“I may not be a first-rate composer,” declared Richard Strauss with characteristic self-deprecation, “but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” He was speaking in 1947, aged 83, during a golden Indian summer which yielded such works as Metamorphosen and the Four Last Songs.
Strauss was most definitely a first-rate composer, particularly in the realm of opera, from the succès de scandale of Salome (1905) to the wistful “conversation piece”, Capriccio (1942). He also excelled at writing tone poems, where he harnessed the dramatic power of the Wagnerian opera orchestra and unleashed it into the concert hall with flair and opulence.
Strauss was born into a musical family in Munich, 11th June 1864. His father, Franz Strauss, was Principal Horn of the Munich Court Orchestra, and had an important influence on his son’s musical education. A prodigy in composition, by the time he left school in 1882, he had 140 works under his belt. Through Franz’s connections, Hans von Bülow commissioned the Suite in B flat major for 13 wind instruments for the Meiningen Orchestra and invited the young Strauss to conduct its November 1884 premiere. This led to von Bülow offering Strauss the post of assistant conductor at Meiningen, launching a parallel career that continued through his long life, including key posts in Munich, Berlin, Vienna and at the Bayreuth Festival.
In Meiningen, Strauss was encouraged to adopt the symphonic poem as a genre and the triumph of Don Juan (1889) led to him being acclaimed as Wagner’s heir. In 1894 came the premiere of his first opera, Guntram, where the lead soprano role was taken by Pauline de Ahna, a few months before they married. Pauline was ill-tempered and outspoken – quite the opposite to Richard – yet theirs was a happy marriage and she was depicted musically as the hero’s companion in Ein Heldenleben and in the Symphonia domestica. Strauss’ opera Intermezzo is a thinly veiled portrait of their happy marriage.
As well as Pauline, Strauss was generally in love with the soprano voice itself and his greatest roles – Salome, Elektra, the Marschallin, Ariadne, Arabella, Daphne – were written for sopranos, as well as the vast majority of his nearly 200 Lieder.
Salome was Strauss’ big operatic breakthrough. With his next opera, Elektra, a study in bloody revenge, Strauss went to the very edge of the atonal abyss… only to swiftly withdraw. Elektra was Strauss’ first collaboration with Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. The would produce five more operas together, including Der Rosenkavalier and Die Frau ohne Schatten. In 1920, they were among the co-founders of the Salzburg Festival.
Strauss’ reputation was later tainted by association with the Third Reich. In 1933, he was appointed President of Germany’s Reichsmusikkammer (Chamber of State Music) as well as Principal Conductor at Bayreuth, replacing Arturo Toscanini who had resigned in protest against the Nazis. Toscanini was not impressed: “To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.”
But Strauss was no Nazi. His daughter-in-law, Alice, was Jewish and he did much to protect her and his grandchildren. When he insisted on using Stefan Zweig, a Jewish librettist, for his opera Die schweigsame Frau, the Nazis fired Strauss from his official posts.
Postwar, Strauss’ name was cleared at the Allied denazification tribunals, after which he returned to live out his final years in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the villa he had built on the royalties earned from Salome. He died on 8th September 1949. From his death-bed, he remarked to Alice that “dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung”.
1Salome
Based on Oscar Wilde’s notorious play, Strauss turned Salome into an equally notorious opera: bloody, biblical and erotic. The Judean princess, fascinated by the imprisoned John the Baptist but rejected by him, performs the Dance of the Seven Veils for her stepfather, Herod, who has promised her anything she requests. When she asks for the head of the prophet as her reward, he is revulsed, but yields to her demand. The opera is lushly scored, really a tone poem with singing. Strauss himself described Salome as “a scherzo with a fatal conclusion”.
2An Alpine Symphony
Eine Alpensinfonie was the last of Strauss’ tone poems (1915), taking its inspiration from Nietzsche. The struggle between man and his natural surroundings is depicted in the form of a dawn-to-dusk trek, the ascent and descent from an alpine mountain serving as a metaphor for the exaltation of nature. It was written for a huge orchestra – around 125 players – its instrumentation including a wind machine, cowbells, organ and a massive brass section. At the final rehearsal, Strauss quipped, “You see, I have finally learned how to orchestrate.”
