Strauss, Richard

Salome. Elektra. English National Opera Guide 37

Erte's Costumes & Sets for "Der Rosenkavalier" in Full Color

Richard Strauss: An Intimate Portrait

Richard Strauss (1864 -1949) always claimed that his music was a self-portrait, that he depicted himself, his nature, and his world in musical notes. From the charming autobiographical opera Intermezzo, based on a domestic misunderstanding, to the self-confident tone poem Ein Heldenleben, the composer's works relate to his personal experience as closely as those of any nineteenth-century Romantic. For the huge audience that enjoys the music of Strauss, Kurt Wilhelm's book has proved to be a cornucopia of information. Many of the numerous illustrations--taken from the private archive of the Strauss family--have never been published previously, and all are of immense historical interest. Skillfully woven around them is a detailed and revealing text, rich in anecdotes, quotations, and personal reminiscences by members of the Strauss family and contemporaries. The result is an intimate investigation of the private life, opinions, background, and works of Strauss that comes as close to the man as one is likely to get.

Richard Strauss: The Staging of His Operas and Ballets

Richard Strauss (20th-Century Composers)

Richard Strauss's 85 years of life spanned a revolution in Germany - from 1864 when the nation did not exist to 1949.A nationalist but also a humanist, he believed in culture as moral exoneration' and chose to remain in Nazi Germany and serve the Third Reich.Matthew Boyden examines for the first time Strauss's behaviour under Nazism, and assesses the incongruity of a seemingly crude character and the unfailing beauty and articulation of his music.A product of his age, an astounding talent and a man adept at concealing himself, Strauss only properly revealed his nature during the last twenty years of his life, when the pressures became both unbearable and unavoidable.This is the first detailed study of that nature.

A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931-1935

Richard Strauss (The Master Musicians)

There are few composers whose critical stock has roller-coastered as dramatically as that of Richard Strauss, both during his lifetime and in the five decades since his death in 1949. Once considered a dangerous firebrand of the avant-garde--his early masterpiece Salome was given the equivalent of an X rating--Strauss remained an exceedingly prolific composer throughout his long career, yet lived to be "written off as an extinct volcano." The painful story of his involvement with the Third Reich further cast a pall over his final years. But in the past two decades, a gradual reassessment has been underway--along with a recuperation of his neglected later works--and the field is ripe for a critically insightful overview of Strauss's achievement.

Such is the goal of Michael Kennedy, a longtime advocate of Strauss, in his new biography, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. Kennedy, the Sunday Telegraph's music critic and author of several other musical biographies--including an earlier study of the composer as well as illuminating articles and CD booklets on his music--here undertakes to penetrate the contradictions and see the man whole. Through his impressive access to diaries, letters, and living relatives, he posits an underlying consistency of attitude that made "art the reality in [Strauss's] life." The central enigma about the composer that fascinates Kennedy is the "disparity between man and musician," the paradox that this fundamentally aloof and reserved person, dedicated to bourgeois stability, could produce music of such overpowering passion.

While steering clear of Freudian reductionism, Kennedy reveals the crucial significance of Strauss's mother's nervous instability--she was eventually committed to various sanatoriums--and the centrality of the work ethic inherited from his father. The result was to make music "Strauss's means of escape ... and in much of his music he wore a mask." Yet for all his aloofness, Strauss "let [the mask] slip"--another aspect of the enigma surrounding him--in such compositions as Don Quixote ("the most profound" of his orchestral works) or the pervasively autobiographical Sinfonia Domestica, Intermezzo, and Capriccio, which Kennedy counts as Strauss's greatest achievement for the lyrical stage.

