Richard Strauss was born to a wealthy and prominent musical family. He revealed himself as a prodigy at a very young age, saw quick and spectacular success, and for decades enjoyed a pleasant and profitable career as composer and conductor. In his early work he is late-romantic in voice, but pushed that stylistic envelope to the brink of dissolution. Then he stepped backward instead of forward. He began his career as a bomb-throwing revolutionary and ended his long life outmoded and politically compromised. Perhaps Strauss didn’t mind that much. He was not worried about expressing his soul or his vision but, rather, interested in reveling in his gifts, making a lavish income, and enjoying his success. His work endures because in his compulsion to seize his audience he wrote some of the more vivacious, compelling, sometimes provoking music of his time. That the titanic opening of his Also sprach Zarathustra has become a cultural icon would perhaps have amused him; he would have appreciated the royalties even more.
Richard Georg Strauss was born in Munich, his father the principal horn of the court orchestra, his mother an heiress of Schorr, the still-famous brewery. His father’s tastes were conservative—he particularly loathed Wagner. In his early work, Strauss followed suit and adopted a comfortably neo-Brahmsian mode. By age eighteen he had composed some 140 pieces, some of them for orchestra. By age twenty he was assistant conductor of the famed Meiningen Orchestra. He would conduct widely for the rest of his life.
But behind his father’s back Strauss developed a great passion for Wagner, which changed the course of his life and work. On the advice of an older friend he abandoned classical forms and took up the Lisztean genre of the tone poem, a.k.a. symphonic poem. That led to the 1889 Don Juan and worldwide fame—or rather, for a while, a mingling of fame and infamy. The piece is already pure Strauss: it seems to explode out of the orchestra, seizing the audience by the throat. He never really lets you take a breath.
Strauss was a natural with the orchestra, writing for it in constantly changing colors and textures. Pursued more meticulously than any before him, his symphonic poems are virtual operas for orchestra, their stories portrayed with enormous musical/visual imagination. Musical progressives adopted him as their hero; Brahms called him “the chief of the insurrectionists.” Conservatives lambasted him for his rambling, post-Wagnerian harmony, his relentless nervous energy, his negation of the cherished idea of instrumental music as “pure” and “abstract.” But Strauss was a fine craftsman, his music does make internal sense, and the music easily dominates the stories. After all, beside Wagner, his other musical hero was Mozart.
Soon he premiered his first opera, Guntram, also in a post-Wagnerian vein, and married its leading soprano, Pauline de Ahna. A hyperdiva and grand eccentric, she more or less ran Strauss’s life from then on, which he appeared to appreciate over the fifty-five years of their marriage. She kept him on a short allowance, so he took to playing cards with his orchestral musicians and fleecing them regularly. Said conductor Hans Knappertsbuch: “I knew him very well. I played cards with him every week for forty years and he was a pig.”
In 1898 came Strauss’s second blockbuster symphonic poem, Don Quixote. Here his tone-painting went in even more crafty directions: the attack on the windmills, the bleating sheep and flying horses. Underlying it all was Strauss’s covert classical side; the music is laid out in the old genre of a theme and variations. Here and elsewhere in his symphonic poems you can find some of the greatest fun in the repertoire, a quality in which the concert hall is sometimes deficient.
Then Strauss turned back to opera, with a vengeance. He took up Oscar Wilde’s deliriously decadent play Salome and lavished his tone-painting skills on its most notorious elements: Salome smooching the decapitated head of John the Baptist, and of course her ecdysiastical “Dance of the Seven Veils.” Salome was widely condemned as blasphemous and immoral, was banned in Vienna, and made a sensation as intended. From the gratifying proceeds Strauss built a dream villa in Garmisch, where he and his wife lived the rest of their lives.
In the 1930s, Strauss like all contemporary artists faced the advent of totalitarianism and worldwide conflagration. Each dealt with the cataclysm in his own way. With the Nazis, at first, Strauss took the path of cooperation. Privately he called them a bunch of savages, but as the leading German composer of the time (at least for a regime that called modernist music “degenerate”) he was offered a position as head of the Chamber of State Music, and he took it. He lasted in the post for two years, but friction with the Nazi Party, including his defense of his Jewish librettist Stefan Zweig, led to his removal. From that point he tried to fade into the woodwork for the rest of the war. Whatever Strauss’s culpability, postwar tribunals did not bring charges against him as they did with some other artists.
In 1909 came Elektra, his first partnership with the great librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This story, based on the ancient Greek epic of Agamemnon, the Trojan War, and the bloody aftermath, reached a level of ferocity and hysterical near-atonality that took audiences’ breaths away.
In the next decades Strauss and Hofmannsthal had five more collaborations, above all the exquisite Der Rosenkavalier. Elektra did not mark the end of Strauss’s great work, but it was the last time he was called a bomb-thrower. Schoenberg and Stravinsky were already in the wings. Strauss’s style calmed down to something more backward-looking, but still rich and individual.
This being a book mainly about instrumental music, I’ll recommend another symphonic poem. Also sprach Zarathustra is an evocation of the philosopher Nietzsche’s mystical treatise of that name. Most of Zarathustra is not particularly mystical; rather, it is lushly and mellifluously Viennese-romantic. It was a modestly popular repertoire item when filmmaker Stanley Kubrick took up its opening “Dawn of Man” segment for the colossal opening of 2001. Zarathustra, or that opening anyway, became a culture-wide symbol of achievement, sold cars on TV, whatever. When the Boston Red Sox unrolled their first World Series banner in eighty-some years, it unrolled to “The Dawn of Man.”
At one point Strauss himself declared, “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer!” In a time whose most exciting musical voices were the likes of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Bartók, Strauss never departed again from his comfortable late-romantic style. His 1945–1946 Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings shows that in his eighties he could still wield that style in a work of great beauty, vitality, and nostalgia. The piece has no stated program, but many feel that it amounts to a memorial for what the Nazis destroyed in German culture. After the war Strauss wrote in his diary, “The most terrible period of human history is at an end, the twelve year reign of bestiality, ignorance and anti-culture under the greatest criminals, during which Germany’s 2000 years of cultural evolution met its doom.”
In 1948 came his farewell to music and to life, the Four Last Songs for soprano and orchestra. These four meditations on death are calmly beautiful, without bathos or sentimentality. Here his handling of the orchestra is at its most subtle and lovely. In September 1949 Strauss died in Garmisch, a relic of an earlier time, compromised but unbowed.
More Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks; Salome; Elektra; Der Rosenkavalier.