cover image Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss

Matthew Boyden. Northeastern University Press, $35 (431pp) ISBN 978-1-55553-418-9

Strauss (1864-1949), the last great composer in a German line reaching back centuries, was an extraordinary mixture of the poetic (creating music of great beauty and technical sophistication right into his 84th year) and the prosaic (regarding his work strictly as a business, for which he expected to be--and was--paid remarkably well). He also came from a long anti-Semitic tradition that his closeness to the Wagner family in Bayreuth did nothing to diminish--and that made the Nazi assault on the Jews late in his life entirely palatable to him (only when a valued colleague like his sometime librettist Stefan Zweig was involved did he raise a murmur of protest). He also had, in the singer Pauline de Ahna, one of the most vixenish wives with whom a great man was ever saddled, though Strauss always insisted her pugnaciousness and public bullying were good for him. Boyden, an English record producer and writer, has worked particularly hard to place Strauss in his cultural context, rightly seeing in him not the musical innovator many of his contemporaries praised but rather a deeply conservative artist with an extraordinary flair for crowd-pleasing melody and effects. As Boyden acutely observes, Strauss can be seen as the progenitor of much of the bombastic music that thunders from our movie screens today. Was he guilty of Nazi collaboration, a subject on which most biographers have given him the benefit of some doubt? Yes, declares Boyden unequivocally, as protection for his wealth and the continuing performance of his music in a land, and a tradition, he had loved all too well. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Sept.)