Rainer Bayreuther: Der Held des Heldenleben
Who is the hero in Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben? This study evaluates three overlooked pieces of evidence together with autobiographical references. To begin with, a comparative analysis between this symphonic poem, composed in 1899, and another, Don Quixote (composed as a complement to Ein Heldenleben), indicates that the hero in Ein Heldenleben is on the verge of madness: Strauss thus lends his hero not only heroic but pathological characteristics. Secondly, several features of the heroic appear to be derived from Thomas Carlyle’s collection of lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), according to Strauss’s hitherto unknown notes. Thirdly, Strauss graced Jószef Faragó’s 1899 portrait of him with the hero’s main theme, rendering the painting as a pictorial representation of the heroic. Comparisons with other portraits painted at the turn of the twentieth century reveal that Faragó’s hero exemplifies typical attributes associated with the heroic genre—replete with resignation, loneliness and potential pathological traits—whose prototype can be found in photographs and portraits of Friedrich Nietzsche, the inarticulated vanishing point for the identity of Strauss’s hero.