Richard Strauss, in full Richard Georg Strauss (born June 11, 1864—died Sept. 8, 1949), an outstanding German Romantic composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His symphonic poems of the 1890s and his operas of the following decade have remained an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire.
Strauss’s father, Franz, was the principal French-horn player of the Munich Court Orchestra and was recognized as Germany’s leading virtuoso of the instrument. His mother came from the prominent brewing family of Pschorr. During a conventional education, Strauss still devoted most of his time and energy to music. When he left school in 1882, he had already composed more than 140 works, including 59 lieder (art songs) and various chamber and orchestral works. These juvenilia reflect Strauss’s musical upbringing by his father, who revered the classics and detested Richard Wagner both as a man and as a composer, even though he was a notable performer of the horn passages in performances of Wagner’s operas.
Through his father’s connections, Strauss on leaving school met the leading musicians of the day, including the conductor Hans von Bülow, who commissioned Strauss’s Suite for 13 Winds for the Meiningen Orchestra and invited Strauss to conduct that work’s first performance in Munich in November 1884. Following this successful conducting debut, Bülow offered Strauss the post of assistant conductor at Meiningen. Thenceforward Strauss’s eminence as a conductor paralleled his rise as a composer. Among the conducting posts he went on to hold were those of third conductor of the Munich Opera (1886–89), director of the Weimar Court Orchestra (1889–94), second and then chief conductor at Munich (1894–98), conductor (and later director) of the Royal Court Opera in Berlin (1898–1919), and musical codirector of the Vienna State Opera (1919–24).
At Meiningen Strauss met the composer Alexander Ritter, who reinforced that admiration for Wagner’s music which Strauss had previously nurtured in secret so as not to upset his father. Ritter urged Strauss to abandon classical forms and to express his musical ideas in the medium of the symphonic, or tone, poem, as Franz Liszt had done. Strauss had to work his way to mastery of this form, a half-way stage being his Aus Italien (1886; From Italy), a “symphonic fantasy” based on his impressions during his first visit to Italy. In Weimar in November 1889, he conducted the first performance of his symphonic poem Don Juan. The triumphant reception of this piece led to Strauss’s acclamation as Wagner’s heir and marked the start of his successful composing career. At Weimar, too, in 1894 he conducted the premiere of his first opera, Guntram, with his fiancée Pauline de Ahna in the leading soprano role. She had become his singing pupil in 1887, and they were married in September 1894. Pauline’s tempestuous, tactless, and outspoken personality was the reverse of her husband’s aloof and detached nature, and her eccentric behaviour is the subject of countless anecdotes, most of them true. Nevertheless the marriage between them was strong and successful; they adored each other and ended their days together 55 years later.
The years 1898 and 1899 saw the respective premieres of Strauss’s two most ambitious tone poems, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). In 1904 he and Pauline, who was the foremost exponent of his songs, toured the United States, where in New York City he conducted the first performance of his Symphonia Domestica (Domestic Symphony). The following year, in Dresden, he enjoyed his first operatic success with Salome, based on Oscar Wilde’s play. Although Salome was regarded by some as blasphemous and obscene, it triumphed in all the major opera houses except Vienna, where the censor forbade Gustav Mahler to stage it.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Preussischer KulturbesitzIn 1909 the opera Elektra marked Strauss’s first collaboration with the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss wrote the music and Hofmannsthal the libretti for five more operas over the next 20 years. With the 1911 premiere of their second opera together, Der Rosenkavalier, they achieved a popular success of the first magnitude. Their subsequent operas together were Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; Ariadne on Naxos), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; The Woman Without a Shadow), and Die ägyptische Helena (1928; The Egyptian Helen). But in 1929 Hofmannsthal died while working on the opera Arabella, leaving Strauss bereft.
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.After 1908 Strauss lived in Garmisch, in Bavaria, in a villa that he built with the royalties from Salome. He conducted in Berlin until 1919, when he agreed to become joint director, with Franz Schalk, of the Vienna State Opera. His appointment proved unfortunate, since it coincided with a postwar mood that relegated Strauss and similar late Romantic composers to the category of “old-fashioned.” Strauss was neither interested nor skilled in politics, national or musical, and he resigned from his post in Vienna in 1924. This political naïveté tainted Strauss’s reputation when the National Socialists came to power in Germany in 1933. Though able to manipulate grand dukes and kaisers, he proved to be no match for the ruthless totalitarians of the Third Reich and unwittingly allowed himself to be used by them for a time. Thus from 1933 to 1935 he served as president of Germany’s Reichsmusikkammer (Chamber of State Music), which was the state music bureau. But in the latter year he fell foul of the Nazi regime. After Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929 he had collaborated with the Jewish dramatist Stefan Zweig on a comic opera, Die schweigsame Frau (1935; The Silent Woman). This collaboration was unacceptable to the Nazis. The opera was banned after four performances and Strauss was compelled to work with a non-Jewish librettist, Joseph Gregor. The fact that his son’s wife was Jewish was also held against him. Above all else a family man, Strauss used every shred of his influence as Germany’s greatest living composer to protect his daughter-in-law and her two sons. He spent part of World War II in Vienna, where he was out of the limelight, and in 1945 he went to Switzerland. Allied denazification tribunals eventually cleared his name, and he returned to Garmisch in 1949, where he died three months after his 85th birthday celebrations.
