Richard Strauss was a famously private man, hiding his passion under a veneer of affability. Yet a clue to his temperament can be found in two great musical loves of his life. First is Mozart, whose music was a benign influence as Strauss came to maturity in nineteenth century Munich. Then there is Wagner, whose example helped to liberate him from more conservative models. Strauss was often caricatured for the extravagance of his orchestrations.
But while his writing can be the most opulent of any late-Romantic composer, he was capable of supreme refinement. He also had a superb understanding of the female voice. This came from soprano Pauline de Ahna, who was his wife of 55 years. He was a tremendous player, but conservative in his tastes. As a young man he took many character-forming conducting posts.
But one of these provided a seminal experience. By then he had struck out on his own as a composer. His first major achievement in the genre, Don Juan, was a breath of brilliant, sensual fresh air when it appeared in Yet performances and recordings of the staggeringly well-structured Symphonia domestica —03 and the nature-worshipping Eine Alpensinfonie —15 proved this not to be the case.
Nevertheless, his operatic breakthrough came only after he had extracted himself from the heavier influence of Wagner. This was no anachronistic turning back. Viennese waltzes meet with sweeping symphonic scope, superb vocal set-pieces and even a touch of chromatic torment. Strauss, if not Hofmannsthal, was well aware that Der Rosenkavalier was in many ways his greatest achievement.
It was a work that belonged to a now-lost era, a casualty of the upheavals of the First World War. After this, Strauss consolidated his successful formulas and expanded his luminous orchestral palette. His subsequent works ranged in variety from the semi-autobiographical domestic comedy Intermezzo , which infuriated Pauline, to the translucent mythological opera Daphne The composer thought he would get by with paying lip-service to the regime as he had done with Kaiser Wilhelm I.
