Ein Heldenleben
Richard Georg Strauss was born in Munich, Germany, on June 11, 1864, and died in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, on September 8, 1949. He began sketching Ein Heldenleben in spring 1897 and completed the score on December 1, 1898. On December 23 he began to rewrite the ending and composed what are now the final 25 measures, completing this work on December 27, 1898. Strauss himself conducted the first performance on March 3, 1899, at a Frankfurt Museum concert. The score is dedicated to Willem Mengelberg and the Orchestra of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw.
The score of Ein Heldenleben calls for 3 flutes and piccolo, 4 oboes (4th doubling English horn), E-flat clarinet, 2 clarinets in B-flat, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 8 horns, 5 trumpets, 3 trombones, tenor tuba, bass tuba, timpani, percussion (cymbals, tam-tam, snare drum, tenor drum, bass drum), two harps, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). There is a prominent part for solo violin.
Richard Strauss conceived Ein Heldenleben, “A Hero’s Life,” (1898) not as an isolated self-portrait, but as the serious counterpart to a satire — Don Quixote (1897). The composer even urged conductors to program them together, and he once wrote: “Don Quixote and Heldenleben are conceived so much as immediate pendants that, in particular, Don Quixote is only fully and entirely comprehensible at the side of Heldenleben.” The pairing complicates the longstanding charge of arrogance that has dogged Heldenleben since its premiere. If Strauss truly intended it as nothing more than a monumental act of self-glorification, why would he place it cheek-by-jowl with a lampoon of heroism’s folly?
The connection between the works is more than programmatic. Sketches show that Strauss worked on them in close succession — and at times simultaneously. Although Don Quixote was completed first, Heldenleben actually came first in conception. On April 16, 1897 — just four days after the birth of his son Franz — Strauss noted in his diary: “Hero and World [the original title] begins to take shape; as a satirical work to accompany it — Don Quichotte. Franz Alexander Strauss progresses well, as does his dear mother.” This domestic milestone was a key catalyst for Heldenleben, yet, contrary to the usual order in satire (where the “serious” subject precedes its parody), Strauss set the hero aside to finish the mock-hero first.
The charge of egotism against Heldenleben was easy for critics to make. This was, after all, the longest, largest-orchestrated tone poem yet written, a work that closes with a vast, encyclopedic self-survey of Strauss’s earlier music in the coda. And in the fin-de-siècle German context, such grandiosity seems in step with the times. The Ruhr Valley had transformed from sheep pastures to industrial powerhouse; Kaiser Wilhelm II erected monumental civic projects, including the Siegesallee (Victory Avenue) in Berlin — a gaudy parade of marble busts celebrating imperial lineage. Hubris was in the air.
But here lies the paradox. Strauss, a Bavarian, loathed Wilhelm, his court, and Prussian society; none of his tone poems premiered there. The irony is sharpened when Heldenleben is heard next to Don Quixote — a reminder that, for Strauss, heroism could be as absurd as it was noble. The two works, conceived as pendants, make it impossible to hear the Hero straight. The satire, lurking in plain sight, keeps the monument from ever standing entirely on its own.
These two paired works embody the characteristic Straussian enigma that might prompt a quiz show host to ask: “Will the Real Richard Strauss Please Stand Up?” Who should stand up among the subjects of Strauss’s tone poems? The hero or the hapless Don, the artist or bourgeois, the thinker or the card player, Nietzsche’s mystic Zarathustra or the rogue Till Eulenspiegel, the stone-faced conductor or the composer of Don Juan?
But let’s return to this strange situation of satire before its subject of parody. Strauss, of course, did have a model to work with, he chose selections from Cervantes’s lengthy, picaresque novel, Don Quixote, and transformed them into a tone poem consisting of a prologue, epilogue, and ten variations featuring a solo cello (Don Quixote) and viola (Sancho Panza). Don Quixote comically fights windmills, battles a herd of sheep, meets a garlic-breathed peasant girl, and is defeated by the knight of the shining moon. Thereafter, he returns home and dies.
The comic parallels to Ein Heldenleben are fairly clear. But to explore this flip side of the coin, Strauss did not rely on a writer, on a literary text; rather he looked to his own life: his love for his wife (who had just given birth to their only child) as well as his internal and external struggles. The six sections of this work — 1) the hero, 2) the hero’s adversaries, 3) his life’s companion, 4) his battle against a world of indifference, 5) his works of peace, 6) and his retirement from the world — do not go much beyond this fundamental idea. The suggestion that these six subheadings somehow comprise Strauss’s autobiography is patently false. Clearly, in 1898, he didn’t retire from the world, indeed that year he moved to Berlin and would soon establish himself as the leading composer of German opera.
The essential meaning of the tone poem is summarized by Strauss himself in one of his sketchbooks. Here he describes the nature of the hero’s struggle: “Finally the hero rises up, in order to confront [his] inner enemies (doubt, disgust) and outer enemies: battle (C minor), reinvigorated from this battle — accompanied by his beloved — all his inner, spiritual, and artistic powers increasingly developed and presented to the world.”
