The other day, Hannah Edgar, a recent high-school graduate from Walnut Creek, California, wrote to me asking whether I had learned anything new about Strauss and the G.I.s. She was referring to a strangely pregnant musical-historical moment that I describe in my book “The Rest Is Noise”: on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s suicide, a squad of American soldiers rolled up the driveway of a quaint, green-shuttered villa in the Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Bavaria, and found themselves face to face with the eighty-year-old composer and conductor Richard Strauss. “I am the composer of ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ and ‘Salome,’” Strauss said, in English. The G.I.s had intended to commandeer the house as a temporary headquarters. After listening to Strauss play excerpts from “Rosenkavalier” at the piano, they let him be, and moved on to another destination.
When I was writing “The Rest Is Noise,” I became mildly obsessed with this encounter, which seemed to bridge a canyon of time: on the one side, a composer who had been born in 1864, before the founding of the German Empire; and, on the other, Americans who had come of age with Frank Sinatra. The Army established a post in the area, and Strauss had many military visitors. While most of them knew little of classical music—after getting questions about a statue of Beethoven, Strauss muttered, “If they ask one more time, I’m telling them it’s Hitler’s father”—a few proved to be musicians of high accomplishment. The oboist John de Lancie, who had played in the Pittsburgh Symphony before joining the Army, showed up one day and asked Strauss whether he had ever considered writing an oboe concerto. Strauss shook his head, but a seed was planted; some months later, de Lancie was astonished to read, in an Army newspaper, that Strauss had composed an oboe concerto at a soldier’s request.
It was especially striking to read such stories circa 2003, when I was researching the Allied occupation of Germany at National Archives II, in College Park, Maryland. The invasion of Iraq was then filling the news, and Donald Rumsfeld was making light of the looting of Iraq's heritage. In 1945, by contrast, the armed forces demonstrated a certain sensitivity in the handling of Central European culture. The book “The Monuments Men,” and the subsequent film adaptation, documents one such effort; a similar narrative could be written about music officers in occupied Germany. Carlos Moseley and Everett Helm, among others, gave crucial support to new-music series in Munich and Darmstadt; these are still thriving today.
The events of April 30th also shed light on the personality of Strauss, a supremely wily character who maintained a lofty position in German music through the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime, and beyond. He was often accused of opportunism, and the claim is not unjust: Strauss did what he needed to do to protect the sacred circle of his art, and, not incidentally, the profits that accrued from it. When he saw the soldiers in his drive, he understood at once that a new Reich was at hand, and took care to present himself as a well-travelled cosmopolitan. (He liked to display a document declaring him an honorary citizen of Morgantown, West Virginia, which he acquired on an American tour in 1904.) Strauss may have had an easy time accommodating himself to power because, deep down, he never took power seriously. In his youth, he had read the anarchist writings of Max Stirner, who declared that each man should make his own laws. For better or worse, Strauss followed that philosophy to the end.
I managed to track down several veterans who had met Strauss in 1945 or thereafter. One, Milton Weiss, appears to have been the first American soldier to greet the composer. After I mentioned the story of Strauss and the G.I.s in a 1997 article for this magazine, Weiss, who lived in Larchmont, wrote a letter to the editor recounting his role, and I talked to him further on the phone. “I was looking to get my men a place to sleep,” Weiss told me. “Strauss was good-looking for a man of eighty. I was impressed enough not to move my unit into his house.” Weiss would seem to be the unnamed soldier who, according to Strauss’s diary, exempted the house from occupation, early on the morning of April 30th. I also interviewed Russell Campitelli, then a private, who visited Strauss on June 23rd. Campitelli gave me a postcard that Strauss signed for him; it shows the composer standing with his wife on the porch of his villa.
