Early life and career (1864–1886) , father of Richard Strauss Strauss was born on 11 June 1864 in
Munich, the son of Josephine (née Pschorr) and
Franz Strauss, who was the principal
horn player at the Court Opera in Munich and a professor at the
Königliche Musikschule. His mother was the daughter of Georg Pschorr, a financially prosperous
brewer from Munich. A
child prodigy in composition, Strauss began his musical studies at the age of four, studying piano with August Tombo who was the harpist in the Munich Court Orchestra. In early 1882, in Vienna, Strauss gave the first performance of his
Violin Concerto in D minor, playing a piano reduction of the orchestral part himself, with his teacher Benno Walter as soloist. The same year he entered the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, where he studied philosophy and art history, but not music. He left a year later to go to Berlin, where he studied briefly before securing a post with the
Meiningen Court Orchestra as assistant conductor to
Hans von Bülow, who had been enormously impressed by the young composer's
Serenade (Op. 7) for wind instruments, composed when he was only 16 years of age. In 1906, Strauss purchased a block of land at
Garmisch-Partenkirchen and had a villa () built there with the down payments from the publisher
Adolph Fürstner for his opera
Salome, residing there until his death. He also conducted several other works in collaboration with composer
Hermann Hans Wetzler and his orchestra that year at Carnegie Hall, and also performed a concert of lieder with his wife. In 1924 Strauss's son Franz married Alice von Grab-Hermannswörth, daughter of a Jewish industrialist, in a Roman Catholic ceremony. He later wrote in his journal: In November 1933, the minister Goebbels nominated me president of the
Reichsmusikkammer without obtaining my prior agreement. I was not consulted. I accepted this honorary office because I hoped that I would be able to do some good and prevent worse misfortunes, if from now onwards German musical life were going to be, as it was said, "reorganized" by amateurs and ignorant place-seekers. Strauss privately scorned Goebbels and called him "a pipsqueak". However, in 1933 he dedicated an orchestral song, "
Das Bächlein" ("The Little Brook"), to Goebbels, to gain his cooperation in extending German music copyright laws from 30 years to 50 years. Also in 1933, he replaced
Arturo Toscanini as director of the Bayreuth Festival after Toscanini had resigned in protest against the Nazi regime. Strauss attempted to ignore Nazi bans on performances of works by Debussy, Mahler, and Mendelssohn. He also continued to work on a comic opera,
Die schweigsame Frau, with his Jewish friend and librettist
Stefan Zweig. When the opera was premiered in Dresden in 1935, Strauss insisted that Zweig's name appear on the theatrical billing, much to the ire of the Nazi regime. Hitler and Goebbels avoided attending the opera, and it was halted after three performances and subsequently banned by the
Third Reich. On 17 June 1935, Strauss wrote a letter to Stefan Zweig, in which he stated: Do you believe I am ever, in any of my actions, guided by the thought that I am 'German'? Do you suppose Mozart was consciously 'Aryan' when he composed? I recognise only two types of people: those who have talent and those who have none. This letter to Zweig was intercepted by the
Gestapo and sent to Hitler. Strauss was subsequently
dismissed from his post as
Reichsmusikkammer president in 1935. The
1936 Berlin Summer Olympics nevertheless used Strauss's
Olympische Hymne, which he had composed in 1934. In 1940, Strauss was chosen by Goebbels to compose the
Japanese Festival Music to celebrate the
2600th anniversary of the founding of the Japanese Empire. Strauss's seeming relationship with the Nazis in the 1930s attracted criticism from some noted musicians, including Toscanini, who in 1933 had said, "To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again", when Strauss had accepted the presidency of the
Reichsmusikkammer. Much of Strauss's motivation in his conduct during the Third Reich was, however, to protect his Jewish daughter-in-law Alice and his Jewish grandchildren from persecution. Both of his grandsons were bullied at school, but Strauss used his considerable influence to prevent the boys or their mother being sent to
concentration camps.
Late operas and family tragedy Frustrated that he could no longer work with Zweig as his librettist, Strauss turned to
Joseph Gregor, a Viennese theatre historian, at Gregor's request. The first opera they worked on together was
Daphne, but it ultimately became the second of their operas to be premiered. Their first work to be staged was in 1938, when the entire nation was preparing for war, they presented
Friedenstag (
Peace Day), a one-act opera set in a besieged fortress during the
Thirty Years' War. The work is essentially a hymn to peace and a thinly veiled criticism of the Third Reich. With its contrasts between freedom and enslavement, war and peace, light and dark, this work has a close affinity with
Beethoven's
Fidelio. Productions of the opera ceased shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939. The two men collaborated on two more operas which proved to be Strauss's last:
Die Liebe der Danae (1940) and
Capriccio (1942). While Alice's mother, Marie von Grab, was safe in Lucerne, Switzerland, Strauss also wrote several letters to the
SS pleading for the release of her children who were also held in camps; his letters were ignored. In 1942, Strauss moved with his family back to Vienna, where Alice and her children could be protected by
Baldur von Schirach, the
Gauleiter of Vienna. However, Strauss was unable to protect his Jewish relatives completely; in early 1944, while Strauss was away, Alice and her son Franz were abducted by the Gestapo and imprisoned for two nights. Strauss's personal intervention at this point saved them, and he was able to take them back to Garmisch, where the two remained under house arrest until the end of the war.
Norman Del Mar in 1964, to describe Strauss's late creative upsurge from 1942 to the end of his life. The events of World War II seemed to bring the composer – who had grown old, tired, and a little jaded – into focus. The major works of the last years of Strauss's life, written in his late 70s and 80s, include, among others, his
Horn Concerto No. 2,
Metamorphosen, his
Oboe Concerto, his
Duet concertino for clarinet and bassoon, and his
Four Last Songs. The conductor later described how, during the singing of the famous trio from
Rosenkavalier, "each singer broke down in tears and dropped out of the ensemble, but they recovered themselves and we all ended together". Strauss's wife, Pauline de Ahna, died eight months later on 13 May 1950, at the age of 88. Strauss himself declared in 1947 with characteristic self-deprecation: "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer." The Canadian pianist
Glenn Gould described Strauss in 1962 as "the greatest musical figure who has lived in this century". ==Music==