16 - Strauss and the sexual body: the erotics of humor, philosophy, and ego-assertion

Summary

Affirmation of the will must properly be called affirmation of the body.

richard strauss (1893)

[In Strauss’s work,] the main lines reveal themselves: a philosophical one, a humorous one, and an erotic one.

paul bekker (1909)

What Paul Bekker observed in his Musikdrama der Gegenwart had been evolving in Strauss's artistic personality for nearly two decades. In his “breakaway” tone poem Don Juan (1888), the erotic and the humorous are inseparable, while the philosophical, latent but unreflective, had not yet become a symmetrical part of this equilateral triangle. Within a few years, however, Strauss would go through a period of intensive reading, discussion, and introspection that bore fruit in a series of philosophically informed creative products: the composer's operatic debut, Guntram (1893), the second cycle of tone poems (Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben), the two symphonies of the early twentieth century (Symphonia domestica and Eine Alpensinfonie), and finally the operas Feuersnot and Salome.

Without doubt, Bekker's three elements endure in Strauss's later works: the playful erotics of Der Rosenkavalier, Arabella, and Die Liebe der Danae; the humor of Intermezzo and Die schweigsame Frau; or the philosophical in such pieces as the Deutsche Motette and the Metamorphosen. But it was only in the music of the 1890s and the beginning of the twentieth century that they were so profoundly intermingled, each one feeding off the other to produce the creative spark of these often misunderstood musical works.