Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Specht: Strauss before Sixty

Introduction

In the twenty-first century, the most widely known contemporary examination of Richard Strauss in the interwar years is Theodor W. Adorno’s early essay “Richard Strauss at Sixty” (1924).¹ Adorno saw Strauss as “nothing but surface,” but that superficiality, in his Simmel-influenced reading, reflected the whole world: “an admittedly fragmentary reality of external things in the fruitless chase after that inner reality which is, by itself, quite unreal.”² As with many of Adorno’s writings, his interpretation of Strauss was simultaneously of his time and at odds with it. The two texts excerpted here provide alternative, supplementary voices on Strauss from this period: soprano Elisabeth Schumann (1888-1952) and music journalist and musicologist Richard Specht (1870-1932). The vantage points and purposes of a young singer who soon would become a star of the age, on the one hand, and an aesthete-musicologist, on the other, are obviously very different from Adorno’s. Still, just as Schumann’s and Specht’s contemporaneous accounts are enriched when placed alongside each other, they also illuminate Adorno: all three heard and witnessed the same Strauss, but understood and assessed what they observed differently.

Adorno did not broach Strauss as a performer, but much of Strauss’s time after the First World War was spent directing, conducting, and accompanying. In 1921 Strauss embarked on a second tour of the United States (his first had been in 1904) with Elisabeth Schumann, among others.³ Schumann had sung Rosenkavalier’s Sophie, in addition to other roles, to great acclaim at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1914-15 season and was therefore known to American audiences. In May 1917 she also worked directly with Strauss in Switzerland, where he conducted her in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Zauberflöte (Schumann sang Zerlina and Papagena, respectively).⁴ This experience (and their resulting offstage acquaintance) reportedly inspired Strauss to return to Lieder composition—he had largely abandoned the genre from 1906 until 1918—and set the stage for Schumann’s involvement in the 1921 American tour, as well as her engagement under Strauss at the Vienna State Opera. The excerpts of Schumann here are taken from the diary that she kept while traveling with the composer, available on the Elisabeth Schuman website as: “In Amerika mit Richard Strauss. Elisabeth Schumanns Tagebuch, 14. Oktober bis 31. Dezember 1921.”⁵ Our excerpts slightly modify and annotate those translations that are available through the website. Schumann kept this diary for several reasons: for her husband, Karl Alwin,⁶ who could not join her for the trip; as an intimate personal record (for example, she notes when she is menstruating); and, lovingly, for posterity—in the final entry, written on the SS Olympic⁷ on December 31, 1921 as she was about to sail back to the Old World, Schumann characterized Strauss as a “great man,” “wonderful friend,” “like a father to his beloved daughter,” and “the noblest of people.”

Richard Specht was also a fervent admirer of Strauss, one might even say a sycophant. A poet and dramatist associated with the Jung-Wien circle, Specht is best known as a prolific music journalist, critic, and musicologist. His music publications include monographs on Mahler (1905, 1913), Johann Strauss II (1909), Wilhelm Furtwängler (1922), Brahms (1928), and Puccini (1931), and in 1925 he was appointed professor at Vienna’s Akademie für Musik und darstellende Kunst (a position that would have been terminated after the Anschluss had Specht lived to see it as he was Jewish). Here we offer excerpts from Specht’s two-volume study Richard Strauss und sein Werk, written in Vienna between May 1917 and August 1920, published in 1921, and dedicated to the poet Arthur Schnitzler (about whom Specht subsequently penned a monograph).⁹ Although known internationally among Strauss scholars, Specht’s study has not been translated except in targeted quotations, and we include here a series of passages from the first volume’s first section, entitled “Der Künstler und sein Weg” (The Artist and His Path).¹⁰ Specht was acquainted with Strauss...