The UdK Berlin Symphony Orchestra will perform works by Richard Strauss in its Philharmonie concert on 20 November. To mark the occasion, the newsletter's history column looks back at the composer's contact with the Berlin Hochschule für Musik, now the UdK's Faculty of Music. In the last two decades of the German Empire, Strauss was “on site” in Berlin: he worked at the Linden Opera - and would have liked to have become a university director.

Richard Strauss is known to have grown up in Munich, and important premieres such as Salome (1905), Elektra (1909) and Der Rosenkavalier (1911) took place at the Semper Opera in Dresden. However, his career also took him to Berlin - something that is probably less known today: in 1898 he turned down an offer from New York and moved to the Prussian-German capital. He remained there until the days of the revolution, albeit with decreasing time commitments. He held the post of Court Kapellmeister and General Music Director at the Unter den Linden Opera House.
From there, the Hochschule für Musik - located in Charlottenburg since 1902 - was not far away. This applies to the location, but also to the organisational position. It is true that the training centre belonged to the Prussian Minister of Culture, while the General Directorate of the Royal Theatre was responsible for the Court Opera. However, Kaiser Wilhelm II stood above everything - and not just formally. 
There were also personal links between the opera and the university in which Richard Strauss was involved. The memoirs of cellist Heinrich Grünfeld (In Major and Minor, 1923), for example, bear witness to this. In it, the author recounts humorous anecdotes from his friendship with Strauss. He had got to know him through Carl Halir, the long-time concertmaster of the Berlin Court Orchestra. Halir was also professor of violin at the academy and second violinist in the Joachim Quartet.

Richard Strauss was not one of the personalities who influenced the development of the academy due to the lack of a corresponding function. Only for a short time, from 1917 to 1920, did he preside over a masterclass for musical composition, one of those masterclasses that - like the Hochschule, but separate from it - was affiliated to the Academy of Arts. However, Strauss would probably have liked to take over the management of the academy.

Just under a decade after Strauss' arrival in Berlin, in 1907, Joseph Joachim, the long-time director and founder of the Hochschule für Musik, died. A successor therefore had to be found for him. Friedrich Schmidt-Ott was entrusted with the matter at the ministry. The later last Minister of Culture of the monarchy held the Arts Department at the time; his important position in the cultural policy of the empire was based on the trust of the emperor. Schmidt-Ott skilfully manoeuvred between the conservative attitudes of the monarch and the demands of the liberal music public, which he did not want to alienate completely.

Joachim's death had left a huge gap in the eyes of the ministry; he was considered irreplaceable. Countless names were considered. It was not until 1909 that Hermann Kretzschmar, Professor of Musicology at the University of Berlin, was appointed Director of the University on a temporary basis. Richard Strauss was not one of the candidates seriously considered.

He was out of the question, Max Friedlaender ruled in a detailed expert opinion at the time. Friedlaender - like Kretzschmar a professor at the university - had published the Kaiserliederbuch in 1906, a book of folk songs for male choir commissioned by the Kaiser. According to Friedlaender, Strauss belonged to the ‘far left’. With this statement, the advisor to the ministry was alluding to the modernity of Strauss' compositional oeuvre, as the composer was by no means far to the left in political terms.

Almost a decade later, in 1916, Friedlaender returned to the decision on Joachim's successor. He wrote to Schmidt-Ott about a ‘temperamental outpouring from Richard Strauss’. ‘I had recently written to him quite innocently about the date of a Goethe song,’ Friedlaender informed him. In his reply, however, Strauss then brought ‘completely different things’ into play. ‘It seems that he is disappointed that he did not succeed Joachim as director of the university in his time.’ Friedlaender enclosed a copy of Strauss' letter.

In it, Strauss refers to the graphic design of a book sent by Friedlaender. ‘You can't believe your eyes when you see an edition of the highly official Berlin decorated with the names Slevogt and Kalckreuth,’ he wrote. 

"Should it at least meet in Berlin for the visual arts? Then someone who has been watching on the spot for 20 years to see if anything changes in Berlin's musicalibus need not lose hope that the “power of darkness” will also recede from the academy and university. By then I will probably be dead, and in retrospect some people will perhaps wonder how long I lived incognito (at least seen from above) in beautiful Berlin, and how much good I might have done if my presence there had been known at the highest and highest levels."

Friedlaender took Strauss' statement so seriously that he informed the ministry. He again justified the view that he was out of the question as Joachim's successor. "His choice would, I believe, have caused a general shake of the head, because an artist of an extreme secessionist tendency probably does not belong at the head of a state teaching institute. Liebermann and Corinth as directors of the neighbouring college would have had a similarly strange effect."

This refers to the Königliche akademische Hochschule für die bildenden Künste (Royal Academic Academy of Fine Arts), which was run by the great opponent of the Berlin Secession and all the modern movements that followed it, Anton von Werner, until his death in 1915.

There was, of course, a vacancy at the master schools. Friedlaender now suggested that Strauss be considered for this position: ‘Strauss would be the first man here, and compared to this greatest of living composers, all other candidates shrivelled into pygmies’. Arnold Mendelssohn, Hans Pfitzner, Max von Schillings, Eusebius Mandyczewski and Julius Röntgen are mentioned by name.

The Ministry of Culture followed Friedlaender's advice, so that Strauss was given a chance to do good at one of Berlin's educational institutions after all. However, his work remained an episode; affected by the world war, it ended after a short time with the fall of the empire. Strauss moved to Vienna in 1919.

He was still self-confident and provocative at the very end. In June 1920, he informed the ‘honourable secretariat’ of the Berlin Academy that he would be staying in his villa in Garmisch during the summer; however, he was prepared to ‘receive and teach the students there’. Now, Garmisch-Partenkirchen is not as close to Berlin as Charlottenburg - the president of the Akademie der Künste was now Max Liebermann; he noted in the margin of the letter: "This is called teaching. It's a scandal".

Author: Dr Dietmar Schenk (former director of the university archive)