The Weimar Triangle (25 page)

“Alas, yes. I am amazed how well informed you are. They do not understand that their aims are the same as his, to mitigate the effects of Versailles, to reduce it piece by piece until it becomes ancient history, but he grasps that this can be done by diplomacy only.”

I was becoming increasingly aware that, after all, her bed was perhaps not the most appropriate location for such highlevel political talk.

“Don’t you think we should discuss these things tomorrow and go to sleep?” I asked.

“Oh no,” she shot back. “Never procrastinate! I am wide awake. This is the time and place!”

“Just as you wish,” I laughed.

So we continued. There was no point wasting time telling her things she obviously knew as well as I did, that for Germany diplomacy could only work if German representatives sat down with their former adversaries as equals. This could not be considered while the war continued in another form, while the French where occupying the Rhineland and the Ruhr. Also, German reparation payments first had to be rationalized.

The psychological moment came on February 9, 1925. On that day the French press reported the sensational, totally unexpected news that the German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann had proposed a security pact between Germany, France and Belgium, to be guaranteed by England and Italy, outlawing any attempt to change the current borders between them by force. That would mean, among other things, that Germany would give up, once and for all, its historic claim on Alsace and Lorraine. At first, the Quai d’Orsay did not believe it. Mistrust of Germany had become endemic. It took them four months to reply. The British, too, were cool, The conference did not take place until October, in Locarno, a small Swiss resort at the northern end of
Lago Maggiore
, which up to then was little known.

“It is a lovely place, Hermann. Have you been there?’

“I only went through it once on my way for a brief holiday in Ascona, a favourite for artists and writers
—
and pacifists.”

“So you probably don’t know the charming city hall, where the conference was held. So there they sat, on one side Stresemann and the German chancellor Hans Luther, and opposite them our delegation, headed by Aristide Briand, the foreign minister, with his walrus mustache, who, thank Heaven, was not as pathologically obsessed with security as his predecessors had been, and my boss’s boss, Philippe Berthelot, who was just extricating himself from a major scandal connected with the Industrial Bank of China, in which not he but his brother was involved. The British delegation was led by their new foreign minister Austen Chamberlain, widely regarded as pro-French and anti-German, and given to long-winded speeches, in contrast to Briand who was succinct, amiable and ironic. I thought Stresemann struck just the right note of relaxed seriousness in his speeches.”

“I suppose this must have been a great moment for him,” I mused.

“Oh yes. The first time that a German faced his former enemies not as the accused in the dock, or as a recalcitrant debtor, nor or as a petitioner, but as an equal. This meant the war was really over, once and for all. The conference had been called as a result of his initiative, to examine a proposal of his from which all of Europe would benefit, even though the future of Germany’s eastern borders was still to be discussed. And everybody knew that Stresemann’s initiative had come under furious attack from his opponents at home, that he was risking his political life. Maybe, in view of the fate of another foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, not only his political life. He had real courage. I kept humming the main theme of the
Eroica
as I listened to them.”

This time I gave her left shoulder a little squeeze.

“Stresemann did not only have courage,” she went on, “but he was also a strategic genius. The conference was winding down, but there were still a number of difficult topics to be resolved. So he hired a motor boat for a cruise on Lake Maggiore for all the major conference participants to resume the conference on board and told the captain not to return until he gave him the signal
—
that is, not until all the topics had been resolved to his satisfaction. The boat was called
Orange Blossoms.

“They did not return until late in the evening. I can’t swear to it, but Briand exclaimed as they landed, ‘Thank God we’re home. I don’t know how many more concessions I would have made if the cruise had taken even longer.”

A
N
E
XCUSE FOR
W
RITING ABOUT
R
ICHARD
S
TRAUSS AND
T
HOMAS
M
ANN

Erwin Herzberg’s Feuilleton in the Frankfurter Zeitung, July 29, 1927 (clipped from the newspaper)

The municipal planners of the exhibition deserve our collective gratitude for inviting Richard Strauss to Frankfurt to conduct six of his operas. It is indeed a fitting climax to the Summer of Music. The world honours him, as it should, as Germany’s leading composer. No doubt many of those assembled in the Opernhaus breathed a sigh of relief that at last they were hearing agreeably accessible music.

At the turn of the century, the Wagnerians in Bayreuth thought
Elektra
and
Salome
had polluted the opera stage forever. Siegfried Wagner, speaking of Strauss’s use of the orchestra, said his father would turn in his grave if he knew. The sounds Richard Strauss asked his players to make, he said, “seem to be have been composed during attacks of feverish delirium.” He was referring specifically to the requirement that the violinists, when so requested, touch “the poor strings” upside down, with the wood of their bows, rather than the hair. This was at the
fin de siècle
when, as a young and sardonic anarchist, he was the foremost representative of international modernist decadence.

In 1911 the
Rosenkavalier
was a return to tradition. One was not surprised that this opera was deplored by Stravinsky who never had any use for Strauss and blasts him still as the master of “triumphant banality.” All his operas should be sent to purgatory, Stravinsky says. “
Ariadne
evokes in me the desire to scream.” The
Rosenkavalier
upset some people for non-musical reasons
—
the Kaiserin, for example. The empress took exception, in the opening scene, to the rumpled double bed at the centre of the stage and to the post-coital duet between the two lovers, a young single man, sung by a soprano, and a mature lady, married, a mezzo-soprano. The Kaiserin would have been even more upset if she had noticed that the short overture depicted a sexual climax.

