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Richard Strauss (1864
- 1949)
Munich, Germany
Richard
Strauss was a successful conductor and composer. The work
of Wagner was influential to him. He developed the symphonic
or tone poem to an unrivalled level of expressiveness and
after 1900 achieved great success with a series of impressive
operas, at first on a grand scale, but later tending to
a more classical restraint. His father was a horn player,
and provided Strauss with a good classical music background;
this was the only source of education exposure for Strauss.
By six, Strauss began composing. He had several works given
in Munich, including a symphony, when he was 17, and the
next year a wind serenade in Dresden and a violin concerto
in Vienna. At 20, a second symphony was given in New York
and he conducted the Meiningen Orchestra in a suite for
wind. In 1885 he became conductor of that orchestra, but
soon left and visited Italy. Strauss became the conductor
for the Munich Opera. As a conductor, Strauss experimented
with music and developed tone poetry, which was programmatically
oriented and as descriptive as the paint brushes of the
Renaissance. It is Don Juan that, with its orchestral
brilliance, its formal command and its vivid evocation of
passionate ardour (he was in love with the singer Pauline
von Ahna, his future wife), shows his maturity and indeed
virtuosity as a composer. With its premiere, at Weimar (he
had moved to a post at the opera house there), he was recognized
as the leading progressive composer in Germany. At the turn
of the century, Strauss wanted to explore the world of Operas.
His Feuersnot was given in 1901; in 1904 Salome was
begun, after Wilde's play. It was given at Dresden the next
year. Regarded as blasphemous and salacious, it ran into
censorship trouble but was given at 50 opera houses in the
next two years. This and Elektra (given in 1909)
follow up the tone poems in their evocation of atmosphere
and their thematic structure; both deal with female obsessions
of a disordered, macabre kind, with violent climaxes involving
gruesome deaths and impassioned dancing, with elements of
abnormal sexuality and corruption, exploiting the female
voice pressed to dramatic extremes. During the 1930s Strauss,
seeking a smooth and quiet Iife, had allowed himself to
accept - without facing up to their full import - the circumstances
created in Germany by the Nazis. For a time he was head
of the State Music Bureau and he once obligingly conducted
at Bayreuth when Toscanini had withdrawn. But he was frustrated
at being unable to work with his Jewish librettist, Stefan
Zweig (Hofmannsthal had been part-Jewish), and he protected
his Jewish daughter-in-law; during the war years, when he
mainly lived in Vienna, he and the Nazi authorities lived
in no more than mutual toleration. When Germany was defeated,
and her opera houses destroyed, Strauss wrote an intense
lament, Metamorphosen, for 23 solo strings; this is one
of several products of a golden 'Indian summer', which include
an oboe concerto and the Four Last Songs, works in
a ripe, mellow idiom, executed with a grace worthy of his
beloved Mozart. He died in his Garmisch home in 1949.
Works
Orchestral music
- Macbeth (1888)
- Don Juan (1888-1889)
- Death and Transfiguration (1889)
- Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Till Eulenspiegel's
Merry Pranks, 1895)
- Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra,
1896)
- Don Quixote (1897)
- Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life, 1898)
- Domestic symphony (1903)
- Alpine symphony (1915)
- Horn Concerto No. 2 (1842)
- Oboe Concerto (1946)
Operas
- Salome (1905)
- Elektra (1909)
- Der Rosenkavalier (The Cavalier of the Rose, 1911)
- Ariadne auf Naxos (1912)
- Die schweigsame Frau (The Silent Woman, 1935)
Chamber works
- Metamorphosen (1945)
Additional Information
Life and Works of Strauss - http://www.hnh.com/composer/straussr.htm
Sources:
Sony Classical. Sony
Music Entertainment. 2001. <http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/eras/romhist.html>
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