Richard Strauss

(b Munich, 11 June 1864; d Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 8 Sept 1949). German composer. His father, a professional horn player, gave him a musical grounding exclusively in the classics, and he composed copiously from the age of six. He went briefly to university, but had no formal tuition in composition. He had several works given in Munich, including a symphony, when he was 17, and the next year a wind serenade in Dresden and a violin concerto in Vienna. At 20, a second symphony was given in New York and he conducted the Meiningen Orchestra in a suite for wind. In 1885 he became conductor of that orchestra, but soon left and visited Italy. He had been influenced by Lisztian and Wagnerian thinking; one result was Aus Italien, which caused controversy on its première in 1887. By then Strauss was a junior conductor at the Munich Opera.

Other tone poems followed: Macbeth, Don Juan and Tod und Verklärung come from the late 1880s. It is Don Juan that, with its orchestral brilliance, its formal command and its vivid evocation of passionate ardour (he was in love with the singer Pauline von Ahna, his future wife), shows his maturity and indeed virtuosity as a composer. With its première, at Weimar (he had moved to a post at the opera house there), he was recognized as the leading progressive composer in Germany. He was ill during 1891-3 but wrote his first opera, Guntram, which was a modest success but a failure later in Munich. His conducting career developed; he directed many major operas, including Wagner at Bayreuth, and returned to Munich in 1896 as chief conductor at the opera. To the late 1890s belong the witty and colourful Till Eulenspiegel, a portrait of a disrespectful rogue with whom Strauss clearly had a good deal of sympathy, the graphic yet also poetic and psychologically subtle Don Quixote (cast respectively in rondo and variation forms) and Ein Heldenleben, ‘a hero's life’, where Strauss himself is the hero and his adversaries the music critics. There is more autobiography in the Symphonia domestica of 1903; he conducted its première during his first visit to the USA, in 1904.

Strauss was now moving towards opera. His Feuersnot was given in 1901; in 1904 Salome was begun, after Wilde's play. It was given at Dresden the next year. Regarded as blasphemous and salacious, it ran into censorship trouble but was given at 50 opera houses in the next two years. This and Elektra (given in 1909) follow up the tone poems in their evocation of atmosphere and their thematic structure; both deal with female obsessions of a disordered, macabre kind, with violent climaxes involving gruesome deaths and impassioned dancing, with elements of abnormal sexuality and corruption, exploiting the female voice pressed to dramatic extremes.

Strauss did not pursue that path. After the violence and dissonance of the previous operas, and their harsh psychological realism, Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal turned to period comedy, set in the Vienna of Maria Theresa, for Der Rosenkavalier; the score is no less rich in inner detail, but it is applied to the evocation of tenderness, nostalgia and humour, helped by sentimental Viennese waltzes. Again the female voice - but this time its radiance and warmth - is exploited, in the three great roles of the Marschallin, Octavian and Sophie. It was given at Dresden in 1911 with huge success and was soon produced in numerous other opera houses. Strauss followed it with Ariadne auf Naxos, at first linked with a Molière play, later revised as prologue (behind the scenes at a private theatre) and opera, mixing commedia dell′arte and classical tragedy to a delicate, chamber orchestral accompaniment. The two versions were given in 1912 and (in Vienna) 1916. Strauss had been conducting in Berlin, the court and opera orchestras, since 1908; in 1919 he took up a post as joint director of the Vienna Staatsoper, where his latest collaboration with Hofmannsthal, Die Frau ohne Schatten, was given that year: a work embodying much symbolism and psychology, opulently but finely scored, and regarded by some as one of Strauss's noblest achievements. His busy, international conducting career continued in the inter-war years; there were visits to North and South America as well as to most parts of Europe in the 1920s, which also saw the premières of two more operas, both at Dresden, the autobiographical, domestic comedy Intermezzo and Die ägyptische Helena. His last Hofmannsthal opera, Arabella, an appealing re-creation of some of the atmosphere of Rosenkavalier, followed in 1933. Of his remaining operas, Capriccio (1942), a ‘conversation-piece’ in a single act set in the 18th century and dealing with the amorous and artistic rivalries of a poet and a musician, is the most successful, with its witty, graceful, serene score.

