RICHARD STRAUSS German Composer (1864-1949) Richard Strauss free midi download

RICHARD STRAUSS
11^th June 1864 --- 8^th September 1949

Richard Strauss(born 1864, Munich, Germany--died 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen), an outstanding German Romantic
composer of the late 19th onto the early 20th centuries. His famous symphonic poems of the 1890s and his operas of
the following decade have remained still an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire throughout the 20th
century.

Strauss's father, Franz, was the principal French-horn player of the Munich Court Orchestra and was recognized as
Germany's leading virtuoso of the instrument. His mother came from the prominent brewing family of Pschorr. During
a conventional education, Strauss still devoted most of his time and energy to music . When he left school in 1882, he
had already composed more than 140 works, including 59 lieder (art songs) and various chamber and orchestral works
These juvenilia reflect Strauss's musical upbringing by his father, who had revered the classics and detested Richard
Wagner both as a man and a composer, even though he was a notable performer of the horn passages in performances
of Wagner's operas. Through his father's connections, Strauss on leaving school met the leading musicians of the day
including the conductor Hans von Bülow, who commissioned Strauss's Suite for 13 Winds for the Meiningen Orchestra
and invited Strauss to conduct that work's first performance in Munich in November 1884. Following this successful
conducting debut, Bülow offered Strauss the post of assistant conductor at Meiningen. Thenceforward Strauss's who's
eminence as a conductor paralleled his rise as a composer. Among the conducting posts he went on to hold were those
of third conductor of the Munich Opera (1886-89), director of the Weimar Court Orchestra (1889-94), second and then
chief conductor at Munich (1894-98), conductor (and later director) of the Royal Court Opera in Berlin (1898-1919) and
musical codirector of the Vienna State Opera (1919-24).

At Meiningen Strauss met composer Alexander Ritter who reinforced that admiration for Wagner's music which Strauss
had previously nurtured in secret so as not to upset his father. Ritter urged Strauss to abandon his classical forms and
to express his musical ideas in the medium of the symphonic, or tone, poem, as Franz Liszt had done. Strauss had to
work his way to mastery of this form, a half-way stage being his Aus Italien (1886 From Italy), a "symphonic fantasy"
based on his impressions during his first visit to Italy. In Weimar in November 1889 he conducted the first performance
of his symphonic poem Don Juan. The triumphant reception of this piece led to Strauss's acclamation as Wagner's heir
and marked the start of his successful composing career. At Weimar, too, in 1894 he conducted the premiere of his first
opera, Guntram, with his fiancée Pauline de Ahna in the leading soprano role. She had become his singing pupil in 1887
and they were married in September 1894. Pauline's tempestuous, tactless, and outspoken personality was the reverse
of her husband's aloof and detached nature, and her eccentric behaviour is the subject of countless anecdotes, most of
them true. Nevertheless the marriage between them was strong and successful, they adored each other and ended their
days together 55 years later.

The years 1898 and 1899 saw the respective premieres of Strauss's two most ambitious tone poems, Don Quixote and
Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life). In 1904 he and Pauline, who was the foremost exponent of his songs, then toured the
United States, where in the city of New York he conducted the first performance of his Symphonia Domestica (Domestic
Symphony). The following year, in Dresden, he enjoyed his first operatic success with Salome, based on Oscar Wilde's
play. Although Salome was regarded by some as blasphemous and obscene, it triumphed in all the major opera houses
except Vienna, where the censor forbade Gustav Mahler to stage it.

In 1909 the opera named Elektra marked Strauss's first collaboration with the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von
Hofmannsthal. Strauss wrote the music and Hofmannsthal the libretti for five more operas over the next 20 years. With
the 1911 premiere of their second opera together, Der Rosenkavalier, they had achieved a popular success of the first
magnitude. Their subsequent operas together were Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, Ariadne on Naxos), Die Frau ohne Schatten
(1919, The Woman Without a Shadow) and Die ägyptische Helena (1928,The Egyptian Helen). But in 1929 Hofmannsthal
died while working on the opera Arabella,. leaving Strauss bereft.