Strauss goes on to describe this world as self-satisfied, and it remains so despite all the artist’s strivings. He likens this complacent, indolent environment to a world of Prussian philistines. Through his vain struggle with the outer world, the hero has conquered his inner enemies (self-doubt, disgust), and he retreats into himself with his beloved, realizing that isolation is his only choice. Like Don Quixote, he returns home, but he does not die. Instead, he turns toward domesticity, towards his wife and their son. We now see the importance of domestic love as an underlying theme in Ein Heldenleben and, thus, it should not be surprising that his next symphonic work should be his Symphonia domestica (1904).
If we pull back our lens to a wider angle, we can see that nearly every tone poem up until Heldenleben involves some sort of male hero (or protagonist) struggling or in confrontation with an uncomprehending outer world. The hero might be Don Juan or Don Quixote, it might be Till Eulenspiegel or Zarathustra: the main differences being whether or not they are treated comically or tragically, or whether they live at the end or die.
All of this ego assertion against societal indifference (Strauss uses the word Indolenz) has two sources for Strauss: Nietzsche and Wagner. The Nietzschean connection is the more obvious, after all Zarathustra is one of the philosopher’s own characters, but we should remember that Wagner’s tenor heroes are all largely misunderstood outsiders: Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Siegmund, Walther, Tristan, and Parsifal, among others.
Strauss sets this 50-minute tone poem in E-flat major, making a conscious tonal allusion to Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony No. 3, also in E-flat (indeed, Strauss called the work Eroica in many of the sketches). He organizes the six sections of this work into three large parts:
1) Expository material: hero, adversaries, beloved
2) Developmental space: struggle
3) Recapitulatory rejection of struggle, seeking solace in domestic love
The opening theme is a long, sprawling, triadic one (also based on Beethoven’s Eroica) in double basses, cellos, and horn. At first it lacks harmonic foundation, then — after some contrapuntal interplay — repeats, with solid harmonic support in E-flat major. The theme suggests strength, power, and mastery. In typically Straussian fashion it is, of course, intentionally overwrought, so that it may be ironically undercut by the hero’s adversaries. The “hero section” builds to a mighty, final, extended dominant-seventh chord that has us begging for a resolution to our heroic E-flat, but it is cut off, undermined by the adversaries, a cacophony of dissonant woodwinds nagging and arguing among themselves.
Now we come to the end of the exposition, the section of the hero’s life’s companion, his beloved, a section that culminates in monumental lovemaking. Strauss spent more time on this section than any other, and the basic shape is as follows: a confrontation of male libido (rising gesture in those same double basses, cellos, and horn) against initial female indifference (virtuoso solo violin). It seems that the louder the hero gets, the more stubborn the beloved becomes. Having realized this, our hero tones it down and, after a now tender response in the violin, the lovemaking begins. (Symphonia domestica would feature a similarly explicit love scene.)
Strauss sonically saturates this scene, complete with harp glissandi, divided strings, aching horns, and the like. Not only does he create a sensual sonic surface, but feels compelled to suggest orgasm (E-flat minor) and post-coital bliss (G-flat major). In a diary entry at this time Strauss described the blissful, post-coital expression on a woman’s face: “That smile — I have never seen such [an] expression of the true sensation of happiness! Is not the way to redemption of the Will to be sought here (in the condition of the receiving woman)? … Affirmation of the will must properly be called affirmation of the body.”
With his libido now satisfied, the hero turns to the struggle — not to vanquish his enemies, but to face himself. Instead of triumph on the battlefield, he contemplates his life’s work and discovers the profundity of domestic love.
Strauss labels the final section of Ein Heldenleben, “Withdrawal from the World,” crafting a new theme from the opening heroic one. Like its predecessor, it is built from triads, but where the heroic theme soars outward and upward, this autumnal “withdrawal theme” moves downward, its lines curling inward. It is the most poignant moment of the work, especially in the lush writing for divided violins, with their tender, dissonant suspensions.
Strauss himself was an intensely private man — ironic for someone who spent so much of his life in the public eye, conducting his works across Europe and the Americas. His wife resented his exhausting travel schedule, and Strauss once explained why he endured it: to earn money. “Money,” he wrote, “money with which I hope to come to peace, surrounded by beautiful nature, sunlight, and healthy air, [so] that I can peacefully be with you and [our son] and my little musical notes.”
May we all enjoy Strauss’s “little musical notes.”
BRYAN GILLIAM
Professor Emeritus of Music at Duke University, Bryan Gilliam is a scholar of 19th- and 20th-century German music. He is the author of The Life of Richard Strauss in the Cambridge Musical Lives series as well as editor of several volumes of Strauss scholarship. His most recent book is Rounding Wagner’s Mountain: Richard Strauss and Modern German Opera.
The first American performance of Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben took place on March 10, 1900, with Theodore Thomas conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
The first Boston Symphony Orchestra performance of Ein Heldenleben was given by Wilhelm Gericke on December 7, 1901, with a further performance in New York the following week.