Patrick Bade
Richard Strauss: Youthful Prodigy and Enfant Terrible

Patrick Bade - Richard Strauss: Youthful Prodigy and Enfant Terrible

- Well, this is the second lecture on Richard Strauss that I have given for lockdown. The first one was about a year ago, and it was specifically concerned with Strauss’s troubled relations with the Nazi regime in the last parts of his life. So I’m not going to go into great depth about that today, but I’m going to start by preempting two inevitable questions. There’s nothing in the Q and A yet, but there will be soon, I’m sure. Was Strauss a Nazi and did he collaborate with the regime? Well, I will give a very resounding no to the first question. He was never a Nazi. He always resolutely refused to join the Nazi party. He absolutely abhorred Nazi ideology and ideas. And even before the Nazis, he was always totally against any kind of extreme German nationalism. And his view is expressed very succinctly in an entry in his diary in May 1945 at the end of the Second World War. This is what he says, “The most terrible period in human history is at an end, the 12 year reign of bestiality, ignorance, and anti-culture under the greatest criminals in history, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met their doom.” Well, I think that says very clearly what he thought. The second question, did he collaborate, is a bit more complex. He certainly made certain compromises for which he has been very criticised. He was briefly accepted to be the head of the Reichsmusikkammer, which officially, which made him, of course, de facto, a Nazi official. But he was soon sacked from that role when the Nazis opened a letter that he’d written to Stefan Zweig, in which he expressed his contempt of Nazi ideas.

On two occasions, he agreed to step in for conductors who’d been forced to withdraw. Bruno Walter was forced to withdraw from a concert in Berlin, Jewish conductor. Strauss took his place. Many people interpreted that very badly. And he also agreed to replace Toscanini at the the Bayreuth Festival. And he agreed to write a hymn for the 1936 Olympics. He’s been accused of naivety. He’s been accused of self-interest. But I think it wasn’t so much self-interest. He was certainly passionately interested in his music. He wanted to protect his music. Above all, he wanted to protect his grandchildren. He was an adoring grandfather of his two grandsons who were in mortal danger because his daughter-in-law was Jewish. So in horrible Nazi terminology, his grandchildren were what they called Halbjude, half Jews. They were effectively under house arrest in the last part of the war. So he needed to not offend the Nazis too much if he wanted to protect his grandchildren. So that’s all I’m going to say on that subject today. Now, he was a long lived composer. He lived into his mid eighties and he had a composing career. He was starting composing in his early childhood. He was producing quite mature work in his teens. So he had a composing career of nearly 60 years. And he started off as an infant and youthful prodigy. And he ended up as a geriatric prodigy writing late masterpieces, like the “Four Last Songs”, which I’m sure are very familiar to you. His career can really be divided into two halves. From 1888, when he wrote the tone poem, “Don Juan Op. 20,” and then until “Elektra,” the opera, “Elektra” in 1909, he was the cutting edge of the Western musical avant-garde.

He was the enfant terrible. And then, not quite overnight, but almost overnight, he’s transformed from enfant terrible into the grand old man of German music. And that really is the position that he held from about 1911 until his death in 1949. So he was born in Munich. I suppose he’s the most famous cultural son of Munich, 1864. This is what the Munich of his youth looked like. This is where he was born, sadly destroyed in the bombings of the Second World War. It is actually the bierkeller of the beer brewing Pschorr firm. His mother was a member of that family. You can see her there. And his father, Franz Strauss, was a horn player in the Court Orchestra in Munich. He actually helped Wagner devise Siegfried’s famous Horn Call in the Ring Cycle. But he was a diehard musical… He actually loathed Wagner and didn’t really approve either of his son’s work. But it’s interesting that Strauss… There are two instruments which inspired much of his most beautiful music, the human voice, the soprano voice, he’s a wonderful composer for the soprano voice. But also in the orchestra, he had a particular love of the horn and he wrote two horn concertos and there are many, many beautiful horn passages in his tone poems and his operas. So the work that really launched his fame was the tone poem, symphonic poem, “Don Juan,” written when he was 24. And it was an explosion of orchestral colour and virtuosity. It was the first major step forward, you could say, in Western music after the death of Wagner. And it’s the first of a series of symphonic poems that he wrote in the 1890s, which are central to the orchestral repertoire, and which he enormously expanded the descriptive and the expressive possibilities of the orchestra.

