Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss was a German late-Romantic composer and conductor, especially celebrated for his symphonic poems and operas. Among 20th-century composers, he was second only to Puccini in the number of operas performed annually. His work, together with that of Gustav Mahler, came to embody late German Romanticism after Wagner, and he exerted a substantial influence on musical expressionism. In vocal writing he preferred a parlando style.

Strauss was born on 11 June 1864 in Munich, then in the Kingdom of Bavaria. His father, Franz Strauss, was the principal horn player of the Munich Court Opera. He received a broad but conservative musical education from his father and his father’s closest colleagues, wrote his first musical piece at the age of six, and continued composing almost without interruption for the rest of his life. He began piano lessons in 1868 with the harpist and teacher August Tombo and from 1872 studied music with his cousin-uncle, the violinist Benno Walter, to whom he later dedicated his youthful violin concerto. He also attended orchestral rehearsals at the opera and studied music theory and orchestration with Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer. In 1882 he entered the University of Munich to study philosophy and history, but left a year later for Berlin.

In Germany’s capital he studied briefly and in 1883 became assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow at the Meiningen Theatre Orchestra. When von Bülow retired in 1885, Strauss replaced him in Meiningen, though after five months he returned to Munich, where he conducted productions at the Court Opera until 1889. His early compositions were conservative and showed the influence of Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn; the Horn Concerto No. 1 belongs to this period. A decisive change in style came after his meeting with Alexander Ritter, who persuaded him to abandon his youthful conservatism and turn to the symphonic poem, while also introducing him to the essays of Richard Wagner and the writings of Schopenhauer. Strauss married the soprano Pauline Maria de Ahna on 10 September 1894; despite her forceful and volatile temperament, the marriage was happy, and she became an important source of inspiration. Throughout his life he showed a special preference for the soprano voice.

His breakthrough as a mature composer came with the symphonic poem Don Juan, whose 1889 premiere sharply divided the audience but confirmed for Strauss that he had found his own voice. It was followed by a remarkable series of orchestral works including From Italy, Macbeth, Death and Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote, Ein Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony. Other orchestral works mentioned in the article include the suite The Bourgeois Gentleman and the symphonic study Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings.

At the end of the 19th century Strauss turned increasingly to opera. His first efforts in the genre, Guntram and Feuersnot, were unsuccessful, but in 1905 he achieved a major, controversial success with Salome, based on the play by Oscar Wilde. The work provoked strong protests, including at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, where it was withdrawn after a single performance, yet it was successful elsewhere and brought Strauss enough income to build his house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In Elektra he intensified his use of dissonance, and with that opera began his long and fruitful collaboration with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Their later operas included Ariadne on Naxos, The Woman Without a Shadow, Intermezzo, Helen of Egypt, and Arabella. After Hofmannsthal’s death, Strauss worked with other librettists on The Silent Woman, Peace Day, Daphne, The Love of Danae, and Capriccio. He also wrote two ballets, The Legend of Joseph and Whipped Cream.

Alongside his stage and orchestral music, Strauss composed chamber music, piano pieces, songs, and works for solo instrument with orchestra. The article highlights the String Quartet, the Violin Sonata in E-flat, a small number of late chamber works, and his final chamber composition, the Allegretto in E minor for violin and piano from 1940. Among his concertante works, the two horn concertos remained central to the repertory, and the article also singles out the violin concerto, Don Quixote for cello, viola, and orchestra, the late oboe concerto, and a concert duet for bassoon and clarinet from 1947. In that duet, Strauss himself described an extra-musical plot in which the clarinet represents a princess and the bassoon a bear who turns into a prince during their dance.

Strauss was also an outstanding conductor and a pupil of Hans von Bülow. His conducting repertory embraced not only his own music but also many operatic and symphonic scores from the 18th to the early 20th century. After his years in Munich he served from 1889 to 1894 as principal conductor of the Weimar Court Theatre. In 1894 he made his debut as a conductor at the Wagner Festival in a performance of Tannhäuser, in which his wife sang Elisabeth. During the Third Reich he headed the Reich Music Chamber. The article describes deep disagreement over his role under National Socialism: some see him as consistently apolitical, others as an official who served the regime. Appointed in 1933 by Goebbels without consultation, he accepted the presidency of the Reich Music Chamber while attempting to remain apolitical, wrote a hymn for the future Berlin Olympic Games in 1934, and was criticized for naivety. He was forced to resign in 1935 after refusing to remove the name of the Jewish writer Stefan Zweig from posters for The Silent Woman; a letter he wrote to Zweig criticizing the Nazis was intercepted by the Gestapo. The article also presents his opera Peace Day as a courageous pacifist work and notes his efforts to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and other Jewish friends and colleagues.

In his final years Strauss’s health declined. In 1948 he wrote his last composition, Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra, which became his best-known songs. Although by then his harmonic and melodic language could seem old-fashioned beside that of younger composers, these songs remained highly popular with audiences and performers. He once remarked in 1947, “Perhaps I am not a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” Strauss died on 8 September 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the age of 85. His remains were cremated, and his urn was buried at the Garmisch Cemetery in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.