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Updated: May 2, 2025
Guntram swore that he did, with many passionate avowals, and the lady slipped a ring on his finger. Even as he embraced her the cry of a screech-owl rang through the night air, and the maiden became a corpse in his arms. Overcome with terror, he staggered through the darkness to his room, where he sank down unconscious.
The creative force within him flows out in imaginative works; and here Richard Strauss, with a daring warranted only by his genius, represents these works by reminiscences of his own compositions, and Don Juan, Macbeth, Tod und Verklärung, Till, Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Guntram, and even his Lieder, associate themselves with the hero whose story he is telling.
Strauss, who was imbued at that time with neo-Christian ideas and the influence of Wagner and Tolstoy, was carried away by the subject, and took Guntram from the Streiter der Liebe, and made him his hero. The action takes place in the thirteenth century, in Germany. The first act gives us a glade near a little lake. The country people are in revolt against the nobles, and have just been repulsed.
In the morning he related his experience to the attendant. Alas, alas! said the old man, in three times nine days you must die. Guntram was quite overcome by the horror of his situation, and seemed for a time bereft of his senses. Then he had his horse saddled, and galloped as hard as he was able to Falkenburg. Liba greeted him solicitously.
But Freihild is full of an unaffected and almost savage joy at her deliverance by Guntram's sword. Love for Guntram fills her heart, and her one desire is to save him. The third act takes place in the prison of the château; and it is a surprising, uncertain, and very curious act. It is not a logical result of the action that has preceded it.
Strauss was too advanced in the composition of his work to escape the neo-Christian renouncement which had to finish the drama; he could only have avoided that by completely remodelling his characters. So Guntram rejects Freihild's love. He sees he has fallen, even as the others, under the curse of sin.
But to all their pleadings she turned a deaf ear, for she was already betrothed to a young knight named Guntram whom she had known since childhood, and they only waited until Guntram should have received his fief from the Palsgrave to marry and settle down.
But he has never re-found the delicate and melodious purity of soul and youthful grace of his earlier work, which still shines out in Guntram, and is then effaced. Strauss has directed Wagner's dramas at Weimar since 1889. While breathing their atmosphere he turned his attention to the theatre, and wrote the libretto of his opera Guntram.
After a time her foreboding affected her health and spirits, her former pursuits and pleasures were neglected, and day after day she sat listlessly at her casement, awaiting the return of her lover. Guntram, having successfully achieved his mission, set out on the homeward journey. On the way he had to pass through a forest, and, having taken a wrong path, lost his way.
He wandered on without meeting a living creature, and came at last to an old dilapidated castle, into the courtyard of which he entered, thankful to have reached a human habitation. He gave his horse to a staring boy, who looked at him as though he were a ghost. Where is your master? queried Guntram. The boy indicated an ivy-grown tower, to which the knight made his way.
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