Richard Strauss’s father, Franz, was a distinguished horn player in the orchestra of the Court Opera at Munich. His mother was a member of the prosperous brewing family, Pschorr. His father’s musical tastes were conservative, a characteristic reflected in his son’s early works. Richard began to compose at the age of six, and when he was ten wrote his first two published works, a serenade for wind instruments and the Festival March; he completed his Symphony in D minor in 1880, and a string quartet during the following year. Between 1882 and 1883 he was a student at Munich University, leaving it for a short period of study in Berlin before becoming Hans von Bulow’s assistant with the Meiningen Court Orchestra. Here a member of the orchestra, Alexander von Ritter, who was married to Richard Wagner’s niece Franziska, encouraged him to immerse himself in the music of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner. Strauss’s first characteristic work, his Horn Concerto No. 1, was premiered under Bulow’s direction in 1885. In the same year Bulow resigned from his position with the orchestra, to be replaced by Strauss.

Strauss composed Aus Italien following a visit to Italy in 1886 and Macbeth in 1887, the year in which he became third conductor at the Munich Court Opera. He was recruited as conductor at the Weimar Court Opera in 1889, the year of the controversial first performance of Don Juan, after which he wrote: ‘I now comfort myself with the knowledge that I am on the road I want to take, fully conscious that there never has been an artist not considered crazy by thousands of his fellow men’. He was invited by Wagner’s widow Cosima to conduct Tannhauser at the Bayreuth Festival in 1891 and the influence of Wagner’s music was easily discernible in Strauss’s first opera, Guntram, which was produced at Weimar in 1894. During the same year he married the soprano Pauline de Ahna and was appointed as conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, succeeding Bulow once again.

The next five years saw the composition of several of Strauss’s finest orchestral works, including the symphonic poems Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben. These were followed by several operas written in collaboration with the Viennese author Hugo von Hoffmansthal, including Salome (1905), Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912) and Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919). Strauss had been appointed conductor at the Berlin Court Opera in 1898 and he remained in this post until the end of World War I in 1918, when he resigned. The following year he became co-director of the Vienna State Opera with Franz Schalk, a relationship that lasted until 1925.

The final conducting appointment Strauss held was as chief conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (1933–1934) in succession to Bruno Walter, who was forced to resign from this post by Germany’s Nazi government. His last collaboration with Hoffmansthal, who died in 1929, was on the opera Arabella (1933). Later works included the operas Die schweigsame Frau (1935), with a libretto by Stefan Zweig, Friedenstag (1938), Daphne (1938), Die Liebe der Danae (1944), and Capriccio (1942), the libretto of which was written by the conductor Clemens Krauss, a close colleague of Strauss and an unparalleled interpreter of his music. World War II saw the destruction of the centres of Strauss’s world, notably the opera houses of Dresden (where many of his operas had received their first performances), Munich and Vienna. His last works, such as Metamorphosen (1946) and Vier letzte Lieder (1948), possess a valedictory quality that has rarely been equalled in music.

Strauss recorded a number of his own works throughout his lifetime as well as a limited repertoire by other composers. His great skill as a conductor is immediately apparent in, for instance, the way that he maintains exactly the same tempi in each of his recordings of Don Juan, despite the considerable passage of time between them. The recordings of his own works are also notable for their straightforward and unsentimental character, in contrast to later readings by other conductors. On the podium Strauss was a man of few gestures, conducting as much with his eyes as with his baton. At the same time the intensity that he was able to generate was exceptional: Arnold Rose, the leader of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and of the orchestra of the Vienna Opera, said that his Tristan und Isolde possessed an intensity that was equalled only by Furtwangler. Strauss was also a notable interpreter of Mozart, and did much to reintroduce several of Mozart’s previously neglected works, such as Cosi fan tutte and Idomeneo (in a version considerably adjusted by himself ), to the operatic repertoire.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).