Richard Strauss

Richard Strauss was born in Munich in June 1864, the son of Franz Strauss, principal horn at the Bavarian Court Opera. He composed from the age of six, and his early symphonies and concertos were performed by major German orchestras while he was still in his teens. He read briefly at Munich University before taking up conducting professionally; he held posts at Meiningen, Munich, Weimar and Berlin, and from 1919 to 1924 was Director of the Vienna State Opera.

His mature output divides into two principal areas. The tone poems of the 1880s and 1890s — *Don Juan*, *Tod und Verklärung*, *Till Eulenspiegel*, *Also sprach Zarathustra*, *Don Quixote*, *Ein Heldenleben* — pushed the orchestral resources of the time to their structural and expressive limits. The operas that followed — *Salome* (1905), *Elektra* (1909), *Der Rosenkavalier* (1911), *Ariadne auf Naxos* (1912/16), *Die Frau ohne Schatten* (1919) and several later works on libretti by Hugo von Hofmannsthal — defined what German opera could do in the twentieth century. The *Four Last Songs*, composed in 1948, closed his output with a return to the lyric vocal writing that had run through it from the start.

Strauss’s role under National Socialism — President of the Reichsmusikkammer briefly in 1933–35, his work afterwards conducted under the regime — has been the subject of continuing historical debate. He died at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in September 1949. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his operatic and orchestral work.