This film is documentary as hagiography. It is over directed, overacted, incoherently edited, and abysmally short on facts and any attempt at a real biography. It relies, perhaps too heavily, on archival footage of Strauss himself, most often conducting his own music. Some of these moments are immensely disturbing, such as his leading a performance of his bombastic, banal Olympic Hymn at the Games opening or conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in 1944 while Germany is destroying itself and a great part of the rest of the world, murdering millions. Watching Strauss conduct this orchestra in that year, one must not ignore who has been expelled from it, why they were denied their jobs, and what music they are forbidden to play. Yet the response to scenes such as these by the movie's commentators is mostly to shrug it off. Strauss is never blamed for his participation in these morally heinous circumstances.
Strauss was not the worst collaborator by any means, if he was strictly speaking a collaborator at all, though one image of him with Hans Pfitzner standing at his side in the midst of other committed Nazis is hard to take. Strauss's relationship with the Third Reich was complicated. Yet he did take on a prominent bureaucratic role under it, one he came to find increasingly uncomfortable. The film's attitude is to render him almost entirely inculpable for these acts by either not mentioning them or mentioning them briefly and then ignoring them. He was certainly not blameless. No doubt his position was fraught, since he had family members to protect. But that fact can explain or justify only so much.
The movie concentrates on only a few of his pieces, many of which come back again and again. Most are not among his best, like the overwrought Alpine Symphony and often kitschy Also Sprach Zarathustra. Yet you will learn almost nothing about them. The commentators are uniformly glib and repetitive, emphasizing mostly matters of rhythm or baton technique and so on. The pianist in the bunch seems to be something of a Neo-Nietzschean himself, at least he makes a great deal about Strauss relationship to that philosopher. But the same man also hears biographical matter in almost every bar Strauss wrote. It is obvious nonsense, so overboard does he go in pursuing the analogies. He also states, somewhat offhandedly, that because Strauss was a great family man he was a great composer. The two, for him, apparently go hand in hand. This is more than worshipful. Its evocation of the doctrine of the Volk and the family at the heart of it is maddening.
Besides, one need only to counter his argument with two names, far greater composers than Strauss: Beethoven and Brahms.
This flirting with rightwing opinions is the case with several of the other commentators as well. Make no mistake. Whether it means to or not, this movie has politics. A few comments by the same Nietzsche man have an unmistakeable anti-Semitic cast to them as well. Listen to how he emphasizes that Schoenberg was a Jew at one point and how he champions Strauss as an anti-Christ. His interpretation of the opera Salome, though he says he is quoting Strauss, is similarly tainted. He seems almost unaware of the implications of his way of putting things. I'd say this was true for many of the rest as well, excluding Strauss's grandson and Fassbaender, who mostly makes scary faces and sighs in rapture.
Brigitte Fassbaender, an artist I have long admired, has become, in this film, almost a caricature of herself, mugging and wildly gesticulating. You'd think she was performing Clytemnestra still. The young singer she's instructing is quite good, but almost is never allowed to finish anything. And what is the point of filming her riding on a train or in a car. This same happens to her accompanist. Both journeying take up a lot of useless footage. And what are these interludes between the great retired singer and her novice student meant to be saying about Strauss, especially when no song is sung complete? It's puzzling.
The two actors who read from letters and diaries by Strauss and his wife make you wince from their over acting and reacting. Like everything else in the film, their segments seem to follow no chronology. Why are they shown walking down a corridor together? There is an enormous amount of pointless footage throughout the movie. What they read seems to lead nowhere, to have no thematic shape to it at all, though again there is a great deal of mugging and mewing by both of them, cute little glances and looks back and forth.
And the film does not know how to end. It returns to the beginning, the line from Strauss about how he is the end of the rainbow arcing from the Greeks to him. But then it keeps on going. The most poignant shot is of his wife Pauline at her husband's funeral. That is moving to see. But then, at the real end of the movie, the final shot is of a crucifix. Why, when so much is made about Strauss's anti-Christian views (views that are quite well known to anyone who knows anything about Strauss at all), is this the last image we see?
All of the commendations, again excluding the grandson and Fassbaender, sound as if they had just come from some stuffy Teutonic musicological conference whose topic is that all music is finally German and only German music counts. Strauss was the last in that great line, the end of the rainbow which began over the mountain in ancient Greece. Strauss's beloved Greece was, of course, largely a Greece that Germans, at least since the Romantics, had made up. It was true of Hölderlin, for example. So it becomes Western Culture itself that is at the end of the rainbow.
This notion, Strauss's own, is nonsense, of course. German Culture is not Western Culture and Germany art continued after the war was over. Strauss seemed to mourn far more intensely for what he regarded as the loss of that culture than he did for the many, many millions his country's war had killed and murdered. But, in any case, Western Culture is not German alone, Western music is not German alone, and the world of the East is not even acknowledged in such cultural solipsism, a solipsism which this film seems not just to accept but endorse.
That position is also nonsense, of course. But it would not have sounded out of place in Germany in the thirties and forties. Neither would much of this movie.
Richard Strauss said of himself that he was not a first rate composer but a first rate second rate composer. He wrote a lot of important music, especially many of his songs and a handful of his operas. His late work may be, strangely, among his best and most moving, Capriccio and the Four Last Songs, for example. I suppose it could be said that Die Frau was affected by the First World War; it makes a kind of plea for upping the birth rate. But he was a composer as a composer mostly detached from the world around him. He was no great thinker. Nor was he the greatest composer of his time, a position that the film assumes, summoning Glenn Gould as its authority. I won't make my own list. That would serve no purpose. But that assumption in the film underlines how hagiographic it is. With such a complex figure as Richard Strauss, both aesthetically and ethically, that is an unhelpful attitude to take and makes this movie at times very hard to watch and listen to.
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