One figure eluded me: Major John Kramers, who arrived at the villa a few hours after Weiss. Strauss wrote in his diary, “At 11 o’clock there came a Major Kramers, who, without waiting for a reply, told my son that we would have to vacate the house within fifteen minutes … Richard”—the composer’s older grandson—“did not want me to go out, so that I would not become upset, but I went to the car and identified myself to the young major as the composer of ‘Rosenkavalier’ and ‘Salome,’ whereupon he at once became polite and offered his hand and after two minutes everything was in order.” Who was this debonair officer, who saw to it that an “OFF LIMITS” sign was placed on Strauss’s lawn? I found out a little more: he served in the civil-affairs branch of the 103rd Infantry Division, and he later participated in the rescue of several French notables—including Charles de Gaulle’s sister Marie-Agnès and Édouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud, former Prime Ministers of France—at Schloss Itter, in Austria. But then the trail went cold. I tried calling various Kramerses around the country. On my list were Ted and Ella Kramers, of Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania, but I gave up before I got to them. When you are writing a book, you must let go of such investigative detours, or you will never finish.
When Hannah Edgar, of Walnut Creek, wrote to me, I searched the Internet one more time. I found a blog post written in honor of Colonel John Theodore Kramers, of Mount Gretna, who died in 2012, at the age of ninety-five. This was the same Ted Kramers whom I had failed to call a decade ago. The author of the memorial was Carl Ellenberger, a physician and a flutist, who, some years ago, co-founded a chamber-music series called Gretna Music. I got in touch with Ellenberger, who told me that Kramers, a financial adviser based in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, had long been a regular at Gretna Music concerts, sitting in the first or second row. “He had studied violin as a kid, and generally was a broadly cultured individual,” Ellenberger said. I also called Ella Kramers, who married Ted in 1999, after the death of his first wife, June Werner. Ella said that her husband had spent thirty years in the Army, serving as an attaché in Africa and the Middle East. “He was always very serious, very hardworking. During the Second World War, I think he was more mature than many of his fellow-soldiers—he was older, and had spent four years in college, at Penn State. This showed in how he dealt with Richard Strauss, and also with those French dignitaries he rescued.”
About ten years ago, Ellenberger, a Strauss fan, interviewed Kramers about his encounter with the composer. Kramers’s account differs slightly from the one found in Strauss’s diary. When he arrived at the villa, he sent his driver, Sergeant Griess—Cornelius C. Griess, who died in 2007—to notify the occupants that they had to leave. When, half an hour later, Kramers and Griess returned, Strauss was still there, along with several family members. Kramers later surmised that these people were Strauss’s son, Franz; his daughter-in-law, Alice, who was Jewish; and Richard, the grandson. (The latter died in 2007. His brother, Christian, still lives in Garmisch, and maintains his grandfather’s house as an archive.) Ellenberger writes, “Strauss appeared to Ted as a healthy, sturdy, and proud man who ‘still had all his marbles.’ ” Food was served, and Strauss played “Rosenkavalier” at the piano. Kramers reported that the Strausses did, in fact, leave the house, only to return a few hours later, when Kramers received orders to keep moving. In other words, Strauss may not have entirely succeeded in charming the Americans into letting him keep his house; rather, he was saved by the rapid movement of the 103rd.
I have collected a few other anecdotes. The author and radio commentator William Berger told me that his father, Raymond, who served in the Air Force, once attended a dinner at the Strauss villa after seeing a notice in the local barracks. (Apparently, gatherings occurred often enough that there was a sign-up sheet.) As his son recalls the story, Berger confronted the composer about his collaboration with the Nazis; after attempting to justify his actions, which were partly aimed at protecting his Jewish family, Strauss resignedly said, “I am not a hero.” Carl Ellenberger adds one more delightful detail, in the form of a letter from the late jazz great Dave Brubeck: “I was stationed in the Army at Eibsee near Oberammergau, and often would pass by Richard Strauss’s home. I never had the nerve to go knock at his door, although I wanted to.”
Why do I find these tales mesmerizing? Perhaps it has to do with the awkward relationship that any child of the postwar American empire has with the old European colossus of classical music. No matter how deeply we bow before it, we feel like intruders, pulling into the driveways of the great composers and threatening them with eviction. But then an unlikely conversation occurs: we shake a ghostly hand, are served a metaphorical pastry, and begin to feel at home. The masters seem to invite such gum-chewing strangers, for they represent a renewal of the audience. You could say that Strauss was manipulating his visitors when he played the “Rosenkavalier” waltzes at the piano; but perhaps he was simply delighting in the tremor of pleasure that passed across those young, war-torn faces. He must have known that he would not be forgotten.
