In Honour of Richard Strauss

Extract

We are met together on the eve of his eighty-fifth birthday to do honour to the Master whom Munich proudly and joyfully calls her own, but whom we must also designate as an European, no, a World Musician, for the world recognizes Richard Strauss as a classic writer. Between his birth in 1864—a time so long ago that it is almost legendary (the first performance of Wagner's Tristan only took place in the following year)—and the uncheerful present of 1949 is stretched the arc of a smooth life of immense achievement. Eighty-five years! The intellectual position of the Master, who, looking back on eighty-five years of favoured existence and seventy years of rich creativity, may regard himself as concluding a musical epoch that embraces centuries, is only to be compared with that of Goethe in 1830. Both men, living in periods profoundly disturbed by new ideas and tendencies, are to be seen as superior beings commanding the deep and general respect of the world at large, standing high above all the misunderstandings and envy that invariably accompany fame. Judged and condemned as ‘revolutionaries’ in their youth, decried as ‘reactionaries’ for the classicism of their maturity, both of them obeying their ‘daemon,’ have passed through and left behind various phases of public approval, in order, pursuing their own way, to create work after work on an ever higher level and leave to the world after them the exploration of their spiritual heritage.