The 1905 premiere of Salome, however, marked a major turning point. His first opera, Guntram was a failure at its 1894 premiere but its successor, the risqué comedy Feuersnot, proved more successful in 1901. Ein Heldenleben also contains Strauss’s first musical portrait of his wife, the temperamental soprano Pauline de Ahna for whom he wrote many of his finest songs (one of the best known, Morgen! was a wedding present).
Ein Heldenleben, begun shortly before Strauss’s appointment as Wilhelm II’s kapellmeister (music director) in Berlin, caused a controversy: Strauss identified himself, by means of quotations from his own music, as the hero of his own tone poem, resulting in charges of opportunism. Zarathustra was based on Nietzsche’s book of the same name Strauss considered the philosopher his greatest intellectual influence.
RICHARD STRAUSS COMPOSITIONS SERIES
It was the first of the series of tone poems that dominated his output for the next decade and includes Tod und Verklärung (1890), Till Eulenspiegel (1895), Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), Don Quixote (1898) and Ein Heldenleben (1899).Īlice Guszalewicz as Salome in Dresden in 1907. His first works marked him out as a potential traditionalist but during his early 20s, he studied Liszt and Wagner’s music and rebelled against the classical constraints fostered by his father, becoming famous overnight in 1889 with the premiere of Don Juan, a work of unprecedented hedonism. From then until 1924, Strauss combined composition with a series of increasingly important conducting posts as his reputation grew. The following year, Bülow appointed the 21-year-old as his assistant conductor in Meiningen.
In 1884, his Serenade in E Flat for 13 wind instruments brought him to the attention of influential conductor Hans von Bülow, who immediately commissioned its sequel, the Suite in B Flat, with which Strauss made his conducting debut, also in 1884.
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