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.
