Page - 217 - in Wien und die jüdische Erfahrung 1900-1938 - Akkulturation - Antisemitismus - Zionismus

Sander L. Gilman Karl Kraus and Gustav Mahler Imagine the “Jews” Oscar Wilde was dead only three years when the Viennese poet Anton Lindner ap- proached Richard Strauss in 1903 with the libretto of an opera he had begun, and which he had based on Wilde’s play Salome. (Lindner was the author of the text for “Hochzeitlich Lied,” [opus 37] which Strauss had set in 1889.) While Strauss was taken with the theme, he did not think enough of Lindner’s idea to view it as any more than a potentially minor pendant to his recently completed opera, Feuersnot (produced at the Viennese Court Opera on January 29, 1902). Strauss’s first two op- eras, Guntram (1894) and Feuersnot, were settings of mock-Wagnerian themes. Gun- tram was, as George Marek observes, “a farrago of Wagnerian ideas,” pseudo-medieval plot and all. Feuersnot, according to Marek, is the librettist Ernst von Wolzogen’s version of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger (138). (One can add to this, with all of Die Meistersinger’s antisemitic representations of the language of the Jews, as Barry Mil- lington has long argued. ) With the choice of Salome, Strauss clearly broke with his early attempt to write mock-Wagnerian operas, or at least music to mock-Wagnerian This is a revision of parts of two earlier essays : “Strauss, the Pervert, and Avant Garde Opera of the Fin de Siècle,” New German Critique 43 (1988), pp. 35–68 and “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess’,” German Quarterly 66 (1993), pp. 195–211. They were among the very first attempts to locate racial theory within opera. These essays (and its author) were loudly attacked by critics such as Leon Botstein as providing inappropriate readings of “great” cultural objects as racially tinged. They were also quickly appropriated into Strauss scholarship to the degree of the accusation of plagiarism. See Alex Ross, “The Last Emperor : Richard Strauss, for Better or Worse, Is the Composer of the Century.” The New Yorker 75 (20 December 1999), pp. 84–94. See the beginning of Strauss’s “The History of Die schweigsame Frau” in which he praises Lindner for having recognized Salome as a “covert opera text,” printed as an appendix to A Confidential Matter : The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931–1935, ed. Edward E. Lowinsky, trans. Max Knight, Berkeley 1977, p. 107. On the general background to the composition of the opera see Ludwig Kusche, Richard Strauss im Kulturkarussell der Zeit 1864–1964, Munich 1964, pp. 129–150 (with many con- temporary illustrations) and Roland Tenschert, 7x7 Variationen über das Thema Richard Strauss, Vienna 1944, pp. 91–101. George R. Marek, Richard Strauss : The Life of a Non-Hero, New York 1967, p. 99. Barry Millington, “Nuremberg Trial : Is There Antisemitism in Die Meistersinger ?”, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991), pp. 247–260.