Strongly influencing European musical life from the 1880s
through the First World War and remaining highly productive into
the 1940s, Richard Strauss enjoyed a remarkable career in a
constantly changing artistic and political climate. This volume
presents six original essays on Strauss's musical works--including
tone poems, lieder, and operas--and brings together letters,
memoirs, and criticism from various periods of the composer's life.
Many of these materials appear in English for the first time. In
the essays Leon Botstein contradicts the notion of the composer's
stylistic "about face" after Elektra; Derrick Puffett reinforces
the argument for Strauss's artistic consistency by tracing in the
tone poems and operas the phenomenon of pitch specificity; James
Hepokoski establishes Strauss as an early modernist in an
examination of Macbeth; Michael Steinberg probes the composer's
political sensibility as expressed in the 1930s through his music
and use of such texts as Friedenstag and Daphne; Bryan Gilliam
discusses the genesis of both the text and the music in the final
scene of Daphne; Timothy Jackson in his thorough source study
argues for a new addition to the so-called Four Last Songs. Among
the correspondence are previously untranslated letters between
Strauss and his post-Hofmannsthal librettist, Joseph Gregor. The
memoirs range from early biographical sketches to Rudolf Hartmann's
moving account of his last visit with Strauss shortly before the
composer's death. Critical reviews include recently translated
essays by Theodor Adorno, Guido Adler, Paul Bekker, and Julius
Korngold.
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