15 - Kapellmeister Strauss

Summary

The opera house and the concert hall

Richard Strauss bestrode the nineteenth and twentieth centuries like a musical colossus. As the last great composer-conductor, he was professionally active for more than seven decades and produced a seemingly endless string of important works. He was approached constantly by impresarios and orchestras to perform these pieces at their concerts, but those invitations often had little appeal for Strauss, who preferred instead to conduct the music of his heroes, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner, and to promote works by his contemporaries. Although oft en misrepresented as a mercenary musician interested solely in the promotion of his own compositions, Strauss was an artist of catholic taste, who invariably placed art before ambition.

Strauss was the son of Germany's most celebrated horn player, Franz Strauss. Described by Hans von Bülow as “the Joachim of the Waldhorn,” Franz was a member of the Munich Hofkapelle for forty-two years. A notoriously conservative musician who abhorred the works of Wagner and his followers, he regarded the great Classical composers as iconic figures to be admired above all others. As the Hofkapelle's principal horn, he played under Wagner and his “alter ego …the master-conductor Hans von Bülow” on a regular basis in the 1860s and was constantly at loggerheads with them. Nevertheless, Franz was happy to allow leading Wagnerians to champion Richard's early compositions and to let them support his son's career as a performer.