He boasted that he, in sound, he could describe anything. He said that you could actually see the colour of Donna Anna’s hair in his orchestration for “Don Juan.” He said he was able to describe absolutely anything in sound. So here is the explosive opening of the tone poem, “Don Juan”. From that time, he was world famous and he was constantly news. And I think he was probably the most caricatured composer in history. You can see, this is a jokey illustration of… You can get this very dome like forehead. And you can see that this is a pear being turned into Richard Strauss. Various other caricatures of the early 1900s. These are caricatures of the Strauss Orchestra around the time of- So that’s pretty wild stuff and far more dissonant than anything that had been written in European tradition up to that point. So people who met Strauss were often very disappointed. They found him dull and bourgeois, over concerned with materialistic things. He had very conventional private life. He was happily married throughout his life. No, no passionate infidelities or love affairs. But there is, I said this, an odd side of him that seems to want to expose his private life through his music, both in the symphonic poems and in the operas. He was married to this woman, Pauline de Ahna. She was the daughter of a general of rather a more aristocratic background. She also guarded herself as socially superior to him. But she started off her career as a singer. And they met because he was conducting a performance of “Tannhäuser” and she was singing part of Elizabeth.

And during rehearsal, he corrected her and she threw a terrible tantrum and she threw the score at him and she flounced out and went back to her dressing room and he followed her to the dressing room and the members of the orchestra and theatre staff could hear shouting and screaming and things being thrown. And they were just appalled, you know, ‘cause her bad behaviour and her lack of respect for the conductor. So he emerged looking rather shaken and battered from her dressing room. And they said, “Maestro, we support you and we want to tell you that we will never work with this awful woman again.” And he said, “Oh, gentlemen, that would not please me because she has just agreed to become my wife.” And she was a really notorious character. She was imperious, rude. She constantly humiliated him and insulted him and mistreated him in public. One of those… You probably all know couples like that, where one or the other seems to really mistreat the partner and the partner just seems to laugh it up and love it. And Strauss obviously adored her and he celebrated her many times in his musical works. I think the, all the photographs give a very good sense of the nature of their relationship. She clearly was a very, very formidable woman.

And they had a son, Franz, who you can see here. And this is domestic life with the Strausses, very, very bourgeois interior on the left hand side. Probably the greatest crisis in their marriage was when she intercepted a letter, a love letter, that was mistakenly sent to him. It was actually intended for somebody else. And she assumed that he had been unfaithful and she threatened to divorce him. And this was absolutely traumatic. But strangely, he turned it into an opera for which he himself wrote the libretto. And here, on the right hand side, is a rehearsal for that opera. He met up the great Lotte Lehmann who played the part of Pauline in this performance. And Lehmann’s very funny. She, you know, describes, you know, going to rehearse opera and the absolutely obnoxious and appalling behaviour of Strauss whenever she encountered him. He became very rich. And that’s another thing that has often been held against him, that he was considered to be very mercenary and demanding in monetary matters and that we would do anything for money. I don’t think that is totally true, actually. I think he had very high artistic ideals that took preference over to the monetary ones. But anyway, he made enough money to build this magnificent villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchenin. Obviously, the interior of the villa is very comfortable. This is the desk where he did much of his composing and where he composed the next piece that I’m going to play. Here are the Strausses on holiday. His only other vice really was card game. He liked a game called skat. Very often he, at the end of a performance, backstage, he would play skat with his colleagues. Now at that desk, as I said, was where he wrote this song. And this is a very famous story.

She was, Pauline was just horribly bossy and imperious. And one day she came into his office where he was sitting and starting to compose and she said, “I want to go out in 20 minutes time. I’m going to go shopping. You must come with me. I’m going to go and get dressed and put my hat on. And you have 20 minutes to finish what you are doing and then be ready to take me out.” Well, he was writing this song and it took him 20 minutes to write this absolutely exquisite song, which is obviously a declaration of love for the dreadful Pauline, “Traum durch die Dammerung”. And it’s… What is so strange is how calm this song is. It’s a man who’s being drawn towards the woman that he’s loved and he’s walking towards her. And you can see words “Ich gehe nicht schnell, ich eile nicht”, “I’m not going fast, I’m not hurrying.” And he obviously wasn’t or didn’t feel he was when he wrote this exquisitely calm, almost trance-like song.

