi regime, which is extremely controversial. Much has been written about it. Many criticisms have been made. There was a time after the war where his music was banned in Israel, but he has been forgiven, whereas I think Wagner, understandably, has not been forgiven. My first question I want to raise is, was he anti-Semitic? Well, I’m quite sure that if you go through all his letters and accounts of his conversations, you could probably pick up the odd remark that, to us, might sound anti-Semitic.

It would be very remarkable if that were not the case, considering how pervasive these attitudes were, particularly in the background that he came from. But I wish to say that I think there is actually, considering where he comes from at the period, he’s remarkably friendly and well-wishing towards Jews, remarkably lacking in the anti-Semitism that was so pervasive around him. One criticism that’s been made, was put forward as evidence of anti-Semitism in his operas, is the scene in “Salome”, where you have five Jews arguing with one another and they’re all talking at once. Well, first of all, I want to point out that the text was written by Oscar Wilde. It’s not written by Strauss. And secondly, having sat on a great many committees at the London Jewish Cultural Centre, I can tell you that it’s not unknown that five Jews might talk at once and talk over one another. I assure you that, when we have our committee meetings for Lockdown University, all is harmony and we listen to each other, very, very respectfully. It’s not like this notorious scene in “Salome”. I can’t resist telling you an an anecdote about this scene. When it was put on in the 1940s, just after the war, in New York, at the Met, it was very famous production with the great Ljuba Welitsch, and it was conducted by one of the greatest Strauss specialists; that is, Fritz Reiner, who you see, a rather malevolent-looking man, not known for the milk of human kindness.

And he was a great disciplinarian. And this scene, where you have the five Jews all singing at once and talking over one another, it’s really complicated, and he wanted to make it perfect. So he rehearsed it and rehearsed it and rehearsed it, a whole day of rehearsing this scene, which only lasts a couple of minutes. People were absolutely desperate towards the end of the day. And finally, he was satisfied. He thought they got it right. And he said, “All right then, the Jews can go now.” And apparently, the entire violin section of the orchestra got up and walked out. Now, apart from that scene, I think the only reference to Jews, I was trying to think of it today, I can’t think that there’s any other reference to Jews in Strauss’ operas, except in his autobiographical opera, “Intermezzo”, that was first performed in 1924. It’s the only opera of his operas, for which he wrote his own libretto. And it’s based on an incident in his marriage that deeply, deeply upset him. His wife opened a letter that was addressed to him, and she assumed that he’d been unfaithful to her. It was actually a total misunderstanding, but she threatened divorce, and this was, for him, a terrible thing.

And so, this opera, it’s really extraordinary in its the frankness with which he exhibits, on stage, his relationship with his wife and her behaviour towards him. And there’s one moment in “Act I”, where he’s just gone off, the hero of the opera is Strauss himself, famous composer, conductor, and he goes off on tour and the wife is left behind and she has a conversation with her maid, and the wife is complaining that he’s always travelling. He’s never there. And the maid says, “Yes, I believe that the master is not happy staying in one place for a long time.” And his wife says, “I think he has Jewish blood in his veins.” And there’s a little quote from a piece of music, which apparently Strauss thought was Mendelssohn, but actually is by Schumann. And somebody who is anti-Semitic, they’re not going to advertise the world that their wife thinks that they have Jewish blood in their veins. It’s probably just as well for Strauss, since this opera was not a huge success and had dropped from the repertoire by the time that the Nazis came to power. And here is this little moment.

Now, next to his relationship with Pauline, I think the most important relationship of Strauss’ entire life was with the librettos of six of his operas. And this is Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and you the two of them together on the left-hand side. Their relationship was largely by correspondence, and that was through Hofmannsthal’s choice because he absolutely couldn’t stand Pauline. And very often, in the letters, when they did meet, he’d say, “Oh, well, we’re going to meet next week. Don’t trouble your wife to stay around. Tell her to go out shopping when we meet.” Their correspondence was published, actually, already in Strauss’ lifetime, and it’s fascinating. It’s one of the great documents of artistic creativity. For me, it’s right up there, I will say, with Van Gogh’s letters. Not, perhaps, as moving as Van Gogh’s letters, but revealing of the process of creativity. So at a certain point in his life, it’s about midway, or not even midway, 1/3 of the way through his career, Strauss decided that he created best when working in tandem with somebody else, that he needed somebody to bounce ideas off, he needed somebody to develop these ideas. And it’s noticeable that, up until 1933, when the Nazis took power, in every case, the person that he chose to work with was a Jew. Well, actually, Hofmannsthal was a Catholic, and he was only half Jewish.

