Strauss mit Strauss

It's Strauss all the time at Entartete Musik towers just now. I'm writing about Die Frau ohne Schatten for one of the broadsheets, brewing up an introduction to the opera for the Royal Opera House's Insight Evening on Tuesday night, editing texts for the Salzburg Easter Festival's forthcoming production of Arabella and writing about the same opera for the newly renamed Dutch National Opera (formerly De Nederlandse Opera). And my Strauss A to Z for the Royal Opera House is being posted letter by letter each Monday. If you want to keep in touch with these and other Strauss activities, you can always follow @Strauss2014 on Twitter.

As part of my research, having had a few days' in Cumbria away from my desk, I have finally managed to see Special Film Project 186. It is an extraordinary document. After Nazi Germany surrendered in May 1945, the US Air Force’s Commanding General ‘Hap’ Arnold ordered its First Motion Picture Unit (FMPU), officially called the 18th Army Air Force Base Unit, to document the damage caused by allied bombing in Europe. As well as charting the destruction of German and Central European cities, the American film crews captured the liberation of concentration camps and the arrest of Herman Goering.

In a decidedly more idyllic passage, there is a scene with Richard Strauss in his garden in Garmisch. Aged 80, Strauss looks completely exhausted, thumbing through the score to Die Liebe der Danae – of which he had only seen the dress rehearsal in Salzburg, before the production was cancelled due to Goebbels command of 'total war' – and, in the featured passage, picking some peonies. I had thought, rather fittingly, that they were roses. You can see the film by clicking here. The Strauss scene follows a survey of the damage to Munich, a catastrophe which, along with the bombing of Dresden and Vienna, had inspired his Metamorphosen and the more gleeful contemporaneous München, ein Gedächtniswalzer.

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