Richard Strauss

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Strauss died on the 8th of September 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with the words "dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung" on his lips. He was speaking to Alice, his Jewish daughter-in-law, the woman he had spent more than a decade protecting from the Nazi regime he appeared to serve. That contradiction sits at the heart of Strauss's story: a composer of such immense reputation that even Joseph Goebbels needed him, yet a man who privately called Goebbels "a pipsqueak" and wrote in his notebook that Jew-baiting was "a disgrace to German honour."

  Born in Munich on the 11th of June 1864, Strauss began composing at the age of six and never really stopped. His career stretched across nearly eight decades, from Bismarck's Germany to the rubble of World War II. He wrote tone poems that redrew the boundaries of the orchestra, operas that filled houses from Dresden to Carnegie Hall, and at the very end of his life, songs so quietly devastating that audiences could not speak after hearing them.

  How did one man build music that shaped film scores decades after his death? How did he navigate, and ultimately survive, the most murderous regime in modern history? And what does it mean that he declared himself only "a first-class second-rate composer" after a life that Glenn Gould called the greatest musical figure of the twentieth century?

• 2. Father and Son

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  Franz Strauss, principal horn player at the Munich Court Opera and a professor at the Königliche Musikschule, shaped his son's ear before the boy could read. By the age of four, Richard was already studying piano. By six, he had written his first composition. His maternal grandfather, Georg Pschorr, was a prosperous Munich brewer, which meant the family had money, culture, and strong opinions about music.

  Franz made those opinions architectural. The Strauss household was built around Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert. The composer Ludwig Thuille, an orphan taken in as an informal member of the family, joined the household for music-making and meals. Richard got violin lessons at age ten from Benno Walter, his father's cousin and the director of the Munich Court Orchestra, and at eleven began five years of compositional study with Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer.

  Richard Wagner was the one subject that generated real tension. In the Strauss household, Wagner's music was treated with deep suspicion. Franz was a musical conservative, and he forbade his son to study the works that were reshaping German music. Richard attended his first Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, in 1874, and by 1879 he had heard the entire Ring Cycle, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and Tristan und Isolde. But he could not obtain a score of Tristan until he was sixteen. In 1882, he traveled to Bayreuth to hear his father perform in the world premiere of Parsifal, and surviving letters show he came away with what appeared to be a negative impression. In later life he said he deeply regretted that early hostility.

  Franz's amateur orchestra, the Wilde Gung'l, which he conducted from 1875 to 1896, served as a testing ground for his son's early symphonic writing. Many of those compositions were indebted to Schumann and Mendelssohn, exactly as the father intended. The love of the horn, that most demanding of instruments, passed directly from father to son; the Horn Concerto No. 1 from this period remains a staple of the modern horn repertoire.

• 3. The Meiningen Crucible

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  Hans von Bülow had been enormously impressed by a wind serenade that the teenage Strauss had composed, and he took the young man on as his assistant at the Meiningen Court Orchestra. What happened in Meiningen was nothing less than Strauss's complete transformation as both a musician and a thinker.

  Bülow taught by example. Strauss learned the art of conducting by standing in rehearsals and watching. Bülow introduced him to the stage as a concert pianist as well, and it was under Bülow's baton that Strauss gave his first major appearance in that role, performing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with cadenzas of his own composition.

  In December 1885, Bülow unexpectedly resigned, and Strauss found himself leading the Meiningen Court Orchestra as interim principal conductor through April 1886. The orchestra was then preparing for the world premiere of Johannes Brahms's Symphony No. 4, which Brahms himself would conduct. Strauss conducted his own Symphony No. 2 for Brahms, who advised him directly: "Your symphony contains too much playing about with themes. This piling up of many themes based on a triad, which differ from one another only in rhythm, has no value." The comment stung, but it stuck. Strauss later referred to this period as his "Brahmsschwärmerei," his Brahms adoration, and traces of it are audible in his Piano Quartet in C minor and the Burleske.

  The meeting that would matter most, however, happened in 1885 when the composer Alexander Ritter joined the Meiningen orchestra as a violinist. Ritter was the husband of one of Wagner's nieces and a passionate advocate for what he called the "music of the future." He spent the next years leading Strauss through Schopenhauer, Wagner's essays, and the writings of Friedrich von Hausegger, dismantling the musical conservatism that Franz Strauss had installed and replacing it with something altogether more dangerous and more alive.

