Today is the 150th birthday of Richard Strauss.

I read an amusing anecdote the other day, purely by coincidence, when I looked up the Neapolitan song “Funiculì, Funiculà.” The song is about a funicular cable car that used to service passengers to Mount Vesuvius before it was predictably destroyed in an eruption in 1944. The music was composed in 1880 by Luigi Denza to lyrics by the journalist Peppino Turco. The song became a huge international success and sold over a million copies.

Richard Strauss, like many, believed the piece to be an authentic Italian folk song, so he cheerfully appropriated it in 1886 for use in his large-scale symphonic fantasy “Aus Italien” (“From Italy”). Denza’s lawyers were not so cheerful. Strauss found himself at the receiving end of a lawsuit, which resulted in the composer having to pay a royalty fee every time the work was performed.

This would be irksome to any composer, but Strauss has always been the butt of sardonic remarks about his love of money. Stravinsky used to spell his name using dollar signs in place of the esses. And this only a few weeks after I posted about his never getting paid for “Josephslegende!”

However, I also came across this long and absorbing reminiscence of Strauss by one of his publishers, who claimed the composer had no business sense at all.

http://www.musicweb-international.com/Roth/Strauss.htm

Is it any wonder that he married someone (the soprano Pauline de Anha) who could keep his life together? Pauline, the daughter of a general, was herself frequently portrayed as a martinet. But she kept Strauss on the straight and narrow, and they loved one another devotedly.

Despite her vigilance, however, the Strauss fortune was twice obliterated by two world wars.

Be that as it may, Strauss was not the only composer to step wrong in regard to “Funiculì, Funiculà.” Rimsky-Korsakov used it as the basis for his “Neapolitan Song,” and Arnold Schoenberg transcribed it for string quartet. Whether Denza ever tried to sue Rimsky-Korsakov is unknown. Schoenberg clearly credited the original composer. Maybe he was just too scary to sue.

At any rate, a happy 150th birthday, Richard Strauss!