The World of Yesterday (43 page)

I felt that it was more of an honour than a disgrace to share the fate of total literary annihilation in Germany with such eminent contemporaries, including Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Werfel, Freud and Einstein, and many others whose work I regard as far more important than my own. And I dislike putting on airs of martyrdom so much that I mention my inclusion in our common destiny only with reluctance. But strangely enough, it was given to me to place the National Socialists, even Adolf Hitler in person, in a particularly awkward situation. Of all the literary names now cast into outer darkness, mine was to be the frequent subject of great agitation and endless debates in high places, indeed the highest, the company at the Berchtesgaden villa. So I can count, among the most pleasing moments of my life, the modest satisfaction of having caused great annoyance to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man of the modern age.

In the first days of the new regime I had already, although innocently, been responsible for a certain amount of uproar. At the time a film based on my novella
Burning Secret
, and bearing the same title, was being shown all over Germany. No one took the faintest offence. However, on the day after the Reichstag fire, for which the National Socialists tried, unsuccessfully, to blame the Communists, people gathered in front of the cinema posters and advertising for
Burning Secret
, nudging one another, winking and laughing. Soon the Gestapo discovered the reason for their mirth. The same evening, policemen raced around on motorbikes, further showings of the film were banned, and by next day the title of my novella
Burning Secret
had vanished without trace from all newspaper advertisements and all the advertising pillars where posters went up. Of course it was easy enough for the National Socialists to ban a single word that
offended them, even to burn and destroy all our books, but in one particular instance they could not attack me without also injuring a man who was vitally necessary to their international prestige at this critical moment, the greatest and most famous musician in Germany, Richard Strauss, with whom I had just been collaborating on an opera.

It was the first time I had worked with Richard Strauss. Hugo von Hofmannsthal had been his regular librettist ever since he wrote the texts for
Elektra
and
Der Rosenkavalier
, and I had never met Richard Strauss personally. After Hofmannsthal’s death, however, he got in touch with me through my publishers, saying he wanted to begin a new opera and asking if I would be willing to write the libretto. I was very well aware of the honour of such a commission. Music and musicians had been part of my life ever since Max Reger had set my early poems. Busoni, Toscanini, Bruno Walter and Alban Berg were close friends of mine. But there was no creative musician of our time whom I would more willingly have served than Richard Strauss, last of the great line of German composers of genius running from Handel and Bach, by way of Beethoven and Brahms, and so to our own day. I agreed at once, and at our first meeting I suggested that Ben Jonson’s
The Silent Woman
would make a good subject for an opera. It was a pleasant surprise to see how quickly and perceptively Strauss agreed to all my suggestions. I had not expected him to show such a ready understanding of literature, and his knowledge of the theatre was amazing. Even as I was outlining the course of the action, he saw it in dramatic terms and immediately adapted it to suit the limits of his own powers, which he understood with almost uncanny clarity. I have met many great artists in my life, but never before one who looked at himself with such impersonal and unswerving objectivity. At that first meeting Strauss frankly confessed that he knew a musician of seventy no longer had his former youthful powers of inspiration. He did not think, he said, that he could
write symphonic works like
Till Eulenspiegel
and
Tod und Verklärung
today, for pure music needs a very high degree of creative freshness. But written text still inspired him. Given a subject in verbal form, he could illustrate it to the full dramatically, because he found that musical themes spontaneously developed from situations and words, so in his later years he had turned exclusively to opera. He knew that opera as an art form was played out, he added. Wagner represented such a mighty mountain peak that no one could rise any higher. “However,” he added with a broad Bavarian smile, “I found a solution by going around the mountain instead.”

After we had worked out the basic structure he gave me a few more small directions. He would leave me absolute freedom, he said, because he was never inspired by a libretto made to measure in advance, in the manner of Verdi’s operas, only by a genuine work of literature. But he would be glad if I could provide places for a few complex musical forms that would enable the musical colouring to develop in a certain way. “I’m not thinking of long melodies such as you can find in Mozart. I manage short themes best. But I can vary and paraphrase such themes, get everything possible out of them. In fact I think I do that better than anyone else today.” Again, I was amazed by the frank way he spoke, because it is true that Strauss’s melodies hardly ever go beyond a few bars, but the way those few bars are worked up into a fugal structure—think of the
Rosenkavalier
waltz—gives them fully rounded perfection.