♪ Weite Wiesen im Dämmergrau ♪ ♪ Die Sonne verglomm, die Sterne ziehn ♪ ♪ Nun geh’ ich hin zu der schönsten Frau ♪ ♪ Weit über Wiesen im Dämmergrau ♪ ♪ Tief in den Busch von Jasmin ♪ ♪ Durch Dämmergrau in der Liebe Land ♪ ♪ Ich gehe nicht schnell, ich eile nicht ♪ ♪ Mich zieht ein weiches, sammtenes Band ♪ ♪ Durch Dämmergrau in der Liebe Land ♪ ♪ In ein blaues, mildes Licht ♪

I think mainly the most beautiful song that he ever wrote is “Morgen!” And this is also a love song addressed to Pauline. And he actually gave it, it’s dedicated to her. He gave it to her as a wedding present. And it’s another song… It’s actually, it’s poor sounding song, but very, very difficult to sing. It’s deceptive. I mean partly because the singer is rhythmically out of sync with the accompanist. And the singer needs to keep very, very calm and once again to give a sense of inner calm and stillness. You don’t want any sense of agitation to come into this. And this is the most beautiful version I know. Oh, incidentally, that last musical excerpt was not Lotte Lehmann as is indicated on the list that came to you this morning. At the last minute, I thought perhaps you’d rather hear a more modern version. So that was actually . But this is a historic recording I’m going to play. It’s an orchestral version of the song conducted by Strauss himself with the late Viennese tenor Julius Patzak. ♪ Und morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen ♪ ♪ Und auf dem Wege, den ich gehen werde ♪ ♪ Wird uns, die Glücklichen, sie wieder einen ♪ ♪ Inmitten dieser sonneathmenden Erde ♪ ♪ Und zu dem Strand, dem weiten, wogenblauen ♪ ♪ Werden wir still und langsam niedersteigen ♪ ♪ Stumm werden wir uns in die Augen schauen ♪ ♪ Und auf uns sinkt des Glückes stummes Schweigen ♪ So many people saw Strauss as the successor to Wagner. But of course this was very contested. And one of the jokes that went the rounds in 1890s, people said . In other words, if we got to have a Richard, let’s have Wagner. If we’ve got to have a Strauss, let’s have Johann Strauss, the Waltz King.

In case anybody’s asking, if he was related to the Viennese Strausses, no, he wasn’t at all related to them. He himself was inhibited about writing operas. He was afraid of following in the footsteps of the giant figure of Wagner. His first opera, his first attempt at opera “Guntram” in the 1890s was a total flop ‘cause I think it was really too reverential towards Wagner. It comes across as a rather feeble pastiche of Wagner. But his first great international hit as a opera composer in 1905 with “Salome”. “Salome”, which was a setting of a literal German translation of Oscar Wilde’s very scandalous play “Salome”, which he’d originally written with Sarah Bernhardt in mind. So this was premiered in Dresden in a storm of publicity wherever it was performed. It was banned in Vienna on moral grounds. It was only as far as rehearsals in New York before it was taken off at the Met 'cause it was considered so scandalous. And in London, it was only put on after the sensor had made cuts to the text. Here, this is a photograph of all the people involved in the premiere. You can see Strauss looking rather sceptically at the soprano Marie Wittich who took the role of Salome. He felt she… He didn’t feel that she was right for the part. He dubbed her auntie. She was too much of a hausfrau and overweight for the part. And he was not happy about that. He was absolutely horrified when she did the strip tease dance or the Dance of the Seven Veils. And he ordained that for the rest of the performances, she would not do the dance. She went behind a screen and the Silverlight dancer came out the other side and did the dance and then disappeared behind the screen and the hausfrau Marie Wittich reemerged on the other side. This is the Salome that he really wanted.

This is also not exactly silk, but she was apparently a very sexy woman. This is the Czech soprano Emmy Destinn. And on the left, this is one of my greatest treasures actually, in my collection of autographs. This is Strauss’s requirements for the ideal cast of “Salome” as it was to be put on in Berlin shortly after the Dresden premiere. You can see it’s signed at the bottom and that you can see he wanted . He wanted Emmy Destinn in the part of Salome. So I’m going to play you the final moments, extraordinary sensational moments of this opera where Salome kisses the severed head of John the Baptist and then Herod orders her to be put to death. We’re going to hear it in a recording made in 1944 with the Bulgarian soprano Ljuba Welitsch. Certainly vocally, she is, for me, the ideal Salome 'cause what Strauss said, “I want a 17 year old with the voice a bit older.” You’ve got this huge orchestra. She’s on stage singing over this huge orchestra over an hour and a half. So it’s… Somebody needs to have enormous stamina. They’ve got to be able to make themselves heard over the orchestra. And the the remarkable thing about Welitsch is that the voice sounds so young. You know, you can certainly vocally, you can believe that she was a 17 year old. But it has this, you can say, silvery or metallic quality. It’s got its focus. It gives it real cutting edge. So it actually cuts through the enormous orchestra. I remember once talking about her to the great soprano . She came to London Jewish Cultural Centre. I interviewed her there. And she was very interesting talking about all the other sopranos in Vienna in the post-war period. All these wonderful sopranos they had then. And I said to her, “Oh, I think that Welitsch was born for the role of Salome.”

