The Disastrous Dinne

The Disastrous Dinner – or when Richard Strauss came to visit

It’s August 1909. In the little town of Alt-Schluderbach near Toblach, Gustav and Alma Mahler receive a message from Richard Strauss. He asks permission to visit by automobile, together with some buddies from his residence of Garmisch. The Mahlers say ‘yes, of course’ and are punished for their hospitality with an avalanche of telegrams about barometer readings in the Dolomites. Strauss, the sunny composer demands sunny weather. His persistence irritates the hosts, who have an high esteem of him as a composer, but consider him a problematic case as a human being.

Things go wrong upon the arrival of Strauss and his party: when Gustav politely comes to greet them at their hotel, he is recognized by Richard’s wife Pauline, who bombards him with indiscrete questions on his health and the financial profits of his work in the USA. Money is important to the Strausses.

Even worse: Strauss has brought some comrades from the ‘Schützengesellschaft’, a rifle club from Garmisch: robust Bavarian lads with other interests than Nietzsche or Dostoevsky. They join the artists for dinner. The most irritating guest is Strauss’ neighbor, a sturdy colonel who thinks Alma’s mother is Gustav’s wife and Alma herself is married to Alfred Roller, the famous stage director who is also present at dinner. The Mahlers learn from this misunderstanding that Strauss didn’t even make the effort to properly explain to his friends who’s who. Things escalate after Pauline only tolerates Mahler as her table companion under the condition that he would refrain from “whining and sulking like the last time, because that gives me the jitters”. Floored and demurred, the Mahlers return to Alt-Schluderbach.

The event looks like a dress rehearsal for Strauss’ ‘Der Rosenkavalier’, which will premiere two years later, with the Mahlers symbolizing the refined Marschallin and the Strausses playing the boorish Ochs. The difference between their respective behavior is not a nuance, it is an abyss. Mahler, the pained soul who suffered from philosophical questions couldn’t be more different from Strauss, who drove a car, looked like a banker and bragged that he could "paint a glass of beer in music".

Despite this tragicomical scene, the two geniuses had an artistic friendship that lasted decades. They had a high esteem of each other’s work as composers and conductors. Strauss, like Ochs, just didn’t have a clue how to behave.

EDIT: Many fellow Mahler lovers have rightfully asked if this story is true at all. It is rather extreme, after all. But yes, it is true. We have to keep in mind that the source is Alma, who allegedly despised the Strausses, but all the elements are there: Strauss' materialism, his unbearable wife, the suffering artist Mahler versus the skillful Strauss.

Henry-Louis de la Grange recounts this anecdote in the fourth volume of his Mahler biography, page 500. He also cites telegrams that confirmed Strauss being on an automobile holiday with his rumbustious Bavarian pals. So, the dinner did take place, but how bad it actually was, depends on interpretation. That the Mahlers didn't enjoy themselves very much is quite clear 

[Source: fragments and adaptations from an article on Richard Strauss by the Dutch musicologist and author Bas van Putten (1965)]