Strauss’s first major achievement was to harness the expressive power of the huge Wagnerian opera orchestra for the concert hall. Although some of his early Mendelssohnian works, such as the violin concerto (composed 1882) and the first horn concerto (1882–83), are still played, the real Strauss emerged with the symphonic poem Don Juan (composed 1889), in which his ardent melodic gifts, descriptive powers, and mastery of instrumentation first became fully evident. Harmonically even richer is the climax of the symphonic poem Tod und Verklärung (1888–89; Death and Transfiguration), in which a dying man surveys his life and ideals. The rondo form is used in the tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (1894–95; Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks), wherein Strauss found the exact instrumental sounds and colours to depict the 14th-century rogue Till’s adventures, from his scattering pots and pans in a market and mocking the clergy to his death-squawk on a D clarinet on the gallows. Also sprach Zarathustra (1896; Thus Spoke Zarathustra) is ostensibly a homage to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but is actually a concerto for orchestra in which the entities of man and nature are illustrated and contrasted by opposing tonalities.
To illustrate the exploits of Don Quixote (1897), Strauss employed the variation form in this tone poem. Sheep, windmills, and flying horses are magically described in music that is suffused with poetry. Don Quixote was followed by the quasi-autobiographical tone poem Ein Heldenleben (1898), in which Strauss’s adversaries are the music critics (characterized by petulant woodwinds) whom he defeats in a battle scene of astonishing power and virtuosity before retiring to the countryside to contemplate his “works of peace” (a string of musical self-quotations) with his wife.
Two other tone poems followed that were dignified by the title symphony. In Symphonia Domestica (1903), a huge orchestra describes 24 hours in the life of the Strauss family household, including bathing the baby, quarrels, and love making. In Eine Alpensinfonie (1911–15; Alpine Symphony) an even larger orchestra (more than 150 players) describes a day in the Bavarian Alps, with a thunderstorm, a waterfall, and the view from a mountain summit as highlights.
Like his great contemporary Gustav Mahler, Strauss wrote magniloquently for a large orchestra but was also able to achieve textures of chamber-music delicacy. But whereas Mahler’s music explores his own spiritual and psychological obsessions, Strauss’s music is more objective and is concerned with sensuous emotions and everyday life, rather than with spiritual torment and death. The opulence of Strauss’s orchestrations is tempered by harmonic acerbity.
Strauss had an unrivaled descriptive power and a remarkable ability to convey psychological detail. This last quality was particularly evident in his operas. His first opera was the Wagnerian-influenced Guntram (1892–94, rev. 1940). His next stage work, the satirical comic opera Feuersnot (1900–01; Fire-Famine), employs impish humour to mock small-town prudery and hypocrisy. With Salome (1903–05), Strauss transferred his mastery of the orchestral tone-poem to an opera that is outstanding for the intensity with which it conveys Salome’s naive lust for John the Baptist and the depravity of her stepfather Herod’s court. His next opera, Elektra (1906–08), is a second blockbusting one-act study of female obsession, in this case revenge. In this score Strauss went as far toward atonality as he ever desired. Elektra was followed by Der Rosenkavalier (1909–10), a “comedy in music” that is set in 18th-century Vienna and features an anachronistic string of waltzes and characters like the Marschallin, Baron Ochs, Octavian, and Sophie, whom audiences at once took to their hearts. This opera remains Strauss’s most popular stage work, despite its occasional dull passages.
Strauss had two musical gods, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner, and in his work they struggle for possession of his artistic soul. The battle is fought most persuasively and equally in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, rev. 1916), in which Strauss’s light, parodistic vein and his heroic style are blended and reconciled. At the opposite extreme is Die Frau ohne Schatten, a Wagnerian version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute that requires singing on a scale to match its grandiose conception and staging. Its portraiture of the lowly dyer Barak and his shrewish wife is a foretaste of Intermezzo (1918–23), where the protagonists are Strauss and Pauline, thinly disguised. Arnold Schoenberg was among the first to recognize the mastery and seriousness of this opera, which was at first lightly regarded but in which Strauss perfected his conversational melodic recitative.
With their last opera together, Arabella (1929–32), Strauss and his librettist Hofmannsthal returned to Vienna and amorous intrigue in their most romantic and lyrical work. Strauss’s opera with Zweig, Die schweigsame Frau (1933–34; The Silent Woman), has only lately come into its own as a delightful comedy. Of Strauss’s three operatic collaborations with Gregor, the best is Daphne (1936–37). For his final opera, Capriccio (1940–41), Strauss and the conductor Clemens Krauss wrote an inspired “conversation piece” on the relative importance of words and music in opera. These two media are personified by a poet and a composer who are rivals for the love of a widowed countess, who is herself given the last of Strauss’s marvelously rewarding roles for the female voice.
This last opera initiated the composer’s “Indian summer,” when he recaptured the freshness of his youth in a second horn concerto (1942), an oboe concerto (1945–46), two wind sonatinas (1943–45), and a concertino for clarinet and bassoon (1947). He also composed, in Metamorphosen (1945–46), a study for 23 solo strings that is an elegy for the German musical life that the Nazis had destroyed. Strauss’s richly scored, poignantly retrospective Vier letzte Lieder (1948; Four Last Songs) for soprano and orchestra crowned a career of which his 200 songs comprise an important part.
As a young composer, Strauss came under the influence of Wagner, Hector Berlioz, and Liszt just when his technique and imagination were sharpened to make the most of their impact. From the tone poem Aus Italien onward, his style became recognizable as the big, bravura, flexible, post-Romantic panoply that dominated audiences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But, having achieved fame as an avant-garde composer, Strauss after Der Rosenkavalier became a conservative whose musical evolution was pursued in isolation, unaffected by the advances and experiments going on around him. He spent the last 38 years of his life refining and polishing his style, writing often for smaller orchestras, partly out of practical considerations (to ensure the audibility of sung words in the theatre) and partly because large-scale Romantic musical textures were becoming less and less significant. In later years Strauss’s style became more classical in the Mozartean sense. Indeed, the opera Capriccio and other late works may be said to have achieved a perfect fusion of the late German Romantic and the Neoclassical manner.