And she said, “No, no, she wasn’t. She wasn’t.” She said, “She was, yes, she was a wonderful singer. She’s great in the part. But actually, Salome is a princess. And Ljuba Welitsch was common as muck as she put it off stage, at least.” But here she is in these sensational moments when she kisses the mouth of the severed head. Wonderful, strange, eerie, orchestral. Strauss is such a master of orchestral colour, as you’ll hear in this excerpt. ♪ Ah, Ich habe deinen Mund geküsst, Jochanaan ♪ ♪ Ah, Ich habe ihn geküsst, deinen Mund ♪ ♪ Es war ein bitterer Geschmack ♪ ♪ Auf deinen Lippen ♪ ♪ Hat es nach Blut geschmeckt ♪ ♪ Nein ♪ ♪ Doch es schmeckte vielleicht nach Liebe ♪ ♪ Sie sagen, dass die Liebe bitter schmecke ♪ ♪ Allein, was tut’s ♪ ♪ Was tut’s ♪ ♪ Ich habe deinen Mund ♪ ♪ Geküsst, Jochanaan ♪ ♪ Ich habe ihn geküsst ♪ ♪ Deinen Mund ♪ It caused an absolute sensation all around the globe. And both Debussy and Marlowe, who had considerable reservations about Strauss as a man and as a composer, they were both blown away by the score of “Salome”. So you could see some of the response and the caricatures, funny comments about “Salome” You can see her with John the Baptist. They’re going to chop her head off. And he says, “Well that’s not as bad as being made into an opera by Strauss.” So this is a point where he forms the second most important relationship of his life after that with his wife Pauline. And this is with the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who’s a Viennese. He was Catholic, but as he was half Jewish, he put the Nazis regarded him as a Jew and that would be a problem later. Although he himself didn’t live to see it 'cause he died just before the Nazis came to power.

But so Strauss and Hofmannsthal, they wrote six operas together. And I think you can say it’s the most important partnership in opera since Mozart and Ponte in the late 18th century. And they did the whole thing by correspondence, which is very fascinating 'cause the letters survived and they existed. They give you an extraordinary insight into the creative process of making these operas very much a to and fro between the two men. One reason that the collaboration was entirely by correspondence was that Hofmannsthal absolutely couldn’t stand Mrs. Strauss. And there are lots of letters where he says when they very, very occasionally met, he said, “Oh, please don’t let your wife bother. I’m sure she’d rather go shopping.” It’s very obvious that he was rather keen to avoid any point of contact with the formidable Mrs. Strauss. But the first of their collaborations is “Elektra” that came out in 1909. And you sort of think after the incredible sensation of “Salome” that they thought, “Where can we go next? How can we make something even more scandalous, even more sensational?” And they certainly did. It’s an incredibly powerful opera. But sometimes, it lasts an hour and three quarters without a break and it somehow, it almost feels like head banging. I mean, in a great performance, the audience will go, it’s like at a rock concert, they’ll go completely berserk and crazy at the end.

And sometimes you think, “Oh they’re cheering partly 'cause it’s such a relief that it stopped. It’s the relentless violence and aggression and dissonance of this music. It is absolutely unparalleled. Here are the original cast with the great Ernestine… Annie Krull as Elektra right on that side and the great contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink. She was the most famous contralto in the world. So it was quite a coup to get her for the first performance. She hated the role and refused to have to sing it again. And she was particularly upset during rehearsals when she heard Strauss shouting at conductor, "Louder, louder! I can still hear Madame Schumann-Heink.” So this scene I’m going to play you now, for me, is one of the most exciting scenes in the history of opera. It’s the recognition scene. Elektra believes that her brother Orest is dead and he turns up at the palace to kill their mother in revenge for her murdering their father, Agamemnon. And this is the moment that Elektra recognises her brother. And you’ve got this huge orchestra, 117 instruments in the orchestra, and it just explodes. She utters a cry, “Orest! Orest!” And then every instrument in the orchestra starts wailing, weeping, grunting, shrieking. It’s like feeding time at the zoo. ♪ Orest ♪ Strauss gave a very reluctant interview to a German propaganda magazine in 1942 at the height of the Second World War. It’s obvious that he’s a very reluctant interviewee. Even the guy writing the article says that he was a very difficult and obtuse person to interview. And one of the things he says is that he invented atonal music.

