Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss was born in Munich on 11 June 1864. His father, Franz Strauss, was principal horn of the Munich Court Opera orchestra, one of the finest horn players in Germany, a very conservative musician who loathed Wagner’s music even though he played his operas. His mother came from the wealthy Pschorr brewing family. Richard was no relation to Johann Strauss, the Viennese waltz king. He began piano at four and composed his first pieces at six.

He received a solid classical training but did not attend a conservatory. His early works, in the style of Mendelssohn and Brahms, were performed while he was still at school. In 1885 the famous conductor Hans von Bülow took him on as assistant at Meiningen, and Strauss then succeeded him as head of the orchestra. There the violinist Alexander Ritter introduced him to Wagner and Liszt and encouraged him to write “programme music” that tells a story. He then became a conductor at the Munich Opera and later in Weimar.

In 1889 his tone poem Don Juan, premiered in Weimar, made him famous overnight with its drive, dazzling orchestral colours and virtuosity. A series of masterpieces followed: Death and Transfiguration (1890); Till Eulenspiegel (1895), recounting the pranks of a folk character up to his hanging; Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), after Nietzsche, whose opening sunrise Stanley Kubrick used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey; Don Quixote (1897); and Ein Heldenleben (1898), in which the hero is himself.

In 1894 he married the soprano Pauline de Ahna, a singer with an explosive temperament known for her rages, whom he adored and for whom he wrote many songs. In 1898 he became conductor of the Berlin Court Opera. He then turned to opera. In 1905 Salome, after Oscar Wilde’s play, caused a scandal with its violence and sensuality, including the famous “Dance of the Seven Veils”, but triumphed throughout Europe; his royalties allowed him to build a villa at Garmisch in the Bavarian Alps. Elektra (1909), after Sophocles, went even further in dissonance.

With the Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal he formed one of the most famous partnerships in operatic history. Their Der Rosenkavalier (1911), a nostalgic comedy set in eighteenth-century Vienna, with its waltzes and sublime final trio, was a phenomenal success: special trains brought audiences from Berlin to Dresden. Together they wrote Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919) and Arabella (1933). Strauss also composed An Alpine Symphony (1915), depicting the ascent of a mountain with wind and thunder machines. From 1919 to 1924 he co-directed the Vienna Opera.

In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, Strauss, then the most famous living German composer, accepted the presidency of the Reich Music Chamber, believing he could protect German music. But he was removed in 1935 after a letter to his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig criticising the regime was intercepted by the Gestapo. He continued to live in Germany, partly to protect his daughter-in-law, who was of Jewish descent, and his grandchildren. His stance towards the regime remains much debated.

The destruction of German opera houses by bombing devastated him: in 1945 he composed Metamorphosen, an elegy for twenty-three strings mourning the destroyed German culture. After the war he lived for a time in Switzerland. At eighty-four he composed his Four Last Songs (1948), of luminous serenity, on poems by Hermann Hesse and Joseph von Eichendorff meditating on evening and death. He died at Garmisch on 8 September 1949. At his funeral the final trio from Der Rosenkavalier was sung.