Richard Strauss

This article is about the German opera and tone poem composer. For others with the same name, see Strauss.

Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 – 8 September 1949) was a German composer of the late Romantic and early modern eras, particularly of operas, Lieder and tone poems. Strauss was also a prominent conductor.

Life and works

Early life

Strauss was born on 11 June 1864, in Munich, the son of Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player at the Court Opera in Munich. In his youth, he received a thorough musical education from his father. He wrote his first music at the age of six, and continued to write music almost until his death.

Richard Strauss, 20 October 1886

During his boyhood Strauss attended orchestra rehearsals of the Munich Court Orchestra, and he also received private instruction in music theory and orchestration from an assistant conductor there. In 1874 Strauss heard his first Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser. The influence of Wagner's music on Strauss's style was to be profound, but at first his musically conservative father forbade him to study it: it was not until the age of 16 that he was able to obtain a score of Tristan und Isolde. Indeed, in the Strauss household the music of Richard Wagner was considered inferior. Later in life, Richard Strauss said and wrote that he deeply regretted this.

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Richard Strauss

In 1882 he entered Munich University, where he studied philosophy and art history, but not music. He left a year later to go to Berlin, where he studied briefly before securing a post as assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow, taking over from him at Meiningen when von Bülow resigned in 1885. His compositions at this time were indebted to the style of Robert Schumann or Felix Mendelssohn, true to his father's teachings. His Horn Concerto No. 1 (1882–1883) is representative of this period and is still regularly played.

Richard Strauss married soprano Pauline de Ahna on 10 September 1894. She was famous for being bossy, ill-tempered, eccentric and outspoken, but the marriage, to all appearances, was essentially happy and she was a great source of inspiration to him. Throughout his life, from his earliest songs to the final Four Last Songs of 1948, he preferred the soprano voice to all others. Nearly every major operatic role that Strauss wrote is for a soprano.

Tone poems

Strauss's style began to change when he met Alexander Ritter, a noted composer and violinist, and the husband of one of Richard Wagner's nieces. It was Ritter who persuaded Strauss to abandon the conservative style of his youth, and begin writing tone poems; he also introduced Strauss to the essays of Richard Wagner and the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer. Strauss went on to conduct one of Ritter's operas, and later Ritter wrote a poem based on Strauss's own Death and Transfiguration (Tod und Verklärung).

This newly found interest resulted in what is widely regarded as Strauss's first piece to show his mature personality, the tone poem Don Juan (1888). Strauss went on to write a series of tone poems: Death and Transfiguration, 1888–1889), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, 1894–95), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Also sprach Zarathustra, 1896), Don Quixote (1897), Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, 1897–98), Sinfonia Domestica (Domestic Symphony, 1902–03) and An Alpine Symphony (Eine Alpensinfonie), (1911–1915). One commentator has observed of these works that "no orchestra could exist without his tone poems, written to celebrate the glories of the post-Wagnerian symphony orchestra."

Opera

Around the end of the 19th century, Strauss turned his attention to opera. His first two attempts in the genre, Guntram in 1894 and Feuersnot in 1901 were considered obscene and were critical failures. However, in 1905 he produced Salome (based on the play by Oscar Wilde), and the reaction was passionate and extreme. The première was a major success, with the artists taking more than thirty-eight curtain calls. When it opened at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City, there was such a public outcry that it was closed after just one performance. Doubtless, much of this was due to the subject matter, and negative publicity about Wilde's "immoral" behavior. However, some of the negative reactions may have stemmed from Strauss's use of dissonance, rarely heard then at the opera house. Elsewhere the opera was highly successful and Strauss reputedly financed his house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen completely from the revenues generated by the opera.

Strauss's next opera was Elektra, which took his use of dissonance even further (see also: Elektra chord). It was also the first opera in which Strauss collaborated with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The two would work together on numerous other occasions. For these later works, however, Strauss moderated his harmonic language somewhat, with the result that works such as Der Rosenkavalier (1910) were great public successes. Strauss continued to produce operas at regular intervals until 1940. These included Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918), Die ägyptische Helena (1927), and Arabella (1932), all in collaboration with Hofmannsthal; and Intermezzo (1923), for which Strauss provided his own libretto, Die schweigsame Frau (1934), with Stefan Zweig as librettist; Friedenstag (1936) and Daphne (1937) (libretto by Joseph Gregor and Zweig); Die Liebe der Danae (1940) (with Gregor) and Capriccio (libretto by Clemens Krauss) (1941).

