Conference Agenda

This paper surveys the varieties of modernism found in eighteen newspaper reviews of Richard Strauss's Feuersnot (prem. 1901, Dresden) as performed under Gustav Mahler at the Vienna Court Opera on 29 January 1902. Feuersnot, nowadays a forgotten curiosity but during Vienna's 1901-2 season a highly anticipated premiere, was the only complete Strauss opera that Mahler ever conducted. Here it triggered a flurry of revealing commentary on modernist iconoclasm, from leading figures such as Eduard Hanslick, Robert Hirschfeld, Max Kalbeck, Richard Robert, Josef Scheu, and a host of lesser-known critics.

Three distinct forms of "musical Secession" (their term) emerge in the reception. The first is registered by a scandalized response to the opera's graphic sexual content: the aural representation of a magical sex act necessary to restore fire to medieval Munich. Charges of "obscenity" permeate the reviews, with feuilletons by sophisticated critics even suggesting that cultural/artistic wellbeing may require intervention by the authorities. Another concern involves a perceived attack on Wagner, whose spiritual-artistic integrity is defended against the heir-apparent Strauss by critics from across the spectrum, including every prominent anti-Wagnerian. ("This first stab at a musical Secession could make one into a Wagnerian," wrote Kalbeck in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt.) Finally, writers condemn the work for its irony, which drags the Court Opera down to the level of operetta and undermines dramatic seriousness in a way that threatens the very art of music itself. (Hirschfeld in the Wiener Zeitung: "Strauss's music is not music.")

For all these complaints, Mahler escaped almost unscathed, with his conducting universally praised but his judgment as Director questioned for enabling a grotesque avant-garde. The latter would soon be displaced by something even more revolutionary – Salome (1905), which sparked a controversy that earned Strauss a villa in the Alps even as it hastened Mahler's downfall in Vienna. The Feuersnot affair thus forecast the two figures' strengths and weaknesses in wielding notoriety to build their brands.