Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
Born June 11, 1864 in Munich, Germany
Died September 8, 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany

Guntram, Op. 25
Composed 1887–1893; rev. 1939
Premiered on May 10, 1894 at the Grossherzoglichen Hoftheater in Weimar, conducted by Richard Strauss

Performance Time: Approximately 2 hours and 15 minutes

Richard Strauss’s operatic legacy of 14 operas in the 20th century is unequaled by any other composer. From Feuersnot (1901) to Capriccio (1941), Strauss produced an opera on the average of every three to four years. In the early 1890s, however, Strauss made his first assay in the operatic genre (Guntram, 1893) with mixed results. He had composed two successful tone poems up to that point Don Juan (1888) and Death and Transfiguration (1889)—and after Guntram he composed four more: Till Eulenspiegel (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (1898).

It is a decidedly Wagnerian work, even to the point of a libretto by the composer. It is unique in other ways as well: never again did Strauss center an opera on a male character, and never again did he compose a role (Freihild) for his wife, and opera singer of renown who had sung Elisabeth in Bayreuth for a 1894 production of Tannhäuser. Guntram premiered in Weimar of that year to moderate success.

But what was moderately successful in Weimar was an outright failure in Munich, the city of Strauss’s birth. After that premiere on November 16, 1895, future performances of Guntram were canceled, despite promises to the contrary, and for the first time Strauss, now Kapellmeister at the Munich opera, had to deal head-on with strong conservative elements in Munich. The failure of Guntram was the most bitter, yet most important setback of his life, coming as it did at a time when Strauss was riding so high as a tone poet. He never forgot it, not even in the final weeks of his life. But the composer himself, in a typically honest self-appraisal, assumed much of the blame for Guntram’s failure. Indeed, he put up a grave marker in his back yard reading:

Here lies the venerable, virtuous young Guntram—

Minnesinger, who was gruesomely slain by the symphony orchestra of

his own father

May he rest in peace!

Although Strauss never entirely forgave Munich, he also knew that he had more to learn about composing opera; he recognized his shortcomings as a librettist and saw the dangers of stepping too near Wagner’s shadow.

Contemporary commentators believed Guntram to be one of the many Wagner-like redemption operas of the 1890s. Indeed, at the level of narrative, it appears to be a conflation of Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, and even Parsifal, with its Brotherhood of the Grail. This connection pertains to the music as well, for the very opening prelude creates a phantasmagoric web of sound with sustained high strings in tremolo and upper woodwinds in the manner of the prelude to Lohengrin. But we will later note that there are differences to be had.

This work focuses on one central male character: Guntram, a Minnesinger in the mold of Tannhäuser’s Wolfram who, like Lohengrin, comes from afar to save an innocent woman (Freihild) and, like Tannhäuser, he transgresses and requires redemption. He meets her in Act I as she contemplates suicide by the lake. Her husband, Duke Robert, is a malevolent man who disgusts his wife. In an Act II fight, Robert draws his sword and is killed by Guntram, who is imprisoned and sentenced to death. In Wagner, he would have sought redemption through the love of a woman, and, indeed, Freihild visits him in prison and suggests that they go off together.

Also visiting Guntram is his best friend and fellow member of their brotherhood, who suggests that he receive the judgement of his peers. Freihild’s malevolent husband may have brandished his sword in Act II, but Guntram, the advocate of peace and social justice, struck first. The triangular tensions between crime, punishment, and redemption all take place within Guntram himself, and, indeed, the work ends not with his redemption but with only the promise of it. He needs no eternal feminine, no ethical brotherhood, no judge or jury. His crime, as he articulates it, was not the act of murder—for he acted in self-defense—but rather the deeper motivation for that action: an unspoken love for another man’s wife. Strauss’s understanding of Schopenhauer, specifically The World as Will and Representation, Book 4, Section 60, is central: Guntram was hopelessly guided by the self-destructive force of the Will.

Even Guntram’s music, such as the Act II Peace Narration that so enraged Duke Robert, could not quiet the Will for long, and Guntram ultimately realizes that redemption must come from within (“My God only speaks to me through myself”) and through a rejection of art, love, and the world in ascetic solitude. His epiphany mirrors precisely what Schopenhauer observed at the very end of Book 3 as he makes the transition to the more sober Book 4: “[Art] is not the way out of life, but only an occasional consolation in it, until his power, enhanced by [artistic] contemplation, finally becomes tired of the spectacle, and seizes the serious [i.e., saintly] side of things.” Guntram breaks his lute, vowing never to sing again, and sets out on his solitary redemptive path.

For those contemporaries who made autobiographical assumptions, Strauss openly declared that he was not Guntram, that he himself was no saint, and that he could never abandon the art of music. Indeed, Strauss’s annotations in his copy of Book 4 bear out his lack of sympathy with a philosophy that squarely placed religious asceticism or saintliness ahead of music as the only hope for permanent release from the will and the endless striving that it causes. The typically self-deprecating Strauss made light of his rejection of saintliness in a letter to Cosima: “I can’t help it, I’ll never be granted the halo.” The philosophical distance between the composer and his main character (and thus the potential for irony) was sharply defined in a letter to Thuille in which he referred to Guntram as a “gasbag.” For Strauss, it was not for music to preach, and neither was it for “musical priests” to create sonorous sermons. Music may well be able to represent metaphysics, but it could never be metaphysics, Strauss asserted to Thuille: one should follow Wagner’s example and “not preach a moral sermon.”

If all this seems redolent of Nietzsche, and well it should, we should remember that he was fueling Strauss’s view of art and ego during this period of epistemological turmoil: “[Nietzsche’s] polemic against the Christian religion spoke deeply to my heart; it strengthened and corroborated an unconscious antipathy, which I had felt since my 15th year, for this religion frees its believers of responsibility for their own deeds and actions (through confession).”

Strauss confessed that his attraction to Nietzsche was born of his opposition to the three enemies of art: hypocrisy, the impudence of dilettantes, and philistinism. Thus, for Strauss, the highest form of existence “is to be alone with the great spirits … to be alone with oneself … the more I am alone, the better I amuse myself; I only get bored when I’m in incompatible company.”

But beyond the philosophical roots, Guntram is a work of great musical beauty, a significant work in Strauss’s oeuvre, as it provides a glimpse into the development of his musical language and dramatic sensibilities. The opera is characterized by sumptuous orchestration, a highly expressive use of melody, and intricate post-Tristanian harmonic progressions—elements that would later define Strauss’s signature style.

Outstanding are the three great monologues for Guntram in each act: his expository speech of Act I, the peace narrative of Act II, and his moving farewell at the end of the final act. Strauss creates compelling sexual passion in Act III, when Freihild confesses her love for Guntram while he is in prison and offers to free him as they would escape together. Gustav Mahler was impressed by Guntram’s musical beauty, and he conducted excerpts from the opera in Vienna and even in New York at Carnegie Hall. Tonight, in this same hall, we shall hear the work in its entirety.