Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss stands as the most renowned German composer of his era. He lived through a remarkable period in modern German history: his lifetime encompassed the rise and fall of an empire, the tumult of two world wars, the fluctuations of the Weimar Republic, and the challenges of national socialism, all of which culminated in his death the same year that Germany was split into East and West. Born in an age illuminated by oil lamps, he passed away in a world defined by nuclear power. Throughout this transformative time, Strauss maintained a distinguished career as a prolific composer and an esteemed conductor who collaborated with many of the leading composers, writers, and artists of his generation.

In a career that lasted almost eight decades, he explored nearly every musical genre, ultimately gaining recognition for his tone poems from the late 19th century and his operas from the early 20th century. Emerging as a composer during a time when the relationship between the bourgeois and the artist was increasingly fraught, Strauss adeptly navigated the realms of art and society with a unique blend of honesty and irony.

Averse to Richard Wagner’s metaphysics and Gustav Mahler’s philosophical intentions in music, Strauss focused on the paradoxes and complexities of modern life. This innovative approach is vividly illustrated in his opera Der Rosenkavalier, in which the combination of contemporary and deliberately outdated elements showcases a stylistic diversity that foreshadows the experimental trends of the later 20th century.

Early Works

Nurtured by a family steeped in music, Richard Strauss was a musical prodigy who began composing at the age of six. His maternal relatives, the Pschorrs, were a prominent brewing family of enthusiastic amateur musicians who hosted musical gatherings where the young Strauss showcased much of his early work, particularly piano pieces and songs. However, the most significant influence on his development came from his father, Franz Strauss, who was regarded as a leading horn player in Germany at the time. Much like Leopold Mozart with his son Wolfgang, Franz played a crucial role in shaping Richard’s early career, selecting his teachers in piano, violin, and composition.

Strauss’s initial compositions primarily featured Lieder, piano works, and chamber music. By the late 1870s, he began to show a growing fascination with orchestral music—a shift influenced by his father’s appointment as the director of an amateur orchestra in 1875. This role allowed him to immerse himself in the realm of symphonic composition; he attended rehearsals and joined the ensemble as a violinist in 1882. Under his father’s guidance, Strauss gained practical experience in orchestration and composed some of his earliest orchestral pieces for this group. His early orchestral repertoire included marches, concert overtures, and two symphonies—No. 1 in D minor (1880) and No. 2 in F minor (1884)—but his best remembered works from this period are those for 13 woodwinds, such as the Serenade (1881) and the Suite (1884), and his concertos for violin (1880–82) and horn (1882–83).

Middle Period: The Tone Poet and Opera Composer

Following the Symphony in F minor, Strauss encountered a pivotal crisis characterized by a disconnect between his intended artistic message and the means of its musical expression. Traditional forms proved inadequate for conveying his creative vision, prompting him to explore innovative structures for each new theme. This quest led him to the tone poem: an orchestral, one-movement format, often associated with Liszt, that allowed for a more fluid and dynamic formation of Strauss’s extramusical ideas. During his 1889–1893 tenure as Kapellmeister to the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach  in Weimar, he composed notable tone poems such as Macbeth (1888), Don Juan (1888), and Death and Transfiguration (1889), with the latter two becoming essential components of the contemporary orchestral canon.

Despite his success with tone poems, Strauss harbored a strong desire to create operas, drawing inspiration from Richard Wagner. He attempted this in 1893 with his opera Guntram, for which he also penned the libretto, mirroring Wagner’s approach. However, this work, so closely aligned with Wagner’s style, did not resonate with audiences and was quickly withdrawn after a few performances. Subsequently, while in Munich, Strauss recommitted himself to the genre of tone poems, producing orchestral works that exhibited a significantly broader scope than those from his Weimar period. Compositions such as Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1897), and Ein Heldenleben (1898) are notably longer, often doubling the length of Don Juan.

