Strauss's tone poems made him a celebrity conductor
Richard Strauss (1864–1949) turned the orchestra into storytelling with Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and other tone poems, then ruled opera houses with Salome and beyond. A Munich horn player's son, he was a composing prodigy. In 1933 he took high musical posts under Nazi rule—choices still debated.
Strauss was born in Munich in 1864 to Franz Strauss, principal horn of the Court Opera, and Josephine Pschorr, daughter of a prosperous brewer. He started piano at four with the court orchestra's harpist, wrote his first piece at six and sat in on orchestra rehearsals as a boy. His father drilled him in Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Weber and played his early symphonic works with the amateur Wilde Gung'l orchestra he led. Wagner was frowned on at home, yet the boy heard Lohengrin at ten and the whole Ring by 1879, and that music would shape him profoundly.
After a year studying philosophy and art history, not music, at Munich's university, he became assistant to Hans von Bülow at the Meiningen Court Orchestra in 1883, learning to conduct by watching rehearsals and making his concerto debut in Mozart with cadenzas of his own. When Bülow quit abruptly in December 1885, the young man ran the orchestra for the rest of the season and helped ready the premiere of Brahms's Fourth Symphony under the composer. He later spoke of a spell of Brahms adoration.
The violinist Alexander Ritter, married to a niece of Wagner, then talked him into the progressive path of Wagner and Liszt. Sketches from an Italian trip grew into Aus Italien, and a run of tone poems followed, among them Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. His post at the Munich opera bored him, but guest work in Leipzig brought friendship with Gustav Mahler in 1887, and that year he met the soprano Pauline de Ahna, who became his pupil and later his wife.
From Salome onward his operas, including Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier, won international fame, and his conducting of Mozart, Liszt and Wagner made him a celebrity. In 1933 he accepted leadership of the Reichsmusikkammer and the Bayreuth podium. Critics call it collaboration, but his daughter-in-law was Jewish, and much of his compliance aimed to protect her and his grandchildren.
Source: Richard Strauss
