Stamp of the Month: September 2024

Richard Strauss

The German composer and conductor Richard Strauss was born on June 11, 1864 in Munich. He died on September 8, 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. September 2024 will mark the 75th anniversary of his death.
 
As the son of a musician, Richard Strauss began composing at the age of six. He took composition lessons at high school and by his 18th birthday had already composed 140 works, a number of which had already been performed. On the recommendation of the conductor Hans von Bülow, he was appointed court music director in Meiningen in 1885, and a year later he was appointed third conductor at the Munich Court Opera. From 1889 to 1894 he was second conductor in Weimar, where his importance as a composer grew with the premieres of “Don Juan”, “Death and Transfiguration” and “Macbeth”.

Berlin 18.9.1954

Austria 23.5.1969

After his marriage to the soprano Pauline de Ahna, he became first conductor at the Court Opera in Munich in 1894, where he finally established his world fame as a composer with his tone poems such as “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. In 1898 Strauss went to Berlin, where his operas “Salome” and “Elektra” (in collaboration with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal) became the epitome of “modern” opera. The director Max Reinhardt ensured effective productions of his works and in 1911 Richard Strauss achieved an absolute success with the public with “Rosenkavalier”, the popularity of which continues to this day. In 1919 Strauss was hired as director of the Vienna State Opera and with new, major productions prevented – in his own words – the venerable opera house from becoming an “opera museum”.

In 1920, Strauss, Hofmannsthal and Reinhardt founded the Salzburg Festival as a cultural contrast to the consequences of the First World War. In the 1920s, Strauss worked on lighter material such as the musical comedies “The Egyptian Helen” and “Arabella”. After the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, Richard Strauss found a new lyricist for his opera “The Silent Woman” in the Jewish poet Stefan Zweig, a decision that had a decisive influence on his career. As the most famous German musician of his time, Strauss was appointed President of the Reich Music Chamber by the Nazis in 1933. The fact that Strauss, whose daughter-in-law was Jewish, opposed the “Aryan paragraph”, however, led to his forced resignation in 1935. He spent most of the Second World War in seclusion in Vienna and later fled to Switzerland with his wife. Shortly before his death, Richard Strauss received recognition once again: Thomas Beecham organized a Strauss festival in London in 1948, and in Munich he received numerous honors on his 85th birthday in 1949.
 

The video shows the suite from “Der Rosenkavalier” op. 59 by Richard Strauss, which was performed on January 17, 2020 by the WDR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of its chief conductor Cristian Măcelaru in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall.
 

Austria 1.6.1989

Austria 11.6.2014

Germany 16.9.1999