Strauss also made live-recording player piano music rolls for the Hupfeld system, all of which survive today.

Solo and chamber works

Strauss's solo and chamber works include early compositions for piano solo in a conservative harmonic style, many of which are lost; a rarely heard string quartet (opus 2); a cello sonata; a piano quartet; the famous violin sonata in E flat which he wrote in 1887; as well as a handful of late pieces. After 1890 he composed very infrequently for chamber groups, his energies being almost completely absorbed with large-scale orchestral works and operas. Four of his chamber pieces are arrangements of portions of his operas, including the Daphne-Etude for solo violin and the string Sextet which is the overture to his final opera: Capriccio. His last independent chamber work, an Allegretto in E for violin and piano, dates from 1940.

Solo instrument with orchestra

Much more extensive was his output of works for solo instrument or instruments with orchestra. The most famous include two horn concerti, which are still part of the standard repertoire of most horn soloists; a concerto for violin; Burleske for piano and orchestra; the tone poem Don Quixote, for cello, viola and orchestra; a late oboe concerto (inspired by a request from an American soldier and oboist, John de Lancie, whom he met after the war); and the Duet-Concertino for bassoon, clarinet and orchestra, which was one of his last works (1947). Strauss admitted that the Duet-Concertino had an extra-musical "plot", in which the clarinet represented a princess and the bassoon a bear; when the two dance together, the bear transforms into a prince.

Strauss and the Nazis

Richard Strauss engraved by Ferdinand Schmutzer (1922)

There is much controversy surrounding Strauss's role in Germany after the Nazi Party came to power. For reasons of expediency, he was drawn into cooperating with the regime in the hope that Hitler (himself an ardent Wagnerian and music lover) would promote German art and culture. Hitler had known and admired Strauss's work since he attended a performance of Salome in 1907. Strauss ingratiated himself with Goebbels by dedicating the orchestral song Das Bächlein to him. However, other aspects of Strauss's conduct demonstrate that, far from being a friend of the Nazis, he was even, to some extent, a dissident: Strauss never joined the Nazi party and studiously avoided Nazi forms of greeting. In 1933, he wrote in his private notebook:

I consider the Streicher-Goebbels Jew-baiting as a disgrace to German honour, as evidence of incompetence - the basest weapon of untalented, lazy mediocrity against a higher intelligence and greater talent.

Meanwhile, far from being an admirer of Strauss's work, Goebbels maintained expedient cordiality with Strauss only for a period. He wrote in his diary:

Unfortunately we still need him, but one day we shall have our own music and then we shall have no further need of this decadent neurotic

Nevertheless, because of Strauss's international eminence, in November 1933, he was appointed to the post of president of the Reichsmusikkammer, the State Music Bureau. Strauss decided to accept the position but to remain apolitical, a decision which (as it turned out) became untenable. He attempted to ignore Nazi bans on performances of works by Debussy, Mahler and Mendelssohn and continued to work on a comic opera, Die schweigsame Frau with his Jewish friend and librettist Stefan Zweig. When the opera was premiered in Dresden in1935, Strauss insisted that Zweig's name appeared on the theatrical billing, much to the ire of the Nazi regime. Hitler and Goebbels avoided attending the first performance and the opera was subsequently banned in the Third Reich. On 17th June 1935, Strauss wrote a letter to , Stefan Zweig, in which he stated:

Do you believe I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am 'German'? Do you suppose Mozart was consciously 'Aryan' when he composed? I recognise only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none.

The letter to Zweig was intercepted by the Gestapo and sent to Hitler. Strauss was subsequently dismissed from his post as Reichsmusikkammer president although he composed the Olympische Hymne for the 1936 Summer Olympics. Several noted musicians disapproved of his relationship with the Nazis during this period, among them the conductor Arturo Toscanini, who famously said, "To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again." Evidently, part of Strauss's motivation in his conduct between 1933 and 1945 was to protect his daughter-in-law Alice (who was Jewish) and his grandchildren from persecution. Both his grandsons were mocked and bullied at school but Strauss used his considerable influence to prevent the boys or their mother from being deported.