With the success of his tone poems, Strauss became the most famous composer in Germany, and he made a triumphant return to opera in 1905 with Salome, which garnered immense acclaim. His fruitful collaboration with writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal led to the creation of several notable operas, including Elektra (1908), Der Rosenkavalier (1910), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, rev. 1916), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919), Die ägyptische Helena (1927), and Arabella (1933). Following Hofmannsthal’s sudden passing, Strauss collaborated with the writer Stefan Zweig on Die schweigsame Frau in 1935, but this partnership was abruptly halted by the rise of the Nazi regime, which led Zweig, who was Jewish, to leave Germany. Subsequently, he worked with Joseph Gregor—a collaboration resulting in operas such as Friedenstag (1936), Daphne (1937), and Die Liebe der Danae (1938–40). His final opera, Capriccio, completed in 1941, is a “Conversation Piece for Music,” cowritten with conductor Clemens Krauss. Throughout his career, Strauss also composed numerous songs for voice and piano, as well as for voice and orchestra, initially dedicating them to his wife, Pauline, a talented singer who retired in 1904. Later, he found inspiration in other sopranos like Elisabeth Schumann, Maria Jeritza, and Lotte Lehmann. His Four Last Songs, completed in 1948, just a year before his death, are regarded as the zenith of his lyrical work, encapsulating the tranquility and luminescence of his later style.

Later Period: The War and the End

During the period surrounding the creation of Capriccio, Germany was engulfed in the turmoil of a war ignited by Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Although Strauss was never a member of the Nazi Party, he initially collaborated with the regime, even taking on the role of President of the Reich Chamber of Music from 1933 to 1935. His tenure ended when it became evident that he would not conform to the regime’s ideological demands. Following his dismissal, the lack of governmental protection heightened his concerns for his Jewish daughter-in-law, Alice, and his grandsons, creating a persistent source of distress for the composer. Despite this, his early cooperation with the Nazis casts a shadow over his legacy.

Music historians often seek a cohesive thread within a composer’s body of work, aiming to connect their output with their worldview and historical context. However, Strauss’s cool, phlegmatic exterior complicates such analyses. Additionally, his diverse repertoire, which spans the concert hall, chamber music, Lieder, ballet, opera, and even cinema, resists easy cultural biographies especially those clinging to notions of music as an autonomous, transcendent art. Strauss once remarked that his body of work was “bridged by contrasts,” and indeed, few adjacent pieces maintain a consistent tone, whether tragic or comic. For instance, the heroic Ein Heldenleben follows the anti-heroic Don Quixote, while the tortuous Elektra is succeeded by the more lyrical Der Rosenkavalier.

A notable thread throughout Strauss’s oeuvre is his exploration of the complexities and nuances of everyday life, even within seemingly trivial moments; the sublime final trio of Der Rosenkavalier, for example, is derived from a simple waltz theme introduced earlier in the opera. Despite these contrasts, a coherent trajectory can be discerned in Strauss’s compositional journey, which initially emphasized instrumental music—solo piano and chamber works before a transition to orchestral compositions in the 1880s. As the century turned, following a deep engagement with tone poems, Strauss shifted his focus to opera, which dominated his later years.

However, after completing Capriccio, the aging composer stepped away from the stage, returning to the genres of his youth, such as wind serenades and concertos for horn and oboe. Approaching the end of his life, he exhibited nostalgia without sentimentality, firmly upholding his atheism even on his deathbed, where he expressed to his daughter-in-law, “I am not afraid to die. I have done my job.”

Watching and Listening

There are some remarkable Strauss chamber works from the mid-1880s that are worthy of attention. In the mid-1880s, the composer went through a period that he called his “Brahms-Schwärmerei,” or “Brahms-Infatuation,” connected to his time as assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow, the great Brahms champion. One product of the period was his outstanding Piano Quartet in C minor (1885), reminiscent of Brahms’s emotional C-minor Piano Quartet (No. 3) of 1875: striking are the rich harmonies and intricate thematic development. A similarly richly textured work, though not Brahmsian, is Strauss’s String Sextet in F major, which served as the prelude to his final opera, Capriccio. The same rich textures apply, but there are some wonderful chromatic twists and turns in the harmonies. Both of these works have been performed at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and can be found in the Archive.

Strauss: Quartet in C minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 13

Videos from the Archive:

More Videos