Not just at this first meeting but at all our others I was astonished, over and over again, by the objectivity and certainty that the old master brought to the relation between himself and his works. Once I was alone with him at a private rehearsal of
Die ägyptische Helena
in the Salzburg Festival Theatre. There was no one else in the auditorium, and we sat in the dark. He was listening. Suddenly I noticed him drumming his fingers slightly but impatiently on the arm of his seat. Then he whispered to
me, “Poor! Oh, very poor. I obviously couldn’t think of anything better!” And after a minute or so he added, “If only I could cut that! Oh God, oh God, it means nothing and it goes on too long, much too long.” But after another few minutes: “Ah, there—now, you see, that’s good!” He assessed his own work in as matter-of-fact a way as if he were hearing the music for the first time, and it had been written by some other composer entirely unknown to him. That extraordinary awareness of his own capabilities never left him. He always knew exactly who he was and what he could do. He did not seem very interested in how much or how little other composers meant by comparison to him, or in what he meant to them. It was the work of composition itself that he liked.

With Strauss, that work is a remarkable process. There is nothing daemonic about it, none of the artist’s fine, careless rapture, or the depression and desperation we know from accounts of the lives of Beethoven and Wagner. Strauss works coolly and objectively, he composes—like Johann Sebastian Bach and all those other sublime musical craftsmen—calmly and with regularity. He sits down at his desk at nine in the morning, and goes on composing exactly where he left off the day before, regularly writing the first sketch in pencil, the piano score in ink, and going on without a break until twelve or one o’clock. He plays Skat
11
in the afternoon, transfers two or three pages of his composition to the full score, and then may have to go to the theatre to conduct in the evening. He is never nervous in any way, and his artist’s intellect is bright and clear by day and night alike. When a servant knocks on his door to bring him the tailcoat he wears for conducting he leaves his work, drives to the theatre, and conducts music with the same sure touch and air of calm as when he was playing cards in the afternoon, and inspiration returns to him at exactly the right place next morning. For, to borrow a term from Goethe, Strauss is “in command” of his ideas. To him art means ability,
even all-embracing ability. As he has said, amusingly, “Anyone who wants to be a real musician must be able to set a restaurant menu to music.” Difficulties do not deter him; his creative intellect sees them as a game. I like to remember how his little blue eyes twinkled as he told me triumphantly, when the musicians reached a certain passage: “I gave the singer quite a problem to solve there! Let her puzzle away at it until she works out the answer!” In such rare moments of amusement, you feel that something daemonic does in fact lie buried in the mind of this remarkable man, although you may have doubted it at first because of the meticulous, methodical, reliable craftsmanship of his working method and the apparent absence of any nervous strain. In the same way his face initially looks rather ordinary—plump, childlike cheeks, rather commonplace fleshy features, and his forehead is not domed but recedes slightly. However, one glance at his clear, blue, beaming eyes, and you instantly feel some kind of special magical force behind the everyday bourgeois façade. I think they are the most watchful eyes I ever saw in any musician—if not daemonic then far-seeing, the eyes of a man who knows his art inside out.

Back in Salzburg after this invigorating meeting with Strauss, I set to work at once. Wondering what he would make of my verses, I dispatched the first act to him only two weeks later. By return of post, he sent me a postcard with a quotation from
Die Meistersinger
on it:
The opening was good.
The second act brought me an even warmer comment in the shape of the opening bars of his own song:
How glad I am I found you, my dear child!
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This pleasure, even delight of his made the rest of my work a true delight as well. Richard Strauss did not change a single line of the entire libretto, and only once asked me to add thee or four lines so that he could bring in another voice. A very friendly relationship developed between us; he came to our house and I visited him in Garmisch, where little by little he played me the entire opera from the sketch of the score, his long, thin fingers
moving over the piano keys. Without any written contract, we agreed to take it for granted that when this opera was finished we would start on another one at once. He had already approved of its general outline in advance.