He’s talking about a passage like that, which is a very odd thing to say at the height of the Nazi regime 'cause the Nazis absolutely detested atonal music. They thought it was . But this is as far as Strauss goes towards atonality. After this, he draws back. And it’s the moment of change in his career. As I said, for 20 years he’s been pushing the boundaries. He’s been the cutting edge. But I think he felt he could go no further in this direction. And so he turns to Hofmannsthal and says, “Now I want to write a Mozart opera.” And the result was “Der Rosenkavalier” which came out in 1911. But so we have a sea change, I would say in Western art. 1910, Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire” pushes the boundaries of atonality even further than “Elektra” as does Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, which is 1913. So compared to these two works, this “Der Rosenkavalier” is conservative and backward looking. And as I said, from this point onwards for the rest of his very long career, and there’s another 30 years to go, Strauss sort of almost overnight becomes the grand old man of German music.

So this is the scene in Act One also quite scandalous because it showed the Marschallin who’s a woman in her thirties. and she spent the night with her 17 year old lover. And I wish I had time to play you all of these things. But the music before the curtain goes up is pretty well x-rated. What can I tell you? It really describes the sex that the Marschallin is having with her very impetuous and impatient 17 year old lover. When they climax, you have great whooping horns and then the music subsides, and then you get these post-coital sighs from the Marschallin after her sex. And we can hear the dawn chorus with twittering birds and so on. And the scene I’m going to play you, they’re having breakfast together after this tumultuous night. And you can see it’s written in a very different style. It really is kind of pastiche Mozart.

♪ Marie Theres’ ♪ ♪ Octavian ♪ ♪ Bichette ♪ ♪ Quinquin ♪ ♪ Mein Schatz ♪ ♪ Mein Bub’ ♪

I want to finish with the great trio from the end of the opera. I think this is one of the loveliest songs ever created for the opera stage. Very moving. Very, very cathartic. And of course Strauss is in Clover because he’s combining three female voices together, can be three sopranos, sometimes it’s two sopranos and a mezzo. And in this scene, the Marschallin is nobly and graciously giving up her 17 year old lover to a girl of his own age. And all three singers are expressing their very powerful inner feelings in this scene. All right, I’m going to move on to tone poem. Tone poem, a symphonic poem. It’s a piece of orchestral music, which usually has a programme that’s a plot. It’s telling a story and it’s descriptive and it doesn’t have the form of a symphony, you know, with three or four movements. It’s usually a continuous piece of symphonic music.

Q&A and Comments:

Enfant terrible is usually a young successful person who’s striking, unorthodox, innovative or avant-garde. I think that’s probably true of Strauss in his… Apparently a good “Salome” in Toronto.

Did Strauss truly believe…? No, I hope I dealt with that. No, he absolutely did not. Read his letters, read his famous letter to Stefan Zweig that got him so much trouble with the Nazis. Now all the way through and even before the Nazis, read his correspondence with Hugo von Hofmannsthal during the First World War. He was absolutely against the war, the First World War. And he was outraged and against the the German nationalists who tried to take over the Salzburg Festival. No, he was never sympathetic to the Nazi ideals.

Alma Deutscher. I don’t… The name rings a bell, but I can’t comment. I don’t know enough. And it wasn’t, I don’t who… I have to check who wrote the lyrics to Tom Doherty demo. It wasn’t cause Strauss didn’t write his own poems. A child who’s inopportune remarks cause embarrassment. A person known for shocking remarks. Yes, and I think Strauss was out too shock in those early works and he succeeded in doing so.

Holocaust survivors have told of hearing Wagner’s Overture played by Nazi. This is… I’ve dealt with this. This is so untrue. Ask Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. She’s the one who was there. She will tell you Wagner and certainly not Strauss, they were never played in Nazi concentration camps. I don’t know where that myth comes from. It’s really weird. But I know that Mehta tried to conduct Wagner.

