Richard Strauss, composer of Salome (1905) and other great operas, was so famous in his own lifetime (1864-1949) newspaper cartoonists were constantly making fun of him. Biographers including Kurt Wilhelm and Tim Ashley collected lots of these; here are a few examples.
The man himself was tall and lean, with a frizz of curly hair and always an elegant mustache. Composing was his side-hustle; his primary job was conducting. These studio photographs show the dramatic gestures typical of Maestro Strauss in the 1890s; later on he became legendary for a restrained and undemonstrative podium style. Strauss himself scribbled the notes on these photos, which he sent to his friend Engelbert Humperdinck (composer of Hansel und Gretel; at its 1893 world premiere Strauss conducted Pauline de Ahna, who later became Strauss’s wife, as Hansel). In the fourth photo Strauss conducts Humperdinck’s “Hexenritt,” the Witch’s Ride, a Ride-of-the-Valkyries-esque interlude between Hansel und Gretel Scenes 1 and 2. On the third photo, conducting Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, the dry-witted Strauss has written “enthusiasm at its highest peak.”
“Wie ein Strauß-Porträt
entsteht:
Erst ‘ne Birne, Dann ‘ne Stirne,
Haare kraus—Richard Strauß.”
(“How to draw Richard Strauss: first a pear, then a forehead, curly hair—Richard
Strauss.” But in German, the rhymes are really cute.) This font, known as Fraktur,
was popular in Germany up through World War 2. Strauss himself never spelled
his name with an esset, ß, which can replace two adjacent ‘s’ characters. But
he later wrote an opera, Intermezzo, whose plot concerns someone
misspelling a composer’s name!)
This 1894 cartoon casts Strauss in the role of the self-exiled hero Guntram, protagonist of his (unsuccessful) first opera. Pauline, who sang its soprano role, is caricatured here as the Muse leading away the banished artist’s chariot. Guntram seemed derivative of Wagner’s operas, and this cartoon with its weeping cherubim certainly resembles the many cartoons from that era spoofing Wagner and his operas.
A decade later, a cartoonist with a more twentieth-century style has drawn Oscar Wilde and Strauss unveiling the dancing Salome.
“At the Opera: The Dance of Salome.” A reminder that at Salome’s 1905 world premiere, the voyeurism and scantily-clad erotic dancing was provocative, even before you get to the nymphomaniac necrophilia.
“The new orchestra of Richard Strauss,” 1906 cartoon by Arpad Schmidhammer, shows Strauss conducting atop a large group of music-makers. (Our orchestra for Salome will actually only feature about 80 players. And sorry—no elephants.)
As in Strauss’s tone-poem “Ein Heldenleben” (A Hero’s Life). the heroic composer here ignores the carpings of his critics and detractors.
“Concert at Court. / The Marshall calls a lackey over to him and whispers: ‘His Majesty has noticed an apparent lunatic among the musicians. See that he is removed immediately.’ A few minutes later the lackey says to the Marshall, ‘Excellency, your orders… / …have been carried out!’”
When Salome was (finally) presented in Vienna, a cartoonist draws the princess contemplating a “Strauss ham” head on a silver platter, with a sausage-link font: something of an advertisement for pork products.
Salome had also been banned in London, going back to Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play. According to this British cartoonist in 1910, “The censor having forbidden the Baptist’s head, Mme. Akté danced round a plum pudding. This delicate regard for national sensibilities contributed in no small measure to the success of the performance.”
J. P. Morgan was responsible for Salome being banned (after one performance only, in 1907) from New York’s Metropolitan Opera. One New York cartoonist seems to be suggesting the Met curry favor with the tycoons by running advertisements on Salome’s seven veils: one for Rockefeller Oil, one for “Pierpont Morgan’s Trusts,” another for “Vanderbilt’s Railroad”.
Strauss and his Salome company boarding an early twentieth century train. The conductor/composer was in reality constantly taking trains all over Europe. Back and forth he traveled, to his music director jobs in Berlin and Vienna, to Dresden (where he liked to premiere his operas), to his hometown of Munich and his residence in Garmisch-Patenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps.
The word “Strauss” means “bouquet” or “garland” in German. But cartoonists made much of the fact that it also refers to an “ostrich.”
A 1911 cartoon has Strauss attending the premiere of Der Rosenkavalier with his girlfriends Salome and Elektra.
Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier were the first two collaborations between Strauss and the Viennese writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal, here depicted in silhouette in 1914—probably working on Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau ohne Schatten, and/or their ballet Josephslegende. Later Hofmannsthal would also write Strauss librettos for the operas Die Ägyptische Helena and Arabella.
A cartoonist’s impression of what Hofmannsthal and Strauss did to the ancient Greek tragedian Sophocles when they created their opera on Elektra in 1909.
A premiere of a new Strauss opera was a big deal. Music-lovers from all over Europe would travel to wherever these exciting new works could be heard. Here’s a train-compartment full of opera-lovers carefully studying the orchestral score of Der Rosenkavalier as if it were a new Harry Potter book.
A Strauss-Ostrich, misquoting the nymphs’ trio from the final scene, lays an egg labeled Ariadne auf Naxos; Zerbinetta is hatching. Why this cartoon is labeled “Noise-Contest” is anyone’s guess; Ariadne calls for a tiny (for Strauss) orchestra.
“Gib mir den Kopf des Richard Strauss!” Franz Mikorey works on a bust of the elder Strauss; the sculptor’s uncle had sung the role of Guntram back in 1895.
Strauss caricatured by Olaf Gulbransson for Munich’s Simplicissimus magazine.
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