A monument to himself. Like a tidal wave the imposing sound mass of A Heroic Life (Ein Heldenleben) by Richard Strauss overwhelms the listener. It stuns and intoxicates him with its colourfulness. Poisonous and very sweet. In the plot of this symphonic poem the German composer, who at the time was opera director at the Prussian court, has grafted his own biographical experience: «The Ein Heldenleben plan was ready in my mind before I composed the music». An autobiography set in music when only thirty-five years old (it was first performed in 1899) seems to be – and actually is – a sin of pride. Besides Strauss stood in the flesh, as only a few others did, of a superman in the arts. A strong willed superman-type behaviour indeed, if yet again in June 1949, some months before his death, he could write that in his works there was «demonstrably present the man» as had completely happened «only in Beethoven»!
A 1908 photograph records the occasion when his Garmisch house was inaugurated: he sits in the foreground like a king, with some way behind him the group of servants against the background of the imposing mass of the villa. Just like Wagner and perhaps even more than him, Strauss always sought self honour. This is also shown by the parts chosen for Ein Heldenleben, with an excessive number of wind instruments (8 horns, 5 trumpets, 2 tubas and 4 each for all wood parts), and the recitations of the symphonic poems Macbeth, Don Juan, Death and Transfiguration and Don Quixote, aligned in the fifth movement to nearly form a virtual gallery of Strauss master pieces. Rather, in the third movement the picture of his wife (the violin solo here alludes to her) recalls a homely lyrical atmosphere and small family rifts. The picture is evidently idealistic, because this wife, the singer Pauline de Ahna, had a terrible character and did not think it over twice to humiliate down-trodden Richard in public, like when during a rehearsal she hurled at him – on the head, it seems – the score of the Guntram.
Undoubtedly, Schubert’s music stands at the opposite end of Strauss’ national-small-bourgeois rhetoric. And yet Strauss admired Schubert. «It was only once that I lingered so that I could also reflect on the Fantasia Wanderer […]. as for other works I have not reflected on Schubert, I have simply not: I have only adored him, played, sung and admired his works!». And both admired Beethoven, witness to the deep unity of the Austrian-German musical tradition, one single line from Bach to Schönberg, in spite of the period passages and stylistic shifts. In Schubert’s Symphony no. 4 Beethovenian influences are evident in the initial introduction (the same C minor pitch recalls the more dramatic compositions of Beethoven, like the Pathetique piano Sonata and the Fifth Symphony) and in the concluding Allegro. Though evident they have little significance on an aesthetic level. Actually, the most original movement of the symphony, written by Schubert when he was barely eighteen years old, is the Andante (the theme appears again in a famous Improvviso for piano, op. 142 no. 2), where Beethoven’s ghost hovers, giving a chance to lyricism to explain its wings.