• 4. Tone Poems and Velocity

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  On the 11th of November 1889, Don Juan premiered in Weimar to what the sources describe as tremendous critical response, and virtually overnight Strauss became famous across Europe. The work displayed a new kind of virtuosity in its orchestral manner; James Hepokoski, who has studied the tone poems closely, noted a later shift in Strauss's technique occurring between 1892 and 1893, when Strauss rejected Schopenhauer's philosophy and began more forcefully critiquing the institution of the symphony itself.

  The tone poems followed in rapid succession. Death and Transfiguration premiered in 1890. Then came Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks in 1895, Also sprach Zarathustra in 1896, Don Quixote in 1897, and Ein Heldenleben in 1898. One commentator observed that "no orchestra could exist without his tone poems, written to celebrate the glories of the post-Wagnerian symphony orchestra." Béla Bartók heard Also sprach Zarathustra in 1902 and said it "contained the seeds for a new life." A Straussian influence runs through his First String Quartet, Kossuth, and Bluebeard's Castle. Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern were shaped by the same encounter. Karol Szymanowski modeled his opera Hagith directly on Salome.

  Strauss's journey to Italy in 1886, between his Meiningen post and a new position at the Bavarian State Opera, generated something unexpected. He wrote down descriptions of sites he was visiting alongside tonal impressions of each, then sent them in a letter to his mother. Those notes became his first tone poem, Aus Italien. The method was characteristic: a composer who absorbed the world directly into sound, often bypassing the usual stages of abstraction.

  While in Munich during his second tenure at the Bavarian State Opera from 1894 to 1898, he also served as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for the 1894-1895 season. In 1897, his son Franz was born. In 1906, Strauss purchased land at Garmisch-Partenkirchen and built a villa there with advance payments from the publisher Adolph Fürstner for Salome, living there until his death.

• 5. Opera and Hofmannsthal

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  Salome opened in Dresden in 1905 with more than thirty-eight curtain calls and almost immediately became one of the most performed operas in the world. Maurice Ravel called it "stupendous." Gustav Mahler described it as "a live volcano, a subterranean fire." Strauss reportedly financed his Garmisch villa entirely from its revenues.

  The work rested on a libretto translated by Hedwig Lachmann from Oscar Wilde's French play Salomé. The lead soprano role was so demanding that Strauss often remarked he preferred writing for the female voice; the male parts in Salome and in the later Elektra are almost entirely supporting roles included only to supplement the soprano's performance.

  Elektra followed in 1909 and pushed the harmonic language further, introducing what analysts call the Elektra chord. It also introduced the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal as Strauss's principal librettist. Their collaboration ran for more than two decades, producing Der Rosenkavalier in 1911, Ariadne auf Naxos in 1912, Die Frau ohne Schatten in 1919, Die ägyptische Helena in 1928, and Arabella in 1933. Of these, Der Rosenkavalier is generally considered Strauss's finest achievement. For the later collaborations Strauss moderated his harmonic language, turning from dissonance toward a lush melodic late-Romantic style that found enormous public success.

  In 1924, impatient with what he called Hofmannsthal's post-Wagnerian metaphysics, Strauss wrote his own libretto for Intermezzo, a modern domestic comedy that premiered at the Dresden Semperoper. Hofmannsthal was not pleased. The same year, Strauss's son Franz married Alice von Grab-Hermannswörth, daughter of a Jewish industrialist, in a Roman Catholic ceremony. Their two sons, Richard and Christian, would later become the grandchildren Strauss risked everything to protect.

• 6. The Nazi Years

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  When Adolf Hitler came to power in March 1933, Strauss was sixty-eight years old. He never joined the Nazi Party and studiously avoided Nazi forms of greeting. He wrote in his private notebook that the Streicher-Goebbels persecution of Jews was "a disgrace to German honour, as evidence of incompetence." Yet in November 1933 he accepted the presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer, the Reich Music Chamber.

  His own account of why survives in a 1935 private journal entry: he was not consulted beforehand, and he accepted because he hoped to prevent worse outcomes as German musical life was reorganized by what he called "amateurs and ignorant place-seekers." He wrote to his family, "I made music under the Kaiser, and under Ebert. I'll survive under this one as well." Goebbels, who called Strauss a "decadent neurotic" in his diary, tolerated the composer's international prestige for as long as it remained useful.

  Strauss tried to preserve performances of banned composers, continued working with his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig on the comic opera Die schweigsame Frau, and when it premiered in Dresden in 1935 he insisted Zweig's name appear on the theatrical billing. Hitler and Goebbels did not attend. The opera was halted after three performances and banned. That same year the Gestapo intercepted a letter Strauss had written to Zweig on the 17th of June 1935, in which he stated: "I recognise only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none." He was dismissed from the Reichsmusikkammer presidency shortly afterward. Zweig himself had grown "privately appalled and embarrassed by Strauss's partnership of opportunity with the Nazi regime."

