Richard Strauss

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For other people with similar names, see Richardt Strauss or Strauss.

Richard Strauss, by Max Liebermann, 1918

Signature of Dr. Richard Strauss

Richard Georg Strauss (11 June 1864 8
September 1949) was a leading German composer
of the late Romantic and early modern eras. He is
known for his operas, which include Der
Rosenkavalier, Elektra, Die Frau ohne Schatten and Salome; his Lieder,
especially his Four Last Songs; his tone poems, including Don Juan, Death and
Transfiguration, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks, Also sprach Zarathustra, Ein
Heldenleben, Symphonia Domestica, and An Alpine Symphony; and other
instrumental works such as Metamorphosen and his Oboe Concerto. Strauss was
also a prominent conductor throughout Germany and Austria.
Strauss, along with Gustav Mahler, represents the late flowering of German
Romanticism after Richard Wagner, in which pioneering subtleties
of orchestration are combined with an advanced harmonic style.
Strauss was born on 11 June 1864 in Munich, the son of Josephine (ne Pschorr)
and Franz Strauss, who was the principal horn player at the Court Opera in
Munich.[1] In his youth, he received a thorough musical education from his father.
He wrote his first composition at the age of six and continued to write music
almost until his death.
During his boyhood Strauss attended orchestra rehearsals of the Munich Court
Orchestra (now the Bavarian State Orchestra), where he received private
instruction in music theory and orchestration from an assistant conductor. In
1872 he started receiving violin instruction at the Royal School of Music
from Benno Walter, his father's cousin. In 1874 Strauss heard his
first Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Tannhuser. 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. Indeed, in the Strauss household, the music of
Richard Wagner was viewed with deep suspicion, and it was not until the age of
16 that Strauss was able to obtain a score of Tristan und Isolde. In later life,
Strauss said that he deeply regretted the conservative hostility to Wagner's
progressive works.[2]Nevertheless, Strauss's father undoubtedly had a crucial

influence on his son's developing taste, not least in Strauss's abiding love for the
horn.
In early 1882 in Vienna he gave the first performance of his Violin Concerto in D
minor, playing a piano reduction of the orchestral part himself, with his teacher
Benno Walter as soloist. The same year he entered Ludwig Maximilian University
of Munich, 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 Blow, who had been enormously impressed by
the young composer's Serenade for wind instruments, composed when he was
only 16 years of age. Strauss learned the art of conducting by observing Blow in
rehearsal. Blow was very fond of the young man and decided that Strauss
should be his successor as conductor of the Meiningen Court Orchestra when
Blow resigned in 1885. Strauss's 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, Op. 11, is representative of this period and is a staple of
modern horn repertoire.

Strauss with his wife and son, 1910

Strauss married soprano Pauline de Ahna on 10 September 1894. She was
famous for being irascible, garrulous, 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, and all his
operas contain important soprano roles.
The Strausses had one son, Franz, in 1897. Franz married Alice von Grab, a
Jewish woman, in a Roman Catholic ceremony in 1924. Franz and Alice had two
sons, Richard and Christian.
Death and legacy[edit]

Richard Strauss
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. [26] The conductor later described
how, during the singing of the famous trio fromRosenkavalier, "each singer broke
down in tears and dropped out of the ensemble, but they recovered themselves
and we all ended together." [27]Strauss's wife, Pauline de Ahna, died eight months
later, on 13 May 1950, at the age of 88.[28]
Strauss's late works, modelled on "the divine Mozart at the end of a life full of
thankfulness,"[29] are widely considered[who?] the greatest works by any
octogenarian composer. Strauss himself declared in 1947 with characteristic selfdeprecation: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class secondrate composer." The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould described Strauss in 1962 as
"the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century." [30]
Until the 1980s, Strauss was regarded by some post-modern musicologists as a
conservative, backward-looking composer, but re-examination of and new
research on the composer has re-evaluated his place as that of a modernist,
[31]
albeit one who still utilized and sometimes revered tonality and lush
orchestration.[32] Strauss is noted for his pioneering subtleties of orchestration,
combined with an advanced harmonic style, advances which influenced the
composers who followed him.[original research?]
Strauss has always been popular with audiences in the concert hall and
continues to be so. He has consistently been in the top 10 composers most
performed by symphony orchestras in the US and Canada over the period 2002
10.[33] He is also in the top 5 of 20th Century composers (born after 1860) in
terms of the number of currently available recordings of his works. [34]

Richard Strauss (18641949)

Songs of Love and Death
The German composer and conductor Richard Strauss was born in Munich, the
son of a distinguished horn-player and his second wife, a member of a rich
brewing family. He had a sound general education there, while studying music
under teachers of obvious distinction. Before he left school in 1882 he had
already enjoyed some success as a composer, continued during his brief period
at Munich University with the composition of concertos for violin and for French
horn and a sonata for cello and piano. By the age of 21 he had been appointed
assistant conductor to the well-known orchestra at Meiningen under Hans von
Blow, whom he succeeded in the following year.

