Passing the Baton: Richard Strauss and the Philharmonia
The Philharmonia has enjoyed a unique relationship with the music of Richard Strauss, almost since the orchestra was founded in 1945. Yet just as that history was beginning, Strauss’s life was coming to an end. A child of the 1860s and a hero of the fin de siècle, as well as a somewhat ambivalent figure during the interwar years and the Third Reich, Strauss was 83 years old when he conducted the Philharmonia at the Royal Albert Hall on 19 October 1947.

It should have been an unequivocally happy event. But, sadly, shadows loomed. The former (if reluctant) president of the Third Reich’s Music Chamber could not help but bring the spectre of Hitlerism with him to London. Strauss may have been declaimed innocent of any ties to the Nazi State, but others remained unsure. After all, he had initially been labelled ‘Class I – Guilty’ due to his official role. And while the Bavarian Secretary of State successfully overrode the automatic designation, some maintained the composer was a genuine adherent of Nazism, with the great writer Thomas Mann even calling him a ‘Hitlerian composer’.

In the wake of these events, the dust of war barely settling, Strauss was a somewhat ghostly presence at the London festival arranged for him by Thomas Beecham, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the BBC, Victor Hochhauser and the New Philharmonia Orchestra. No doubt flattered by such attention at a time when flattery was rare, Strauss had supposedly only come to London due to a desperate need for money. The recent sale of some of his sketchbooks and manuscripts had secured piecemeal income, though the composer’s health was also in a steady state of decline. Thankfully, the October 1947 trip—what was to be his last foreign tour—offered both hard currency through the collection of previously withheld royalties and essential medical attention.

Fraught, far from uncomplicated, Strauss’s first (and only) concert with the Philharmonia did, however, engender warmth between the aged composer and the young orchestra. The evening opened with Don Juan, becoming the most regularly performed of Strauss’s works in the Philharmonia’s repertoire, followed by the Burleske for piano and orchestra (with Alfred Blumen at the keyboard). After the interval, Strauss returned to the platform for his 1903/4 Symphonia domestica, with its depictions of family life, before the concert closed with the first of the waltz sequences from his 1911 opera Der Rosenkavalier. To a packed auditorium, the audience no doubt amazed by the composer’s resilience, Strauss brought significant prestige to the Philharmonia’s infancy. But two years later, on 8 September 1949, he was dead.

Between these events had come another milestone in Strauss’s late life and the early years of the orchestra’s history: the creation of the Four Last Songs. Composed in 1948, these twilight Lieder were performed posthumously for the first time, also at the Albert Hall, on 22 May 1950, when the Philharmonia was conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler with Kirsten Flagstad as the soprano soloist. Strauss had always intended Flagstad to give the first performance of the songs, featuring words by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff, though his was to be a palpable absence when that wish finally came true.

Where Strauss left off, the Philharmonia continued, passing the baton to a new generation of musicians. Keen to explore his vast output—operatic, symphonic and otherwise—the orchestra maintained its interest in a composer whose career had often evolved alongside seismic shifts in human history. Yet as much as Salome, an opera the Philharmonia both recorded with Charles Mackerras and performed live in Taormina with Giuseppe Sinopoli, speaks of the hothouse of the turn of the last century, or orchestral poems such as Don Quixote and Don Juan evoke other worlds and characters entirely, the music has remained contemporary. The virtuoso challenge of the scores, their mythological import and the sheer brilliance of Strauss’s sublimation of his source material has ensured that he continues to test and beguile both musicians and audiences.

Over the last 80 years, the Philharmonia has also been blessed with brilliant Strauss interpreters, starting with the composer himself. The legacy continued with Furtwängler, together with other advocates hailing from Central and Eastern Europe. They included Otto Ackermann, who conducted Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s early recording of the Four Last Songs, as well as Herbert von Karajan, a continual presence during the 1950s, and Christoph von Dohnányi.

The latter’s association with the orchestra lasted for many years and included concerts of works by Strauss—as during Sinopoli’s equally happy tenure—and fully staged productions of Arabella, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Die schweigsame Frau. And now, thanks to the Philharmonia’s links to Garsington, that tradition has continued in recent productions of Ariadne auf Naxos and Der Rosenkavalier. But Strauss has also remained a key component of the Philharmonia’s work in the concert hall, not least with its latest principal conductor, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, as revealed in this new recording.