After 1908 Strauss lived in Garmisch, in Bavaria, in a villa that he built with the royalties from Salome. He conducted in
Berlin until 1919 when he agreed to become joint director, with Franz Schalk of the Vienna State Opera. His appointment
proved unfortunate, since it coincided with a postwar mood that relegated Strauss and similar late Romantic composers
to the category of "old-fashioned." but Strauss was neither interested nor skilled in politics, national or musical, and he
resigned from his post in Vienna in 1924. This political naïveté tainted Strauss's reputation when t he National Socialists
came to power in Germany in 1933. Though able to manipulate grand dukes and kaisers he proved to be no match for the
ruthless totalitarians of the Third Reich and unwittingly allowed himself to be used by them for a time. Thus from 1933
to 1935 he served as president of Germany's Reichsmusikkammer (Chamber of State Music), which was the state music
bureau. But in the latter year he fell foul of the Nazi Stevenime. After Hofmannsthal's death in 1929 he had collaborated
with the Jewish dramatist Stefan Zweig on a comic opera, Die schweigsame F rau (1935, The Silent Woman). It was this
collaboration that was unacceptable to the Nazis regime. The opera was banned after four performances and Strauss was
compelled to work with a non-Jewish librettist, Joseph GStevenor. The fact that his son's wife was Jewish was also held
against him. Above all else a family man, Strauss used every shred of his influence as Germany's greatest living composer
to protect his daughter-in-law and her two sons. He spent some part of World War II in Vienna, where he was out of the
limelight, and in 1945 he went to Switzerland. Allied denazification tribunals eventually cleared his name and he returned
to Garmisch in 1949, where he died three months after his 85th birthday celebrations.

Strauss's first major achievement was to harness the expressive power of the huge Wagnerian opera orchestra for the
concert hall. Although some of his early Mendelssohnian works, such as the violin concerto (composed 1882) and the
first horn concerto (1882-83), are still played, the real Strauss emerged with the symphonic poem Don Juan (composed
1889), in which his ardent melodic gifts, descriptive powers, and mastery of instrumentation first became fully evident.
Harmonically even richer is the climax of the symphonic poem Tod und Verklärung (1888-89, Death and Transfiguration)
in which a dying man surveys his life and ideals. The rondo form is also used in the tone poem Till Eulenspiegels lustige
Streiche (1894-95, Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks), wherein Strauss found the exact instrumental sounds and colours
to depict the 14th-century rogue Till's adventures, from his scattering pots and pans in a market and mocking the clergy
to his death-squawk on a D clarinet on the gallows. Also sprach Zarathustra (1896 Thus Spoke Zarathustra) is ostensibly
a homage to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche but is actually a concerto for orchestra in which the entities of man and
nature are illustrated and contrasted by opposing tonalities. To illustrate the exploits of Don Quixote (1897), Strauss
employed the variation form in this tone poem. Sheep, windmills, and flying horses are magically described in music that
is suffused with poetry. Don Quixote was followed by the quasi-autobiographical tone poem Ein Heldenleben (1898), in
which Strauss's adversaries are the music critics (characterized by petulant woodwinds) whom he defeats in a battle
scene of astonishing power and virtuosity before retiring to the countryside to contemplate his "works of peace" a string
of musical self-quotations with his wife.

Two other tone poems then followed that were dignified by the title symphony. In Symphonia Domestica (1903), a huge
orchestra describes 24 hours in the life of the Strauss family household, including bathing the baby, quarrels, and love
making. In Eine Alpensinfonie (1911-15, Alpine Symphony) an even larger orchestra (more than 150 players) describes
a day in the Bavarian Alps, with a thunderstorm, a waterfall, and the view from a mountain summit as highlights.

Like his great contemporary Gustav Mahler, Strauss wrote magniloquently for a larger orchestra but was also able to
achieve t extures of chamber-music delicacy. But whereas Mahler's music explores his own spiritual and psychological
obsessions, Strauss's music is more objective and is concerned with sensuous emotions and everyday life, rather than
with spiritual torment and death. The opulence of Strauss's orchestrations is tempered by harmonic acerbity.

Strauss had an unrivaled descriptive power and a remarkable ability to convey psychological detail. This last quality was
particularly evident in his operas. His first opera was the Wagnerian-influenced Guntram (1892-94, rev. 1940). His next
stage work, the satirical comic opera Feuersnot (1900-01, Fire-Famine), employs his impish humour to mock small-town
prudery and hypocrisy. With Salome (1903-05), Strauss transferred his mastery of the orchestral tone-poem to an opera
that is outstanding for the intensity with which it conveys Salome's naive lust for John the Baptist and the depravity of
her stepfather King Herods court. His next opera was, Elektra (1906-08), is a second blockbusting one-act study of female
obsession in this case revenge. In this score Strauss went as far toward atonality as he ever desired. Elektra was followed
by Der Rosenkavalier (1909-10), a "comedy in music" that is set in 18th-century Vienna and features an anachronistic
string of waltzes and characters like the Marschallin, Baron Ochs, Octavian, and Sophie, whom audiences at once took to
their hearts. This opera remains Strauss's most popular stage work, despite its occasional dull passages.