In January 1933, when Adolf Hitler came to power, the piano score of our opera
Die schweigsame Frau—
The Silent Woman—was as good as finished, and Strauss had completed the orchestration of most of the first act. A few weeks later came the decree strictly banning from the German stage works by non-Aryans, and even those in which a Jew had been involved in any way at all. This sweeping prohibition extended to the dead, and Mendelssohn’s statue was removed from its place outside the Leipzig Gewandhaus, an outrage bitterly resented by all music-lovers. It looked to me as if the ban sealed the fate of our opera, and I assumed that Richard Strauss would naturally give up any idea of further collaboration with me and begin again with a new librettist. Instead he wrote me letter after letter, asking what on earth I was thinking of—on the contrary, he said, now that he was busy orchestrating
Die schweigsame Frau
he would like me to start preparing the libretto for his next opera. He had no intention of letting anyone forbid him to collaborate with me, and I must acknowledge freely that in the course of the entire affair he maintained his loyal friendship with me as long as possible. At the same time, I have to admit, he did take certain precautions that I found less attractive—he moved closer to the men who wielded power, he was often seen in the company of Hitler, Goering and Goebbels, and he let himself be appointed President of the Reich Chamber of Music at a time when even Furtwängler
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was still declining to support the National Socialists.

To have Strauss openly on their side was enormously important to the National Socialists at this moment. Infuriatingly, not only the best writers but also the outstanding musicians of the time had rejected their ideas outright, and the few who did agree with
them, or went over to them, were not widely known. To win the support of the most famous musician in Germany at such a delicate moment would be extremely profitable, in a purely decorative sense, to Goebbels and Hitler. Hitler, who during his vagrant years in Vienna, as Strauss told me, had somehow scraped up the money to go to Graz for the premiere of
Salome
, paid ostentatious tribute to him. The only music performed at evening parties at Berchtesgaden, apart from Wagner’s, consisted of Strauss lieder. Strauss himself had ulterior motives for siding with the National Socialists. He always freely and coolly admitted that, with the egotism of an artist, he was indifferent at heart to any political regime. He had served the Kaiser as his Kapellmeister, and had made instrumental arrangements of military marches for him. Then he had gone to Vienna to be Court Kapellmeister to the Austrian Emperor, but subsequently was
persona gratissima
in both the Austrian and the German Republics. Obliging the National Socialists was also of vital importance to him, because he had put himself morally in the wrong by Nazi standards—his son’s wife was Jewish, and he feared that his grandchildren, whom he loved dearly, would be excluded from school; the librettos of his earlier operas had been by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was not a ‘pure Aryan’; and his publisher was a Jew. So it seemed to him particularly advisable to gain support, and he went about it with great persistence. He conducted anywhere the new masters of Germany asked him to, and set an anthem to music for the Olympic Games in Berlin. At the same time he was writing me extraordinarily candid letters, and he mentioned that commission with little enthusiasm. With the
sacro egoismo
of the artist, his only real concern was to safeguard his work, and most of all to see the new opera, which was especially close to his heart, go into production.

Naturally making concessions of this kind to the National Socialists was bound to be very awkward for me. It could easily
give the impression that I was secretly on the same side, or just agreeing that a single exception to the disgraceful boycott of Jewish artists might be made in my own special case. My friends kept pressing me to protest publicly in Nazi Germany. But for one thing I hate emotional public gestures on principle, and for another I was not inclined to put difficulties in the way of a genius of the stature of Richard Strauss. After all, Strauss was the greatest living musician and was seventy years old; he had spent three years writing this work, and all that time he had shown friendship for me, had behaved perfectly correctly, and had even shown courage. So I thought the right thing for me to do was keep quiet and let things run their course. I also knew that complete passivity was my best way of making life more difficult for the present custodians of German culture. The Reich Chamber of Literature and the Ministry of Propaganda were just looking for a good pretext, one that would hold water, for imposing a ban on their greatest composer in this affair. How convenient it would have been if
Die schweigsame Frau
had contained a risqué situation, like the scene in
Der Rosenkavalier
when a young man comes out of a married woman’s bedroom! Then they could have claimed that they must protect German morality. But to their disappointment, there was no immorality in my libretto. Then they searched any number of Gestapo files and read my earlier books. But again, they could find no evidence that I had ever said a disparaging word about Germany—or indeed about any other nation on earth—or had been politically active. Whatever they did, whatever they tried, the decision was still going to be theirs alone. Were they going to deny the old master, whom incidentally they themselves had appointed to carry the banner of National Socialist music, the right to have his new opera performed, and do it before the eyes of the whole world, or was the name of Stefan Zweig, on whose mention as his librettist Richard Strauss expressly insisted, to contaminate German theatrical programmes as it had so often
done before? What a shameful day that would be! I quietly relished their anxieties and their painful dilemma. I guessed that if I simply did nothing, or rather refrained from helping or hindering the affair in any way, this musical comedy was bound to degenerate into party-political caterwauling.