34 - “Like sand through the fingers”

Summary

“Old age has arrived with me,” a plaintive Straube had written Mezger late in 1945. “Everything taken together has made of me a fretful, sullen geezer, as is the way of the world.” Mezger had accepted Straube's commission to write a foreword to the chorale-based volumes of the Bach edition, which, as the latter pointed out in the same letter, needed to emphasize “the religious content” and “reveal also to the French and the Americans knowledge of the spiritual values in this wonderful art.” He was nothing if not determined, now framing his work as a last opportunity to preach Bach abroad. By March 1946, and evidently at his own urging, he had in hand a contract from Peters promising 1,200 marks as honorarium for each of nine volumes. Incredibly, for the first time in decades, there was an official mandate to proceed.

Yet Straube continued to stew over the work's ultimate relevance. He fixated on his old conviction about the vanity of human striving, even as he became painfully conscious of himself as a relic. The war's destruction had exacerbated these perceptions, not only because it had taken a toll on his health, but also because it had driven a vivid wedge between past and future. He had issued from a world that now lay in rubble. How could his views on Bach claim currency in a new era? Going forward, such questions played on a loop in his mind, even as those to whom he articulated them offered encouragement. “The name Karl Straube is magical and will remain so,” Hella von Hausegger admonished him. “And particularly given today's uncertainty about style, it's very important that someone like you, who knows the right approach, nails down his thoughts.” He was increasingly prone to compare his “right approach” to the work of others, particularly those west of the Rhine. With evident cynicism he told Mezger that requests for “an instructive foreword” had come from the Americans, “who it seems have not been completely convinced by the program-music interpretations of an Albert Schweitzer.” Now more than ever after the Allied victory, he remained aware of the French bias among American organists, even as he aired disdain for what he had long regarded as Schweitzer's dabbling dressed up as authenticity.