Elektra

Richard Strauss, composer

b. Munich, June 11, 1864; d. Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, September 8, 1949

Richard Strauss was a musical prodigy who benefited from a privileged upbringing. His mother had a fortune from the Hacker-Pschorr brewing families. Richard’s father Franz was a distinguished horn player and conductor. Franz was his son’s earliest and most important teacher. Richard began piano and violin study at the age of four, composition at seven. Tall, confident, extroverted, iron-willed, and hyper-productive, he enjoyed and studied the music of Wagner, partly in defiance of his father who hated that composer’s work.

As collaborators, Strauss and Hofmannsthal shared a love for ancient Greece and its theater, especially Aeschylus and Sophocles. By the time they met in 1899, Strauss had already established an international reputation as a conductor, pianist, and composer. 

After their initial meeting, Strauss and Hofmannsthal met again in Paris in 1900 to discuss collaborating on a ballet, but that project never came together. At the end of 1902 Strauss’s artistic fire was then truly lit: he attended a production of Oscar Wilde’s “scandalous” Salomé. The performance inspired Strauss to write his “breakout opera” of the same name, which premiered in Dresden in 1905. 

In the fall of that same year, Strauss attended Hofmannsthal’s stage play Electra. He recognized the subject’s potential for his next opera, but it was Hofmannsthal’s eagerness that moved the process forward. In a 1906 letter he reminded the composer how powerful the events are that lead from the recognition scene to Orest’s final victory. He also flattered Strauss that these moments would be even more stunning with his music than with spoken words alone. 

With Elektra’s creation, they grew together as a team. They produced much of the most viable German-language opera repertoire of the early 20th century: Der Rosenkavalier (1911), two different versions of Ariadne auf Naxos (1912 and 1916), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die ägyptische Helena(1928), and Arabella (1933). Yet the relationship was never easy, stemming largely from the vast differences in their personalities. Though often frustrated and impatient with each other, in time they reached a level of mutual artistic respect.

During World War II, Strauss developed another troubled relationship, not with a collaborator but with the new National Socialist government. Though he never joined the Nazi Party, he understood that the Third Reich needed to court him, since he was the preeminent living German composer. Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, gave the composer a mostly ceremonial position in 1933, an office he kept for just two years. Strauss felt he could not refuse: he had been working with Jewish librettists and his son was married to a Jewish woman. This governmental affiliation had a major impact on his reputation and character, but he might have met a worse fate: Goebbels noted in his diary how he looked forward to the day when the Nazi Party would no longer need the “decadent neurotic” Strauss.

Strauss produced his final opera, Capriccio, in 1942. In the last years of the war and after, he retreated into mostly instrumental music and the Four Last Songs from 1948.

Adapted from a biography written by Thomas Holliday

Hugo von Hofmannsthal, librettist

b. Vienna, February 1, 1874; d. Vienna, July 15, 1929

The Hofmann family was a mix of Jewish, Italian, Swabian, and Austrian ancestries. They prospered as textile merchants, moving from Prague to Vienna at the end of the 18th century, and were promoted for their services into the nobility as “von Hofmannsthal” by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1835. The future librettist’s father, another Hugo, won renown as a lawyer and banker, and he took charge of his son’s extracurricular education, which has since led to inevitable comparisons with the Mozart family.

The younger Hugo grew up as a kind of fairy-tale prince, brilliant at everything, striving for self-transcendence in saintly seclusion. He was born into a Vienna at the apex of the civilized world, when the likes of Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg walked the streets and chatted in cafés. After acquiring an education without apparent effort, Hofmannsthal by the age of 17 won fame in the city’s highest artistic circles as a lyric poet of uncanny maturity. His evolving aesthetic centered on breaking out of existing forms while obeying self-imposed restrictions. In all of his activity, style came before form or content, and his final goal was creating art that would improve the human spirit and enrich society.

At 25, he looked to the heightened reality of theatre, gesture, and dance for answers to his misgivings. His output from that period induced adaptations of Sophocles’s Electra (1904), Oedipus Rex (1906), and the 15th-century English morality play Everyman (1911). In 1920, with the renowned German director Max Reinhardt, Hofmannsthal co-founded the Salzburg Festival.

Hofmannsthal saw great power in the potential for music to be joined to carefully crafted language in order to create universal symbols out of nothingness. His collaboration with Strauss, lasting from 1906 until his death in 1929, is how he is best remembered today.

Adapted from a bio written by Thomas Holliday