Ein Heldenleben and artistic heroism
Recently, I have been listening to Richard Strauss’s tone poem Ein Heldenleben and discovering that I have misunderstood the piece my whole life. A lot of people consider this tone poem the odd work of a monomaniac, an indulgent musical autobiography in which Richard Strauss reimagines himself as a world hero and then, audaciously, shares this perspective of himself with all humankind, couched in vainglorious music. Oddly enough, no one brings Beethoven into this discussion, who did this in the Eroica symphony, and for which I have never heard him criticized as harshly. Surely, the revolutionary Beethoven more completely embodies this heroism than Strauss does, but even so, why should Beethoven’s monomania be given a free pass and Strauss harshly dismissed for his? Frankly, it’s odd.
Strauss idolized Beethoven, and Eroica especially was an important piece for Strauss’s imagination. Despite the “apotheosis” of the hero in Eroica’s fourth movement, and Ein Heldenleben closing with the hero’s “retirement,” both composers were in the middle of their careers when writing these pieces, with so much of their best work yet to come. Beethoven was around 30, Strauss around 34, having yet to compose any of the great operas we love him for. Both probably assumed they had decades more work ahead of them.
We all compare ourselves to the men and women we most admire; Strauss and Beethoven were at a similar place in their careers when composing their respective “Eroicas.” I imagine that at some level of his consciousness, Strauss was comparing his life and career to Beethoven when writing Heldenleben. It’s only natural: and Strauss was an extremely ambitious man. In retrospect, it is easy to see this as hubris on Strauss’s part, even a greater hubris than setting himself as the protagonist of this tone poem. But how much of that judgment is unfair on our end?
The subject of Ein Heldenleben is clearly an artist of some kind, a creator. But is this artist-hero the composer himself, or a more general hero? Most critics believe the former, Strauss himself the latter: but the answer is clearly both. Ein Heldenleben is primarily about the archetypal artist-hero and in a lesser way, how this story-archetype plays out in Strauss’s life.
Though most of his tone poems were about specific literary figures, Strauss was fascinated by musical storytelling in its more abstract form as well. Think of Tod und Verklarung: whose death and resurrection are this? Clearly everyone’s and no one’s, it is a story type, not the story of a specific individual. Ein Heldenleben makes far more sense when considered like this than of the same family as Macbeth, Don Quixote and Till. It is the archetype of a story, about no one in particular. Think of it as belonging to the same tone poem tradition as Les Preludes by Liszt. Les Preludes does not represent the lifecycle of a particular someone, but the universal lifecycle as we all experience it.
Image from the title page of Ein Heldenleben, in this case, for a piano reduction from 1905, from the Leipzig publisher F. E. C. Leuckart. Due to the works complexity and counterpoint, one piano or even two pianists would not do: this arrangement is for two pianos, four pianists total. Otto Singer Jr., who, incidentally, was American educated for the most part, before coming back to Germany, was especially singled out by both Strauss and Mahler for reductions such as this.
But why then would he quote himself dozens of times over the course of the piece, if it is about the archetypal hero and not so much about Strauss himself? I want to say that with his intentions for the piece, he had no alternative, but somehow, I’m not satisfied by this explanation. He clearly wanted an artist subject, but if he had included excerpts from multiple pieces by, say, Wagner or Beethoven, the piece wouldn’t be about heroism in general, it’d be about those very specific figures. If he wanted to do this, he would also likely be obliged to adopt more closely their styles, an interesting idea but odd to think about, as lovely as Strauss’s neoclassical music is. But regardless, the result certainly would not have been Ein Heldenleben. I think he knew that such an act would cheapen the final product, as it would be so much more than a mere homage, it’d be an odd work of quasi-messianic hero-worship, one of the most sycophantic and lowest forms art can take.
An important question: can any great artist tap into his heroism if he doesn’t believe himself to be, at his best, great? What use is humility here, when aspiring to something marvelous? Certainly, Nietzsche and his writings sit behind a work like this, but there’s no time to get into that now. What artist doesn’t romanticize their artist’s journey? I see this quality in children and in beginning artists of all types. Excitement takes hold of their visions for the future and they imagine themselves at the pinnacle of achievement with an enormous sphere of world-altering influence. We’ve all thought this way, not without some silly shame, but it’s too universal a mental turn to be unnatural. Though few achieve the greatness that exists in every beginner’s fantasies, could Wagner have made Tristan or Beethoven Eroica without it? I doubt their attitude was one of pure Christian humility and modesty. We’re all called to do great things, but can you do great things without seeing the greatness within yourself? I don’t think so.
And is there anything more universal than the admiration of heroes and comparing oneself with them in order to measure one’s own progress? I think Strauss knew that Beethoven had to write Eroica in order to write the other six monumental symphonies; in writing an Eroica of his own, maybe he wanted to activate a similar golden age for himself. Maybe Ein Heldenleben somehow enabled him to write the later masterpieces, like Salome and Rosenkavalier, though this is a question as impossible to resolve, as it is worthwhile to consider.
The famous postcard image from a series of composer postcards released in the 1910s by a publisher (or an artist? It’s been hard to find information about this), called Eichhorn. If I’m not mistaken, R. Strauss and Puccini were the only composers in the set who were still alive when the postcards were published.
Forms of heroism may be different, but Strauss demonstrates how the process of becoming a hero is the same for people of all endeavors. I imagine multi-millionaires, Olympic athletes, Nobel-prize winners, could all listen and understand Strauss’s depiction of the hero’s critics, the hero’s home companion, and the hero’s most decisive battle and victory. The process of getting there is the same for everyone, filled with obstacles, critics at every stage and many moments where even an inch of progress requires all the strength of will one can muster. And Ein Heldenleben is an important reminder of this fact; not even Eroica, for all of its pure dynamic energy, depicts a hero contending with his adversaries, a hero facing a hostile world.
Next time I feel defeated, I hope that I think of returning to this piece. Its message is especially important for the low and downtrodden who can still imagine great things in their future.