It showcases one of Strauss’s most celebrated if divisive works—the two qualities never wholly exclusive in the composer’s output. Written in 1897/8, Ein Heldenleben represents the pinnacle of Strauss’s engagement with the tone poem, a genre often taken as a statement of modernising intent at the end of the 19th century. Instead of the traditional symphony, looking back to Haydn, Beethoven and Brahms—one of Strauss’s early idols—Ein Heldenleben embraced both the symphonic and the dramatic.

It had not always been so. The composer began his career writing symphonies, with the Second particularly gaining a foothold in the repertoire. But conventional structures soon lost their appeal, becoming, as Strauss described, ‘giant’s clothes made to fit a Hercules, in which a thin tailor is trying to comport himself elegantly’. Instead, he decided to find a ‘new form for every new subject’, making strides with Aus Italien in 1886, before triumphing with Macbeth (1888), Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung (both 1888/9), followed by Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1894/5), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) and Don Quixote (1897). With their vivid themes and ingenious orchestrations, these were the works that paved the way for Strauss’s later, even greater triumphs in the opera house.

Ein Heldenleben is a particularly wowing case in point. Unlike the literary themes of its predecessors, however, the subject—the ‘hero’—remains ambiguous. Some contemporary critics at the work’s initial performances, including the world premiere in Frankfurt on 3 March 1899, were quick to charge Strauss with arrogance, suggesting the hero was none other than the composer himself. But given that Strauss was just as fond of self-deprecation as he was of fluffing his own ego, such claims sit a little wide of the mark. Perhaps, he remembered his friend and colleague Mahler’s poignant views on gallantry: ‘it is not easy to be or to become a hero.’ And like the anti-heroic Don Quixote (another work championed by the Philharmonia in its early days), Ein Heldenleben certainly speaks of that equivocation.

Instead of a windmill-tilting knight, however, the work’s point of focus and derision may well be Wagner and his leitmotif technique. Strauss had long been an advocate, though had recently turned his back on Bayreuth and the cult of its (now deceased) house composer. But regardless of the ‘intended’ programme and any consequent guesswork, the reality proves much richer, depicting an intense struggle between an individual and the wider world, as well as profound romantic love, all contained within a brilliant synthesis of narrative and form.

The first subject (‘Der Held’) in the sonata-form structure begins in the lower strings, before rising to a salvo of eight horns. Couched in E flat major, the tonality of Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, these sweeping gestures seem to invoke a long history of musical heroism. A transitional passage (‘Des Helden Widersacher’) announces the hero’s adversaries, who are depicted as grotesques and caricatures. Writing to his horn-playing father after the work’s premiere, Strauss described them as figures who ‘spit poison and gall, principally because on reading the analytical note they believed that they could see themselves identified with the really hatefully portrayed “grumblers and antagonists” and that I am meant for the hero, which is only partially true.’

The protagonist is rescued from the critics’ clutches by his companion, described by a solo violin (‘Des Helden Gefährtin’). There is an unmistakable feeling of romance here, though also something skittish and nagging. Surely, this is Strauss the realist. While he dearly loved his wife, Pauline, whom he had married in 1894, he was often a little too true-to-life when it came to depicting her in music: as Barak’s wife in Die Frau ohne Schatten or as Christine in Intermezzo (‘a perverse woman’); as well as more flattering portraits in Ariadne auf Naxos and the Four Last Songs. What follows in Ein Heldenleben, after an extended recitative between the violin and the orchestra, is a love scene of searing intensity.

Adversaries return in the development’s ‘noisy outburst’ (‘Des Helden Walstatt’), as if prefiguring the violence of Elektra. But there can be no doubt, thanks to the broad (if gloriously uncouth) cadence at the end of this central section, that the hero will be triumphant, as his theme returns. Victory is nonetheless brief, the fight clearly not over, as the second subject takes us into an entirely different atmosphere (‘Des Helden Friedenswerke’). Strauss now quotes from his already substantial catalogue, including earlier tone poems, his first opera Guntram and two songs (‘Befreit’ and ‘Traum durch die Dämmerung’), all representing the hero’s ‘works of peace’. Citing their themes, Strauss was nonetheless also marking the end of a chapter. For instead of enjoying the numinous retirement described in the work’s coda (‘Des Helden Weltflucht und Vollendung’), he soon turned his attentions to the opera house full-time, with Salome and Elektra just around the corner. Indeed, the audacity described in Ein Heldenleben was nothing compared to what lay ahead.

Gavin Plumley © 2025