During the 1930s Strauss, seeking a smooth and quiet life, had allowed himself to accept - without facing up to their full import - the circumstances created in Germany by the Nazis. For a time he was head of the State Music Bureau and he once obligingly conducted at Bayreuth when Toscanini had withdrawn. But he was frustrated at being unable to work with his Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig (Hofmannsthal had been part-Jewish), and he protected his Jewish daughter-in-law; during the war years, when he mainly lived in Vienna, he and the Nazi authorities lived in no more than mutual toleration. When Germany was defeated, and her opera houses destroyed, Strauss wrote an intense lament, Metamorphosen, for 23 solo strings; this is one of several products of a golden ‘Indian summer’, which include an oboe concerto and the Four Last Songs, works in a ripe, mellow idiom, executed with a grace worthy of his beloved Mozart. He died in his Garmisch home in 1949.

works:
Operas

• Guntram (1894)
• Feuersnot (1901)
• Salome (1905)
• Elektra (1909)
• Der Rosenkavalier (1911)
• Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, rev. 1916)
• Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919)
• Intermezzo (1924)
• Die ägyptische Helena (1928)
• Arabella (1933)
• Die schweigsame Frau (1935)
• Friedenstag (1938)
• Daphne (1938)
• Die Liebe der Danae (1940, perf. 1952)
• Capriccio (1942)

Instrumental music

• Aus Italien (1886)
• Don Juan (1888)
• Macbeth (1888)
• Tod und Verklärung (1889)
• Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895)
• Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) Ein Heldenleben (1898)
• Don Quixote, vc, orch (1897)
• Symphonia domestica (1903)
• Eine Alpensinfonie (1915)
• Metamorphosen, strs (1945)
• 2 hn concs. (1883, 1942)
• Ob Conc. (1945)
• c 50 other works
• 15 chamber works
• 30 pf works

Vocal music

• 8 choral works with orchestra
• c 30 unacc. choral works
• nearly 200 songs, including Frühling, September, Beim Schlafengehen, Im Abendrot [‘Four Last Songs’] (1948)

---

Richard Strauss (1864-1949), the German composer and conductor, is known especially for his operas and symphonic poems linked to his phenomenal mastery of the orchestra. He was the chief exemplar of post-Wagnerian tastes and techniques.

Richard Strauss was born in Munich to a mother who was a talented amateur musician and a father who was the principal horn player in the Court Opera. Piano lessons with his mother began at the age of 4; at 8 he started violin study. In his own words, however, he was a bad pupil because he did not enjoy practicing. His pleasure even then was in composing, which he tried first when he was only 6. Thereafter he composed steadily while receiving regular instruction in music theory from various local musicians. Meanwhile his general education was furthered at the Royal Gymnasium and for a year at the University of Munich.

Strauss was obviously headed toward a career in composition, for by the age of 20 he had turned out a large and quite respectable collection of piano pieces, songs, chamber music, choruses, and orchestral works, including two symphonies and two concertos. He also got into print very early with the Festival March, written in 1876. This music, as far as one can judge from the available examples, was extremely conservative in tone, modeled after Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, and Johannes Brahms. It clearly carried the mark of his father's tutelage, which Strauss said kept him from hearing anything but classical music until he was 16.

The progressive movements of the 19th century touched Strauss only after he took up conducting and settled in 1885 into his first post as director of the Meiningen orchestra. There he became acquainted with a violinist named Alexander Ritter, who opened Strauss's mind to the "advanced" music and ideas of Hector Berlioz, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner - men whose names were anathema in his father's house.

The effect of this awakening was first apparent in a symphonic fantasy, Aus Italien, written in 1886 while Strauss was on a visit to Italy. Full alignment with the newer currents was signaled by his entry into the field of program music cultivated years before by Liszt. The result was a series of nine single-movement, orchestral tone poems beginning with Macbeth (1890), ending with EineAlpensinfonie (1915), and covering a range of subject matter from medieval legend in Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1895) to Strauss's own domestic life in Symphonia Domestica (1903). Don Juan (1888), Till, and Don Quixote, (1897) are generally the most favored of these works. In principle, however, Strauss's method remained constant. The shaping of each piece was guided by a poetic idea to which his music was linked in a more intimate and detailed way than in earlier programmatic scores. Yet he avoided becoming a mere illustrator by insisting that the composition must also develop "logically from within" to produce a satisfying musical form. And at every point he demonstrated his unsurpassed virtuosity in orchestration.

With the tone poems Strauss came into his own as a composer. He also became increasingly successful as a conductor, performing throughout Europe, especially Germany, where he held positions in Munich, Weimar, and Berlin, and in New York City. By the time he was 30, he was a celebrity on two counts. But there was much more to come after he turned to opera composition.