As far as the Nazis were concerned, of course, he was a Jew. And top right-hand corner, Max Reinhardt, who worked with Strauss on “Der Rosenkavalier”, “Ariadne auf Naxos”, and helped with Strauss, Hofmannsthal as well, so the three of them, of course, created the Salzburg Festival in the 1920s. And bottom right, when Hofmannsthal died, Strauss was absolutely devastated. He was completely devastated. And there are despairing letters, where he says, “That’s the end. I can’t write anymore operas. I’m finished. I needed Hofmannsthal so much.” And then, along comes Stefan Zweig, and Strauss is overjoyed. And for a short time, he thinks the problem is solved and that he continue his working relationship with Stefan Zweig, as he had with Hofmannsthal. That was not to be, as we shall see, because of the Nazis. They, in fact, only did one complete opera together, “Die schweigsame Frau”. It premiered in 1934. Although, they continued to correspond and Zweig continued to offer advice and suggestions to Strauss. In the latter you see on the right-hand side, he wrote, after going to the British Museum, he was going through old plays and novels, and he found the subject which Strauss was later to develop for his final opera, “Capriccio”.

And this is the latter, where he talks about this subject, , It means, first, music, and second, words. And it’s a little play comedy about the relationship between words and music. Now, the one opera that they did put together, I don’t think it’s one of Strauss’. Strauss went through a kind of creative trough, I would say, in the ‘20s and the early '30s. And I would say, this opera, “Die schweigsame Frau”, belongs in that trough. It’s not very often done. Of course, it was very unfortunate timing. The premiere was in Dresden in 1934. The Nazis had just taken power. And there was an interesting incident just before the premiere, the Nazi bigwigs, Hitler, Goebbels, all those people, were going to come to the premiere. But when Strauss saw the posters that had been printed, he saw that Stefan Zweig’s name had been removed from the poster, and he had a real fit of rage. And he said to the opera house, unless Herr Zweig’s name is on the poster and as big as mine, I’m not coming to the premiere myself. So they did that. They put Zweig’s name back on the posters, and then it was the Nazis who then said they weren’t, they withdrew and Hitler and Goebbels did not come to the premiere in 1934. So Strauss was universally regarded as the world’s greatest living composer.

He was the inheritor of the great Austria-German traditional, great composers of the past. So when the Nazis set up the Reichsmusikkammer, which was the state organisation that was going to deal with everything musical in Germany, Strauss was the inevitable choice as the first president. And in fact, he wasn’t really given a choice. It was odd. He was told that he would be the president. And then, in very typical Nazi, bureaucratic fashion, they sent him a form and asked for his references. Of course, he was rather insulted at this, and he sent back the form and he put Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner as his referees on the form. Now, accepting this post, as I said, I’m not sure he had very much choice, really, was, in some ways, a disaster for him. Rather like , I think there is a mixture here of naivety and vanity. He thought that he was so famous, so powerful, he could get his way and he could manipulate the Nazis. And there were lots of reforms he wanted to introduce to the musical world in Germany and he thought this would be an opportunity to do it. And here, you see him addressing a conference of the Reichsmusikkammer. The other thing, which we’ll come back to later is, of course, it meant that, for the time that he was president of the Reichsmusikkammer, which was short, he was an official of the Third Reich, and that was something that would get him into trouble later on.

Now, here, he is with Goebbels, and this photograph might suggest they had a rather jolly and cordial relationship. If they did, it was extremely brief. Goebbels and Hitler became very, very mistrustful to Strauss, very hostile to him. They had really a tough relationship. There was a story during the war, told by another composer called Werner Egk, where all the main composers were summoned for a meeting with Goebbels and told that their duty was to do everything they could to promote the Nazi cause. Strauss disagreed and Goebbels violently insulted him. He said, “Who do you think I am? Who do you think you are? You are nothing. You are the past.” He screamed at Strauss, as I said, in front of all the other composers, reducing the 80-year-old composer to tears. But at the beginning, I suppose, Strauss was hopeful. As I said, he thought he could manipulate them. And so we have one black mark against Strauss, that he was a Nazi official because he was president of the Reichsmusikkammer. Second black mark, and this, in some ways, I think this is actually harder to defend, is that he wrote this song, “Das Bachlein”, as a gift for Goebbels. It’s a very charming song, very typical Strauss song, really. And the poem is actually by . So you can’t really complain about that. It’s the last line which is problematic. It’s the little stream that’s talking. So the translation is that whoever it was that called me out of the stone will be Mein Führer In this context, it means my guide. Well, unsurprisingly, considering the dedicatee, this song is very, very rarely performed. I’m only aware that there are two recordings of it, actually. And I find it extraordinary that Elisabeth Schwarzkopf should have been one of the people to record this song. I mean, the , the woman is really quite breathtaking. But here she is singing this little song that was dedicated to Goebbels.