Who is the real, essential Richard Strauss? Can one tell from the subjects he chooses for his compositions?

In the early tone poems, and in the opera
Feuersnot,
Strauss, himself a rebel, orchestrated a rebellion against Philistines.
Elektra
and
Salome
were deliberate shockers. The
Sinfonia Domestica,
on the other hand, celebrated the joys of bourgeois family life. The
Rosenkavalier
was a touching meditation on morality and mortality in a style deliberately reminiscent of
Figaro,
and included, among others, a gross character driven by lust and greed.
Ariadne auf Naxos
is a dream-opera, a playful combination of the French eighteenth century and Greek mythology.
Intermezzo
a portrait of himself and his family.
Die Frau ohne Schatten,
a quasisurrealist, many-layered, moralistic fairy tale, deliberately post-Wagnerian and suggestive of
The Magic Flute.

This array suggests admirable diversity, rich imagination and high European cultivation. Strauss’s music is as original and personal as that of Schumann and Brahms. He has prodigious musical intelligence and inventiveness, and a remarkable gift for melody and for expressing tenderness, as all of us who treasure his
Lieder
know. Moreover, he has a special facility for writing for female voices, and it has been remarked that his operas are sprinkled with strong women who dominate their men. This may be a reflection of Strauss’s own relation to his adored wife, Pauline, his formidable partner in an exemplary marriage, a singer herself, whose worldly sense of business is the topic of many amiable anecdotes among musicians. (“Richard! Sit down! Compose!”)

Until 1914 Strauss worked with great ease and, as far as we know, without any unusual inner struggle. His friend and competitor Gustav Mahler thought there was something hard and cold in his personality. No doubt others felt differently. After 1914 he had greater difficulties composing. When labouring on
Die Frau ohne Schatten
he often doubted his ability to do justice to the beauty of his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s poetic libretto, and he was gravely dissatisfied with himself. He never lacked courage and he was a gambler from the beginning. What a gamble that blood-curdling sex-and-violence horror-opera
Salome
was! It outraged the Kaiser but was a box office success. “I am sorry that Strauss composed this,” the Kaiser was reported to have said. ”Naturally, I am very keen on him, but this is going to do him a lot of damage.” Strauss often told this story, adding, “Thanks to the damage, I was able to build myself a villa in Garmisch.”

Audiences always liked Strauss better than the critics. Many of us heard stories for years about his lovable habit, during intermission, of taking a pack of cards out of his tails’ pocket and playing a round of skat with kindred gamblers in the orchestra.

And what about his politics? His philosophy of life may have been expressed in his early opera
Guntram
, which opposed the “beautiful dream” of liberal humanity. “The laws of my mind determine my philosophy of life,” Guntram sang. None of his operatic subjects was as political as Mozart’s prerevolutionary
Figaro
or Beethoven’s anti-authoritarian
Fidelio.
Though Bavarian in origin and European in scope, he adapted quickly to the Kaiser’s Berlin. However, the sardonic-anarchist strain in him persisted until 1921, when he proposed to the astute and influential Berlin critic Alfred Kerr the idea of a political operetta, set against the chaos of post-war Germany and revolving around a composer who carries on love affairs with conservatory students. Nothing came of it, perhaps because it approached Weimar culture from a point of view unattractive to Kerr. Later, Strauss met Mussolini several times
—
he was not the only respectable German who did
—
and seemed to have shared with Mussolini a distaste for modernism. By then he had turned his back on the Weimar Republic and moved to Vienna, where, in 1919, he accepted the position of artistic director of the Hofoper. For a Bavarian, Vienna at any time, but particularly at this time, was more congenial than Berlin.

As I was strolling through the exhibition this morning humming one of the
Rosenkavalier
waltzes
—
I had attended the performance the night before
—
I saw in the Wagner room the back of a tall and slightly stooped middle-aged man in a welltailored brown suit scrutinizing the first edition of
Tannhäuser
. I was sure it was Thomas Mann. I have never met him but I had seen many photographs of him even before I heard him read from
The Magic Mountain
at the university a few weeks ago. I had been thinking about him, for some mysterious reason, during the performance, wondering why in the many essays by him, and the dozens of articles about him, and the interviews with him I had read, I could not recall a single instance when he told us what he thought of Richard Strauss. So I did some research and found three references. In 1895, when Mann was twenty, he named Strauss as one of his favourite composers, but in 1909 he expressed his astonishment when a magazine nominated him as the “the king of German music.” In 1911 he congratulated Hofmannthal on his “enchanting” libretto for the
Rosenkavalier
, “so light and graceful,” in contrast to the four hours of noisy and turbulent music, including the “anachronistic waltzes,” which he said drowned out the exquisite text. He should have assumed, I thought, that Hofmannsthal and Strauss were friends. This struck me as an uncharacteristically tactless observation.

There is no record of Thomas Mann and Richard Strauss ever meeting each other, although for some years they were near neighbours in Munich.

Thomas Mann is profoundly musical and often said that if he had not become a writer he would have become a composer. He once wrote to Bruno Walter that if he had, he would compose like César Franck. He had opinions about many of the major artists on the scene and often touched on musical subjects.

But as I stood there in the Wagner room, the question arose in my mind whether I would dare to accost the great man and ask him what he thought of Richard Strauss. I would, of course, first identify myself. He probably knew my name, from having read my
feuilletons.
Perhaps we could go to the café around the corner and have a cup of coffee together. Just as I was about to say something the man turned around.

He was one of the clarinetists in the symphony orchestra.