Richard Strauss

German composer

• Born: June 11, 1864
• Birthplace: Munich, Bavaria, Germany
• Died: September 8, 1949
• Place of death: Garmisch-Partenkirchen, West Germany (now in Germany)

The symphonic poems composed by Strauss in the last years of the nineteenth century won for him early fame and fortune. He was widely regarded by the music community as a composer of brilliance who was destined to lead music into the twentieth century.

Early Life

Richard Strauss (strows) was the elder of two children born to Franz Strauss, a professional horn player, and Josephine Pschorr, whose family owned and operated the Pschorr Brewery. From the beginning, there was little doubt about Richard’s future. The combination of the Pschorr family wealth and Franz Strauss’s position as a virtuoso performer afforded Richard every opportunity to pursue a career in music. Franz, who was the principal hornist of the Munich Court Orchestra, carefully supervised the early music training of his son. He arranged for Richard to study with various members of the Munich Orchestra. Richard studied piano with August Tombo, violin with Benno Walter, and music theory with F. W. Meyer. Since Franz Strauss disliked the music of the late Romantics, it is no surprise that his son was solidly grounded in the classics, studying the music of such composers as Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. His earliest composition was a Christmas song composed when he was only six years old.

Strauss studied at the gymnasium in Munich until he was eighteen years old. He did not take specialized training in music at the Munich Conservatory on his graduation from the gymnasium. Instead, he was enrolled at the University of Munich, where he took courses in the humanities. In fact, Strauss’s performance skills at the keyboard were regarded as respectable but not exceptional. Strauss’s father had been more intent on encouraging and developing the compositional talents of his son rather than performance skills.

Strauss’s first composition for orchestra, entitled Festival March, was composed in 1876 when he was only twelve years old and was actually published by Breitkopf and Hartel, attributable more to the influence of his mother’s family than the merit of the piece. Another early work, the Serenade for Wind Instruments in E-flat Major, was more important because it attracted the attention of Hans von Bülow, one of the more colorful figures in the history of music, who was a virtuoso pianist and a respected conductor. He was the conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra when Strauss’s piece came to his attention. Bülow became one of Strauss’s earliest and strongest supporters and, when the position of assistant conductor at Meiningen became vacant, Bülow recommended the twenty-one-year-old Strauss for the position, thus embarking him on a dual career as a composer and conductor that was to continue throughout his life.

Life’s Work

When Strauss accepted the position of assistant conductor at Meiningen in 1885, he was a conservative composer who knew next to nothing about conducting. On arrival at Meiningen, Strauss entered an intensive apprenticeship under the tutelage of Bülow, and, when Bülow resigned his position as conductor a few months later, he was appointed Bülow’s successor. His appointment as first conductor at Meiningen may have been ill-timed in respect of his experience as a conductor, and he resigned that position several months later, early in 1886, to accept another position as third conductor at Munich. During the remaining years of the nineteenth century, Strauss was to hold the position of conductor at Weimar, a second term at Munich, and at Berlin, all the while steadily growing in confidence and stature as a conductor and as a composer.

While at Meiningen, Strauss had become good friends with and had fallen under the influence of a violinist named Alexander Ritter, who was an ardent Wagnerite. It was during this time that Strauss began to move away from the conservative camp and became interested in the music of Richard Wagner and his followers. His first composition in the new style was a symphonic fantasy entitled Aus Italien , first performed in Munich in 1887, and was an outgrowth of a vacation he had taken in Italy prior to the assumption of his duties at Munich. This work was followed by a series of symphonic poems, or tone poems, as he preferred to call them, all composed in the last years of the nineteenth century, that rocked the music community and catapulted him to international fame as a composer. These works established his reputation as a radical modern composer.

Strauss was unsurpassed in his day for the creative and imaginative way he skillfully wrote for the orchestra, placing unprecedented technical demands on the performers, creating sensitive and subtle nuances of color, and always striving to depict musically the subject content in a realistic manner. Numbering among his finest works in this genre are Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, and Ein Heldenleben.

Strauss’s output in the area of choral music remains generally neglected today, possibly because of the great difficulty in the performance of most of these works. Of the roughly two hundred songs that he composed, many were for soprano voice and written for Pauline de Ahna, who was a graduate of the Munich Conservatory. Strauss had met Ahna, a member of a respected and titled family, in the summer of 1887. A courtship ensued that extended over a period of years, and they eventually married in 1894. Some of Strauss’s best efforts in this genre, such as Standchen and Morgen, were composed during the years of courtship and early marriage. Early in their relationship, Ahna actually sang roles in some of the operas that Strauss conducted, and, over the years, she would often sing his songs in recitals with him accompanying her on the piano. Their only child, Franz Alexander Strauss, was born in 1897.

Strauss’s creative focus changed in the early twentieth century. He moved away from compositions for orchestra and began to concentrate on opera. The change was not as drastic as it would appear on the surface in view of the highly poetic and dramatic content of his symphonic poems, his familiarity and understanding of the voice, and his, by now, extensive experience as a conductor of opera. His earliest attempt was Guntram, first performed in Weimar in 1894; it was poorly received by the public and the critics, a fact he never understood or forgot.