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He does rather overemphasise that final phrase. You get. You get it three times. Here is Strauss and his son meeting Hitler. They all look rather glum. I didn’t think it was a very jolly occasion somehow. And now, the turning point was in 1935, Stefan Zweig was already in exile. His books had been publicly burned. And he wrote a letter to Strauss, saying that he didn’t really feel that he could continue to collaborate with him. Strauss was outraged, upset, really desperate. As I said, he was so counting on continuing to work with Zweig, and this is the letter that he wrote. I’ll be interested to know what you think of it. I did a talk about this in Hamburg a few years ago, and the audience were really outraged by this letter. They thought it was terrible. I actually have a lot of sympathy. I like this letter because it really is from the heart.

It really tells you everything about Strauss, what motivates him and it it tells you his limitations, I think, as a man. “Your letter of the 15th is driving me to distraction! This Jewish obstinacy! Enough to make an anti-Semite of a man! This pride of race, this feeling of solidarity! Do you believe that I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am 'German’, perhaps, qui le sait? Do you believe that Mozart composed as an ‘Aryan’? I know of any two types of people: those with and those without talent. ‘Das Volk’ exists for me only at the moment it becomes the audience. Whether they are Chinese, Bavarians, New Zealanders or, or Berliners leaves me cold. What matters is that they pay full price for admission.” So I mean, this is really Strauss, like him or not. But what is clear is that, I mean, Strauss couldn’t be less… It always upsets me when I hear people say, “Well, Strauss a wonderful composer. It’s a pity he was a Nazi sympathiser.” Look at that. There is nothing that goes with Nazi ideology. This letter makes it very, very clear that he couldn’t have been less Nazi in his core beliefs. Now, unfortunately, the letter was intercepted and it was shown to Goebbels and Hitler.

Hitler had an absolute fit. Strauss was stripped of all his positions. He was no longer head of the Reichsmusikkammer. It was a really dangerous, dodgy moment. Of course, he had to apologise, and he wrote a long, rather grovelling letter to Hitler, that again, is one of the things that has been held against him. People say how shameful that this great composer was reduced to grovelling to Hitler. I’ve really studied this letter over the last few days. I’ve been looking at it. I think it’s very, very interesting, again, in what he doesn’t say, as much as what he does say. And you can see that he’s told that there are three passages in the letter that have given offence to Hitler. “I have been given to understand that these were that I have little comprehension of anti-Semitism, as well as the concept of a People’s Community, and of the significance of my position as present of the Reichsmusikkammer.” He doesn’t refute that. I mean, you would think that if he really wanted to carry favour with Hitler. He was saying, “But of course, I hate Jews.” He doesn’t. He doesn’t follow that up at all. Unlike, say, Stravinsky, who was trying to carry favour with the Nazis. He wrote a letter to his German publishers saying, “Why do the Nazis ban my music? Don’t they understand that I hate Jews and communists more than they do?” Strauss never said anything like that.

And what he says, personally, I have no objection to it. He says, “As a German composer, and in view of the sum total of my works, which speak for themselves, I do not think I have to assert that this…” Well, you can read it for yourself. He says, “My whole life belongs to German music.” It’s an indefatigable effort to elevate German culture. So although he says, “I beg you, My Fuhrer, most humbly to receive me,” and all this kind of things. It’s a bit grovelling. I actually don’t really have a problem with the contents of this letter. What he had to do, of course, was to then fulfil certain official commissions. He had to provide an Olympic hymn for the 1936 Olympics. He was ordered to write a piece of music to celebrate the 1,000-year anniversary of the creation of the Japanese monarchy. You see him here shaking hands with the Japanese ambassador. And those pieces of music were written absolutely on automatic. The hymn is a real dud. You think, “How can he come up with a better tune than that, considering all the wonderful tunes he’d written?” And the music is also 16 minutes of notes spinning.