3Four Last Songs
The Four Last Songs were not written as a cycle. But they are songs of farewell – to life, to music, to a vanishing world – wistful and nostalgic. Strauss’ orchestration is miraculous, the heart-stopping solo violin soaring in Beim Schlafengehen (On going to sleep), and trilling flutes, representing skylarks, in Im Abendrot (At Sunset). The soprano’s final line, “Ist dies etwa der Tod?” (Could this perhaps be death?) is followed by a hushed quotation from the composer’s early tone poem, Death and Transfiguration.
4Der Rosenkavalier
“We were born for one another and are certain to do fine things together,” Strauss wrote to Hofmannsthal after their first collaboration. Their biggest success was Der Rosenkavalier, a bittersweet comedy of manners set in 18th-century Vienna. The title character is the teenaged Octavian – a dead ringer for Mozart’s Cherubino – who is chosen to present a silver rose to Sophie, the oafish Baron Och’s (much) younger bride-to-be. The central character is the Marschallin, who entertains Octavian as her lover, only to eventually lose him to Sophie. The opera bursts with anachronistic waltzes, Strauss paying tribute to his namesake Johann (no relation).
5Death and Transfiguration
Strauss provided his own neat summary of Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). “It occurred to me to present in the form of a tone poem the dying hours of a man who had striven towards the highest idealistic aims, maybe indeed those of an artist.” Composed when he was only 25, it opens with an evocative deathbed setting and the reliving of a flood of memories before exploring the mystery of death and what might lie beyond.
6Don Juan
Strauss’ hedonistic first tone poem is based on the legend of the Spanish libertine nobleman, but based on Nikolaus Lenau’s verse drama. Our swaggering hero makes a swashbuckling arrival, a brilliant upward flourish, before hurtling from one amorous conquest to the next. Tired of his unfulfilled life, his world crashes to a halt with a rapier thrust when he is willingly killed in a duel by an avenging father.
7Don Quixote
Another tone poem based on another Don, this time the chivalric knight-errant of Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote. Strauss uses variation form through his work to depict the Don’s various (mis)adventures – bleating sheep, tilting at windmills, penitent pilgrims, magic flying horses. The befuddled Quixote, represented by a solo cello, and his faithful servant Sancho Panza (viola), set off to find the object of the Don’s desire, the fair Dulcinea, a journey that ends in resignation and death.
8Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks
The jester-like Till Eulenspiegel was a legendary mischief-maker of German folklore. In Strauss’ tone poem he is represented by a mocking, shrieking D clarinet. He gets up to no good, causing mayhem when he rides his horse through a marketplace, impersonating the clergy, flirting with pretty girls, mocking pompous academics. Eventually, Till is put on trial, condemned to hang, squawking from the gallows. Strauss frames his work with a “Once upon a time” string theme… and leaves a final musical joke as Till gets the last laugh.
9Horn Concerto no. 1 in E flat major
The magical playing of his father, Franz, was doubtless an influence on the young Strauss’ First Horn Concerto, composed when he was only 18 years old. It was initially dedicated to Franz, but it was changed at his father’s request; he wanted his son’s musical identity to be independent. Indeed, Strauss Snr never performed the work in public. The concerto is in three linked movements and, after an opening flourish, showcases the horn’s noble, Romantic sensibilities.
10Morgen!
Set to a text by John Henry Mackay, Morgen! (Tomorrow!) is the last of the four Op.27 Lieder composed by Strauss in 1894 as a wedding present to his wife, Pauline. It remains one of Strauss’ most popular songs, especially in the composer’s own orchestration, which features a luscious violin solo:
And tomorrow the sun will shine again
And on the path that I shall take,
It will unite us, happy ones, again,
Amid this same sun-breathing earth...
