From Richard I to Richard III

“Lohengrin is a sweetish inanity“ … “the horn parts in DieMeistersinger are actually parts for the clarinet“ – Franz Joseph Strauss, Richard’s father and first hornist of the Munich Court Orchestra, scarcely missed an opportunity to inveigh against Richard Wagner’s music. His artistic creed centred on the “trinity of Mozart (above all), Haydn and Beethoven“. On the day after Wagner’s death he was the only member of the orchestra who refused to rise in commemoration of the deceased.

It is all the more surprising how soon Richard Strauss shook off the hatred of Wagner he had inherited from his father. Statements like the following one, after a performance of Siegfried, were rapidly to become a thing of the past: “The introductory passage is a long-drawn-out drum-roll with the bass tuba and bassoons roaring out deep notes so stupidly that I couldn’t help laughing … not a trace of coherent melody … and again the initial roar … utter chaos, I would say.”

Strauss eagerly imbibed the “poison”, as his father used to call it, clandestinely at first in order to avoid scandal in the family, then quite openly, particularly when voicing his enthusiasm about Tristan, the “most splendorous belcanto opera” (Strauss in 1886 after a rehearsal in Bologna). As early as 1882, his father most reluctantly decided to reward Richard for having successfully completed grammar school by taking him along to Bayreuth for a performance of Parsifal. When he encountered Maestro Wagner in person, however, Richard simply dared not address him – a missed opportunity. Strauss’ early compositions clearly show how much he was already under Wagner’s spell. His actual involvement with Bayreuth, however, only came about at a later date: Hans von Bülow, a disciple of Liszt’s and Cosima Wagner’s first husband, mediated Strauss’ appointment as musical director at Meiningen. Bülow’s later dictum, “Wagner is Richard I, there is no Richard II, so Strauss is Richard III”, was soon to become legend.

Strauss began to study Wagner even more intensely when he met Alexander Ritter in Meiningen in 1885. Ritter, first violinist at Meiningen and married to one of Wagner’s nieces, was a member of the Neudeutsche Schule around Wagner and Liszt. He acquainted Strauss with the writings of Wagner and Schopenhauer and dispelled the last misgivings that Strauss still had about Liszt: “New ideas have to find new forms of expression – this basic principle underlying Liszt’s symphonic works, in which the poetic idea was in actual fact the formative element, then became the guiding principle I followed in my symphonic endeavours…”.

It was his friendship with Ritter that also spurred Strauss – much to the gratification of opera lovers – to devote himself to musical theatre: “Guntram”, a mediaeval story of chivalry, set to music to Strauss’ own libretto.