Charles Youmans.

Richard Strausss Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: e Philosophical Roots
of Musical Modernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005. x + 294 pp. $39.95 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-253-34573-8.
Reviewed by Sanna Pederson (University of Oklahoma School of Music)
Published on H-German (April, 2006)
Connections between Philosophy and Music at the End of the Nineteenth Century
e titles promise of an account of the German
intellectual tradition informing the output of Richard
Strausswith his masterpieces in both the symphonic
and operatic repertoire appearing over the course of
over sixty years from the 1880s to aer World War IIis
vaguely grand and raises expectations of a general cul-
tural feast. Once beyond the title and into the prologue,
however, musicologist Charles Youmans states his topic
somewhat dierently: e thesis of the present book is
that Strausss coming of age was an intellectual as well
as a musical process, with the intellectual side of things
directly aecting, in specic and sophisticated ways, all
of his major works for orchestra (p. 16). at anyone
would need to prove that Strauss thought about his mu-
sic in an intellectual way is partially due to the composer
himself, who at times cultivated the image of a philis-
tine, an opportunistic money grubber without any ide-
als about art. By examining primary documents, in par-
ticular notebooks in which Strauss made comments on
the books he read, Youmans proves beyond a doubt that
Strauss was thoroughly familiar with Schopenhauer, Ni-
etzsche and Goethe, and that he read those authors with
a view toward understanding his place as a composer
in theworld, the direction of his work and the mean-
ing of music in general. A musical Wunderkind, Strauss
dropped out aer one semester at the University of Mu-
nich to pursue a fast-developing career as a composer
and conductor. However, Youmans emphasizes the im-
portance of the humanistic Gymnasium education that
formed Strauss into someone proud to call himself a Ger-
man Greek (p. 21) who read and reread the complete
works of Goethe as a guide to life. How then would a
person with such pride in the German intellectual tradi-
tion come to need a book to reestablish the connection?
is question points to the problem that continues to
vex all scholarship on Strauss: the problem of determin-
ing who the real Strauss was. Because of his multiple
contradictory and ethically ambiguous actions over the
courseof his career, it has been very dicult to come to
a conclusion about Strausss signicance. Although his
place in the canon of orchestral and operatic repertoire
is secure, his role in the history of music is not. Was he
really an intellectual or a philistine with pretensions? A
true radical or an opportunist? Does his music have pro-
found depths or is it all dazzling surface?
Youmans addresses this unseled problem of what to
make of Strausss music and how to understand the way
it developed by arguing more specically (as indicated by
the books subtitle) that Strausss path-breaking musical
modernism can be traced to his rejection of metaphysics,
a term Youmans uses to refer to both a metaphysical con-
ception of music that was prevalent in the late nineteenth
century and also a more general metaphysical philoso-
phy. In the rst four chapters making up part 1, e
Private Intellectual Context of Strausss Early Career,
Youmans presents evidence for his thesis by discussing
Strausss understanding of the writings of Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Goethe. Because Strauss kept this con-
text private, there has been some doubt as to his under-
standing of these writers. e most famous case is that
of Strausss Also sprach Zarathustrahis 1896 orchestral
work frei nach Nietzsche. e opening measures of this
work are Strausss most instantly recognizable musica
bombastic succession of trumpet fanfares, pounding tim-
pani and full orchestra with organ at maximum volume.
How does this opening and the subsequent half hour of
music relate to Nietzsches text? From the beginning,
there has been skepticism that any relationship was sig-
nicant. However, Youmans uses Strausss diary and an-
notated copy of Also sprach Zarathustra to argue that the
work is deeply engaged with Nietzschean philosophy in
general and with this book in particular. e composi-
tion and all subsequent tone poems, Youmans claims, em-
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body a Nietzschean oscillation between existential angst
and armative overcoming, which reects Strausss own
ongoing philosophical crisis. In Sinfonia domestica (1903)
and Eine Alpensinfonie (1915), in which Strauss portrays,
respectively, family life and nature, the composer came
to a solution he could live with (p. 113). is resolution
to his philosophical issues also brought the series of tone
poems to an end, Youmans claims. While his discussion
of Also sprach Zarathustra is convincing, Youmanss ar-
gument that the other tone poems are all Nietzschean
is brief and general. Aer reading part 1 of this book, the
question remains as to why Strauss would keep his philo-
sophical preoccupations privatewhy be so provoca-
tive as to give a piece of music the same title as a work of
philosophy if he wanted to keep this aspect to himsel?
Part 2, Orchestral Composition as Philosophical Cri-
tique, departs from a focus on Strausss formation as
a musical modernist in the 1880s and 1890s. Instead,
Youmans makes analytical comments about Strausss or-
chestral music from his rst tone poem in 1887 to his
last instrumental composition in 1945. Youmans begins
this section by addressing the problemthat Strauss seems
to have experienced his musical breakthrough with his
modernism-dening early tone poems before his philo-
sophical breakthrough. If it is true that the musical
breakthrough preceded the philosophical one, the re-
jection of metaphysical music cannot account for the
tone poem Don Juan (1889), identied by the musicol-
ogist Carl Dahlhaus and others as the beginning of mu-
sical modernism. Youmans reconciles this discrepancy
rather weakly by suggesting that once Strauss had his
philosophical crisis, he sawhowhis compositional strate-
gies already lent themselves to a philosophical critique
in music. Another shaky moment in his argument oc-
curs when Youmans asserts that sonata formwas equated
with metaphysical truth. e basis for this equation is set
up in the prologue of the book with an overviewof music
aesthetics by way of a summary of a 1929 book by Felix
Gatz. Youmans passes over, however, a distinction that
Gatz makes between the categories of autonomous music
(which includes sonata form) and absolute music (dened
by aspiration to metaphysical truth).[1] Gatz does include
the possibility of a theory of music that is both absolute
and autonomous, but he does not authorize Youmanss
assumption that because music in general was widely un-
derstood as metaphysical, sonata form was also under-
stood as such.
