Life

Strauss’s father, Franz, was the principal 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 revered the classics and detested Richard Wagner both as a man and as 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 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 the 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 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, toured the United States, where in New York City 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 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 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.” 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 the 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 regime. After Hofmannsthal’s death in 1929 he had collaborated with the Jewish dramatist Stefan Zweig on a comic opera, Die schweigsame Frau (1935; The Silent Woman). This collaboration was unacceptable to the Nazis. The opera was banned after four performances, and Strauss was compelled to work with a non-Jewish librettist, Joseph Gregor. 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 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.