Kennedy is particularly persuasive in his high estimation of the post-Rosenkavalier output and the undiminished quest for artistic innovation that they continued to exemplify--above all in Strauss's development of a fluently conversational style in his operas. Although commentary on individual works involves generally concise summations, many observations sparkle with insight, and Kennedy continually sheds light on neglected gems among Strauss's output. The rapport with Hofmannsthal and his other librettists is admirably clarified, and the remarkably well-read Strauss emerges as a more imposingly intellectual figure, steeped in literature and philosophy, than he is usually depicted. We learn of his obsession with the card game skat and of his disdainful attitude toward the new medium of film. Kennedy similarly demystifies much of the received opinion that has developed around the composer, particularly in his level-headed portrait of his wife, Pauline. The fundamental happiness of their lifelong relationship emerges as a context indispensable to Strauss's creative focus.

Kennedy devotes a significant portion of the book to the composer's position as president of the Reich Music Chamber and subsequent fall from grace both with the Nazis and in world opinion. Here the author aims to offer perspective by carefully detailing the facts and documentary evidence from the time. In his view, Strauss becomes a "tragic figure, symbolising the struggle to preserve beauty and style in Western European culture" against emerging barbarism. Yet, as throughout the book, Kennedy's abiding sympathy with Strauss at times veers close to a kind of special pleading that invites skepticism. For all that, his style is admirably lucid, and his biography largely succeeds in pointing to a greatness that "has not yet been fully understood and discovered." --Thomas May

Celebrating its 100th anniversary, this extraordinary series continues to amaze and captivate its readers with detailed insight into the lives and work of music's geniuses. Unlike other composer biographies that focus narrowly on the music, this series explores the personal history of each composer and the social context surrounding the music. In a precise, engaging, and authoritative manner, each volume combines a vivid portrait of the master musicians' inspirations, influences, life experiences, even their weaknesses, with an accessible discussion of their work-all in roughly 300 pages. Further, each volume offers superb reference material, including a detailed life and times chronology, a complete list of works, a personalia glossary highlighting the important people in the composer's life, and a select bibliography. Under the supervision of music expert and series general editor Stanley Sadie, Master Musicians will certainly proceed to delight music scholars, serious musicians, and all music lovers for another hundred years.
Extensively revised, this well-received account of Richard Strauss's life and music enters its second edition. The life was rich in controversy, from the `outrage' caused by operas Salome and Elektra to the years under the Nazi regime. In his survey of the music, rejecting the generally accepted view that Strauss's genius declined in his middle years, Michael Kennedy traces refinements of style from the early 1920s to Strauss's late works.

This first detailed biography of Strauss for many years re-assesses the man and his music half a century after his death, drawing on much hitherto ignored material. Kennedy considers fully the period during the Third Reich when Strauss was first feted and then cold-shouldered by the authorities, as well as describing his long, happy but tempestuous marriage. A picture emerges of a level-headed, practical and extremely versatile musician--a great conductor as well as a great composer.

Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music And The German Intellectual Tradition: The Philosophical Roots Of Musical Modernism

The young Richard Strauss was almost exclusively an orchestral composer. Yet, the year 1903 brought a significant break from orchestral writing, and Strauss then shifted his focus to opera for the next four decades. In the aftermath of the Second World War he returned to orchestral music, having first served and then been summarily dismissed by the Third Reich. Despite its enduring appeal among concert audiences, and the intriguing pattern of his compositional career, Richard Strauss's orchestral music has yet to receive the scholarly consideration it deserves.

Richard Strauss's Orchestral Music and the German Intellectual Tradition breaks new ground in Straussian studies. Youmans provides a provocative investigation of Strauss's private intellectual life and its impact on the brilliant music he created during the formation of his worldview. The composer's works have traditionally been viewed as a product of high German Romanticism, yet Youmans demonstrates that Strauss's entire body of orchestral music can be read as a history of his struggle with specific intellectual-historical concerns. Exploring the significant influences of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Goethe, and Wagner on the young composer, Youmans insightfully establishes that the cultural convictions and preconceptions which grounded the composer's artistic choices in fact provided him with the philosophical and musical materials that formed the basis of an early modernism. Through this grounding, the mature Strauss succeeded in opening up a new aesthetic frontier devoted to! optimism, physicality, and the visual.