Strauss’s first major success, and one of his most powerful works, was Salome , which was first performed in Dresden in 1905. It was a one-act opera based on the Oscar Wilde play of the same name. The subject of the opera, which dealt with Salome’s obsession with John the Baptist, proved to be quite controversial and was regarded as scandalous in some circles. The subject pushed Strauss to new artistic heights as he strived to portray musically the characters and to capture the intensity of their feelings in the music. The music can be characterized by the extreme demands placed on the singers and the extensive use of the orchestra for coloristic effects. The high point of the opera came at the end with Salome’s dance of the veils and then her kissing of the head of John the Baptist.

Strauss’s next opera, Elektra , first performed in Dresden in 1909, marks the beginning of his collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hofmannsthal remained Strauss’s librettist until his death in 1929. Elektra, which dealt with a woman’s obsession with revenge, paralleled Salome in that it was also a very intense psychological drama. Again, Strauss placed great demands on the singers and utilized a very large orchestra. With this work, Strauss had moved to the brink of atonality, thus maintaining a reputation as one of the more radical composers of his day.

Der Rosenkavalier , on a libretto by Hofmannsthal, was first performed in 1911 and marks a strong break with Salome and Elektra. The subject, which deals with the aristocracy of eighteenth century Vienna, has nothing of the brooding darkness and violence of the earlier works. In this work, Strauss returns the voice to its normal position of prominence, making use of duets and trios and using the orchestra in a more traditional role. Ariadne auf Naxos, which followed in 1912, confirmed the change in style. Strauss was to maintain this style, as reflected in Der Rosenkavalier and Ariadne auf Naxos, with little change for the rest of his career. Other operas deserving of mention with Hofmannsthal as librettist are Die Frau ohne Schatten, Intermezzo, and Arabella.

Strauss enjoyed an international reputation as one of the great German composers of his time. It is for this reason that the Third Reich, wanting to receive approval and support from some sectors of the German intellectual and creative community, appointed Strauss as president of the Reich Chamber of Music in 1933. Strauss was forced to resign that position in 1935 over a dispute involving his Jewish librettist, Stefan Zweig, but the damage had been done. World opinion had shifted against him, and, when the war ended in 1945, he was, for a period of time, before being cleared of all charges, regarded as a Nazi supporter. He spent his final years in his villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. His last composition was four songs for soprano and orchestra entitled Vier letzte Lieder (four last songs). Strauss died at his villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, on September 8, 1949, survived by his wife, who was to die a year later, and his son, Franz.

Significance

The twentieth century was not an easy time in which to live for many artists, including Strauss. He was reared in an environment of wealth, security, and opportunity. The early years were exciting and promising ones that saw him achieve national and even international prominence as a conductor and as the composer of the tone poems and the early operas. These were the good times for Strauss.

As did so many composers, he flirted with atonality, one of the major controversies for composers and audiences in the early 1900’s, and rejected it, preferring to work within a tonal framework. Thus, Strauss, who was one of the radical young leaders of the new music at the turn of the century, became one of the conservatives over a period of time, a defender of the status quo. Those who were disappointed with that decision have claimed that he abandoned his artistic principles for fame and fortune. His reputation has suffered for this in past years, but, in the long term, history will judge him most favorably, not only for his many orchestral masterpieces but also as one of the major composers of opera in the twentieth century. He found and rightfully understood that his strength of musical expression lay in the tonal language of the post-Wagnerian era, and, in this idiom, he was the undisputed master.

Bibliography

Del Mar, Norman. Richard Strauss: A Critical Commentary on His Life and Works. 3 vols. Philadelphia: Chilton, 1969-1973. Remains the best general study. This work discusses Strauss’s compositions in some detail. Accessible to the general reader, it is recommended for in-depth study of Strauss.

Griffiths, Paul. “The Turn of the Century.” Music Guide: An Introduction. Edited by Stanley Sadie with Alison Latham. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1986. This chapter by Griffiths provides an excellent overview of music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Strauss and other composers contemporary with him are covered. Highly recommended to the general reader.

Kennedy, Michael. Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. One of two biographies that Kennedy has written about Strauss, this book examines the contradictions between the man and his music, providing a comprehensive overview of his life and his musical achievements.

Marek, George. Richard Strauss: The Life of a Non-Hero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1967. This is a good account of Strauss’s life. It is rich in factual material but does not make any attempt at analysis of Strauss’s style or any of his works. An excellent source for the general reader.

Rolland, Romain. Richard Strauss and Romain Rolland: Correspondence. Edited by Rollo Meyers. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Contains a translation of letters exchanged between Strauss and Rolland, a professor at the Sorbonne and a French musicologist. Also included are excerpted fragments from Rolland’s diary that are of some interest in respect to Strauss.

Schmid, Mark-Daniel, ed. The Richard Strauss Companion. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. Eleven essays examining Strauss’s life and music, including discussions of his influences, the composer and his contemporaries, the development of his worldview, his operas and other vocal works, and his tone poems and their critical reception.

Strauss, Richard. Recollections and Reflections. Edited by Willi Schuh. Translated by L. J. Lawrence. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974. Often very short comments written in response to a wide variety of issues and concerns, these writings allow the reader a very special private insight into Strauss, the artist and the man. Excellent source for the general reader.