Strauss's decision to produce Friedenstag in 1938, a one-act opera set in a besieged fortress during the Thirty Years' War – essentially a hymn to peace and a thinly veiled criticism of the Third Reich – during a time when an entire nation was preparing for war, was hardly the work of a Nazi composer. With its contrasts between freedom and enslavement, war and peace, light and dark, this work has a close affinity with Beethoven's Fidelio. Productions of the opera ceased shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939.

When his daughter-in-law Alice was placed under house arrest in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in 1938, Strauss used his connections in Berlin, for example the Berlin intendant Heinz Tietjen, to secure her safety; he even drove to the concentration camp at Theresienstadt in order to argue (unsuccessfully) for the release of his son Franz's Jewish mother in law, Marie von Grab and wrote several letters to the SS pleading for the release of her children who were also held in camps. His letters were ignored.

In 1942, Strauss moved with his family back to Vienna, where Alice and her children could be protected by Baldur von Schirach, the Gauleiter of Vienna. Unfortunately, even Strauss was unable to protect his Jewish relatives completely; in early 1944, while Strauss was away, Alice and the composer's son were abducted by the Gestapo and imprisoned for two nights. Only Strauss's personal intervention at this point was able to save them and he was able to take the two of them back to Garmisch where they remained under house arrest until the end of the war.

Strauss completed the composition of Metamorphosen, a work for 23 solo strings, in 1945. The title comes from a profoundly self-examining poem by Goethe which Strauss had considered setting as a choral work. Generally regarded as one of the masterpieces of the string repertoire, Metamorphosen contains Strauss's most sustained outpouring of tragic emotion. The work provoked controversy when it was published because Strauss had written the words "In Memoriam" over a quotation from the slow movement of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Because Beethoven had originally dedicated his funeral march to Napoleon, questions were asked about whether Strauss had written the work as a threnody for Hitler. In actual fact, it was the destruction of German culture (including the bombing of Strauss's favorite opera house, the Hoftheater in Munich) which Strauss was mourning. At the end of war, Strauss wrote in his private diary:

The most terrible period of human history (is at) an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany's 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.

In April 1945, Strauss was apprehended by American soldiers at his Garmisch estate. As he descended the staircase he announced to Lieutenant Milton Weiss of the US Army, "I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome." Lt. Weiss, who, as it happened, was also a musician, nodded in recognition. An 'Off limits' sign was subsequently placed on the lawn to protect Strauss and the American oboist, John de Lancie, asked Strauss to compose an oboe concerto. Initially dismissive of the idea, Strauss completed this late masterpiece before the end of the year.

The English playwright Ronald Harwood wrote Collaboration (2008), a play largely sympathetic of Strauss. Themes in this play interweave with Harwood's more ambiguous treatment of Wilhelm Furtwängler in Taking Sides (1995), and many of the characters and events are mentioned or figure in both plays.

Final years

In 1948, Strauss wrote his last work, Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra, reportedly with Kirsten Flagstad in mind. She certainly gave the first performance and it was recorded, but the quality of the recording is poor. It is available as a historic CD release for enthusiasts. All his life he had produced lieder, but these are among his best known (alongside "Zueignung", "Cäcilie", "Morgen!" and "Allerseelen"). Compared to the work of younger composers, Strauss's richly harmonised and orchestrated music seemed firmly rooted in the German Romantic tradition. Nevertheless, the songs and tone poems have always been popular with audiences and performers and are generally considered (along with many of Strauss's compositions) to be masterpieces of the first rank.

Richard Strauss died at the age of 85 on 8 September 1949, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Georg Solti, who had arranged Strauss's 85th birthday celebration, also directed an orchestra during Strauss's burial . During the singing of the famous trio from Rosenkavalier, Solti described how "each singer broke down in tears and dropped out of the ensemble, but they recovered themselves and we all ended together." Strauss's wide Paulina was inconsolable. She died six months later.

Although Strauss himself declared in 1947 with characteristic self-deprecation, "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer" there are many commentators who would disagree with his analysis. The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould described Strauss in 1962 as "the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century." There are certainly few composers in the twentieth century who can compare with Strauss in terms of orchestral imagination, and no composer since Wagner has made a more significant contribution to the history of opera. Strauss's late works, modelled quite self-consciously on "the divine Mozart at the end of a life full of thankfulness", are perhaps the most remarkable works by any octogenarian composer.