In 1886 Strauss resigned from Meiningen and began the series of tone-poems
that seemed to extend to the utmost limit the extra-musical content of the form.
Meanwhile he was establishing his reputation as a conductor, directing the Berlin
Philharmonic Orchestra for a season and taking appointments in Munich and then
in 1898 at the opera in Berlin, where he later became Court Composer.

The new century brought a renewed attention to opera, after earlier relative
failure. Salome in Dresden in 1905 was followed in 1909 by Elektra, the start of a
continuing collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Der Rosenkavalier (The
Knight of the Rose), a romantic opera set in the Vienna of Mozart's time, was
staged at the Court Opera in Dresden in 1911, followed by ten further operas,
ending only with Capriccio, mounted at the Staatsoper in Munich in 1942.
Strauss's final years were clouded by largely unfounded accusations of
collaboration with the musical policies of the Third Reich and after 1945 he
withdrew for a time to Switzerland, returning to his own house at Garmisch only
four months before his death in 1949.

From childhood Richard Strauss had been drawn to the composition of songs, his
earliest attempt, 'Weihnachtslied' (Christmas Carol) written at the age of six. This
was the first of some 42 Jugendlieder, written during the years up to 1883. Three
of these early songs are included here. The first, 'Nebel' (Mist) [Track 20], written
in 1878, when Strauss was fourteen, is a setting of a poem by Nikolaus von
Lenau, to whom he was to return for his tone-poem Don Juan. In a sombre E flat
minor, it is dedicated, as were a number of these early songs, to his aunt
Johanna Pschorr, a talented amateur singer, wife of Georg Pschorr, brother of
Strauss' mother and owner of a well-known Bavarian brewery. The brighter
'Begegnung' (Meeting) [6], written in 1880 and once in the possession of Johanna
Pschorr, is a setting of verse by Otto Friedrich Gruppe, and the maturer 'Rote
Rosen' (Red Roses) [7] dates from 1883 and was dedicated to a girl Strauss had
met on holiday, Lotti Speyer, with whom he exchanged letters, finding in the
verse of the Munich poet Karl Stieler lines that corresponded to his own feelings,
if not completely to his musical intentions.

The first published set of Strauss Lieder was his setting of eight poems mainly
drawn from the Letzte Bltter (Last Pages) of the Innsbruck poet Hermann von
Gilm zu Rosenegg, to whose work he had been introduced by his young friend
Ludwig Thuille. To the disappointment of Aunt Johanna, the songs are dedicated
to the Munich tenor Heinrich Vogl. The first of the set, 'Zueignung' (Dedication)
[5], orchestrated many years later by Strauss as a tribute to the singer Viorica
Ursuleac who had taken the title rle in his opera Die gyptische Helena (The
Egyptian Helen), sets a verse not included in the Letzte Bltter, with the original
title 'Habe Dank'. It remains rightly among the best known Strauss Lieder. The
set continues with the Schubertian 'Nichts'(Nothing) [12], followed, in the
published order, by 'Die Nacht'(Night). The fourth song, 'Die Georgine' [10], with
its strange twists of harmony, treats strophic form with some freedom, and the
fifth, 'Geduld'(Patience) [3], rises to a climax of emotional intensity. Die
Verschwiegenen (The Confidantes) [8] is rhetorical in conception, and 'Die
Zeitlose'(The Meadow Saffron) [11] is a short song of deceptive simplicity. The
series ends with 'Allerseelen'(All Souls) [21], a song that rivals 'Zueignung'in
popularity.

