The Irish composer Stanford, whose long years of living in England did not kill off his Dublin sense of humour, used to say whenever Richard Strauss and his music were mentioned: "If it's Strauss, I prefer Johann, if it's Richard I prefer Wagner." The curious thing is that Strauss in a sense was heir to both of these composers, something which at one time would have seemed impossible, or at least incompatible.
This can be seen in his early opera, Feuersnot, an underrated work which underlines Strauss's ancestry in Wagner and Liszt but also shows the populist, folktune-ish, almost kitsch element which was always present in his music. It was an aspect of him which alarmed and repelled his famous aristocratic librettist, Hofmannsthal. For many years, the complex textures and elaborate scoring of Strauss's music made people blind - or deaf - to the schmaltz or nearschmaltz that often lies at its core.
Strauss has often been described as enigmatic, but probably that is making a mystery where there was none. It rested initially on the belief that he was a daring innovator and modernist who later sold out, when in fact he was always essentially a pragmatic career-composer in the tradition of the 18th century. He became famous very early - the tone poem, Don Juan, written when he was 24, showed astonishing gifts and probably reflects his love affair with Dora Wihan, the wife of an alcoholic musician who was his personal friend. She returned his love, but Strauss did not risk a divorce case and instead married Pauline de Ahna, the opera-singer daughter of a Bavarian general and, by common consent, a tremendous shrew.
Enigma or none, it is often hard to understand Strauss and his combination of musical perfectionism with cool, calculating, worldlywise ambition. His contemporary, Mahler, who obviously saw him as a companion-in-arms against the philistines, tried hard to do so but eventually abandoned the attempt. The careerist-composer and the idealist-composer could not, and did not, sing in tune. It cost Mahler much misery, as his letters show, and when the Mahler revival began in the 1950s, he was exalted posthumously while Strauss was correspondingly despised as an artist who had pandered to the taste of an opulent, materialistic, vulgar period - the Belle Epoque. But it is not as simple as that. Strauss cannot be condemned according to canons of taste which he never professed to believe in; he must be judged by the quality of his music alone.
He was the son of a Munich horn-player who was also a respected all-round musician and a tyrannical family man. Young Strauss never studied music at an academy or conservatoire, because his despotic father insisted that he must be able to earn a living. Richard (pronounced Rick-hardt) did have professional tuition, but most of his musicianship was either innate or acquired pragmatically in local music-making.
An early symphony was praised by Brahms, but Strauss was soon infected by the Wagner-Liszt heresy, to his conservative father's horror. He won the esteem and patronage of Hans von Bulow, who was largely responsible for launching him on his career as a conductor - a field in which he proved to be one of the greatest of all time. Whenever he could not earn money from his compositions, he earned it from his conducting.
The operas Salome and Electra brought him a European reputation, and then came the huge success of Der Rosenkavalier, a work which many "progressive" critics have seen as a back-tracking to tradition. But Matthew Boyden argues that Strauss was never at heart a radical innovator - he was essentially a late Romantic, and surely this view is justified (it is not original in any case; it was propounded by Cecil Gray more than 70 years ago). More to the point, he was an opportunist, though also a tremendous professional who tolerated no slackness either in himself or others.
The collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who provided Strauss with the librettos for most of the operas of his maturity, was always an uneasy affair. The fastidious, snobbish, rather neurasthenic Viennese patrician had little in common with the gregarious, outgoing, slightly vulgar Kleinburger from Munich. Neither could he endure Strauss's wife, though here at least he uncharacteristically sided with the majority.
When Hofmannsthal died in his fifties, the apparently unfillable void was in fact quickly filled and Strauss went on to write the operas of his late period - a kind of Silver Age phase in his work, which became very popular posthumously a generation ago. But in the twilight of his life and career, when the social order he had grown up in was gone and the leading German opera houses had been bombed into rubble in the second World War, he also found a poignant, nostalgic new vein in such works as Metamorphosen and the very last songs. These are, in effect, a kind of requiem for the whole German Romantic movement and a mellow, bitter-sweet celebration of a vanished European society.
Matthew Boyden is unsparing in his depiction of Strauss's complacency towards the Nazis, and his acceptance of honours and public position when many or most of Germany's avant-garde were fleeing oversees, or even suffering active persecution. Though he had a Jewish daughter-in-law, the overall policies of the Third Reich do not seem to have bothered him overmuch; Strauss was always a self-centred man, and well before the Nazis came to power he had aired his views about the necessity for a dictatorship.
Yet in the end he fell foul of the regime, and in the final two years of the war he was officially under a cloud. Somehow he lived it all out, though in isolation and mounting depression. When Garmisch Partenkirchen, his Bavarian home, was invaded in 1945 by American soldiers, he told them haughtily who and what he was, and was then left in peace. There followed a macabre interlude when he and Pauline sought peace in neutral Switzerland, where she insulted one hotel-manager after another and they became unwelcome guests virtually everywhere they went.
This is a long, well-written, detailed biography, illuminating on many areas of Strauss's career, but perhaps making too much of his dubious attitude to the Third Reich. He was an old man by then, and he was worried about the survival of his son and Jewish daughter-in-law and their children - a point made in Michael Kennedy's useful book on Strauss in the Dent Master Musician series. It is unfair to Strauss to see him as a mercenary careerist who stayed on in Germany merely because all the leading operahouses were staging his works and bringing him a good income. He was politically naive, in fact a-political, and when he woke up to the real nature of Hitler's rule, it was too late. He belonged psychologically to a different epoch, that of Reger and Pfitzner and the whole opulent, self-confident Wilhelminian ethos.
There are some oddities here and there - for instance, Mr Boyden appears to believe that Nietzsche was a militarist (almost the exact opposite of the truth) and that his book, The Antichrist, is at least partly an anti-Jewish tract. Neither does he seem to understand what Schopenhauer meant by "the Will"; and while he is justified in pointing to the increasing anti-Semitism of late 19th-century Germany, it should be remembered that it was thanks to Bismarck that Jews got the vote and emerged from the ghettoes into full citizenship. And perhaps he should have quoted Ernest Newman's initial description of Rosenkavalier as "nearly four hours long and rather broad."
This, then, is hardly the last word on either Strauss or his era; but Boyden loves and knows the music, pointing out that the so-called Post-Modernist age has come to a new understanding of a complex, sophisticated composer who, after decades of world fame, was correspondingly downgraded when fashion and political ideology inevitably swung against him. In short, Richard Strauss is back in favour, though arguably, neither the concert-hall nor the opera-house - nor the musical public itself, for that matter - had ever really lost faith in him. Neither have the record companies, as a visit to almost any music store will show.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic