With his three last and largest tone poems – Ein Heldenleben (1897/8) the Sinfonia Domestica (1903) and Eine Alpensinfonie (1915) – Richard Strauss faced mounting criticism, charges of excess, megalomania, superficiality, and bad taste. For the eminent Richard Strauss scholar

Richard Strauss: Elektra In Greek mythology, Elektra is widely considered the most psychologically advanced Greek tragedy. The Greek dramatist Sophocles constructed a play that centers on the heroine’s obsession to avenge her father’s murder. Elektra lives in hope that her

Few characters have captured our imagination than Don Quixote, the befuddled knight—a pathetic, aging oddball who dreams of righting the world’s wrongs. The knight is the protagonist of Miguel Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote or ‘The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of

Elektra (1909), proved crucial to Strauss’s later development as a composer of opera, since it marked the beginning of his collaboration with the young Viennese poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal. This tale of multiple murder and bitter vengeance is musically and

Throughout his life, Richard Strauss surrounded himself with beautiful women!

Yo-yo Ma, cello Emanuel Ax, piano Richard Strauss: Cello Sonata in F Major, Op. 6, TrV 115 Richard Strauss was controversial as a person and as a composer, despite being one of the more prominent composers of the 20th Century.

Six years after the dismal failure of his opera Guntram in Munich, Richard Strauss collaborated with the librettist Ernst von Wolzogen on a project he hoped would exact revenge on the bourgeois provincialism of his hometown. Feuersnot (In need of

The Allied initiative to rid German and Austrian society, culture, press, economy, judiciary, and politics of any remnants of National Socialist ideology was launched after the end of the Second World War. The directives of “denazification” identified specific groups and