The following groups of songs published as Opp. 15, 17 and 19, were largely
settings of verses by Adolf Friedrich, Graf von Schack, formerly a member of the
Prussian and then of the Mecklenburg-Schwerin civil service, who had settled in
Munich in 1855. Two songs here included are taken from Op. 15, the third of the
set, 'Lob des Leidens' (Praise of Suffering) [18] and the fourth, 'Aus den Liedern
der Trauer'(From Songs of the Mourner) [17]. Both are dedicated to the Munich
Opera contralto Victoria Blank, the first with its sombre ending, and the second
haunted by the shifting horn-call in the piano part. The songs date from 1886.

The six songs of Op. 19 were attributed, in Strauss's title, to Schack's collection
of poems under the title Lotosbltter (Lotus Leaves), the last three of which are
included here. 'Wir sollten wir geheim sie halten'(How should we keep it secret)

[9], with its exuberant use of portamento, the fourth of the set, is followed by
'Hoffen und wieder verzagen'(Hoping and despairing again) [4], the poem taken
from Schack's Liebesgedichte (Love Poems), which shifts between major and
minor, as the text suggests. The last of the group, 'Mein Herz ist stumm, mein
Herz ist kalt'(My heart is silent, my heart is cold) [19], recalls, in the cold of old
age, memories of an earlier time, of the murmuring of streams and the sound of
the hunting-horn, both graphically expressed, until the bleakness of the final
bars, where the opening words are repeated. Op. 19 was published in 1888, with
a dedication to the singer Emilie Herzog, of the Munich Opera, who had been
involved in coaching Strauss's future wife, Pauline de Ahna.

The same year brought settings of five poems by Felix Dahn, by now a professor
at Breslau University and later better known as the author of a series of novels
on early German history than as a poet. The third of the group, published as
Schlichte Weisen, Op. 21, (Simple Songs), 'Ach Lieb, ich muss nun scheiden!'(Ah
Love, I must leave you now) [15], its opening words those of a folk-song to which
Dahn had added an imaginative continuation, has all the simplicity of the verse.

Mdchenblumen, Op. 22, (Maiden Flowers), further settings of Dahn, also

belongs to 1888. Op. 26, including only two songs, dated 1891, consists of
settings of two poems by Lenau. The second of these is the curiously chromatic
'O wrst du mein' (O if you were mine) [2]. The set is dedicated to the tenor
Heinrich Zeller, who was to sing the title rle in Strauss's unsuccessful opera
Guntram.

The four songs of Op. 27, dating from 1894, include 'Ruhe, meine Seele' (Quiet,
my soul) [22], a dramatic setting of words by the left-wing writer Karl Friedrich
Henckell, taken from his Buch des Kampfes (Book of Struggle). Strauss
orchestrated the song in 1948. The third of the group, 'Heimliche Aufforderung'
(Secret Invitation) [1], sets words by another writer with strong left-wing
affiliations, the Scottish-born John Henry Mackay, who had lived in Germany
since early childhood. This is a love-song, with a flowing piano part, the whole far
away from the anarchistic leanings of the poet.

The following year, 1895, brought three settings of texts by Otto Julius Bierbaum,
Op. 29. A novelist, journalist and poet, Bierbaum was concerned, in Berlin, with
the modern theatrical venture, the Verein Freie Bhne. The third song,
'Nachtgang' (Night Walk) [14], is fully in the romantic tradition, but with the
harmonic shifts that were now fully characteristic of the composer.

Op. 31, completed in 1896, brought settings of Carl Busse and Richard Dehmel,
with Op. 32, in the same year, bringing five settings of various writers. Op. 33
offered four songs with orchestral accompaniment, with four more songs in 1898
in Op. 36. Op. 37, in the same year, offered six songs, with texts by various

writers, dedicated to Strauss's wife. 'Ich liebe dich' (I love you) [13] takes a poem
by the soldier-writer Detlev von Liliencron, a heroic pledge of loyalty.

Op. 39 brings five more songs and chronologically the last of those included
here, 'Befreit'(Set Free) [16], a setting of a poem by Richard Dehmel, a friend of
Liliencron and a prolific writer. Strauss orchestrated the song in 1933. Tranquil
and serene in spirit, the verse and the setting are punctuated by the exclamation
'o Glck!' ('O happiness!') in music penetrated again and again by shafts of light.

The present recording contains songs from the earlier part of Strauss's long
career, but he continued to write songs throughout his life, with the Four Last
Songs composed in 1948, the year before his death. They make up an important
and essential part of German Lieder tradition, a remarkable contribution by a
musician of the greatest versatility.

Keith Anderson