Richard Strauss

Don Juan, first heard in 1888, announced a twenty-four-year-old with an entirely new command of the orchestra: brilliant, fast and exactly descriptive. Richard Strauss had grown up in Munich in the conservative household of his father Franz, a horn player who took part in Wagner premières and disliked the music; Alexander Ritter turned him towards the symphonic poem, and Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben followed within a decade. Then he turned to the stage. Salome and Elektra pushed harmony to the edge of tonality; Der Rosenkavalier stepped back from that edge into a Vienna of his own invention and became his most popular work. Six operas came from the collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the most consequential composer-librettist partnership since Mozart and Da Ponte, ending with Arabella; Capriccio, an opera about opera, followed in 1942. He was also among the outstanding conductors of his generation, with posts in Munich, Weimar, Berlin and Vienna. The late works — Metamorphosen, the Oboe Concerto and the Four Last Songs, completed in 1948 — return to a plain, luminous manner, and the songs were first sung after his death. As a boy he sat in regularly on the rehearsals of the Royal Opera orchestra in Munich, where his father was principal horn, and in time he conducted that orchestra himself. The concert works beyond the symphonic poems include two horn concertos, a violin concerto, the Burleske for piano and orchestra, a Romance for cello and orchestra, and the double concerto for clarinet and bassoon with strings.