Strauss Heirs Have to Share

An Associated Press article in the Knoxville News-Sentinel this morning tells of a Munich state court's decision which would force the heirs of Richard Strauss to share royalties from his operas with heirs of his librettist, Hugo von Hoffmansthal, who collaborated on some of Strauss greatest hits, e.g., Rosenkavalier and Elektra.

We tend to think of composers before the 20th century as paragons of virtue. They wrote because their muse told them to. They spread their music all over the world for the betterment of mankind, never worrying about things like royalties and commissions. If someone did commission a work, that person was also virtuous in that he was helping a composer spread the joy of his talents.

In other words, we don't think of composers and averages Joes. They were like characters on our modern TV: static, melodramatic, and never encumbered with going to the bathroom:

Knock-knock. "Jack! Jack Bauer! Are you in there? The evil president is threatening to launch all our nuclear missiles!"

"Uh, well... hold on a second. That chili dog I had for lunch went right through me."

The reality is quite different. Artists had to eat. They had to have a place to stay... and to go to the bathroom. They had to buy clothes and sundries. They had wives and/or ex-wives and/or mistresses, kids, parents, etc. to take care of. So they had to work, hard! If you're amazed at Bach's musical output, consider that he had 17 kids to feed. (Which begs the question, how did he have time to write everything he wrote, teach music at two schools, and oversee the music programs of three churches... or anything for that matter?) Beethoven never married, but he had various "amenuenses"--that was my Masters committee music history prof's $1.75 name for "assistants"--among them Anton Schindler, who wrote a very entertaining if somewhat spruious biography on the classical romanticist's travels and travails ("Or was Beethoven a romantic classicist?" My history prof, again).

So, all those folks you see in oil paintings, they had to get out every day and pound the pavement to find a job to feed themselves and their retinue. And, in those lean times, they scraped by. Some got other jobs. The eccentric composer Charles Ives, who made millions as an insurance agent while composing the greatest American music of the early 20th century, was very adamant about supporting his family: "If a composer has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" Other composers were assisted by more affluent family members (e.g., Mozart's dad). But they all got by, somehow.

The same goes for artists that worked with composers: choreographers, poets, librettists, singers, instrumentalists, etc. Unfortunately, often these people were forgotten when a work they'd done for a composer was a hit and vilified for ruining things if it wasn't. Regardless, they're often cited in a footnote of the 1,000-page biography of a composer.

And so we come back to Herr Hoffmansthal. From the article, it appears that Hoffmansthal talked to Strauss about the problem of his contributions being forgotten and they worked out an equitable and legally-binding agreement. (I wonder when legal documents started coming into commissions and collaborations in music? Probably about the same time that things like honor and personal responsibility began to wane.) And so, nearly 80 years after Hoffmansthal's death, his forebears can still receive the fruits of his labor, the world's way of saying "Thanks for having a great relative. We appreciate his contribution to mankind's brightest and best creations."