Strauss, Richard

(1864-1949)

   conductor and composer; his colorful orchestration and expressive power made him Germany's most celebrated com-poser from 1900 until his death. He was born to affluent circumstances in Mu-nich; his father was a well-known horn player, while his mother was a scion of the Pschorr brewing family. Composing by age six, he took piano and violin lessons, studied theory and composition with Friedrich Wilhelm Meyer, and then attended the University of Munich in 1882-1883. He was engaged as Meinin-gen's music* director in 1885 and became conductor of the Munich Court Or-chestra in 1894. Renowned for his virtuosity as both pianist and conductor, he was engaged in 1898 by Berlin's Court Opera on Unter den Linden; during 1908-1919 he also conducted the Berlin Court Orchestra. After five years of directing (with Franz Schalk) Vienna's State Opera, he worked from 1924 only as a guest conductor and composer. In 1924 he became honorary director of the Salzburg Festival.

   An early devotee of Brahms, Strauss eventually fell under Wagner's influence; a musical revolutionary, if a late romantic, his greatest creativity occurred before World War I. His tone poems Don Juan (1889), Till Eulenspiegel (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), and Don Quixote (1898), while stirring controversy in the Kaiserreich, became part of the Republic's orchestral repertoire. He was also a prolific songwriter. His operas incorporate Wagner's principles of musical drama. Salome (1905), based on Oscar Wilde's version of the biblical story, was banned after performances in New York and Chicago. Elektra (1909), his first opera to use a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, launched a partnership that ended in 1929 with the author's death; by then the two men had produced six operas. Der Rosenkavalier (1911), whose waltzes evoke old Vienna, was the most quickly accepted work in his repertoire. Despite an early interest in modern music (he corresponded with Arnold Schoenberg*), Strauss resolved that his music should be understood and abandoned efforts to fathom atonality in 1912. By the 1920s his "neoclassical" compositions (such as Intermezzo and Die ägyptische Helena), incorporating both baroque and classical elements, clearly diverged from the music of Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Ferruccio Busoni.*

   With Friedrich Rosch and Hans Sommer, Strauss had founded the Genossen-schaft deutscher Tonsetzer (Cooperative of German Composers) in 1898; it was the first organization aimed at providing security (e.g., copyright protection) for creative musicians. In November 1933 the NSDAP named him president of the Reichsmusikkammer. Neither Nazi nor anti-Nazi, he sparked controversy with his 1935 premiere of Die schweigsame Frau, an opera based on a libretto by Stefan Zweig, a Jew. The episode induced his resignation from the Reichsmu-sikkammer, after which he led a strictly private existence. He wrote until his death; his final compositions included The Four Last Songs.

   REFERENCES:Del Mar, Richard Strauss; Gilliam, Richard Strauss and His World; Krause, Richard Strauss; Marek, Richard Strauss.