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 [Publisher description].

Renowned as the gifted composer of a string of masterworks, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) is less often remembered for his achievement as a major conductor. This book considers Strauss' career as a conductor and places it in relation to his life as a composer.

Richard Strauss saw an empire come and go, survived two world wars, witnessed the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, endured the period of National Socialism, and died the year that Germany was officially divided into two separate states. All the while he enjoyed a successful career as composer, as conductor of international stature, as organizer for the rights of composers, and as colleague of and collaborator with some of the most important composers, writers, and artists of his day. This biography covers Strauss's early musical development, his emergence as a tone poet in the late nineteenth century, his turn to the stage at the beginning of the twentieth century, the successes and failures of the post-World War I era, the turbulent 1930s, and the period of the Second World War and its aftermath.

A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.

Richard Strauss in Context offers a distinctive approach to the study of a composer in that it places the emphasis on contextualizing topics rather than on biography and artistic output. One might say that it inverts the relationship between composer and context. Rather than studies of Strauss's librettists that discuss the texts themselves and his musical settings, for instance, this book offers essays on the writers themselves: their biographical circumstances, styles, landmark works, and broader positions in literary history. Likewise, Strauss's contributions to the concert hall are positioned within the broader development of the orchestra and trends in programmatic music. In short, readers will benefit from an elaboration of material that is either absent from or treated only briefly in existing publications. Through this supplemental and broader contextual approach, this book serves as a valuable and unique resource for students, scholars, and a general readership.

Norman Del Mar (1919-1994) was universally recognised as a leading authority on the music of Richard Strauss, and his masterly three-volume study of his life and works remains a classic. Volume I deals with the years from the composer's birth (1864) to Der Rosenkavalier (1912), discussing the early orchestral and chamber music, the tone poems and the operas Guntram, Feuersnot, Salome and Elektra. 'Deploying a well-nigh encyclopaedic knowledge, Mr Del Mar acquits himself brilliantly of his task of disentangling and reassembling the numerous strands that make up the backcloth of poetry and philosophy which Strauss, while not always understanding every intricacy, yet needed as a constant reference map for his composing. The three volumes of this magnificent book should be studied by all lovers of the late-romantic music, amateurs and professionals alike...a monumental achievement.' Times Literary Supplement 'A brilliant and copiously analytical study ... a constant fascination.' Guardian