RichardStrauss

Richard Strauss grew up hearing the horn. His father Franz played in the Munich Court Orchestra, including the first performances of Wagner’s Tristan and Die Meistersinger, and detested the music. At home, Mozart was placed above every other composer, and Haydn and Beethoven were also approved. Richard, born in 1864, had piano lessons from the age of four and was composing at six. His mother Josepha came from the Pschorr brewing family. He studied privately with Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer and learnt how an orchestra sounds from the players who worked beside his father.

Hans von Bülow took him to Meiningen in 1885. At twenty-one he had an orchestra of his own to rehearse, as well as a choir and a princess to teach. The violinist Alexander Ritter, married to Wagner’s niece, completed his conversion to the music his father disliked. Ritter also urged Liszt’s symphonic poems upon him. Strauss spent the next decade writing for the concert orchestra without voices.

1888–⁠98The tone poems and marriage

He conducted Don Juan at Weimar in November 1889. The strings open with a rapid upward rush; later, an oboe plays a long love theme and four horns answer with a theme in unison. Then the E major of the opening changes to E minor. Tod und Verklärung follows a dying artist through memories towards a large final vision; Till Eulenspiegel gives its rogue a horn theme and a clarinet figure that represents a laugh. Till goes to the gallows, and the music continues after the execution.

In 1894 Strauss married the soprano Pauline de Ahna and gave her the four songs of Op. 27 as a wedding present. She had sung Freihild in his first opera, Guntram, and later appeared with him in song recitals. In Ein Heldenleben she is portrayed by the solo violin, which is by turns coaxing and argumentative, and the hero’s achievements include quotations from Strauss’s earlier scores. Their son Franz was born in 1897. In Sinfonia domestica, first performed in New York in 1904, the orchestra portrays the whole family.

1905–⁠09Salome and Elektra

Salome opened in Dresden on 9 December 1905. Strauss had cut Oscar Wilde’s play in Hedwig Lachmann’s German translation and set the remaining words himself. A clarinet curls upwards at the start; before the act is over, Salome will kiss the severed head of the prophet who refused her. The orchestra makes the kiss sound like the fulfilment of a love scene. Herod has her killed. Strauss had spent years conducting opera in Munich, Weimar and Berlin.

1911–⁠29Der Rosenkavalier and Hofmannsthal

Then came Der Rosenkavalier. In its invented eighteenth-century Vienna, nineteenth-century waltzes accompany a boorish baron, a young man in disguise and the woman who knows she will lose him. The Marschallin’s Act I talk about time is close to conversation; in the last trio her voice must float beside those of Octavian and Sophie as she lets the lovers go. It opened in Dresden in 1911. Ariadne auf Naxos followed in 1912, awkwardly attached to Molière’s Le Bourgeois gentilhomme. In 1916 a new prologue explained the absurdity: a rich patron has ordered the tragic opera and the comedians to perform at once.

Strauss continued to write large orchestral works. Eine Alpensinfonie (1915) begins before dawn, reaches a summit and brings the climbers down through a storm, with parts for wind machine and thunder machine. Die Frau ohne Schatten, completed during the war and first performed in Vienna in 1919, sets Hofmannsthal’s fairy tale of an empress who must acquire a human shadow. Strauss co-directed the Vienna State Opera from 1919 to 1924 and helped Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt establish the Salzburg Festival. His own domestic comedy, Intermezzo, put a version of Pauline on stage.

Hofmannsthal died in July 1929, before he could make the revisions Strauss wanted to Arabella. The composer wrote to his widow: “No one will replace him for me or for the musical world.” Stefan Zweig became his next librettist and wrote Die schweigsame Frau. By the time of its Dresden première in 1935, the name of a Jewish writer on a theatre programme had become a matter of political dispute.

1933–⁠49Reichsmusikkammer, late works and death

In 1944, after lunch at Garmisch, Strauss sat at the piano and played and sang songs to Hans Hotter for four hours. Hotter remembered the jokes and the energy of a man approaching eighty. In the Second Horn Concerto Strauss had returned to the instrument of his childhood; the Oboe Concerto followed in 1945. That year he also finished Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings. Munich’s opera house had burned. In the work the string parts move around one another until the bass plays the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica”. Strauss wrote “In memoriam” beside it.

He and Pauline spent the post-war years in Switzerland and returned to Garmisch in 1949. Strauss wrote four orchestral songs in 1948. In September a solo horn plays after the singer has stopped; in Beim Schlafengehen a violin rises. Im Abendrot recalls the theme from Tod und Verklärung, written nearly sixty years earlier. Strauss died on 8 September 1949. The publisher gave the songs their collective title and order; Kirsten Flagstad and Wilhelm Furtwängler first performed them in London in May 1950.