So I think, from this time onwards, he was always in a very, very dodgy position, vis-a-vis, the Nazis. And here, we’ve got an official letter of 1938. It’s a kind of report on him, and it mentions his letter to his Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig. And it’s also known that, in 1935, that he refused to publicly give the Nazi salute and that he continues to maintain contacts with Jews outside of Germany. So they’re watching him, and he was in a dodgy position because his only son had married a Jewish woman called Alice, who you see, Strauss with her in two photographs. And Strauss had the reputation for being a very cold man. He came across to people as cold, but he was not cold towards his family. He was a very, very devoted family man. He loved his daughter-in-law, Alice, and of course, he was a typical loving grandfather. He really adored his two grandsons, and many pictures that are testament to that. So by the late ‘30s, he was a very isolated figure, I think, in a funny kind of way, this helped him creatively because he was a composer. I mean, people revered him for what he’d written in the past, but he was considered to be reactionary. He was swimming against the tide of history, musically.

But I think the fact that his troubled situation in Germany isolated, in a way, he went into his own little world and he was able to do his thing. 1938, he wrote two operas, “Friedenstag”, which was a pacifist opera. It’s set the 30 years war. You could see this opera, as an apology for appeasement or even for collaboration. It obviously had a message that did not go down well with the Nazis. But I think this opera is, it’s 1938. It was premiered a few weeks before the Munich conference, and here you see, of course, Neville Chamberlain coming back, waving that scrap of paper and talking about appeasement. Later in the same year, in October, “Friedenstag”, I have to say, is another opera that I think is, musically, a dud. But we sense a revival of Strauss’ genius and a new phase of development in his second opera of 1938, which is “Daphne”, which is about the myth of Daphne who was about to be raped by Apollo and she prays to the gods and they transform her into a tree. And it’s in this opera, in the final scenes, that we hear the typical late Strauss, with this wonderful, floating, melismatic line. Melisma is a melody where there is more than one note to a syllable. So you get this strange, almost oriental, floating line, which of course, reached its climax in the four last songs. But this is an excerpt from “Daphne”, recorded in 1938 with the original soprano, Margarete Teschemacher.

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So that opera premiered October, 1938. The following month, November the 9th, 1938, was Kristallnacht. After that, nobody could have any illusions really about the intentions and barbarity of the Nazi regime. As I said, Strauss withdrew into his little world. And in 1939, just around the time of the outbreak of war, he embarks on his final opera, “Capriccio”, which he said intended to be his artistic testament, an expression, really, of his core beliefs. And it’s based on that little play that had been discovered by Stefan Zweig, “Prima La Musica, Dopo Le Parole” And so, the main, obvious theme of the opera is a debate between a poet and a musician, who are both in love with the same woman, and about the primacy of words and/or music. Here is the programme of the first performance, you can see, which is 28th of October, 1942. Now, I think this opera, as I said, it’s really a statement of Strauss’ core beliefs. And I think, in a very discreet way, he’s putting forward a philosophy, which is again, as un-Nazi as it could be.

It’s a celebration of civilised values. Now, the initial plot was that it was going to be set in Germany in the romantic period, but after the outbreak of war, when Germany was at war with France, he decided to change the setting to 18th century France, ‘cause he did not want the opera to have any kind of nationalist connotations. This is a photograph of the original production. I think I’m going to skip this because I may run out of time. So in the war, he lived in his beautiful house in Garmisch with his son and his daughter-in-law, and his wife, of course, and his two grandchildren. She told a story at the end of the war, her grandmother was a prisoner in the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, which you see here. And Strauss had an invitation to conduct a concert in Prague, and this gave him an idea. He agreed to do the concert on condition that he would have a car with a driver to take him there. And his plan was, what he did, was that he instructed the driver not to go straight to Prague, but to drive to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where he intended to visit, and if possible, take out the grandmother of his Jewish daughter-in-law. And he did it.

