Twenty years after Wagner’s conquest of Berlin, a new musical revolutionary was storming the gates: Richard Strauss. A protégé of Bülow’s, Strauss had made a huge reputation for himself around Germany as a conductor and composer of “tone poems” such as
The chief obstacle was Kaiser Wilhelm, who disapproved of Strauss’s music except for the bombastic marches that the composer dedicated to His Majesty. Wilhelm finally consented to Strauss’s appointment in Berlin only because the musician promised to cooperate with him in guiding the Royal Opera to even greater heights. But once ensconced on the Spree, Strauss continued to write the sort of modernist music the kaiser hated. “I raised a snake in the grass to bite me,” fumed Wilhelm. He told Strauss to his face that he considered his music “worthless.” After the empress stalked out of Strauss’s
Although Strauss often deferred to the kaiser’s judgment in the interest of promoting his career, he was determined to keep Berlin on the cutting edge of modern music. Because Wilhelm could not be dissuaded from interfering with his work at the Royal Opera, the composer founded a private orchestra, the Tonkünstler, which put on unbowdlerized versions of his own operas as well as works by experimentalists like Bruckner, Elgar, Wolf, and Schonberg. Thus in music as well as in drama, official Berlin was unable to suppress the growing influence of the avant-garde.
Berlin was not Germany’s capital of plastic arts at the time of national unification. That distinction was claimed by Munich, which boasted the largest community of painters and sculptors in the nation. But this began to change in the 1880s and 1890s, when artists started scrambling to the new imperial capital in search of money and prestige. The growing concentration of talent also brought bitter internecine battles over commissions and contracts. The divisiveness was exacerbated by the kaiser, who could not resist taking sides, especially in a domain where he considered himself an expert.
Prior to the 1880s, Berlin’s best known and certainly most beloved artist was Adolf Menzel, who had moved from his native Breslau to the Prussian capital in 1830 at age 15. In his youth Menzel had been a protomodernist, turning out impressionistic treatments of Berlin’s seamier side, its dark streets and primitive factories. Degas was one of his admirers. But by the 1870s he had changed tack both in technique and subject matter, focusing on official Berlin and its historical antecedents. His
The Iron Rolling Mill: Modern Cyclops