Works

• See List of compositions by Richard Strauss.

Operas

• See List of operas by Richard Strauss.

Ballet music

• Josephslegende (The Legend of Joseph), Op. 63 (1914)
• Schlagobers (Whipped Cream), Op. 70 (1921/2)

Tone poems

• Aus Italien, Op. 16 (1886)
• Don Juan, Op. 20 (1889)
• Macbeth, Op. 23 (1888/90)
• Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration), Op. 24 (1888–89)
• Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks), Op. 28 (1895)
• Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30 (1896)
• Don Quixote, Op. 35 (1898)
• Ein Heldenleben, Op. 40 (1899)
• Symphonia Domestica (Domestic Symphony), Op. 53 (1904)
• Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine Symphony), Op. 64 (1915)

Other orchestral works

• Symphony in D minor (1880)
• Symphony in F minor, Op. 12 (1883)
• Festive Prelude for orchestra with organ (1913)
• Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, suite for orchestra Op. 60 (1917)
• Film music for Der Rosenkavalier (1925)
• Japanese Festival Music (1940)
• Metamorphosen, for 23 solo strings (1945)

Concertante

• Romance for Clarinet and Orchestra (1879)
• Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 8 (1882)
• Horn Concerto No. 1 in E flat major, Op. 11 (1882/83)
• Romance for Cello and Orchestra (1883)
• Burleske for piano and orchestra (1886–1890)
• Parergon zur Symphonia Domestica, for piano (left hand) and orchestra, Op. 73 (1925; ded. Paul Wittgenstein)
• Panathenäenzug, for piano (left hand) and orchestra, Op. 74 (1926–1927; ded. Wittgenstein)
• Horn Concerto No. 2 in E flat major (1942)
• Oboe Concerto in D major (1945)
• Duett-Concertino, for clarinet and bassoon with string orchestra (1947)

Vocal/Choral

• Acht Lieder aus Letzte Blätter, Op. 10 (1885)
• Cäcilie, Op. 27 No. 2
• Heimliche Aufforderung ("Secret Invitation"), Op. 27 No. 3
• Morgen! ("Tomorrow!"), Op. 27 No. 4
• Zwei Gesänge, Op. 34 (1896/97) — 1. Der Abend 2. Hymne
• Wiegenlied ("Lullaby"), Op. 41 No. 1
• Deutsche Motette, Op. 62 (1913)
• Olympische Hymne, for chorus and orchestra (1934)
• Die Göttin im Putzzimmer (1935)
• Männerchöre (1935)
• An den Baum Daphne (1943)
• Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) (1948)

Recordings

Richard Strauss made a number of recordings of his music, as well as music by German and Austrian composers. Harold C. Schonberg in The Great Conductors (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) says that, while Strauss was a very fine conductor, he often put scant effort into his recordings.

The 1929 performances of Till Eulenspiegel and Don Juan with the Berlin State Opera Orchestra have long been considered the best of his early electrical recordings; even the original 78 rpm discs had superior sound for their time and the performances were top-notch and quite exciting at times, despite a noticeable mistake by the French horn soloist in the famous opening passage of Till Eulenspiegel. The breaks for side changes, necessitated by the 78 rpm process, are rather curious because Strauss actually repeated a few notes each time the music resumed; careful editing for LP and CD reissues resolved the repetitions as well as the obvious interruptions in the music.

Schonberg focused primarily on Strauss's recordings of Mozart's Symphony No. 40 in G minor and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A, as well as noting that Strauss played a breakneck version of Beethoven's ninth symphony in about 45 minutes. Concerning the Beethoven seventh symphony, Schonberg wrote, "There is almost never a ritard or a change in expression or nuance. The slow movement is almost as fast as the following vivace; and the last movement, with a big cut in it, is finished in four minutes, twenty-five seconds. (It should run between seven and eight minutes.)" Schonberg also complained that the Mozart symphony had "no force, no charm, no inflection, with a metronomic rigidity."