Strauss, as he said, may have put off composing for the theater from awe of Wagner. Once started, however, he gave it his main attention for almost 40 years, producing 15 operas in that period. The first two, Guntram (1893) and Feuersnot (1901), were failures. Then came Salome (1905), Elektra (1908), Der Rosenkavalier (1910), and Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), which are possibly his best and certainly the most frequently played of all. Salome, with its shocking, perverse sensuality, and Elektra, which goes beyond that in violence and unremitting tension, are prime examples of German expressionism in its most lurid phase. They also show Strauss at the peak of his modernity in respect to musical vocabulary and technique. In Der Rosenkavalier he reverted to a sweetly diatonic strain cast much of the time in waltz rhythm; in Ariadne he looked still farther back as he applied classical methods to the ingenious idea of presenting an antique myth simultaneously with a sketch out of the commedia dell'arte. Of his remaining operas, Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917), Arabella (1932), and Capriccio (1941) are the most interesting, although none has won repertory status.

After Capriccio Strauss returned to earlier interests in concerto composition, chamber music, and songs, the peak of this final effort being the Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings (1945). Grave and Wagnerian in tone, it recalls Strauss's ties to the Germany of his youth and sounds an affecting though belated finale to an era that had long since been closed out by composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Béla Bartók.

Further Reading

Strauss's Recollections and Reflections were edited by Will Schuh (1953). Two biographical studies are George R. Marek, Richard Strauss: Life of a Non-hero (1967), and Ernst Krause, Richard Strauss: The Man and His Work (trans. 1969). Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama (1956), offers a biting censure of the Straussian dramaturgy, while William Mann, Richard Strauss: A Critical Study of the Operas (1964), is generally sympathetic. Strauss's historical position is outlined in Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (1938; 3d ed. 1964), and Adolfo Salazar, Music in Our Time (trans. 1946).

Additional Sources

Kennedy, Michael, Richard Strauss, Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995.

For more information on Richard Georg Strauss, visit Britannica.com.

Strauss, Richard (b Munich, 11 June 1864, d Garmisch, 8 Sept. 1949). German composer. He wrote the music for The Legend of Joseph (chor. Fokine, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Paris, 1914) and Schlagobers (chor. Kröller, Vienna State Opera, 1924). In 1923 Kröller also choreographed a work to his Couperin Dance Suite, a score that was later extended for the ballet Verklungene Feste (chor. Mlakers, Munich State Opera Ballet, 1941). Several of his other scores have also been used for dance, including Till Eulenspiegel (chor. Nijinsky, Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, New York, 1916; chor. Babilée, 1949, and chor. Balanchine, 1951), extracts from Salome (chor. Gorsky in Salome's Dance, Bolshoi, Moscow, 1921; for other versions see under Salome), Le Bourgeois gentilhomme (chor. Balanchine, Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, 1932, and chor. Tudor in Knight Errant, Royal Ballet, 1968), Death and Transfiguration (chor. Milloss, Augsburg, 1934, and chor. van Dantzig in Blown in a Gentle Wind, Dutch National Ballet, 1975), Burlesque for Piano (chor. Tudor in Dim Lustre, Ballet Theatre, 1943), and Four Last Songs (many versions, including Macdonald, Royal Swedish Ballet, 1966; van Dantzig, Dutch National Ballet, 1977; and Béjart, in Serait-ce la mort?, Marseilles, 1970).

Strauss, Richard (1864–1949), Bavarian, the most important successor of Wagner, composer of 15 operas, numerous Lieder, and much instrumental music. His early symphonic poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, 1895) recalls the exploits of the 14th‐century north German peasant clown and vagabond hero, immortalized in many chapbooks, the first appearing about 1500. Strauss's collaboration with the Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal resulted in several works based on classical or mythological themes, including Elektra (1909), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, revised 1916), and especially Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman without a Shadow, 1919). In this ambitious opera, which pays general homage to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute, 1791), Hofmannsthal provided Strauss with a fairy tale vaguely inspired by Wilhelm Hauff's Das Kalte Herz (The Stone Heart, 1887), expanded by various ideas from Goethe's Hafiz poems, from Bachofen's Myths of the Occident and the Orient, The Arabian Nights, and other sources, but above all from his fertile imagination.