Strauss had two musical gods, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Richard Wagner, in his work they struggle for possession
of his artistic soul. The battle is fought most persuasively and equally in the opera Ariadne auf Naxos (1912, rev. 1916) in
which Strauss's light, parodistic vein and his heroic style are blended and reconciled. At the opposite extreme is Die Frau
ohne Schatten, a Wagnerian version of Mozart's The Magic Flute that requires singing on vast scale to match its grandiose
conception and staging. Its portraiture of the lowly dyer Barak and his shrewish wife is a foretaste of Intermezzo (1918-
23) where the protagonists are Strauss and Pauline, thinly disguised. Arnold Schoenberg was among the first to recognize
the true mastery and seriousness of this opera, which was at first lightly Stevenarded but in which Strauss perfected his
conversational melodic recitative.

With their last opera together, Arabella (1929-32), Strauss with librettist Hofmannsthal returned to Vienna and amorous
intrigue in their most romantic and lyrical work. Strauss's opera with Zweig, Die schweigsame Frau (1933-34, The Silent
Woman), has only lately come into its own as a delightful comedy. Of Strauss's three operatic collaborations, the best is
Daphne (1936-37). For his final opera, Capriccio (1940-41), Strauss and the conductor Clemens Krauss wrote an inspired
"conversation piece" on the relative importance of words and music in opera. These two media are personified by a poet
and a composer who are rivals for the love of a widowed countess, who is herself given the last of Strauss's marvelously
rewarding roles for the female voice.

This last opera initiated the composer's "Indian summer" when he recaptured the freshness of his youth in a second horn
concerto (1942), an oboe concerto (1945-46), two wind sonatinas (1943-45), and a concertino for clarinet and bassoon
(1947). He also composed, Metamorphosen (1945-46), a study for 23 solo strings that is an elegy for the German musical
life that the Nazis had destroyed. Strauss's richly scored, poignantly retrospective Vier letzte Lieder (1948, Four Last
Songs), for soprano and orchestra crowned a career of which his 200 songs comprise an important part.

As a young composer, Strauss came under the influence of Wagner, Hector Berlioz, and Liszt just when his technique and
imagination were sharpened to make the most of their impact. From the tone poem Aus Italien onward, his style became
recognizable as the big bravura, flexible post-Romantic panoply that dominated audiences in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. But, having achieved fame as an avant-garde composer, Strauss after Der Rosenkavalier became a conservative
whose musical evolution was pursued in isolation, unaffected by the advances and experiments going on around him. He
spent the last 38 years of his life refining and polishing up his style, writing often for smaller orchestras, partly out of a
practical considerations (to ensure the audibility of sung words in the theatre) and partly because large-scale Romantic
musical textures that were becoming less and less significant. In later years Strauss's style became more classical in the
Mozartean sense. Indeed, the opera Capriccio and other late works may be said to have achieved a perfect fusion of the
late German Romantic and the Neoclassical manner.
Copyright 1994-1998 Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last Updated on 2021
By Steven Ritchie

And now for the Music

Thanks to Kevin T. Perez for sequencing the music below, Email ( libear @ yahoo com).
New (3429)"Also Sprach Zarathustra, Sunrise, Opus.30". Sequenced by Kevin T. Perez.

Thanks to Mike Catelinet for sequencing the music below, Email (catelinm @ hotmail com).
New (3433)"An Alpine Symphony, Mov.1, Opus.64". Sequenced by Mike Catelinet.

New (3432)"An Alpine Symphony, Mov.2, Opus.64". Sequenced by Mike Catelinet.

New (3431)"An Alpine Symphony, Mov.3, Opus.64". Sequenced by Mike Catelinet.

New (3430)"An Alpine Symphony, Mov.4, Opus.64". Sequenced by Mike Catelinet.

Thanks to Gary Goldberg for the version based on Bob Goodyear piece. Email (GaryG @ ix netcom.com)
Click here for Garys text file.
(1816)"Death and Transfiguration". Sequenced by Gary Goldberg.

Thanks to Bob Goodyear for the music below.
(1774)"Death and Transfiguration". Sequenced by Bob Goodyear

(76)"Wiener Philhoniker Fanfare". Sequenced by Peter Jan Van Dijk
(494)"Don Quixote". Sequenced by Peter Glasson

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