Elisabeth Schumann and Richard Specht: Strauss before Sixty

Abstract

In the twenty-first century, the most widely known contemporary examination of Richard Strauss in the interwar years is Theodor W. Adorno's early essay “Richard Strauss at Sixty” (1924).1 Adorno saw Strauss as “nothing but surface,” but that superficiality, in his Simmel-influenced reading, reflected the whole world: “an admittedly fragmentary reality of external things in the fruitless chase after that inner reality which is, by itself, quite unreal.”2 As with many of Adorno's writings, his interpretation of Strauss was simultaneously of his time and at odds with it. The two texts excerpted here provide alternative, supplementary voices on Strauss from this period: soprano Elisabeth Schumann (1888–1952) and music journalist and musicologist Richard Specht (1870–1932). The vantage points and purposes of a young singer who soon would become a star of the age, on the one hand, and an aesthete-musicologist, on the other, are obviously very different from Adorno's. Still, just as Schumann's and Specht's contemporaneous accounts are enriched when placed alongside each other, they also illuminate Adorno: all three heard and witnessed the same Strauss, but understood and assessed what they observed differently.