  Arturo Toscanini, who had resigned from the Bayreuth Festival in protest and whose post Strauss then accepted, said of him in 1933: "To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again." Strauss also replaced the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter at a Berlin Philharmonic concert after Walter was forced to withdraw. These acts generated a criticism from which Strauss never fully escaped.

  What the historical record also shows: he drove to the Theresienstadt concentration camp to argue in person for the release of Alice's grandmother, Paula Neumann. He wrote letters to the SS pleading for the release of Alice's relatives held in camps. His letters were ignored. Neumann and twenty-five other relatives were murdered. In early 1944, while Strauss was away from home, Alice and her son Franz were abducted by the Gestapo and held for two nights; Strauss's personal intervention secured their release and return to Garmisch under house arrest. In 1948, a denazification tribunal in Munich cleared him of any wrongdoing.

• 7. Indian Summer

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  Metamorphosen, a work for twenty-three solo strings completed in 1945, is described by the source as containing Strauss's most sustained outpouring of tragic emotion. Conceived during the final years of World War II, it mourns the destruction of German culture, including the bombing of every great opera house in the country. Its title and inspiration came from a self-examining poem by Goethe that Strauss had long considered setting as a choral work. At the end of the war he 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, American soldiers arrived at his Garmisch estate. Strauss descended the staircase and announced to Lieutenant Milton Weiss of the U.S. Army, "I am Richard Strauss, the composer of Rosenkavalier and Salome." Weiss, himself a musician, recognized the name. An "Off Limits" sign was placed on the lawn. The American oboist John de Lancie, who was in the same army unit and knew Strauss's orchestral writing for oboe thoroughly, asked Strauss to compose an oboe concerto. Initially dismissive, Strauss completed the Oboe Concerto before the end of the year.

  His bank accounts were frozen and assets seized by American forces. In October 1945, he and Pauline left for Switzerland, settling first outside Zurich and later at the Montreux Palace hotel. Short of money, in 1947 he made a three-week trip to London, his last international tour, conducting tone poems and opera excerpts and attending a complete BBC staging of Elektra. The trip provided much-needed funds.

  From May to September 1948 he composed the Four Last Songs, which deal with the subject of dying. The last, "Im Abendrot," ends with the question "Is this perhaps death?" and closes not with words but with a quotation from his own tone poem Death and Transfiguration, the "transfiguration theme" he had written decades earlier. He had reportedly composed these songs with the soprano Kirsten Flagstad in mind, and she gave the first performance. His last public performance came on the 10th of June 1949, conducting the end of Act 2 of Der Rosenkavalier at the Prinzregententheater in Munich during celebrations of his eighty-fifth birthday. On the 8th of September he died quietly of kidney failure in his sleep at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, with Pauline surviving him by only eight months.

• 8. A Century Later

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  Stanley Kubrick chose the opening of Also sprach Zarathustra for his 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and overnight a tone poem written in 1896 became one of the most recognized pieces of music on earth. Film music historian Timothy Schuerer traced the deeper connection: the lush sound, expanded harmonic language, chromaticism, use of leitmotifs, and program music of Strauss's post-Romantic style had already formed the vocabulary that Hollywood composers like Max Steiner and Erich Korngold carried into film scoring. Roy Prendergast wrote that when Steiner, Korngold, and Newman faced the dramatic problems of film, they looked to Wagner, Puccini, Verdi, and Strauss for the answers. John Williams has extended that inheritance in scores for Superman and Star Wars.

  Until the 1980s, some post-modern musicologists characterized Strauss as a backward-looking conservative. Later research shifted that assessment toward a modernist who retained tonality and lush orchestration by choice, not default. The conductor Mark Elder, recalling his first encounter with Ariadne auf Naxos at a university production, said he "was flabbergasted. I had no idea music could do the things he was doing with harmony and melody."

  Strauss himself was characteristically ambivalent about his standing. In 1947 he declared: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer." Glenn Gould, writing in 1962, disagreed in the plainest possible terms, calling Strauss "the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century." Between those two poles, the listening public has consistently landed closer to Gould: Strauss remained in the top ten composers most performed by symphony orchestras in the US and Canada across the period 2002-2010, and is in the top five of twentieth-century composers by the number of currently available recordings. The Duet concertino for clarinet and bassoon, composed in 1948 as one of his last works, is still in the active repertoire, which means Richard Strauss has been in the concert hall continuously for more than a century.