Hofmannsthal's verse libretto for Strauss's opera, which he also expanded into a prose narrative (Erzählung), is a story of enchantment set vaguely in a region called the South Eastern Islands where a certain emperor reigns. He will lose his wife, the daughter of the mysterious Keikobad of the spirit world, unless she conceives a child within 12 months—that is, casts a shadow—and at the same time he will turn to stone. The opera describes how the empress finds her shadow, or becomes fully human. Meanwhile, in the mundane and materialistic world live Barak the dyer and his wife. She has a shadow but wants to renounce it. The point is that neither the empress nor Barak's wife understands her potential for life, which is not merely the desire or the ability to bear children, but rather to have compassion and sympathy for humankind—this is to have a shadow. Strauss composes music of astonishing brilliance that well illustrates these different spheres of action. The empress in her first scene, for example, has music of shimmering coldness and translucence, emphasizing her connection with the spirit world; but Barak's music is more thickly and deeply orchestrated. Both couples—the emperor and empress, and Barak and his wife—must undergo tests of confession and repentance to become worthy of possessing a shadow. At the triumphal end of the opera, with trials completed, the two couples are shown to be worthy of love by possessing virtuous desire and purity of motive. The Dyer's wife now may properly embrace her shadow, while the empress gains her very own shadow. Strauss's glorious music interprets and elevates Hofmannsthal's marvellous tale at every stage in what may be the greatest achievement of his career and one of the most successful of all operatic fairy tales.

Bibliography

• Del Mar, Norman, Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on his Life and Works (3 vols., 1962–72).
• Mann, William, Richard Strauss: A Critical Study of the Operas (1964).
• Pantle, Sherrill Hahn, ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’ by Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss: An Analysis of Text, Music, and their Relation (1978).
• Stanwood, Paul G., ‘Fantasy and Fairy Tale in Twentieth‐Century Opera’, Mosaic, 10.2 (1977).

— P. G. Stanwood

Strauss, Richard (Munich, 1864-1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen), had a distinguished career as a conductor, beginning with an appointment to the Meiningen court at 21 (1885), going on to Munich (1886-9), Weimar (1889-94), Munich again (1894-8), Berlin (Generalmusikdirektor, 1898-1919), and Vienna (Staatsoper, 1919-24). In 1933 he was appointed president of the Reichsmusikkammer, but he dissented from the racial policies of Nazism, and by 1935 was under suspicion.

Strauss wrote much orchestral music, beginning with a violin concerto in 1883. He became especially known for his illustrative orchestral works, which he called Tondichtungen. These were intended to convey visual (Aus Italien, 1887), or literary impressions (Don Juan, 1889, based on Lenau's poem; Macbeth, 1890; Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, 1895; Also sprach Zarathustra, after Nietzsche, 1896; Don Quichote, 1898). Ein Heldenleben (1899) and Sinfonia domestica (1904) were intended as works of musical autobiography. Eine Alpensymphonie (1915) reverted to visual impression. Strauss was the most notable opera composer of the early 20th c. Guntram (to his own libretto, 1894) was noticeably influenced by R. Wagner. Strauss's own individuality was first evident in the short opera Feuers-not (libretto by E. von Wolzogen, 1900).

In 1905 Strauss shocked the musical public with Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's play, and repeated the process in 1909 with Elektra, which took H. von Hofmannsthal's tragedy as libretto. From this time until the death of Hofmannsthal in 1928 the two collaborated regularly and produced five more operas, which bore witness to their profound devotion to an ideal conception of opera. They are Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die ägyptische Helena (1928), and Arabella (1933). Other operas are Intermezzo (libretto by Strauss himself, 1924), Die schweigsame Frau (1935, libretto by S. Zweig, based on Ben Jonson's Epicene, or The Silent Woman), two one-act operas, Dafne (1938, libretto by J. Gregor, 1888-1960) and Capriccio (1942, libretto by the conductor C. Krauß, 1893-1954, and Strauss himself), and a three-act work with Gregor as librettist, Die Liebe der Danae (1940).

Strauss wrote other vocal music, including motets, Enoch Arden after Tennyson (1899), and songs (see Lied, 2). Among the poets he set are O. J. Bierbaum, G. A. Bürger, R. Dehmel, H. von Gilm, Heine, and Weinheber. His Vier letzte Lieder, written between 1946 and 1948, consist of three songs to poems by H. Hesse (‘Frühling’, ‘September’, and ‘Beim Schlafengehen’) followed by ‘Im Abendrot’ by Eichendorff. In these, as in a number of other songs, he used orchestral accompaniment in preference to the piano. His writings appeared as Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, ed. W. Schuh, 1949 (reissued 1957), and editions of correspondence include that with H. von Hofmannsthal (1926, revised 1964), and with S. Zweig (1957).

