ABSTRACT
Richard Strauss’s interwar career was bookended by his most prolific year of song (1918) and his most productive decade of operatic composition (the 1930s). For musical historiography of the Weimar Republic, however, his artistic ambitions between these two watersheds have remained sharply contested. When not dismissive altogether, critics have chosen to either laud the innovative qualities of isolated compositions, such as the film-like Intermezzo (1924), or rehabilitate overlooked genres such as dance, thereby presenting the composer as a ‘worthy’ subject for present-day musicology.
Moving beyond a works-centred approach altogether, this chapter reframes Strauss as a cultural agent within a broader ideological movement to rebuild and reinvigorate European musical life following the Great War. Beginning with his involvement in the Salzburg Festival, it traces out prominent strands in Strauss’s thinking about the propagandistic value of Germanic culture and institutional platforms, especially his failed attempt in 1926 to establish his own Festspielhaus in Athens. Although overshadowed by increasingly self-conscious histrionic attitude toward his own career as it traversed into its seventh decade, Strauss’s activities as cultural administrator between 1918 and 1926 are indicative of a fundamental breakdown in utopian thinking about music’s ability to provide a stabilising force in post-war cultural life.
