Dimensions
156 x 220 x 20mm
Part of the 20th Century Composers series.
The greatest and most popular German composer of the twentieth century, Richard Strauss (1864-1949) remains one of the most complex figures in the history of music. The rebellious son of a horn player in the Munich court orchestra, Strauss became the musical star of imperial Germany when his tone-poem "Don Juan" was given its premiere in 1889. A celebrity almost overnight, and the subject of constant media gossip and critical scandal, he subsequently enjoyed more than two decades of public success, during which he composed the works on which his fame primarily rests - the tone-poems "Till Eulenspiegel", "Also sprach Zarathustra", "Don Quixote" and Ein Heldenleben", and the operas "Salome", "Elektra" and "Der Rosenkavalier".
Yet with the premiere of the first version of Strauss's opera "Ariadne auf Naxos" in 1912, the public began to desert him. Strauss feared for the demise of European culture in the years around World War I, and his stance became increasingly conservative. Critics who once saw him as an outrageous modernist now found him old-fashioned, and only after his death has much of his later music secured a place in the repertoire. Though Strauss is now accepted as one of the finest of all orchestral composers, and his operas are the most subtly characterised since Mozart's, controversy still surrounds his reputation: the heady subject-matter of the early works has opened him up to charges of sensationalism; his self-promotion and fondness for money has led to accusations of careerist opportunism; most importantly, his decision to remain in Hitler's Germany and subsequent failure to condemn publicly the Third Reich has led to charges of Nazi collaboration.
This powerful study places Strauss's life in the context of German history, probes beneath the flamboyant public persona to reveal the paradoxes that characterised the private man, and discusses his work in the light of the influences - personal, artistic, literary and political - that shaped it.
Includes black-and-white illustrations.