He arrived there and I don’t know how you knock on the door of a concentration camp, or I suppose there must be some kind of e entrance where he introduced himself, and he said, “I am the composer Richard Strauss, and I’ve come to collect Frau ,” and so, of course, they treated him as a complete mad man. So here is his house, and very comfortable. Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. And so, as I said, he was already in bad odour with the Nazis, and what really finished off his reputation with them, towards the end of the war, he received a request to billet wounded soldiers from the Eastern front, a typical Strauss piece of tactlessness. He answered, “Well, no, I’m not going to take soldiers into my house. As far as I’m concerned, nobody needs to get wounded on my behalf.” Of course, the Nazis were completely outraged by this. And so we get this letter of the 24th of January, 1944, official letter about Strauss, where it says.

Any kind of personal contact between leading Nazis and Dr. Strauss is forbidden. So we get towards the end of the war, and this terrible carpet bombing of German cities. Very controversial, of course, these days, both militarily and morally. So all the great German cities were destroyed and all the opera houses were destroyed. And Strauss was very, very, very depressed about this. And he wrote a letter to a friend saying, “Oh, my god, the house, the most sacred place in the world has been destroyed. My beautiful Dresden has been destroyed, Weimar has been destroyed, Munich has been destroyed.” And he sat down to write a piece of music. It’s called “Metamorphosen”. And it’s a theme taken from Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony, or “Funeral March”, and he developed that into a piece of music of incredible, tragic power. It’s one of his greatest masterpieces, “Metamorphosen”, a real gut-wrenching piece. Now, the letter would seem to think that the tragedy of this piece is the destruction of buildings, the destruction of the cities. I mean, Strauss was not the kind of man really to express himself, usually, on paper in very emotional terms. But I read this piece as not just being about the destruction of buildings, it’s the destruction of German culture and all the human tragedy of the Second World War.

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He was very clear, in his mind, by the way, who was to blame for all of this. He writes about it in his diary. He doesn’t blame the Americans or the British. He knows where the blame lies. And early, in 1945, he wrote this in his diary, he said, “The most terrible period in human history is at an end, the 12-year reign of bestiality, ignorance, anti-culture under the greatest criminals in history, during which German’s 2,000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.” You couldn’t put it better. As I said, he’s very clear where the blame lies. So like every prominent German, he needed to be denazified at the end of the war. Bavaria, where he lived, was the American zone. The problem was that, of course, that brief period, 1934-5, when he had been the president of the Reichsmusikkammer, which made him an official of Nazi Germany. The son of of Thomas Klausmann went back to Germany in disguise as an American reporter, and he went round all of Germany, interviewed at all the prominent Nazis and painted a really black picture of them, and he’s particularly harsh on Strauss.

I don’t doubt that Strauss said lots of tactless and silly things. That’s what he did at all stages of his life. But anyway, this account of his interview with Strauss did Strauss a great deal of harm. But I’ve had an email correspondence, recently, with the nephew of an American officer, Colonel Bill Garlock. He was of Jewish origin and he befriended Strauss, and he helped to get him through this very difficult period of denazification. And I was sent this rather nice drawing, and you can see it’s dated 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which is where Strauss lived. Now, Strauss lived until 1949, and he had one more great masterpiece in him, which is the four last songs. So I think he got through that phase of terrible grief and terrible despair. And so many people have told me that they hope that they will be in the kind of mood that Strauss was when they come to die, or at least the mood that he expressed in these wonderful four last songs. So the images here, it’s Strauss on his deathbed and the redoubtable Pauline at his funeral. I’m going to finish with an excerpt of one of the four last songs of Strauss.

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So that’s it. I’m going to go into Q & A.

Q&A and Comments:

Can’t agree with your opinion on “Morgen!”. Too staccato. The marking is . Well, I’m afraid, I really do disagree with you about that quite strongly. not my taste at all. These are all very subjective things.

Strauss was friendly towards Jews. He had tea with my grandmother in Hamburg. My great-uncle was the financial director of the Hamburg Opera, both Jews. Thank you for that information. It doesn’t surprise me at all. It fits in with what I know about him.

My mother maintained that if Strauss was an anti-Semite, what was he doing playing scat with her father and the rabbi in Karlsburg, about in the 1930s? Thank you for that too. That’s very interesting.

I’m sure you know of Julius Patzak and Kathleen Ferriers’ recording of “Das Lied Von Der Erde”. I certainly do. A very, very great recording. I don’t find him the ideal… Well, I love him in that piece, but it’s true. He’s not a heldentenor. But mind you, I can’t stand those dreadful German heldentenors, who make such an a meal out of that. I actually don’t want to hear a heldentenor in it.