Richard Strauss and His World

A valuable late-summer festival at Bard College in upstate New York, devoted each year to a different composer, has produced several noteworthy collections of papers. This volume on Strauss appeared just before the 1992 festival. When the book was first published, Timothy L. Jackson's thoughts on the Four Last Songs got the most attention. Jackson argues, quite persuasively, that the four songs were originally five, with the orchestral song "Ruhe, meine Seele!" to be heard before "Im Abendrot." His analysis extends all the way to details of orchestration, but the best proof is in the hearing. Several recordings (such as Jessye Norman's with Kurt Masur) allow listeners to program the songs in this order, and the sequence is revelatory.

Elsewhere, Leon Botstein contributes the "keynote address," taking up the odd disjunction of the composer's life versus his music. He demolishes the idea of Strauss having stylistic shifts. (Botstein, as president of Bard College, is known to consider Elektra one of the essential texts for a liberal-arts education.) Michael Steinberg takes on Strauss's behavior during the Nazi era. Like Kirsten Flagstad, Karl Boehm, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Strauss will always be linked to his politics. James Hepokoski offers a look at Macbeth, Strauss's first tone poem. In general, the lesser-known works such as Intermezzo and the Burleske for piano and orchestra come up more than you would expect, with correspondingly less on Don Juan or Ariadne auf Naxos. Two chapters offer selections from the composer's correspondence, nicely translated by Susan Gillespie. The most interesting is that with Josef Gregor, the librettist for Daphne. The essays are quite fine individually; taken together they offer nothing less than a wholesale reevaluation of the composer. Focusing on the "middle period" after Elektra, editor Gilliam asks for a separation of style from historical era, and it is the key to a much deeper understanding of the music. --William R. Braun

Strongly influencing European musical life from the 1880s through the First World War and remaining highly productive into the 1940s, Richard Strauss enjoyed a remarkable career in a constantly changing artistic and political climate. This volume presents six original essays on Strauss's musical works--including tone poems, lieder, and operas--and brings together letters, memoirs, and criticism from various periods of the composer's life. Many of these materials appear in English for the first time. In the essays Leon Botstein contradicts the notion of the composer's stylistic "about face" after Elektra; Derrick Puffett reinforces the argument for Strauss's artistic consistency by tracing in the tone poems and operas the phenomenon of pitch specificity; James Hepokoski establishes Strauss as an early modernist in an examination of Macbeth; Michael Steinberg probes the composer's political sensibility as expressed in the 1930s through his music and use of such texts as Friedenstag and Daphne; Bryan Gilliam discusses the genesis of both the text and the music in the final scene of Daphne; Timothy Jackson in his thorough source study argues for a new addition to the so-called Four Last Songs. Among the correspondence are previously untranslated letters between Strauss and his post-Hofmannsthal librettist, Joseph Gregor. The memoirs range from early biographical sketches to Rudolf Hartmann's moving account of his last visit with Strauss shortly before the composer's death. Critical reviews include recently translated essays by Theodor Adorno, Guido Adler, Paul Bekker, and Julius Korngold.

Richard Strauss: Salome (Cambridge Opera Handbooks)

This full-length study of Salome is the first in English since Lawrence Gilman's introductory guide of 1907. The handbook presents an informative collection of historical, critical and analytical studies of one of Strauss's most familiar operas. Classic essays by Mario Praz and Richard Ellmann cover the literary background. How Strauss adopted Wilde's play for his libretto is discussed by Roland Tenschert in a fascinating essay which has been updated by Derrick Puffett. In three central analytical chapters, Derrick Puffett considers Salome in relation to Wagnerian music drama, Tethys Carpenter examines its tonal and dramatic structure, and Craig Ayrey analyses the final monologue. The last part of the book moves from analysis to criticism, with a review by John Williamson of the opera's critical reception and an interpretative essay by Robin Holloway. The book also contains a synopsis, bibliography, and discography; Strauss's little-known scenario for the 'Dance of the Seven Veils' is reprinted as an appendix.

This first full-length study of Salome in English since Lawrence Gilman's (1907) moves from historical and literary analysis to critical appraisal and includes a synopsis, bibliography and discography.