(rikh-ahrt strows, shtrows)

A German composer and conductor of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Strauss is best known for the opera Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose) and for Thus Spake Zarathustra, a piece for orchestra inspired by the book of the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche.

Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner are outstanding examples of composers of the late romantic period in music. (See romanticism.)

• Period: Post-Romantic (1870-1909)
• Country: Germany
• Born: June 11, 1864 in Munich, Germany
• Died: September 08, 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany
• Genres: Ballet, Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Miscellaneous Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony, Vocal Music

Biography

Though the long career of Richard Strauss spanned one of the most chaotic periods in political, social, and cultural history of the world, the composer retained his essentially Romantic aesthetic even into the age of television, jet engines, and atom bombs. Born in Munich in 1864, Strauss was the son of Franz Joseph Strauss, the principal hornist in the Munich Court Orchestra. Strauss demonstrated musical aptitude at an early age, and extensive training in piano, violin, theory, harmony, and orchestration equipped him to produce music of extraordinary polish and maturity by the time he reached adulthood. His primary teachers had been his father, who was a musical conservative, and Ludwig Thuille, a Munich School composer and family friend. Strauss' Serenade for 13 Winds, Op. 7 (1881), written when he was 17, led conductor Hans von Bülow to pronounce him "by far the most striking personality since Brahms." Bülow was able to give Strauss his first commission and an assistant conductor position. Through new friendships, Strauss learned to admire the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the music of Wagner and Liszt. He embarked on a long career of conducting and composing, which take him all over Europe and the U.S.

From the beginning of Strauss' career as a composer, it was evident that the orchestra was his natural medium. With the composition of the "symphonic fantasy" Aus Italien in 1886, Strauss embarked on a series of works that represents both one of the pivotal phases of his career and a body of music of central importance in the late German Romantic repertoire. Though he did not invent the tone poem per se, he brought it to its pinnacle. In such works as Don Juan (1888-1889), Ein Heldenleben (1897-1898), and Also sprach Zarathustra (1895-1896) -- whose first minute or so, thanks to its use in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, is the composer's most readily recognizable music -- Strauss displayed his abundant gift for exploiting the coloristic possibilities of the orchestra as a dramatic device like few composers ever had (or have since).

With the arrival of the twentieth century, after becoming conductor at Berlin's Hofoper, Strauss' interest turned more fully to opera, resulting in a body of unforgettable works that have long been fixtures of the repertoire: Salome (1903-1905), Elektra (1906-1908), and Der Rosenkavalier (1909-1910) are just a few of his best-known efforts for the stage. In 1919, Strauss became co-director of the Vienna Staatsoper, but was forced to resign five years later by his partner, Franz Schalk, who resented being left with many of the operational duties while Strauss was frequently away guest conducting or being feted as a great composer. When the political situation in Europe became malignant in the 1930s, profound political naïveté led to Strauss' confused involvement the Nazi propaganda machine, and the composer eventually alienated both the Nazis and their opponents. With the end of World War II, however, he was permitted to resume his professional life, although it would be a mere echo of his previous fame. He began to have serious health problems, his financial situation had been compromised, and the monuments that embodied great German art for him -- Goethe's Weimar house; the Dresden, Munich, and Vienna opera houses -- had been destroyed. Throughout his last years, works such as the Oboe Concerto (1945) and the gorgeously expressive Four Last Songs (1948) attest to Strauss' unwavering confidence in his singular musical voice. ~ AMG, All Music Guide

Discography

Richard Strauss Conducts Beethoven Buy this CD	Richard Strauss Conducts Till Eulenspiegel; Don Juan; Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme Buy this CD	Richard Strauss conducts Richard Strauss Buy this CD	Richard Strauss Conducts Buy this CD	Richard Strauss Conducts Richard Strauss Buy this CD
Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 7 Buy this CD	Richard Strauss Conducts...the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra Buy this CD	Strauss Conducts Strauss Buy this CD	Richard Strauss Conducts Richard Strauss Buy this CD	Richard Strauss Conducts "Eine Alpensinfonie" & Film Music from "Der Rosenkavalier" Buy this CD

Show More Albums Show Fewer Albums

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)