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His son Franz and the grandchildren and family were supportive of the composer not only privately but also in his work. The horn player Franz Joseph Strauss (1822 – 1905) was already 42 years old when his second wife gave birth to Richard (the first wife died from cholera).
However, Strauss's daughter-in-law, Alice Grab Strauss [née von Hermannswörth], was Jewish and much of his apparent acquiescence to the Nazi Party was done to save her life and the lives of her children (his Jewish grandchildren).
He was the first child of the Musician Franz Joseph Strauss and his wife Josepha (who is descended from the Brewery Dynasty Pschorr). As early as the age of six, Strauss was already composing his first pieces.
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Richard Strauss (born June 11, 1864, Munich, Germany—died September 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen) an outstanding German Romantic composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His symphonic poems of the 1890s and his operas of the following decade have remained an indispensable feature of the standard repertoire.
Strauss’s father, Franz, was the principal horn player of the Munich Court Orchestra and was recognized as Germany’s leading virtuoso of the instrument. His mother came from the prominent brewing family of Pschorr. During a conventional education, Strauss still devoted most of his time and energy to music. When he left school in 1882, he had already composed more than 140 works, including 59 lieder (art songs) and various chamber and orchestral works. These juvenilia reflect Strauss’s musical upbringing by his father, who revered the classics and detested Richard Wagner both as a man and as a composer, even though he was a notable performer of the horn passages in performances of Wagner’s operas.
Through his father’s connections, Strauss on leaving school met the leading musicians of the day, including the conductor Hans von Bülow, who commissioned Strauss’s Suite for 13 Winds for the Meiningen Orchestra and invited Strauss to conduct that work’s first performance in Munich in November 1884. Following this successful conducting debut, Bülow offered Strauss the post of assistant conductor at Meiningen. Thenceforward Strauss’s eminence as a conductor paralleled his rise as a composer. Among the conducting posts he went on to hold were those of third conductor of the Munich Opera (1886–89), director of the Weimar Court Orchestra (1889–94), second and then chief conductor at Munich (1894–98), conductor (and later director) of the Royal Court Opera in Berlin (1898–1919), and musical codirector of the Vienna State Opera (1919–24).
At Meiningen Strauss met the composer Alexander Ritter, who reinforced that admiration for Wagner’s music which Strauss had previously nurtured in secret so as not to upset his father. Ritter urged Strauss to abandon classical forms and to express his musical ideas in the medium of the symphonic, or tone, poem, as Franz Liszt had done. Strauss had to work his way to mastery of this form, a half-way stage being his Aus Italien (1886; From Italy), a “symphonic fantasy” based on his impressions during his first visit to Italy. In Weimar in November 1889, he conducted the first performance of his symphonic poem Don Juan. The triumphant reception of this piece led to Strauss’s acclamation as Wagner’s heir and marked the start of his successful composing career. At Weimar, too, in 1894 he conducted the premiere of his first opera, Guntram, with his fiancée Pauline de Ahna in the leading soprano role. She had become his singing pupil in 1887, and they were married in September 1894. Pauline’s tempestuous, tactless, and outspoken personality was the reverse of her husband’s aloof and detached nature, and her eccentric behaviour is the subject of countless anecdotes, most of them true. Nevertheless the marriage between them was strong and successful; they adored each other and ended their days together 55 years later.
The years 1898 and 1899 saw the respective premieres of Strauss’s two most ambitious tone poems, Don Quixote and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). In 1904 he and Pauline, who was the foremost exponent of his songs, toured the United States, where in New York City he conducted the first performance of his Symphonia Domestica (Domestic Symphony). The following year, in Dresden, he enjoyed his first operatic success with Salome, based on Oscar Wilde’s play. Although Salome was regarded by some as blasphemous and obscene, it triumphed in all the major opera houses except Vienna, where the censor forbade Gustav Mahler to stage it.
In 1909 the opera Elektra marked Strauss’s first collaboration with the Austrian poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Strauss wrote the music and Hofmannsthal the libretti for five more operas over the next 20 years. With the 1911 premiere of their second opera together, Der Rosenkavalier, they achieved a popular success of the first magnitude. Their subsequent operas together were Ariadne auf Naxos (1912; Ariadne on Naxos), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1919; The Woman Without a Shadow), and Die ägyptische Helena (1928; The Egyptian Helen). But in 1929 Hofmannsthal died while working on the opera Arabella, leaving Strauss bereft.
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- A young talent. Richard Strauss was born on 11 June 1864. His father Franz was a principal horn player who gave Richard a solid musical education. The boy wrote his first composition, aged six.
- A fan of Wagner. Richard Strauss heard his first Wagner operas, Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, in 1874. At first, his father banned the youth from studying Wagner’s music.
- Influenced by Ritter. Strauss’s early works were quite conservative but they began to develop and change when he met Alexander Ritter, a composer and violinist who was the husband of one of Wagner's nieces.
- Violin Concerto in D minor (1881-1882) In early 1882 Strauss gave the first performance of his Violin Concerto in D minor in Vienna, playing a piano reduction of the orchestral part himself, with his cousin and teacher Benno Walter as soloist.
Strauss was born in Munich in 11 June 1864, the son of Franz Strauss, first horn in the court orchestra there. He had his first piano lessoins at the age of four and began violin studies four years after that; another invaluable part of his apprenticeship was being able to sit in on the rehearsals of the orchestra in which his father played.
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Jul 24, 2018 · Strauss discouraged his children from pursuing musical careers, but after his vigorous touring schedule and a romantic affiar put an end to his marriage, his ex wife Maria Anna sought to support the musical development of their eldest son, Johann II.