Yeah, presumably the account of Pauline’s behaviour in their domestic setting… No, no, it doesn’t come from Strauss himself. He was always extremely protective of her. And he was absolutely furious when, I mean, the accounts of Pauline’s behaviour come from many different people, from Lotte Lehmann, from Bruno Walter, from Alma Mahler.

Lots and lots of people commenting on her appalling behaviour. If Strauss was besotted with his wife, maybe this pushed him into his creative… It’s interesting. I think that’s a very interesting idea. ‘Cause the other person of course who was married to a woman who was famous for her disagreeable behaviour was Pierre Bonnard. And you know, people that really… She was so obnoxious that, you know, people really didn’t want to socialise with them. So I think somehow Strauss did really need Pauline. And I think she was somehow very important to the creative process. Strauss’s first horn concerto was written for his father, but proved too difficult for him to play. And then there’s another horn concerto at the end of his life as well.

Q: Do you know the what of being a secondary composer?

A: Yes. That’s an interest… I sometimes think Strauss is like three composers. There’s just this famous comment. He said, “I’m a first-rate, second-rate composer.” I think there are certain works of Strauss, the early tone poems, “Elektra” where he’s a first-rate composer. He’s a very great composer. He’s as great as they come. And there are plenty of other works where I would agree with him that he’s a first-rate second-rate composer. And there are other works where he sounds like a total hack. I mean, God, you should… The Olympic hymn that he wrote. You’d never think that a major composer would write anything quite so feeble.

Enjoyed the history of “Salome”. Two Richard Strauss love songs in parallel to text must have been a translator’s challenge. Thank you.

This is Vivian Anderson whose granny lived in Dresden attended the world premiere of “Rosenkavalier”. I bet. Lucky her.

Yes, Verdi and Francesco Maria Piave. It’s very interesting. There’s a very different dynamic. You know, in the relationship between Strauss and Hofmannsthal, Hofmannsthal basically has the whip hand and he often talks down to Strauss. And it kind of annoys me. I just think, “Well, Hofmannsthal, who do you think you are outside of the German speaking world?” Who knows about Hofmannsthal today apart from Strauss? But Verdi was actually something of a bully towards Francesco Maria Piave. He told Piave what he wanted and Piave, he cracked the whip and Piave had to do it.

Thank you, Arthur. Very kind. And thank you Rita and Miriam.

The most seductive music. It’s certainly up there, Lillian. It is absolutely wonderful, isn’t it? That last scene. Not just that trio I played you, but the two duets between the young lovers as well. Katryn. Yes, of course that’s true. I did talk about that in my last lecture that his despair… I mean, what you could say about him. He was primarily interested in art and culture and there’s a side of him that, I mean, even in the thing that I read you, of course, what he’s talking about, his despair and his sadness and what was behind metamorphosing was the destruction of German culture. He never actually says, “Well what about all the millions of people who died?” So that’s… He’s a very complex character and in some ways quite hard to understand.

This is Dennis who’s been intrigued by the fact that “Rosenkavalier” with all the wonderful music and sopranos, the most beautiful arias of them all is… Oh, do you think so? What about the tenor aria is pretty good. And of course Strauss didn’t really care for tenors, but he wrote a very beautiful aria for the tenor in Act One of “Rosenkavalier”. And it’s a catchy tune for . I’m not sure if I agree with you that it’s the most beautiful of all.

And the trio, as you say, very powerful, very emotional. The trio. The recording I played, it’s on the list that you were sent. It’s the second Carrie-Anne recording. Not usually a conductor I like or wished to expose or play. But I do think that is, the recording I played you is actually very good. I could do… Obviously, I could do endless sessions on Strauss, but I think we might lose some listeners if I did.

Uh… Well, you know, I think this is wrong. You know, I know that Strauss… I don’t think Strauss’s music was ever officially banned, but there was a long time when it wasn’t played by the Israeli Philharmonic. And I think it was Zubin Mehta that said, “You can’t be a world of world beating first class orchestra if you don’t play the Strauss.”

They stretch an orchestra. Uh… Yeah, I’ll look… My e-mail is p-j-s-b-a-d-e @aol.com. But I will look up Alma Deutsche. It’s a familiar name. I’m not sure why I don’t know more about her.

Yes, about the rhythm. The three time… Of course, there are plenty of walls all the way through “Der Rosenkavalier”.

Right. Thank you all very much. And I’ll see you again on Wednesday when I’ll be talking about painting rather than music.