Youmans needs to be able to assume that sonata form
was equivalent to metaphysical truth in order to make his
claim that in all of Strausss tone poems, the deforma-
tion of sonata form signies a rejection of metaphysics.
Expectations of sonata form are set up and then not met:
[H]e invoked the form in order to make it fail, believing
that the clarity with which he announced the paradigm
would make its collapse easier to perceive (p. 177). By
making sonata form collapse, Strauss made metaphysics
collapse. e problem with this type of approach is that
it depends on being able to establish two things: rst,
what the specic formal expectations were exactly (what
an un-deformed sonata form would be), and secondly,
how the composer could have assumed that his strategy
of failing to meet those expectations would have been un-
derstood as intentional and meaningful and not simply
failure. Youmans himself seems ambivalent about this
approach in that he repeatedly emphasizes that sonata
form is not the key to the tone poems. Indeed, one of the
books most interesting topics is Strausss aempt to pro-
vide keys to understanding his tone poems. ere are
titles and other verbal information in the score (Zarathus-
tra, for instance, contains a quotation as preface and
chapter headings taken from the Nietzsche text demar-
cating musical sections). Besides this, Strauss aempted
to shape the public perception of the intellectual con-
tent of his works through a carefully delimited and con-
trolled release of information about the works. Informa-
tion was communicated in only two ways (p. 25). First,
Strauss hired ghost writers to produce listener guides (Er-
luterungen). Second, he planted his own remarks about
his compositions in newspaper gossip columns. Such
strategies seem to have been aimed at avoiding any di-
rect admission of his intentions while at the same time
trying to guide the listener. Nevertheless, Strauss oen
expressed frustration that listeners did not understand
him (p. 176). Strausss quandary concerning his audi-
ence and his elaborate solutions illustrate vividly the sit-
uation for modern composers, caught between popular
and elite understanding of what constituted high art. If
music was exalted as the highest of the arts, understood
by composers themselves and also by the general public
to have philosophical import, then composers were bur-
dened with creating music that could be considered as
such both by themselves and their audience. is context
starts to explain why Strauss would simultaneously keep
his erudition private and put it on display, as in the case
of Zarathustra, and perhaps starts to account for Strausss
strange formal procedures.
In the nal chapter, Youmans treats the nal two po-
ems, Sinfonia domestica and Eine Alpensinfonie, which he
had earlier described as representing together a solution
to philosophical issues through a celebration of family
and nature. Youmans goes so far as to assert: e philo-
sophical problem that Strauss faced in his Nietzschean
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compositionshow to move beyond pure criticism to the
creation of a positively dened worldviewwas the same
problem that Nietzsche himself faced and failed to solve.
I would argue that Strauss found more success than Ni-
etzsche, at least insofar as he found ways to conceptual-
ize a life radically purged of metaphysics (p. 222). is
breathtaking claim is problematized by Youmans him-
self in that he observes how Strausss credo of family
and nature is destabilized by his alienating treatment of
it through vulgarity, parody, intertextuality and general
excess. Can it really be called arriving at a solution if
Strauss continued his practice of distancing himself from
any sign of sincere endorsement?
Youmans gives his characterization of Strausss
musical-philosophical solution a sudden, confusing twist
in the nal three paragraphs of the book. He brings up
Strausss nal orchestral composition, the Metamorpho-
sen (1945). is piece was discussed in chapter 4, and
the books concluding paragraphs make more sense as
part of that chapter. Youmans apparently leaves it for the
end, however, because he claims this piece shows how
Strauss, in the aermath of Germanys cultural collapse
and his own impending death, discovered that liberation
from metaphysics produced nihilism (p. 131). In his last
words, Youmans makes the judgment that Strausss re-
jection of metaphysics was a fatal error because it was
nihilistic. Since the issue of nihilism was never raised in
the discussion of any stage of Strausss outlook, this con-
clusion comes as quite a surprise and leaves the reader
wondering what its implications are, not least for the
assertion made earlier in the chapter that Strauss had
succeeded in nding a positive post-metaphysical world-
view.
Despite the indication of the title, this is not a book
for someone with a strong background in German in-
tellectual history who would like to know more about
Richard Strauss. It is a book for other Strauss special-
ists. Biographical details are taken as given. e part
of the book given over to musical analysis assumes a
thorough familiarity with recent secondary literature by
other Strauss scholars, making it quite user-unfriendly
for anyone else. For a concise account of Strausss life
and times that addresses the problems raised by Strauss
and his music, including the question of the composers
relationship with the ird Reich, see the 1999 biogra-
phy by Youmanss dissertation advisor, Bryan Gilliam.[2]
With his thorough examination of primary documents,
Youmans has provided signicant information for con-
sideration of a very complex topic; his work contributes
to the evolving understanding of Richard Strauss.
Notes
[1]. Felix M. Gatz, Musik-sthetik in ihren Hauptrich-
tungen (Stugart: Ferdinand Enke, 1929), pp. 48-50.
[2]. Bryan Gilliam, e Life of Richard Strauss (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:
hp://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Sanna Pederson. Review of Youmans, Charles, Richard Strausss Orchestral Music and the German Intellec-
tual Tradition: e Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. H-German, H-Net Reviews. April, 2006.
URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11663
Copyright 2006 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for
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