Art over politics?

All this suggests Strauss’ rather complex legacy – this was a man who was president of Hitler’s Reichsmusikkammer (Reich Music Chamber), yet watched the persecution of his beloved Jewish daughter-in-law and family in horror – has finally settled around what is arguably the only incontrovertible fact: that of his musical and dramatic genius. Where the debate around Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his music still rumbles on, Strauss has been largely exonerated in the popular as well as official historical imagination.

As the music critic Michael Kennedy makes clear in his masterful biography Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma, after Hitler came to power in January 1933, Strauss faced a moral and professional quandary (as did all professional musicians in Germany at the time). He was ambitious and rather self-regarding, but above all he was a pragmatist. “I made music under the Kaiser,” he supposedly told his family. “I’ll survive under this lot, as well.” Considering himself above politics, he also said: “I just sit here in Garmisch [his home, outside Munich] and compose. Everything else is irrelevant to me.”

If this seems disingenuous, especially given his acceptance of Goebbels’ invitation to take up the post of Reichsmusikkammer president on 15 November 1933, Strauss was adamant that he wished to use his influential position for the good. “I hoped that I would be able to do some good and prevent worse misfortunes,” he said later. While his chief objective seemed to be improving the economic position of musicians, increasing their job security, ensuring more government subsidy and in particular protecting the rights of composers – he lobbied hard for Germany to sign the Berne Convention on copyright law – he also refused to blacklist Jewish composers and remained publicly loyal to his Jewish friends and colleagues who were falling foul of the ‘Aryanizing’ Nazi authorities – most notably the Austrian-Jewish writer Stefan Zweig, who wrote the libretto for his opera Die Schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman) in 1934 recommends the less trendy wise The artist Sow not despair of mankind influences the health of female baboons Sunday morning Mass in St Peter Square chance to succeed e-commerce space .