Richard Strauss [Hardcover]

Matthew Boyden (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 1999

One of Germany's most successful and popular composers, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed huge celebrity, vast wealth, and unequaled adulation during his lifetime. His masterful tone poems and operas, including Der Rosenkavalier, Salome, and Elektra, form a musical legacy that endures today. Yet Strauss was an enigmatic figure-an artistic genius who was consumed with a passion to protect the prosperity and security of his own interests.

In this intriguing biography, Matthew Boyden unveils the man behind the music, painting in masterful fashion a portrait of Strauss's life and work against the backdrop of his culture and turbulent times. Boyden examines his upbringing, his education, the influence of his domineering father and other mentors, and his loving but tempestuous relationship with his wife, soprano Pauline de Ahna.

This compelling volume provides a frank discussion of his open anti-Semitism at the Bayreuth Festival and delves into his active and willing collaboration with Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime, fully exploring why and in which ways Strauss allied himself with the Third Reich.

Boyden's revealing picture of Strauss shatters the myths surrounding the great composer and confronts the schism between his artistic achievements and his driving ambition and egotism. This definitive biography also richly depicts the social, cultural, and political milieus that shaped Strauss's character and exceptional talent.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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 beAand wasApaid remarkably well). He also came from a long anti-Semitic tradition that his closeness to the Wagner family in Bayreuth did nothing to diminishAand 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.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This book, written to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Strauss's death, is a remarkably clear-eyed and intelligent assessment of one of this century's most important and problematic composers. British music critic Boyden is no sycophantic apologist: all of Strauss's flaws and excesses, both personal and musical, are soberly laid bare. According to Boyden, Strauss was guided not by any particular aesthetic position but solely by egotism, pragmatic and moneymaking considerations, bourgeois nationalistic values, and an unrepentant Nietzschian worldview that ultimately led to his uncritical acceptance of Nazism. Boyden proceeds chronologically through Strauss's output, with fascinating digressions into the social and intellectual milieu that underlie each work. One of his intriguing theses is that Strauss did not beat a retreat from the precipice of modernism (as is usually presumed) because he never embraced modernism in the first place. This book contains no musical examples and skirts detailed analyses of individual pieces, yet it is so rich in background information and perceptive observations that one doesn't mind. Highly recommended.ALarry A. Lipkis, Moravian Coll., Bethlehem, PA
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Northeastern; 1St Edition edition (July 8, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155553418X
• ISBN-13: 978-1555534189
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,409,843 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Balanced & well worth reading, May 30, 2002

By 

Brian Kelly "mbriankell" (Glendale, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Richard Strauss (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating, impressively researched, balanced biography of Richard Strauss. The author clearly appreciates Strauss's music, but refuses to either gloss over or demonize Strauss's personal flaws, anti-Semitism, or involvement with the Nazis. (Strauss was not a party member; his involvement with the Nazis was in part because of career pragmatism, in part because of his interest in composers' rights, and, well, in part because he agreed with their cultural agenda.) He was a great composer and an outstanding conductor, but hardly a hero.

Until reading this, my knowledge of Strauss was limited mostly to various album notes and a few encyclopedia articles. I'd heard that some biographies trash him, and some are basically a whitewash. I'm glad I chose this one. It gives a comprehensive view of his influences and his life. Other composers had spectacular flaws; Strauss's reputation has probably suffered disproportionately.

Be warned: this is a thesis. You will experience the horror of endnotes. I don't know why Northeastern University Press didn't turn these into footnotes; perhaps some editor there has a fetish for turning back and forth between pages. Given that some chapters have over 50 endnotes, you're forced to either ignore them, read them all at once out of context, or place a post-it on the appropriate endnotes page and flip back and forth. Pointlessly annoying.

Although this is not always a fast read, especially because of the endnotes, toward the end it does become a page-turner. The epilogue, with the author's conclusions, is impressive.

If you love Strauss's music and want to know more, this is worth buying.

M. Brian Kelly

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A balanced biography of Strauss, August 18, 1999

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Richard Strauss (20th Century Composers) (Paperback)

In a fairly straightforward biography emphasizing the composition and production of Strauss's music, this book also looks unblinkingly at his anti-Semitism (which diminished after the birth of his two adored half-Jewish grandsons) and at his confused and confusing involvement with Hitler's Third Reich. The music is lovingly and skilfully described. This is the portrait of a man who is utterly devoted to his art and his family, and who is all too human when confronted with the political pressures bearing on them.

2 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars snore and a half, December 6, 2001

By 

disappointed (NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Richard Strauss (20th Century Composers) (Paperback)

This book is a snore and a half because it does not depict the composers life in a realistic view. The auther must have read an encyclopedia exert and then thought he knew enough about him to write a book, because the book can be summerized into 1 scentance and that scentance would be Richard Struass was a great composer. All in all I am very disappointed in this book.