Works of Richard Strauss

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 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 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; An 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 large orchestra but was also able to achieve textures 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 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 Herod’s court. His next opera, 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, and 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 a 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 mastery and seriousness of this opera, which was at first lightly regarded but in which Strauss perfected his conversational melodic recitative.

With their last opera together, Arabella (1929–32), Strauss and his 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 finally come into its own as a delightful comedy. Of Strauss’s three operatic collaborations with Gregor, 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), two wind sonatinas (1943–45), and a concertino for clarinet and bassoon (1947). He also composed, in 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 his style, writing often for smaller orchestras, partly out of practical considerations (to ensure the audibility of sung words in the theatre) and partly because large-scale Romantic musical textures 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.