Somebody’s saying that Zweig was a relation of their mother. Great letter. I presume you’re talking about the Strauss letter. When did Schwarzkopf make the recording of “Das Bachlein”? Very late. It might even be her last commercial recording. It’s her second version of the four last songs. It’s one of the fill-up songs.

Q: What happened to his daughter?

A: He survived and the grandchildren survived. I think one of the grandsons is still alive. Yes, they all survived.

Somebody saying they’ve been singing his songs ever since Israel forgave him.

Alice, daughter-in-law, was a cousin of my grandmother’s who was from the Czech Republic. The family were not very happy with the connection to Strauss at the time. Many family members were in Theresienstadt. I had read that he got daughter-in-law out of Germany. No, that’s not so. She stayed in the house till the end of the war.

Last masterpiece is the four last songs, which has, of course, become one of his most loved pieces. In reference to “Intermezzo”, he must have had Jewish blood in his veins. The comment relates to the previous statement that he didn’t stay in the same place for long, an illusion to the idea of the wandering Jew. I don’t see this as anti-Semitic. Well, I certainly don’t see it as anti-Semitic either.

Oh, that terrible film. Yes, “The Dance of the Seven Veils”. Grotesque. What a joke, Ken Russell. Well, I think Ken Russell was just being, he suggested he was a Nazi sympathiser. It was just a piece of sensationalism in my view.

Do we know Strauss’ views on the music of Mahler? I don’t think we do actually. They were sorts of frenemies. We know what Mahler’s were about Strauss. Again, very mixed. Strauss certainly helped promote Mahler. He conducted his work and promoted his music. So I assume that he he liked it. Mahler liked some of Strauss and not other things.

No, he didn’t succeed in rescuing the grandmother. The Jewish daughter-in-law would have done that. She survived. I mean, both the daughter-in-law and the sons, they were, in effect, towards the end of the war, they were prisoners in their house. They couldn’t go out. And of course, if Hitler had won the war, that would’ve been curtains for them.

Right, lots of people asking about the Jewish daughter-in-law.

Did he not write a concerto at the request of the Jewish soldier? I think you’re probably talking about the left-hand pieces that he wrote for Paul Wittgenstein, the brother who lost his right arm in the First World War and commissioned pieces from Strauss. I think that’s the reference there.

Don’t see how one couldn’t be an anti-Semite if one was part of the Nazi party. He wasn’t. I should have said that, which I made that very clear. Strauss always refused to join the Nazi party. He was not a party member.

The woman who sang in the four last songs, I mean, certainly, my favourite of more recent versions is the Finnish soprano, Soile Isokoski.

No, he didn’t rescue the grandmother.

Somebody’s saying I’ve converted them to Strauss. I hope that’s the case ‘cause I do love his music.

Yes, there was a play, that Ronald Howard play. I didn’t think it was a good play. Because I think I’ve read everything that has been written on Strauss, and I’ve read all his letters and all his diaries. The text of that play was largely borrowed from letters and diaries and I just didn’t think it worked very well as a play, actually.

No, Strauss is not related to the Vienna Strauss’, and they were, of course, partly Jewish.

Will I be doing a talk on Mahler? Do you know I think I would rather Dennis did that. I think Dennis would do a better talk on Mahler. I could do a talk on Alma. I’ve done lots of talks on Alma.

Jessye Norman, very interesting recording. I mean, the voice is unbelievably fabulous. It’s incredibly slow. The four last songs is one of those things. It’s a bit like the song “The Man I Love.” If you listen to the early recordings, it goes da da da da da da da da da, and it just gets slower and slower and slower with time. And the four last songs have got slower. And the slowest of all, I think, is probably the Jessye Norman one. Her breath control is just unbelievable, that she could actually sing at that speed.

And I think that is it. Thank you all very, very much for your attention. We’ve got a big change. Next time, I’m going to be talking about swing and jazz.

• Thank you, Patrick. That was really outstanding.

• Thank you, Wendy.

• [Wendy] Another wonderful presentation.

• Thank you.

• Thanks, everybody. We will see you again Monday.

• [Judi] Tomorrow.

• Tomorrow, very good. Thank you, Jude. Thanks, everybody, for joining.

• [Judi] Thanks Wendy.

• Thanks Patrick.

• [Judi] Safe travels, Wendy. Thank you.

• Take care.

• [Judi] Bye-bye.

• Bye.