Peter Gutmann's 1994 review for classicalnotes.com says the performances of the Beethoven fifth and seventh symphonies, as well as Mozart's last three symphonies, are actually quite good, even if they are sometimes unconventional. "The Koch CDs", Gutman wrote, "represent all of Strauss's recordings of works by other composers. (The best of his readings of his own famous tone poems and other music are collected on DGG 429 925-2, 3 CDs.) It is true, as the critics suggest, that the readings forego overt emotion, but what emerges instead is a solid sense of structure, letting the music speak convincingly for itself. It is also true that Strauss's tempos are generally swift, but this, too, contributes to the structural cohesion and in any event is fully in keeping with our modern outlook in which speed is a virtue and attention spans are defined more by MTV clips and news sound bites than by evenings at the opera and thousand page novels."

Koch Legacy has also released recordings of overtures by Gluck, Carl Maria von Weber, Peter Cornelius and Wagner. The preference for German and Austrian composers in Germany in the 1920s through the 1940s was typical of the German nationalism that existed after World War I. Strauss clearly capitalized on national pride for the great German-speaking composers.

One of the more interesting of Strauss's recordings was perhaps the first complete performance of his An Alpine Symphony, made in 1941 and later released by EMI, because Strauss used the full complement of percussion instruments required in this spectacular symphony. The intensity of the performance rivaled that of the digital recording Herbert von Karajan made many years later with the Berlin Philharmonic.

There were many other recordings, including some taken from radio broadcasts and concerts, during the 1930s and early 1940s. Undoubtedly, the sheer volume of recorded performances would yield some definitive performances from a very capable and rather forward-looking conductor.

In 1944, Strauss celebrated his 80th birthday and conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in recordings of his major orchestral works, as well as the seldom-heard Schlagobers (Whipped Cream) ballet music. Some find more feeling in these performances than in Strauss's earlier recordings, which were recorded on the Magnetophon tape recording equipment. Vanguard Records later issued the recordings on LPs. Some of these recordings have been reissued on CD by Preiser and are of remarkable fidelity.

Richard Strauss was the composer of the music on the first compact disc to be commercially released: Deutsche Grammophon's 1983 release of their 1980 recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting the Alpine Symphony.

Sources

• Michael Kennedy, "Richard Strauss", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, ed. Stanley Sadie. 20 vol. London, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1980. ISBN 1-56159-174-2
• Kennedy, Michael (2006), The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 985 pages, ISBN 0-19-861459-4
• Bryan Gilliam: "Richard Strauss", Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed August 19, 2005), (subscription access) (This article is very different from the one in the 1980 Grove; in particular, the analysis of Strauss's behavior during the Nazi period is more detailed.)
• David Dubal, "The Essential Canon of Classical Music", North Point Press, 2003. ISBN 0-86547-664-0

Selective bibliography

• Del Mar, Norman (1962). Richard Strauss. London: Barrie & Jenkins. ISBN 0-214-15735-0.
• Tuchman, Barbara W. (1966, reprinted 1980). The Proud Tower chapter 6. Macmillan, London. ISBN 0-333-30645-7.
• Gilliam, Bryan (1999). The Life of Richard Strauss. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-57895-7.
• Kennedy, Michael (1999). Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-58173-7.
• Osborne, Charles (1991). The Complete Operas of Richard Strauss. New York City: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80459-X.
• Wilhelm, Kurt (1989). Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait. London: Thames & Hudson. ISBN 0-500-01459-0.
• Youmans, Charles (2005). Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition: the Philosophical Roots of Musical Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34573-1.
• Karpath, Ludwig and Strauss, Richard (1905–1936). The handwritten correspondence between Richard Strauss and Ludwig Karpath, covering 31 years was acquired by the National Library of Austria in l962 from the daughters of Dr. Alfred Marill who was Mr. Karpath's attorney. It consists of approximately 150 items covering Strauss relationships with the Vienna State Opera and other musical events of the period. It stops at the death of Ludwig Karpath in 1936. Dr. Alfred Marill was Mr. Karpath's executor. The terms of the will stipulated that the correspondence between Karpath and Strauss not be published until after Richard Strauss death. In keeping with these terms Dr. Marill transported it to the United States when he emigrated in 1940. After Dr. Marill's death his daughters provided the letters to the library so that Mr. Karpath's wishes could be carried out. There is no evidence that these letters have been published.

External links

• Chronological list of Strauss's works
• Richard Strauss online
• Free scores by Richard Strauss at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)
• Free scores by Richard Strauss in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
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• Timeline biography of Strauss at Richard-Strauss.com