A Hero’s Life and Nietzschean Struggle in Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben

Nietzsche influenced Strauss throughout the composer’s mature career, from Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 (1896), which shares the same name as the treatise by Nietzsche, to Eine Alpensinfonie, Op. 64 (1911–15), which initially bore the title Der Antichrist, after Nietzsche’s 1888 essay. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, stresses the idea of the Übermensch, which proposes that the human occupies the stratum between the primal and the super-human. The Übermensch is not, however, the zenith for a man. The goal for man is rather his journey toward self-overcoming, his struggle within himself. In Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life, 1898), Strauss incorporates Nietzschean concepts without any direct references to Nietzsche. The designation of a man as a hero, the battle as an obstacle with which one struggles, the alternation between peace and war and the cycle of recurrence in this tone poem all reflect Nietzsche’s ideas. This research considers the tone poem from a hermeneutical perspective and argues that Strauss’s hero in Ein Heldenleben embodies qualities encompassing the true Nietzschean hero.

Strauss's ‘Intermezzo’

Of Strauss's three large-scale autobiographical works, Intermezzo is surely the sincerest and the best. It avoids the grandiosity of Ein Heldenleben and the coyness of parts of the Sinfonia Domestica, and approaches bathos only in the final duet of reconciliation between the composer and his wife. For the rest, the story and music give an unvarnished account of the Strausses' menage, and in particular of one incident, taken from life, when Mrs. Strauss wrongly suspected her husband of infidelity after opening an incriminating letter from a Berlin demi-mondaine that was intended for another conductor with a similar name.